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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3647 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Haaretz recently reported on a trove of new documents pertaining to the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians by Jewish Zionists. They are quite interesting, as they provide evidence toward the disputed claim that the Zionists used a conscious strategy of terror to expel the Muslim and Christian inhabitants.

The most important documents for closer historical examination were those that dealt with the War of Independence. One document that stood out among the papers that had been tossed into the garbage was written by Yitzhak Broshi, commander of Golani's 12th Battalion in the war. It was an order from July 1948 that Broshi sent commanders of the brigade's companies that were engaged in combat in the northern part of the country, titled "Conduct in captured villages where there is a population." The contents of this document are not the type of material one finds in Israeli history books. Broshi informed the officers that after an Arab village was captured, identification certificates were to be issued to the inhabitants. If someone transferred their certificate to another person, both were to be shot. If someone did not report on time for military inspection, they were to be shot and their home was to be blown up. If an "outside Arab" was found in a village, according to Broshi's directives, he was to be shot immediately. In general, the rule was to shoot "every 10th man" in a captured village where outsiders were found. In addition, all the men in any household in which property stolen from Jews was found were to be executed.

Moreover, while there was an order to raze villages, in some cases that was not enough. For example, when it came to Arab a-Zabah, a Bedouin community in the Lower Galilee, not a soul or a trace was to remain. "Every Arab among the Zabahim is to be killed," the order stated. These were not vague directives conveyed by word of mouth. This one and others appeared in "black on white" and were signed by Broshi in his handwriting. In another order dated July 1948, Broshi instructed his troops to mount a search for Arabs who might have hidden in the Mount Turan area of the Lower Galilee, after the site had already been conquered. The order was: "Kill anyone who is hiding."

Among the documents is one stating that "Arabs in a small number are wandering about in the [captured] villages," apparently to collect possessions and food. As per the instructions in the document: "The area is to be cleansed of Arabs." Under the heading "The method," the document adds that "every Arab who will be met with is to be annihilated."

Kotzer's vast collection, some of which was quoted above, is part of a trove of thousands of legal documents from 1948 that were declassified by the military courts due to recent procedures initiated by the Akevot Institute. This rich resource, which was approved for publication by the Military Censor, sheds new light on the history of the Palestinian refugee question. Moreover, it completely dispels the Israeli narrative according to which the country's Arab inhabitants fled of their own volition at the behest of their own leaders. Although some such instructions were indeed disseminated, and some people left at their own initiative – it can now be confirmed, on the basis of an impressive range of evidence, that the IDF expelled Arabs systematically and violently during the War of Independence. The expulsion was effected by massacres, murder and a variety of moves aimed at terrorizing this civilian population and expediting its flight.

There are a number of insightful things here that are a bit too long to quote. It mentions one Shmuel Lehis who massacred 40 Palestinians, becoming the only Israeli convicted of a war crime in this period. He received just one year in jail (in practice: hanging out at a military base) before being pardoned. He went on to work with the World Zionist Organization and became the president of the Jewish Agency in 1978. He later won the Chairman of the Knesset prize, the highest honor bestowed by the Israeli Parliament. Another interesting file involves the commander of the most prominent brigade at the time conveying the dominant expulsion strategy: "How do you expel a village? You lop off the ear of one of the Arabs before everyone else's eyes, and they all flee. In practice, no village was evacuated without stabbing someone in the stomach or by means of similar methods. We won thanks only to the fear of the Arabs, and they were fearful only of deeds that were not in accordance with the law."

I think these documents will be influential in future discourse about the Palestinian Question and the Israel Question. How justified is the Palestinian drive to take back their land from forces of terror (or their inheritors)? How justified is the existence of Israel? Should the world reward a state for taking land through ethnicity-targeted terrorism? Or are these events simply too old to inform present opinion? Comparing these events to Ukraine, we might ask: if Russia were to begin a strategy of terror bombing civilian homes, so as to lead Ukrainians to flee en masse, in how many years should we forget they they’ve done this and welcome them into the World Order?

Isn't this the norm during WW2? What is the expected norm during the 1940s on military tactics related to civilian targets?

This kind of indiscriminate murder was the norm among Axis countries. For example the "kill 1 in 10" rule was something the Germans frequently deployed when "pacifying" unruly communities in Yugoslavia or Greece or Italy. (They were likely to do far worse in Eastern Europe)

For the Allies, no this was not normal. Violence against civilians in occupied territory was either very rare (western Allies) or common and unrestrained (Soviets), but in any case not typically used as an overtly political tool to quash dissent.

It’s more accurate to say that the western Allies did not use violence against civilians as a political tool after their states had surrendered. Hiroshima, etc.

Yes, that's why I specified "in occupied territory." The western Allies didn't necessarily consider enemy civilians to be "fair game" per se, but there was certainly a murkier moral world view than might have wished to be remembered. Certainly the strategic bombing offensives engaged in a similar kind of euphemistic language ("morale bombing", attacking the "enemy housing stock") as the Nazis did with respect to targeting civilian populations.

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