‘Terror Was Needed to Make Arabs Leave’: What the Israeli Army Did in 1948, Revealed

Just about two years ago, in late March 2024, Ronit Zilberman, a zoologist, was walking near her home in the Ramat Hahayal neighborhood of Tel Aviv when she noticed boxes with what she realized were thousands of documents that someone had left next to a dumpster.

Curious, Zilberman started to riffle through the material. What she discovered was an extraordinary number of documents relating to the War of Independence, including some labelled confidential, others describing military operations in nascent Israel and neighboring countries, and maps and historical photographs that, it emerged, had never been made public (including images appearing in this investigative report).

Documentation of this sort and of this scale must be properly researched and archived, Zilberman thought. Although the boxes were quite heavy, she lugged them home. Her next step was to contact Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, where I am a researcher.

The collection turned out to belong to Rafi Kotzer, one of the first fighters in the Golani infantry brigade and a founder of the 12th Battalion’s commando unit, which later became Sayeret Golani, the brigade’s elite recon force. Kotzer commanded several battles in 1948 and was later a founder of the Israel Defense Forces’ Disabled Veterans Organization.

Part of the collection was personal – correspondence, school report cards, children’s drawings, etc. – and thus not important for research purposes. But there were also logbooks, notes, and summaries, for example, documenting discussions by Mapam – the left-wing political party that played a key role in Israel’s early decades – among other subjects, on the peril of nuclear weapons and on the military government that was imposed on Israel’s Arab population from 1948 until 1966. 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 to 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.”

Nearly 80 years have passed since the War of Independence, but much material in Israel’s archives remains classified. The country’s secrecy in this regard has left open one of the most fundamental questions relating to the war: whether close to 800,000 Arabs fled at their own initiative and at the directive of their leaders, or were expelled. And if expelled, what part did massacres and murders play in expediting that process? The fact that Israel prevented the Arabs from returning and demolished their villages – thus deliberately perpetuating their removal from the country – is often missing from historic discourse.

In the view of many Israelis, if the Arabs decided to flee, Israel is not responsible for creating the Palestinian tragedy. But if Israel expelled the Palestinians and its troops apparently didn’t hesitate to spill the blood of those who refused to leave, then a very dark cloud hangs over the period of the state’s establishment. If the underlying mission of the nascent army was not to ensure “purity of arms” as conceived at the time – i.e., that soldiers will not harm innocent people and will only use their weapons against individuals who perpetrate violent acts – but rather to perpetuate ethnic cleansing, it follows that historical memory in Israel is a deception.

If so, even those who underscore the war’s context – the fact that Arab countries had rejected the United Nations’ partition plan in 1947, the Holocaust had ended only three years earlier, and other conflicts at the time ended with population expulsion – will have to acknowledge what actually happened.

This historical discussion does not relate only to the past. Acknowledgement of the injustice that was done might have implications for Israel’s future and pave the way to conciliation. Lack of acknowledgement, however, comes with a price. What is collectively repressed surfaces in ugly ways later on. It’s worth giving the power of the truth a chance.

The impetus for this investigative report stems from an opportunity that recently arose to address this forgotten past in unmediated form. 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.

The most important documents released for publication and underlying this report relate to Shmuel Lahis. Lahis was a company commander in the Carmeli Brigade who, with his own hands, massacred dozens of residents of Hula, a village near Kibbutz Manara, on the Lebanese side of the border. Lahis is the only Israeli soldier ever tried for the murder of Arabs during the War of Independence – thanks to the insistence of his superior officer, deputy battalion commander Dov Yermiya, to bring him to justice. Lahis maintained that he had acted in accordance with the orders of his commanders, and he was sentenced to one year in prison. In practice, however, he was never jailed but served a short stint at a military base and was soon granted a pardon. He would go on to become the director general of the Jewish Agency.

Gideon Eilat, one of the judges in the case, noted that in the War of Independence, atrocities occurred that were worse than what Lahis perpetrated, and wondered why only he was brought to trial. He stated that no response had been forthcoming from the top brass “to multiple war crimes that were committed by commanders and soldiers,” and he clearly saw Lahis as a scapegoat.

Judge Eilat’s remarks were not made in a vacuum. The line of defense pursued by Lahis’ lawyers – that he was following orders – was supported by many senior officers who testified in his trial. Their testimonies are being made public here for the first time and appear in a book being published at present by the Akevot Institute.

One of the witnesses in the Lahis trial was Mordechai Maklef, an operations officer on the northern front who four years later was promoted to IDF chief of staff. “There were operations in which the potential enemy, namely civilians, was annihilated,” he told the court. “For example, in Safsaf, Jish, Ilaboun, Lod, Ramle, and in the south, on a large scale. The intention was to expel. It is impossible to expel 114,000 people who lived in the Galilee without terror. There had to have been an element of initial terror for them to leave.”

Maxim Cohen was commander of the Carmeli Brigade, one of the largest and most prominent of the infantry brigades involved in the war, in 1948-49. Summoned to the witness stand by Lahis’s lawyer, he provided gruesome testimony. “How do you expel a village?” he asked. “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.”

Haim Ben-David, an operations officer in Carmeli who rose to the rank of IDF major general and later became Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s military secretary, explained in his testimony that expulsion of Arabs was a routine matter and that the mop-up of an area “takes the form of killings,” depending on the circumstances.

“In our operative orders, we were careful not to mention killing. The orders relating to conduct were orally conveyed to the battalion commanders,” Ben-David explained, noting that written directives that came from the General Staff did not expressly call for the destruction of the villages, but actions on the ground were undertaken “with the knowledge of the High Command.”

What if an Arab insisted on remaining in his home? In that case, “he gets a bullet,” Ben-David told the court. “We knew the international laws, but I also know that we often did not behave according to those laws. We resorted to illegal means.” Such means, he said, were also implemented against women and children.

Another high-ranking officer called to the witness stand was Yosef Eitan, commander of the 7th Armored Brigade, who went on to become head of Central Command. Eitan referred to the disparity between written orders and what the troops were told orally: “I didn’t see [a written order] to annihilate every living soul, but in the form of hints – that, yes.” He added that officers in the field had “permission to interpret the order,” adding that “our soldiers annihilated inhabitants” on the basis of directives they were given.

Yisrael Carmi, a battalion commander in the 7th Brigade, testified in the Lahis trial about the conquest of Be’er Sheva in October 1948, explaining that the method was to kill civilians who resisted expulsion and that it was used in both the north and the south.

“I conquered the city,” Carmi testified. “In mopping up that area, I gave an order to annihilate anyone who appeared in the street, whether they resisted or did not resist. An order was given to destroy everything. After the conquest of the police station – after the surrender – the murder stopped. Until then, everyone was killed – women and children and everyone. Then an order was given to the people to go to Hebron. Anyone who didn’t go was ‘removed'” (quotation marks in the original).

Another archival file whose materials have been made available deals with the trial of soldiers who raped and murdered a Bedouin girl in the south in 1949. The documents show how the killing of civilians served not only to expedite their expulsion, but also to prevent the return of Arabs to their lands. An operational command issued to soldiers in writing shortly after the cease-fire agreements ordered them “to shoot every Arab who is in the area as far as the armistice boundary.” Signed by: A. Rosenblum. Captain. Commander of the line.”

The verdict in this case stated that the orders issued to soldiers “were unreservedly to shoot every Arab – hence it makes no difference whether it is a man or a woman, whether the Arab is armed or not, whether he flees or raises his hands and surrenders. If you saw an Arab while on patrol, you are obligated to shoot him.”

In light of this, the judges noted, it’s difficult to see the soldiers as being responsible for murder, and accounts should be settled with them only for the rape. “If the officer had killed the Arab woman instead of ‘taking’ her, it’s possible that he would not have merited punishment at all.”

The recently publicized collection of documents also refers to another case, relating to the murder of three elderly Arabs – two women and a man – in Al-Bureij, south of Hebron. IDF soldiers captured the village in July 1948, and three months later, wondered how to dispose of four Arabs who were still there.

Pvt. Arye Ben-Shem, from the 143rd Battalion, related that one of the four was deemed to be of service to the troops in the kitchen, and it was decided to spare him. As for the other three, according to Ben-Shem’s testimony, Lt. Yosef Fishel ordered the troops to put them into a building and fire a Fiat antitank shell at it. “Finish them off,” Fishel ordered.

After the shell missed the building, it was decided that the troops should throw grenades into it and then set it on fire. “When I entered the house, one [man] was dying, and I pumped a bullet into him,” one of the soldiers testified. Their condition was that they were lying on the ground. I gave the two others kicks in the legs. They didn’t respond.”

One soldier testified that “liquidating Arabs according to an order from someone of authority was not surprising, because I heard about a lot of cases in which that was done.”

Unlike Lahis, accused of murder in the massacre at Hula, Fishel was tried and convicted for attempted murder. The court explained that the prosecution had been negligent and hadn’t made the necessary effort to prove that a murder had indeed been committed. Fishel was sentenced to 60 days in prison – increased to a year’s incarceration, in an appeal – and the court noted that the accused could have been led to believe that his deeds were justified both morally and militarily.

Fishel’s lawyer said he could not understand “why the accused should do time. For having exaggerated in his actions? He carried out an unpleasant duty and acted from the purest of reasons. It’s not one officer who was punished here – it’s a whole school of thought.”

The fact that the acts of murder and expulsion were considered to be part of “a whole school of thought” was blurred over the years, emerging only infrequently in research studies. And even then, the focus was on Operation Hiram, whose aim was to conquer the Galilee, and which was launched at the tail end of the war.

In fact, the methods that are described here were practiced in the local warfare that took place between November 1947 and May 1948, and more intensely in the stage of the subsequent regional conflagration. Indeed, acts of violence surged starting in April-May 1948, when the Haganah pre-independence army moved to the offensive. During that period, many Arab cities were captured and their inhabitants expelled. Hundreds of villages suffered the same fate in the months that followed.

Descriptions of these developments appear in comprehensive research about Operation Hiram that was conducted in the 1950s by Maj. Yitzhak Moda’i, who three decades later would become Israel’s finance minister. Written at the request of the IDF’s History Department, his study was based on internal documents and not meant for public consumption. In it Moda’i notes that Yigael Yadin, IDF head of operations during the war and the IDF’s second chief of staff, beginning in late 1949, who later became a world-famous archaeologist and had a long political career, stated plainly in a written order that “We are not interested in Arab inhabitants.”

Moda’i also writes that, “In the final stages of Operation Hiram, the head of [the northern front] command informed the brigades as follows: ‘Do all you can to effect a rapid and immediate cleansing of the conquered territories of all hostile elements. In accordance with the orders that were issued, the inhabitants have to be helped to leave.'”

In summary, he noted that IDF units had tried to remove the Arab population of the Galilee “and frequently and not necessarily by legal and gentle means.”

The expulsion order that Moda’i quoted in his study was attributed to the commander of the northern front, Maj. Gen. Moshe Carmel. The document was declassified by the IDF Archives in the late 1990s and was the basis of a book by Israeli historian Benny Morris, “Correcting a Mistake: Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel, 1936-1956” (2000, in Hebrew).

In an earlier, pioneering study entitled “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949” (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Morris described the expulsion of Arabs as fomenting disarray and confusion, in light of the absence of any clear policy. In his subsequent book, he sought to correct that description and wrote that Carmel’s written order, which had been declassified by then, made it clear that expelling the local inhabitants was “extremely urgent.”

In the meantime, documentation referring to the expulsion was relegated to obscurity in the IDF archives, along with that attesting to war crimes. To understand how rare the testimonies and directives being cited here for the first time are, we must examine Israel’s decades-long policy of concealment. Of 17 million files in the Israel State Archives and the IDF and Defense Establishment Archives, more than 16 million are inaccessible to the public.

An internal document from the IDF archives that was classified until a few years ago, and recently uncovered by Akevot, specified to the archives’ staff which subjects and topics they should try to keep hidden from public scrutiny. For example, “material that might harm the IDF’s image [and show it] as an occupying army devoid of moral foundations, [which displays] violent behavior against an Arab population and cruel acts (killing, murder).”

In addition, documentation relating to the “expulsion of Arabs” is not to be uncovered, nor is that concerning “orders to harm infiltrators [Arabs trying to return to their villages].” Also off-limits, the memorandum instructed staffers, was material referring to “violent behavior against prisoners, contrary to the Geneva Convention (killing), and also instructions “not to pay attention to white flags.”

The efforts at concealment also encompassed archives held by political parties and private collections, an alternative resource for researchers and journalists. In the past 25 years, staff at what is referred to in Hebrew as Malmab – the office of the director of security of the defense establishment – went from archive to archive, ensuring that potentially revealing documents were kept off-limits to the public, without any legal authority to do so.

The High Court of Justice also played a part in this policy. Asked to allow publication of documents and images from the 1948 massacre in the Arab village of Deir Yassin, on the edge of Jerusalem, the court declined to do so in 2010, citing the feeble rationale that doing so was liable to harm Israel’s foreign policy and “relations with the Arab minority” in the country.

Similarly, the minutes of the relevant cabinet meetings have yet to be declassified, even though almost 80 years have passed. Still, some of the ministers’ exchanges have been made available for perusal in recent years, in the wake of pressure exerted by the state archives.

For example, in a real-time discussion about orders “to cleanse the territory,” Interior Minister Yitzhak Gruenbaum said, “Anyone who looks from the side at all these matters cannot find an explanation for the flight of the Arabs. It stands to reason that they were driven to flee because [people] robbed, raped, murdered, expelled.” He urged that an order be issued to stop the expulsion.

Another minister, Mordechai Bentov, stated at a cabinet meeting, “It is easy to expel; Hitler was the first,” adding, “Everything we are doing is contrary to international conventions.” And longtime minister Moshe Haim Shapira asserted that the violence of Israeli troops against the Arabs had reached epidemic proportions.

A recurring motif in the documents being revealed here for the first time is the directive against taking prisoners. The definition of prisoners turns out to have been quite broad – sometimes encompassing women and children – and was mentioned in the context of Lahis’ line of defense. It was argued that transferring inhabitants of the conquered village to a rear army base was “contrary to the order” Lahis had been given by his commander, namely, “that we don’t need to take prisoners and it’s necessary to cleanse the enemy from the whole territory.”

Operations officer Ben-David, from the Carmeli Brigade, testified in the Lahis trial that the order on this subject was conveyed orally to the troops – and bore an unequivocal message: “It was clear to everyone,” he said. “No questions were asked about what was meant by not taking prisoners.”

During the war, Ben-David added, young Arab men “were not considered civilians” and could be killed. Pvt. Yitzhak Soroka told the court during the same proceedings that the instructions were to kill the men who didn’t flee from their villages. Asked about the age of the men in question, he said that on one occasion he received “an operational order defining the age [as being] from 15.”

An intelligence officer named Yaakov D. (his name is blacked out in the documents that have been made available) referred to the killing of Arabs who were apprehended in their communities: “That is clear and obvious from the intelligence officers course – when it’s stated not take a prisoner, that doesn’t mean to expel him, but to kill him,” Yaakov D. explained, adding that in cases where combat troops took prisoners, they killed them afterward. The commanders, he noted, had been ordered to kill whoever remained behind, and this occurred “in quite a few villages.”

The witnesses called to testify often referred to the issue of international conventions. “We know international laws,” Ben-David said. “But I also know that quite a few times we didn’t behave according to those rules. We used illegal means,” – and that was done, he added, with the consent of High Command and even at its behest. Mordechai Maklef, for example, said that soldiers were not familiar with the Geneva Convention, while the commander of the 7th Brigade, Yosef Eitan, noted that it’s possible the units were sent information about “Hague rules [but] we didn’t pay any special attention to it.” Carmi from the 7th Brigade stated that, “we behaved [toward the prisoner] not according to the Geneva agreement,” and the brigade commander, Cohen, testified that even in the period of the pre-state Haganah force, orders were disseminated to the effect that “unarmed Arabs have to be killed.”

Carmi added that sometimes a directive was issued in order “not to burden intelligence,” meaning essentially allowing those caught to be killed. From his point of view, every “man who has hands and a head constitutes a danger,” and a person’s fate would be determined for better or worse, according to the faces.” In cases where Carmi thought the Arabs he encountered were dangerous, he would kill them on the spot.

Besides the liquidation of prisoners, in some cases, the documents under review here attest to the killing of Arab civilians who sought to return to their captured villages. An example is the minutes of a 1951 trial dealing with such acts in the Arab town of Majdal (today’s Ashkelon), in 1949. Under debate were the actions of a company stationed there in order to prevent the return of the residents. The court found that “the soldiers sometimes ran amok. Some thought they were free to behave toward the Arabs, especially infiltrators, as they pleased.” According to a number of testimonies, which the court accepted as credible, killing Arabs “was considered legal” by the troops, and the soldier who did the killing was even perceived by his buddies as “a good sport.”

The trial in this case dealt with an incident in which young Arabs “infiltrated” Majdal in order to visit their parents, who were among the few hundred who remained in the then-Israeli-controlled locale during a gradual expulsion process there. They were caught by soldiers, who executed them. In a rare exception, the parents testified in the trial.

“My son came from Gaza to my home in Majdal,” the father stated. “I told him, after the end of the curfew, I will turn you over to the Jews.” He went on to recount the discovery of his son’s body. “I saw bullets in my son’s chest and three-four bullets in his head and back. I fainted and fell down. There were signs of a beating.”

The testimonies cited in this investigative report do not exist in a vacuum. In the past decade and a half, a wave of publications has appeared about the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, but they haven’t coalesced into a coherent story or generated a public discussion. Some haven’t even been translated into Hebrew.

The material in question comes from diverse sources: Israeli research (Alon Confino, Shay Hazkani); Palestinian research (Saleh Abd al-Jawad, Adel Manna); Arab fiction (Elias Khoury, Salman Natour), journalistic reports (Hagar Shezaf in Haaretz); nonfiction books (for example, “My Promised Land,” by Ari Shavit); documentary films (Neta Shoshani’s “Remember, Remember Not,” Alon Schwarz’s “Tantura” and Einat Weizman’s “Agenda Item: Erasure”) and activity of civil society organizations (the nonprofits Zochrot, Akevot Institute).

Shavit’s best seller, in English, which provoked much discussion in the United States but was not translated into Hebrew, recounts in detail the conquest of the Arabs of Lod in 1948, based on numerous interviews with officers and soldiers. The author relates how the city was captured quickly, whereupon thousands of residents were taken to two mosques and a church. The next day, two Jordanian armored vehicles entered the city by mistake and triggered a renewed wave of violence, because the locals thought, erroneously, that they were an Arab auxiliary force that had come to release them. The IDF responded by shooting in every direction and fired a Fiat antitank shell at one of the mosques in which the Arabs had been concentrated.

Shavit, quoting a confession by the soldier who fired the shell, writes that within 30 minutes, 200 civilians were killed, adding that after the shooting died down, Ben-Gurion ordered Yigal Allon, commander of the Palmach (the Haganah’s commando unit), to expel the inhabitants. Shavit quotes a written order that another Palmach commander, Yitzhak Rabin, who was involved in the conquest of Lod as part of Operation Dani, sent to the Yiftah Brigade and which was disseminated shortly afterward: “The inhabitants of Lydda [Lod] must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.”

The same Fiat shell is mentioned also in documents related to the Lahis trial, which are being revealed here. According to Carmi, the battalion commander, “In Lod, hundreds of Arabs were taken into a mosque, and Fiats were fired into it.”

Shoshani’s film also addresses the events in Lod, quoting from a joint log kept by the Yiftah soldiers: “After breakfast, two enemy armored vehicles suddenly appeared and started to approach. Rifle barrels immediately popped out of every window. Rebellion. We overcame the enemy, but another 15 or so wounded and three killed were added [to the toll].

“The guys seethed with anger; they were ready to murder on the spot. An order was given to carry out a thorough cleansing, and indeed a cleansing was carried out. A stench arose and enveloped every corner. The rest of the day passed relatively quietly, other than the happy times we had.”

In the film, Shoshani also provides grim testimony that sheds additional light on one of the harshest events of the war: the October 1948 massacre in Dawayima, in the Lachish region in the northern Negev. This testimony, which caught the eye of historians in the past, was kept under wraps in an archive by Malmab staff, but eventually made public thanks to pressure from the Akevot Institute. It’s mentioned in a letter written by a member of Mapam named S. Kaplan to Eliezer Peri, the editor of the party’s newspaper, Al Hamishmar, and presents the eyewitness testimony of a soldier named Meir Efron: “The soldier, one of ours, is an intellectual, one hundred percent reliable. He arrived in the village immediately after the conquest. There was no battle, and there was no resistance. The first conquerors killed 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women, and children.

“One commander ordered the sapper to put two old Arab women into a certain house, and to blow it up with them inside. Another soldier boasted that he had raped an Arab woman and then shot her. One woman who was holding a newborn baby worked as a cleaner. She worked for a day or two, and in the end, they shot her and her baby.”

Alon Schwarz’s documentary “Tantura” added valuable information about the massacre in May 1948 in that village, located on the coast north of Zichron Yaakov, including several first-hand testimonies. “I didn’t talk to anyone about it,” a veteran of the Alexandroni Brigade says. “What would I tell, that I was a murderer?” According to other testimony, “One [soldier] took them and murdered them in the pens. They went wild in Tantura; it was something horrible.” A third witness recalled: “Many were killed. I buried them.”

While Jewish filmmakers were focusing on the Nakba in documentaries, Arab writers chose to publish memoirs of survivors in a fictional framework. This format, without corroborating evidence or footnotes, allowed Israeli historians to shrug off the brutal testimonies and deem them unreliable. In a book published a decade ago, “Memory Talked to Me and Walked Away,” Salman Natour describes an execution in an almost completely identical way to the description in the documents informing this article.

Following is a scene from the book that describes IDF soldiers’ invasion of an Arab village: “‘Hands up!’ They raised their hands. ‘Kneel on your knees.’ They kneeled on the ground. ‘Stand on your feet.’ They stood. ‘Hand over the weapons.’ They had no weapons. ‘You, you, you, and you. Come with me.’ Four young men, not yet 30.

“He ordered a soldier to take them and move away. He moved away with the four to a range of 50 meters. ‘Raise your hands. With backs to the wall.’ He moved back a few meters and squeezed the trigger. He heard whispers, ‘Shut up. Shut up, you donkeys.’ Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Within a few seconds, the bodies were lying before our eyes.”

And here, almost in a mirror image, is testimony from a soldier about the massacre in Hula, from the Lahis trial: “First Lt. Shmuel Lahis asked me for 15 people from the Arab inhabitants. He chose the young ones. He told me to go with them to an isolated house in the village. The company commander was carrying arms. He had a pistol and a Sten gun. I had a rifle.

“When we got there, the company commander told them, through me, to turn their face to the wall. They turned their face to the wall. Then First Lt. Lahis told me to ask them where the weapons were. They said they have no weapons. After that, Lahis started to shoot them with the Sten. He shot them in volleys, and the Arabs pleaded and shouted and afterward fell. The shouts and the pleading didn’t influence anyone.”

Lahis himself told the court that the battalion commander, Avraham Peled, asserted that the company “will go and wreak the revenge on behalf of their comrades.” Lahis then turned to Pvt. Ephraim Huberman said, “If you want to take revenge, there are still four alive, take [them] and avenge.”

A book by historian Shay Hazkani (“Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War,” Stanford University Press, 2021) quotes a letter written by a female soldier who visited the Galilee, which illuminates the revenge motif. “I think that such an occupation is the work of the devil,” she wrote. “The corpses reached up to the knees.” She saw soldiers who behaved “with dreadful brutality,” but understood them because of what they had suffered. “The first boys in the Galilee… they too should be allowed to erupt and kill just like that, out of revenge and pleasure.”

Readers of Hebrew who take an interest in the annals of the war can peruse works by Israeli historians and documentarians. But what about the Palestinian side? For many years, Palestinian researchers and other chroniclers did not focus on collecting testimonies and addressing the horrors of events relating to the 1948 war.

There were a variety of reasons for this: the sheer desire to survive after the brutal, mass expulsion; the redoubled effort to promote the national struggle; shame; fear of Israeli retaliation against those who talked; and the dispersion of the Palestinian people across the world, from the Middle East to Chile. However, in the many decades after the Nakba, there were some who collected testimonies from the survivors.

In 2017, Adel Manna, a Palestinian historian and Israeli citizen, published a study entitled “Nakba and Survival: The Story of the Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948-1956” (in Hebrew). He asserted that, “The massacres in Operation Hiram were organized ‘from above’ and were intended to bring about flight.” Historian Morris was critical of the book, maintaining that “Manna has no corroborating evidence that links these things.” But evidence that is continuing to surface shows that Manna is right: The IDF initiated massacres and murders in order to spur the Arabs to flee. As Mordechai Maklef testified: “There needed to be an element of initial terror for them to leave.”

But how extensive was this bloodbath? Morris enumerated 24 massacres. The present writer has already stated in these pages that there were many dozens of such acts. Today it seems that even that figure was conservative. In this context, one of the most impressive studies of the Nakba was conducted by a group of researchers at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, under the aegis of the Palestinian historian Salah Abd al-Jawad.

His comprehensive work is based on 300 in-depth interviews with survivors that were conducted beginning in the late 1990s. The researchers even decided that the witnesses should be interviewed under oath. Afterward, the testimonies were cross-checked with each other and with various documents.

At first, al-Jawad concluded that more than 70 massacres had been perpetrated between 1947 and 1949. However, in recent years, in a follow-up study based on diverse sources and an additional group of oral testimonies, al-Jawad has found that at least 100 massacres took place. In other words, Civilians were massacred in one out of every five villages that were captured by the military.

The massacres can be divided into five types: broad, general killing (Dawayima); indiscriminate killing during the conquest (Be’er Sheva); killing stemming from a lust for revenge sparked by the death of soldiers (Balad ash-Sheikh); selective execution of a group of noncombatant men by firing squad (Majd al-Kurum); execution of all male prisoners (Hula); and killing of civilians who tried to return home (Majdal).

Updated research literature makes it possible to map a large number of the massacres with a high level of certainty. The following is a partial list: The three most serious events – that is, where 100 or more civilians were killed – took place in Deir Yassin, Dawayima, and Lod. Six massacres exacted between 50 and 100 victims: in Jish on the slopes of Mount Miron, in Safsaf and Ein Zeitun near Safed, in Salha on the Lebanon border, in Abu Shusha near Ramle, and in the village of Bureir north of Gaza.

A few dozen civilians were massacred in Tantura, Be’er Sheva, Kafr Inan in the Safed area, Tira in the Haifa area, and Hula on the Lebanon border. There were about 20 victims in Ilaboun west of Lake Kinneret, in Nasir al-Din near Tiberias, in Sabbarin adjacent to Haifa, in Al-Bassa north of Acre, and in a Bedouin community south of Acre. Additional massacres of note took place in Majd al-Kurum, in Kfar Sava, in Rehovot (in the village of Zarnuga), south of Nahariya, and near several kibbutzim: Kabri, Negba, and Kfar Menahem.

In 2021, a selection of testimonies that al-Jawad’s team compiled, which are consistent with those collected on the Israeli side, was published in book form under the title “Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine” (Pluto Press). On the basis of these gut-wrenching testimonies, the author discerned a recurring, four-stage pattern during the conquests of that era: encirclement of villages from three directions while being terrorized by means of shooting and shelling; permitting the escape of some locals to neighboring countries; murder of inhabitants who did not leave, particularly males aged 15 to 50; and blowing up and torching of structures – not infrequently with people still inside.

This too is a heritage of the War of Independence.

Almost eight decades have passed since those blood-soaked events, but in Israel, a deep gulf still separates memory and self-image, and reality. Crimes committed in 1948 are concealed and repressed, blanketed by a culture of silence. In large measure, recognition of the crimes of the past and of the denial that typically accompanies them is essential in order to come to terms with Israel’s present. A society that, over generations, represses acts of massacre, murder, and expulsion that it perpetrated, finds it easier to shut its eyes to what has been fomented in the Gaza Strip over the past two years.

This defective collective memory did not come into being by chance, and the blame for inculcating it does not lie only with school textbooks. It’s the domain of an entire system: political, judicial, and media. Israeli academia also collaborated with the policy of concealment and denial, whether from identifying with it or due to laziness or apathy.

And like then, now once again, “noncombatants” are killed, crimes are concealed, and those responsible are not being brought to trial. That has been the pattern all along. Israel brought about the death of an estimated 100,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip after October 7, but not one soldier has been accused of murder or manslaughter. As of this writing, one soldier has been tried for looting.

The denial of the crimes of 1948 has fueled decades of conflict. What will the denial of the crimes of Gaza bring down upon us?

Adam Raz is a reporter for Haaretz.

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