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The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
cleansing, 'tihur', was used economically in the Consultancy's meetings, but appears on every order the High Command passed down to the units on the ground. It means in Hebrew what it means in any other language: the expulsion of entire populations from their villages and towns. This determination overshadowed all other political consideration. There were crossroads ahead where the Zionist leadership was offered a chance to take a different course of action, both by the United States and by Arab actors on the scene. Ben-Gurion and his Consultancy had decided to blaze a clear road ahead, and they rejected these offers one after the other.
FEBRUARY 1948: SHOCK AND AWE
Nothing of the atmosphere that pervaded the first meetings of the Consultancy was reflected in the fiery speeches Ben-Gurion delivered to the wider public. Melodramatic and full ofpathos, he told his audience: 'This is a war aimed at destroying and eliminating the Jewish community,' never referring to the passivity of the Palestinians or the provocative nature of Zionist actions. These speeches, one should add, were not just rhetoric. The Jewish forces did suffer casualties in their attempts to keep the lines open to all the isolated settlements the Zionists had planted in the heart of the Palestinian areas. By the end of Ianuary, 400 Jewish settlers had died in these attacks - a high number for a community of 660,000 (but still a much lower number than the 1500 Palestinians who had so far been killed by the random bombardment and shelling oftheir villages and neighbourhoods). These casualties Ben-Gurion now depicted as 'victims of a second Holocaust'. The attempt to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as Nazis was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings. Already in 1945, Natan Alterman, the national poet of the Jewish community, had identified the impending confrontation with the Palestinians with the war against the Nazis in Europe: Likeyou the brave English nation that stood with its back to the wall when Europe and France were covered black