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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4426 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?

All colonial partitions had displacement and some amount of killing and chaos. See also: the balkans, India/Pakistan, the US etc. As these things go, taking the worst possible interpretation of the documents here, it's barely on the scale. When India was partitioned, anywhere from half a million to three million people died or were killed and twelve million or so were made refugees.

Once again, we're supposed to care because jews act exactly like everyone else when they have to form a state, only a bit less so. States are force and violence. They cannot be created nor destroyed without force and violence. Some people have to win, and some have to lose. The alternative is the status quo.

A lot of british loyalists got run out of the states, their land stolen, and many were just killed. The Revolutionary war went on some years after Yorktown, ugly local fighting crushing the rest of the loyal colonial Americans, and subjecting them to the new revolutionary order.

This is all thin gruel. None of it creates a legal right of return, any more than Benedict Arnold had a right of return to the US. Any more than muslim refugees' grandchildren have a right to their ancestral home in India. Any more than the Hindu refugees' grandchildren have a right to enter Pakistan. This is how partition and population transfer work.

The Arabs ran all teh jews out of their countries, Israel took them. Israel ran a minority of the arabs out of their new country, and the arab countries did not take them. That's the real difference here. It's the hereditary refugee status of the Palestinians, and the refusal of their part of the partitioned territories to take them, and the failure of their own politics to produce a government that can even negotiate with the Israelis.

Indian partition violence was the result of mobs, not a top down military policy. But the violence of Israelis against Palestinians occurred as part of a conscious military policy involving ethnic cleansing and terrorism, which is shown in the documents. This makes them qualitatively different events.

It doesn't. It's just confirmation bias. Plenty of countries have some amount of "military policy" about displacing groups of people for any number of reasons. This is not new, it is not distinct, it isn't even illegal. It's part of the "sovereignty" that allows countries to make deals about territory and absorb population transfer.

It is not illegal to massacre civilians and ethnically cleanse populations through terror? Nuremberg disagrees with you, as does probably every expert of international law not from Israel.

It is not. It is illegal to do that in the country next door, to the degree anyone feels like enforcing that law. No one at Nuremberg was convicted of mistreating Germans. Once again, this is one of those sovereignty things. It is not against international law, and is outside the purview of outside governments, for a government to use force to move or eliminate any portion of their population. These are internal matters.

It's not against the law for Iran to kill protesters, though we may use that for political advantage. It's not against the law for Hutus to genocide Tutsis, which is why no one did anything except the Tutsis. Where things get dicey is when people are being killed in an argument over who is the sovereign power. In those cases, it matters who wins militarily. Might does not make right, but it does make sovereignty, and sovereignty has certain rights.

Interesting; so had Germany genocided all of their Jews within their own borders, this would have been perfectly legal, totally beyond the purview of outside governments. Just an internal matter. TIL.

In any case, this doesn’t apply to the Nakba, as the newfound “State of Israel” did not have legal possession over the land that they terrorized. Immediately after 15 May 1948, the majority of the land belonged to the Palestinians.

As it happened, relatively few of Germany's jews were genocided, because most of them were pressured to leave ("ethnically cleansed") before the war really kicked off. And no, no one did anything about that. In fact, Britain sent boatloads of jewish refugees back to Germany for trying to get into Palestine.

Immediately after 15 May 1948, the majority of the land belonged to the Palestinians.

According to who? Part of sovereignty is deciding who gets to keep what land. Britain held the "mandate" previously, from the Ottomans, and they gave it up. There was no deal in place due to the arabs declining, so sovereignty is a jump ball. Everyone had an even break to form a state, and the arabs were in a much stronger position. But they did not declare a state, and the jews did. Whatever palestinian national aspirations might have proved died when they lost to the Jews at the local level and were occupied by their "allies" in the neighboring arab countries. Part of that whole process was some of those arabs being forcibly moved off their land for any number of good and bad reasons. New borders had to be drawn, and policed, and defended on both sides. A new government had to make a lot of decisions about who gets what, and there's always losers in that process. They tend to come from the losing side, but the fact that arabs remain a significant portion of the Israeli population in a way that jewish residents of arab nations are not is a pretty big clue to how relatively ruthless those groups are.

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