The Blueprintfor Ethnic Cleansing: Plan Dalet
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village, and the Palestinians who were present at the meeting later recalled their apologetic tone when they explained that all the villages on the road between Tiberias and Safad were scheduled to be expelled. The mukhtar did not reveal the fact that the village was almost deserted and avowed that the people 'will defend their homes'." After the swift occupation of the village, another pattern emerged. A Jewish soldier went out on the roof of one of the houses and inquired whether among the men captured there were any Druze. 'If so', he shouted, 'they can stay. The rest have to go to Lebanon.' But even that option was not open to all, as the occupying force decided to conduct a selection process before 'allowing' the villagers to leave for Lebanon. Such selection operations were to become the model for the following expulsions, and one that has remained deeply engraved in the collective memory of Palestinians from the Nakba years, haunting them to this very day. Young men between the age of ten and thirty were taken aside and sent to prison camps. Forty men of Ghuwayr were thus separated from their families for eighteen months, languishing in pens. The village of Ghuwayr was frequently visited by UN observers checking first-hand how the partition resolution was being implemented. They witnessed the expulsions. Representatives of the western media, including a New York Times reporter, were still filing stories about individual villages, although the public interest in their fate was by this time diminishing; in any case, western readers were never given the full picture of events. 52 Furthermore, it seems that none of the foreign correspondents dared openly to criticise the actions ofthe Jewish nation just three years after the Holocaust. It was in and around Haifa that the ethnic cleansing operation gathered momentum, its deadly pace heralding the destruction to come. Fifteen villages - some of them small, that is with less than 300 people, some of them huge, with around 5000 - were expelled in quick succession. Abu Shusha, Abu Zurayq, Arab al-Fuqara, Arab al-Nufay'at, Arab Zahrat al-Durnayri, Balad Al-Shaykh, Damun, Khirbat al-Kasayir, Khirbat al-Manshiyya, Rihaniyya, Khirbat al-Sarkas, Khirbat Sa'sa, Wa'rat aI-Sarris and Yajur were wiped off Palestine's map within a sub-district full of British soldiers, UN ern issaries and foreign reporters. Expulsion and flight were not enough to save the villagers. Many of them were hunted down by the Marxistkibbutzniks of Hashorner Ha- Tza'ir, who swiftly and efficiently looted their houses before detonating them. We