“In Safsaf, after the inhabitants had hoisted the white flag, the soldiers gathered the men and women into separate groups, bound the hands of 50 or 60 villagers, shot them, then buried them all in the same pit.”
Yosef Nahmani, a senior officer of the Haganah, wrote these words in his diary on 6 November 1948, recounting the mass slaughter of Palestinians by the armed force of the Jewish Agency six months earlier. The atrocity was part of the larger operation of what became known as al-Nakba (“the catastrophe” in Arabic).
Another Israeli veteran, Amnon Neumann, described how the army drove Palestinians off their land. “We burned their houses”, he said. And when villagers tried to sneak back to tend to their crops during the night, “We would shoot and kill them”.
Eighty-seven-year-old Palestinian Ebtihaj Dola later recounted the horrific scenes she witnessed in Jaffa during al-Nakba. “We would see the dead bodies on the ground”, she said. “They [Zionist militia members] would move around the streets in their cars and shoot randomly. People walking would just drop dead.”
From 1947 to 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. During al-Nakba, Zionist forces razed 530 villages and slaughtered at least 15,000 Palestinians.
This is how the state of Israel was born.
Read the article by Bella Beirhagi in Red Flag.