The West Side Story, Part 3: From Bourgeois Comfort to Untenable Peril: The Emptying of the New City

Such attacks were soon directed by a larger military strategy. Plan Dalet, as it was known, was a controversial military strategy, created by the Haganah in March 1948, with the ultimate aim of securing a Jewish state throughout Palestine, of merging Jerusalem with it, and of expelling Palestinian Arabs.20

While not the first such plan (it was based on three previous plans, dating back to 1945), it was the final one meant to deliver the state:

As several historians have noted, Plan Dalet was ultimately a strategy of ethnic cleansing, whereby Haganah forces would ensure the “destruction of both rural and urban areas of Palestine.”22 British Mandate authorities largely turned a blind eye to the violence.

A number of Zionist military operations were launched with the aim of taking Jerusalem and its environs, both before and after the declaration of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948. Indeed, as David Ben-Gurion stated at a meeting of the Mapai (Land of Israel Labor Party) Council on February 7, 1948: “In many Arab districts in the west one sees not a single Arab. I do not assume that this will change.”23 Detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this backgrounder, but some of the more important ones in the Jerusalem arena included Operations Danny, Kedem, Nachshon, Harel, Yevusi, Ha Har, Maccabee, Shififon, and Kilshon. These are only the operations related to this area of the country; others were targeted elsewhere (see BOX: Plan Dalet: Operations and Their Objectives).

In the New City, which was to become West Jerusalem, the overall effect of these multiple lines of attack over many months was to render the city unlivable, with limited access to basic necessities. Critically, only one main road led through the outlying hills into the city. The Arabs, with their many villages scattered along the road to the west, many on high ground, were very effective at blockading this road in the early months of the year, preventing supply convoys from getting to the city and thereby threatening the city’s Jews. Heavy Palmach numbers also became tied up with guarding the supply convoys.

Despite the heavy guard, there were frequent ambushes.24 In March 1948, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini and his troops in the Jihad Muqaddas, and with the assistance of villagers, managed to ambush Jewish convoys to Jerusalem arriving from the west, effectively blocking their access to the city.

The biggest ambush of the war occurred on March 27, when three dozen supply trucks were waylaid by thousands of armed villagers from Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron and were ambushed and trapped for 24 hours until a British armored column came to their rescue.25

Al-Husseini and his troops also attacked Jewish civilians in the city, and throughout February and March, killed dozens of Jews in car and truck bombs at the offices of the Palestine Post newspaper (February 1–2; 1 killed, 20 wounded), outside the Atlantic and Amdursky hotels on Ben Yehuda Street, which housed Palmach forces (February 22; 58 killed, 32 seriously injured), and in the National Institutions Compound, targeting the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund (March 11; 12 killed, 10 wounded).26 By late March, al-Husseini and his troops had effectively laid siege to Jewish Jerusalem, depriving Jews of food, water, and basic services.27

The following are more examples from the local press at the time of the violence that spread across Jerusalem, especially in the New City, and which caused many to flee. Filastin newspaper details an attack carried out by Zionist forces on the Arab neighborhood of Qatamon in the New City on March 11, 1948. It describes how the Zionists used the weather conditions to their advantage, and opened fire using modern military weaponry to attack civilian houses:

On March 11, 1948, al-Difa‘ newspaper described the disheartening feeling of the Palestinian Arabs toward their Jewish neighbors after being attacked by Zionist groups from the nearby neighborhoods:

Fighting in the middle of the night was a common tactic, as reported frequently in newspapers. On March 11, 1948, Filastin described another invasion in the western corridor of the New City when the Zionist militias again used the proximity of the Jewish and surrounding neighborhoods to attack the neighboring Arab community. The Arab community was caught off guard in the middle of the night:

The fighting documented in newspapers from the time reveals a picture of strategic thinking and well-orchestrated military operations on the part of the Zionist militias. They used the proximity of the nearby Jewish neighborhoods to the wealthy Arab ones to plan their attacks, often in the dark of night.

Indeed, Filastin detailed how the attack on Qatamon unfolded on March 11, 1948, by beginning with the hour of night:

In another instance of Zionist strategizing, and regarding the March 11 attack on Qatamon, Filastin described the attacks of Zionist militias as follows:

The Palestinian Arabs on the receiving end of these attacks were terrified and increasingly considered leaving. Hala Sakakini, a resident of Qatamon and the daughter of Khalil Sakakini, a Palestinian scholar, educator, and teacher who was a central figure in the community, describes how people would come to their house to pass the tense evening hours together in solidarity. In her detailed memoir, she describes one such evening, March 13, 1948:

These events led to more waves of departures. The Sakakinis, however, stuck it out to the bitter end, leaving on April 30, only days before the neighborhood fell.34

While the different newspaper articles indicate an unprecedented level of strategizing on the part of the Zionist militias, they also suggest British forces’ deliberate disregard for the aggression. In another incident that took place in March 1948 in Beit Safafa, Filastin reported the intervention of the British officers only when the Arab troops fired back at the Zionist aggressors:

Another instance of Arab neighborhoods being targeted while British security personnel looked aside was reported on April 17, 1948, in Filastin:

The question raised above had been answered days before on April 14, when the same newspaper documented the fighting in Sheikh Jarrah, describing how the British troops opened fire on the Arab fighters:

The Battle of al-Qastal, which took place in the Palestinian village of al-Qastal, located on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road west of Jerusalem, was a critical turning point for the Palestinians. Due to its strategic location, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini and his troops used the village as a base from which to attack Jewish relief convoys.38 During Operation Nachshon, which lasted for nearly two weeks in the first half of April, 1948, Palmach and Haganah forces invaded the village and laid siege to it on April 3. Most of the village’s inhabitants had already fled.39

Days later, on April 7, al-Husseini and his troops attacked and besieged al-Qastal. That night was foggy and during the ongoing fighting, al-Husseini was killed by a Haganah soldier. The following day, al-Husseini’s troops recaptured al-Qastal; however, the death of their leader resulted in an overall loss of morale among the fighters of Jihad Muqaddas.40 Over the course of April 8-9, Palmach forces managed to retake al-Qastal. They demolished most of the houses of the village, turning it into a command post for the remainder of the war.41

Husseini's funeral took place on April 9, at the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem. It was a major event that drew his men away from their positions. This was the very same day as the Deir Yasin massacre.

Arguably the most well-known of Zionist militias’ orchestrated attacks on Palestinian Arabs was the Deir Yasin massacre of April 9, 1948. As part of Operation Nachshon, the Irgun and Lehi planned an attack on the village, though its residents had made an agreement with the Haganah in February that their lives would be spared in exchange for their readiness to collaborate with the Haganah.42 While residents of Deir Yasin upheld their end of the bargain and drove out an Arab military group that had tried to use the village as a base, 130 Zionists from the Irgun and Lehi stormed the small village just west of Jerusalem and massacred 100 Palestinian Arabs, including 31 children and 14 elderly individuals.43

The commander of the Irgun forces, Ben-Zion Cohen, described that the pre-attack agreement among the Zionist forces was the “liquidation of all the men in the village and any others found that opposed us, whether it be old people, women and children.”44 Evidently, David Shaltiel, commander of the Haganah, sent a memo to the leaders of the Irgun and Lehi indicating his knowledge of their plan to invade the village. In the memo, he said: “I have no objection in you carrying out the operation provided you are able to hold the village.”45 As a result, the Haganah provided the Irgun and Lehi with rifles and grenades to conquer the village completely, forestalling the need for returning to the village at a later time.

In an interview with Israeli director Neta Shoshani for her documentary, Born in Deir Yassin, Ben-Zion later recounted that shortly into the soldiers’ initial entry into the village, crawling on their stomachs under cover of darkness, suddenly dogs began barking, shouting erupted and he got shot in the knee. At that point, he told Shoshani, he gave an order to “take the gloves off.”

He continued: “Then I said, there’s no woman, no man. [We’re] blowing up as many houses as possible, and killing anyone who shoots. Approach the building, lay the explosives, activate them, fall back, blow up the building with all its inhabitants after they’ve opened fire. Immediately after the explosion, we go, because they’re in shock, and the first thing is to [shoot] bursts right and left.”46

Though many conflicting accounts exist regarding the details of the operation and the number of Palestinians killed, the Deir Yasin massacre was undoubtedly gruesome and seminal in the war. Meir Pail, a member the Haganah forces, recounted that, after parading a group of 25 men who survived the massacre through the streets of Jewish-held Jerusalem, the Irgun and Lehi forces “put them in a line in some kind of quarry, and shot them.”47 Zionist forces also evidently poured gasoline over the bodies of the victims of the village and set them on fire. Many in the Haganah also distanced themselves from the massacre, recognizing it as “an inhumane, terrible act by the right wing.”48

In retaliation, Palestinian Arab fighters attacked a Jewish convoy on its way to Hadassah Hospital on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus on April 14. The convoy was ambushed in Sheikh Jarrah, directly north of the Old City, and it included doctors, nurses, Irgun fighters wounded at Deir Yasin, and Haganah escorts. By the end of the ambush, 77 Jews, including 40 medical staff, were killed. Another 14 Arabs were shot dead during the attack.49

The Deir Yasin massacre was a pivotal point in the 1948 violence as it escalated armed conflict between Arabs and Jews, driving many more Palestinians to flee in fear. Indeed, following the massacre, the Haganah radio station repeatedly menaced the Arabs of Jerusalem by declaring, “Remember Deir Yasin,” and delivering messages in Arabic by loudspeaker vans such as: “Unless you leave your homes, the fate of Deir Yasin will be your fate.”50 The massacre also impelled neighboring Arab states to intervene, which they did weeks later.

The combined effect of the death of al-Husseini and the widely proclaimed and terrifying Deir Yasin massacre created a turning point in the war.

Beyond military strategy, Zionist forces sought to maintain a demographic advantage over the Arabs in Jerusalem. To prevent evacuation of Jewish neighborhoods in the New City, Zionist leaders in Jewish neighborhoods bordering Arab ones forced sanctions on Jewish residents, demanding that those who fled continue to pay local taxes. They also refused to accept responsibility for property left behind. Other forms of preventing Jewish abandonment included providing aid to those who remained by organizing food stores.51

Despite these moves by the Zionist leadership to maintain the Jewish presence in the city, the escalation in the security situation forced many Jews to leave their homes as well. For example, during the spring of 1948, Shimon Ha-Tsedek neighborhood, which bordered Sheikh Jarrah, was almost completely emptied of its Jewish inhabitants. Jewish residents of Talbiyya and in the northern corridor of Qatamon also fled their homes. At the same time, similar shifts occurred in the Arab communities and neighborhoods that bordered Jewish areas.52

Jewish neighborhoods of southern Jerusalem were also soon evacuated, and by March 1948, the neighborhood of Mekor Chaim was emptied and became a fortified Haganah outpost. By then, the majority of the Jewish population of Arnona, Talpiyot, and North Talpiyot had evacuated their residences. By mid-May, Kibbutz Ramot Rachel was evacuated.53 In the center of the city, too, most of the residents of Yemin Moshe evacuated their homes. To be sure, following the war and the establishment of the State of Israel, these Jewish communities were allowed back to their residences, while Jerusalem’s Palestinians remain in exile to this day.

The large number of Jews leaving the city was alarming to the Haganah, and while it could not force them to remain, it could put pressure on the Arabs to leave. To do this, the Haganah threatened Arab neighborhood leaders with posters, notes, and phone calls; they also raided Arab neighborhoods to sever phone lines and electricity wires, threw hang grenades, and fired live ammunition into the air.54

The destruction of Palestinian urban life was a crucial aspect of the 1948 War. Around one third of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 were urbanites. Among them, between 25,000 and 30,000 were inhabitants of the New City who had little choice but to flee their homes from January through May 1948.55

The few available accounts of Palestinians’ flight from the New City are consistent: residents left in a great hurry, out of fear, and without taking much of anything. They were certain they would soon return. As former mayor of Jerusalem Hussein al-Khalidi informed the mufti of the city on January 13, 1948: “The position here is very difficult. There are no people, no discipline, no arms, and no ammunition. Over and above this, there is no tinned food and no foodstuffs. The black market is flourishing. The economy is destroyed . . . This is the real situation, there is no flour, no food . . . Jerusalem is emptying out.”56

The dire economic situation also derived from the abrupt ethnic separation between the two populations, separating workers from employers and goods from the markets upon which they had previously relied. Arab public transportation ground to a halt. Unemployment skyrocketed. By the end of April, all the Arab banks were closed.57

Between January and March 1948, almost all of the wealthy Arab families of Palestine—approximately 300,000 Palestinians from Jerusalem, Haifa, and other coastal villages—had left the country. The remaining Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, and especially in the Old City, severed communication.58

The neighborhood of Qatamon was strategically located on a hill in the New City; it lay at the center of Zionist plans to conquer Jerusalem. In the weeks leading up to their invasion of Qatamon, Zionist forces targeted it with heavy artillery to scare its residents. On April 22, the Palestinian National Committee of Jerusalem ordered that all women, children, and elderly people be relocated from the area. On April 30, Zionist forces invaded Qatamon, and in three days of battle, killed 150 Arabs and drove out the rest. Widespread looting of Arab homes ensued, and some survivors even watched from a nearby neighborhood as their homes were robbed and their valuable possessions taken forever.59

Ghada Karmi describes her family’s departure from Qatamon:

Hala Sakakini was among the very last to leave Qatamon with her family on April 30, 1948. She relates:

At six o’clock the next morning, they loaded up their car and left for Cairo, never to return. It bears mention that the entire house, including her father’s extensive library, was looted and lost in the aftermath of the war, like many others.

With the capture of Qatamon, Zionist forces were able to take the remaining Arab neighborhoods of the New City. Al-Baq‘a fell on May 16, one day after the establishment of the new State of Israel. Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout, whose father was Ajaj Nuwayhed, the renowned Palestinian orator, scholar, and translator, and who later went on to marry the founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Shafiq al-Hout, recalled her family’s departure from al-Baq‘a:

As soon as Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, Zionist forces and Jewish civilians alike took part in massive looting, which continued for months. John Rose, an Armenian resident of Jerusalem who stayed in al-Baq‘a after it fell to the Zionists, described that in June 1948:

The looting and pillaging were so rampant, Israeli historian Adam Raz writes, that they “spread like wildfire” among Israelis in the first months following the establishment of the state in May 1948.64 Across Palestine, tens of thousands of Palestinian homes, stores, and factories were raided and emptied of their contents. This included, “mechanical equipment, farm produce, cattle … pianos, books, clothing, jewelry, furniture, electrical appliances, engines and cars.” To collect all this loot, Yair Goren, a resident of Jerusalem in 1948, explained that “men, women and children scurried hither and thither like drugged mice.”65

Moshe Salomon, commander of a Zionist military unit in 1948 Jerusalem, wrote in his diary about this disturbing phenomenon that gripped the looters: “We were all swept up by it, privates and officers alike. Everyone was seized by a craving for possessions. They rummaged through every house, and some found food, others found expensive objects. The mania attacked me, too, and I was barely able to stop myself.”66

David Werner Senator, a senior administrator at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, described what he saw in 1948: “These days, when you pass through the streets of Rehavia, you see everywhere old people, young folk and children returning from Katamon or other neighborhoods with bags filled with stolen objects. The booty is diverse: refrigerators and beds, clocks and books, undergarments and clothing. What a disgrace the Jewish robbers have brought on us, and what moral ruin they have brought on us!”67

Senator was not alone in his disapproval of the looting. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of Israel, wrote a letter to Ben-Gurion on June 2, 1948, deploring what was happening in Jerusalem: “I cannot remain silent about the robbery . . . Robbery has become a general phenomenon . . . Everyone will agree that our thieves fell upon the abandoned neighborhoods like locusts on a field or an orchard.” And on July 24, 1948, Ben-Gurion relayed the following words during a meeting of Mapai: “It turns out that most of the Jews are thieves . . . I say this deliberately and simply, because unfortunately it is true.”68

Dov Doron, a Jewish soldier who partook in the battle in Jerusalem, offers the following testimony regarding the 12 days he and his fellow troops spent in the city:

Raz explains that the looting was both deliberate and political.70 Often, the looters personally knew the Palestinian Arabs whose homes they were looting. In some cases, they were their neighbors. Raz explains that this looting was “allowed to proceed apace with no interference” by state authorities due to political ideology. The plundering, Raz goes on, “was a means to realize the policy of emptying the country of its Arab residents . . . with a vested interest in not allowing them to return.”71

Looting or destroying Palestinians’ possessions was one way of ensuring their erasure from West Jerusalem. Confiscating and archiving their books in Israel’s National Library was another. As early as April 25, 1948, following the Haganah’s Operation Nachshon in Jerusalem, which led to the emptying of several of the New City’s Palestinian neighborhoods, the director of the National Library, Curt Wormann, wrote a letter to senior administrators at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in which he spoke of “the book collection operation” that would ensue following the capture of the New City.72

Qatamon fell on May 1, followed by Talbiyya and al-Baq‘a on May 14. Subsequently, on June 10, Senator of the Hebrew University forwarded a memorandum written by Wormann to the Jewish Agency titled: “Regarding the Urgent Need for a Central Authority Which Would Have Custodianship over Abandoned Public and Private Libraries and Books.” In the memo, Wormann described that this central authority would be the National Library, because it “has the means to keep the books in proper conditions, as well as to return them to their lawful owners, should such owners appear.”73 Approximately 30,000 books were confiscated from what became West Jerusalem within the nine months after the war. Palestinian private book collections and libraries across Palestine were similarly confiscated, and their owners have since not been allowed to appear in order to reclaim their properties.

Israeli historian Gish Amit describes the overarching ideological and practical considerations behind the new state’s book confiscation campaign:

The new Israeli nation-state, therefore, took it upon itself to salvage these books as part of a long-standing European humanist and universalist tradition. Amit adds that the quantitative benefits to the campaign were undeniable: the National Library suddenly acquired tens of thousands of books in multiple languages.

In early 1949, the newly created office of the Custodian of Absentee Property took possession of the books, since they were considered movable absentee property. For years, Arabic-speaking students and staff at the Hebrew University and the National Library catalogued these books, a challenging process since determining the authors of the thousands of confiscated private documents and letters was nearly impossible in the absence of the owners.

Starting in the 1960s, and under the supervision of the Custodian’s office, 6,000 of these books and documents were revisited and simply labeled with the initials “AP” for “absentee property,” instead of the original authors’ names.75 As Amit put it, “it is this designation that appears to this day on the books’ covers and in the National Library’s computerized catalogue.”76 And ironically, these 6,000 books are much more easily found in the library’s catalogue; the remaining 24,000 are much harder to identify without the “AP” in the call numbers.77

The reason why the office of the Custodian decided to remove the owners’ names from many of the books is unknown. However, the decision to eliminate “the unique and nonduplicable memory of human beings,” as Amit put it, occurred during a period in which the Israeli state was erasing Palestinians irreversibly. In 1965, he explains, “the Israel Land Administration began an operation in which over 100 deserted Arab villages were razed to ‘clean up’ the country and permanently prevent Palestinians from returning to their homes.” He concludes that the reason behind erasing Palestinians’ names from their books and the razing of Arab villages was “deliberate and premeditated”; it rendered “the outcome of the war a final, irreversible reality.”78

Today, “the ‘Abandoned Property’ books in Palestine remain under the control of a government unwilling to return them to their owners,”79 and equally unwilling to allow their owners to return home.

Beyond the city, Zionist forces depopulated 40 Palestinian villages surrounding Jerusalem.80 Many of these villages were also destroyed by Zionist forces, particularly in the second half of 1948.81

In total, approximately 28,000 Palestinian villagers were expelled from villages surrounding Jerusalem, particularly to the west of the city. The village land totaled 250,000 dunums.82

As opposed to urban refugees, the majority of rural Palestinians expelled from their villagers ended up in Jordan; about a third continue to live in West Bank refugee camps. It is believed that the presence of UNRWA services in Jordan drove many to settle there.

Britain’s planned exit from Palestine on May 14 was preceded by UN intervention. In late April, the Trusteeship Council of the defunct November 29, 1947, Partition Plan, proposed to either place Jerusalem under international trusteeship or to manage the city with a UN force of 1,000 officers.83 While the Arabs refused this plan since it tacitly recognized partition, on May 7, they agreed to a truce in Jerusalem. When the Jewish Agency rejected the proposal for a truce, the UN imposed an immediate cease-fire, which lasted a few days. And despite many more efforts by UN representatives to have the Jewish Agency agree to a truce, Zionist forces continued with their plan of overtaking the New City.

The Zionists were aided by British forces in Jerusalem, who allowed them to secure strategic positions throughout the New City. The Villa Harun al-Rashid in Talbiyya, which was the command base for the Royal Air Force, was occupied by the Haganah on May 14. This strategy of Zionist forces sweeping in following British withdrawal was common in the final days of British presence in Palestine. British forces did nothing to stop them.84

In the afternoon of May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared “the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, to be called Israel.” And at midnight on May 14, the new State of Israel declared its independence from Britain. In the end, the demographic, legal, political, and economic changes implemented by “Britain” throughout its 30-year rule in Palestine transformed the country permanently.85

Indeed, the repercussions of three decades of British rule in Palestine, which ensured the increasing segregation of Jewish communities and the rise of anti-Arab Zionist violence, meant drastic changes for Jerusalem and its New City. The declaration of the State of Israel signified the effective division of Jerusalem between east and west—the former Arab, and the latter now Jewish. The west side of Jerusalem, once home to thriving and cosmopolitan Palestinians of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, transformed into an exclusively Jewish and decidedly anti-Arab section of the city, now under Zionist Israeli control.

As part of a deliberate Zionist strategy to keep them away, the Palestinians of Jerusalem’s New City have, to this day, never been allowed to return to their homes. Indeed, the policy has its origins in the very establishment of the State of Israel. On June 16, 1948, and in response to calls by members of Israel’s Mapam Council to allow Palestinian refugees from Jaffa to return, Ben-Gurion declared: “We must prevent at all costs their return.”86 The ways in which the new state secured Palestinians’ permanent dispossession and exile are detailed in Part 4.

Nadim Bawalsa and Kate Rouhana of the Jerusalem Story Team collaborated on the research, writing, and editing for this Backgrounder. 

Shahrazad Odeh, formerly with Jerusalem Story, worked on an early version of this Backgrounder.