The Hebron Massacre and the 1948 War

 The rooms looked like a slaughterhouse…

This is Pierre Van Paassen account of what he witnessed in the aftermath of the deadly Hebron 1929 Pogroms.

What occurred in the upper chambers of Slonim’s house could be seen when we found the twelve-foot-high ceiling splashed with blood. The rooms looked like a slaughterhouse. When I visited the place in the company of Captain Marek Schwartz, a former Austrian artillery officer, Mr. Abraham Goldberg of New York, and Mr. Ernst Davies, correspondent of the old Berliner Tageblatt, the blood stood in a huge pool on the slightly sagging stone floor of the house. Clocks, crockery, tables and windows had been smashed to smithereens. Of the unlooted articles, not a single item had been left intact except a large black-and-white photograph of Dr. Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism. Around the picture’s frame the murderers had draped the blood-drenched underwear of a woman.[1]

We stood silently contemplating the scene of slaughter when the door was flung open by a British solder with fixed bayonet. In strolled Mr. Keith-Roach, governor of the Jaffa district, followed by a colonel of the Green Howards battalion of the King’s African Rifles. They took a hasty glance around that awful room, and Mr. Roach remarked to his companion, “Shall we have lunch now or drive to Jerusalem first?”

For some reason, there is a movement to create a false equivalency between the peacetime slaughter of Jews simply for being Jews, and a mass dispossession that occurred more than 2 decades later during a war for survival.

[

[[This post was a response to an incredibly violent rant by someone on a website name Arres Maroni. I am not putting it here.]

Let’s talk about the definition of “ethnic cleansing”.

As OP here states, ethnic cleansing definition includes dispossession and force

but there are more elements that the international community uses to define ethnic cleansing.

United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect

Ethnic Cleansing Background United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). UN Photo/John Isaac Ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law. The term surfaced in the context of the 1990’s conflict in the former Yugoslavia and is considered to come from a literal translation of the Serbo-Croatian expression “etničko čišćenje”. However, the precise roots of the term or who started using it and why are still uncertain. The expression “ethnic cleansing” has been used in resolutions of the Security Council and the General Assembly, and has been acknowledged in judgments and indictments of the ICTY, although it did not constitute one of the counts for prosecution. A definition was never provided. Definition As ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law, there is no precise definition of this concept or the exact acts to be qualified as ethnic cleansing. A United Nations Commission of Experts mandated to look into violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing in its interim report S/25274 as "… rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area. " In its final report S/1994/674 , the same Commission described ethnic cleansing as “… a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. ” The Commission of Experts also stated that the coercive practices used to remove the civilian population can include: murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, severe physical injury to civilians, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, use of civilians as human shields, destruction of property, robbery of personal property, attacks on hospitals, medical personnel, and locations with the Red Cross/Red Crescent emblem, among others. The Commission of Experts added that these practices can “… constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.”

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/ethnic-cleansing.shtml

Here the UN points out four elements

That is is has to be one ethnic group against another for the purpose of creating ethnic homogeny.

Reading Plan Dalet and other documetns from Israel’s war for survival in 1948, I don’t see any interest in creating ethnic homogeny. In fact, quite the opposite, villages that did not participate in attacking Jews were not destroyed even in areas, where Israel could have easily expelled their inhabitants. And after the war ended, most of the remaning Arabs had their rgiht to remain and be part of the country enshrined in their citizenship

the 1948 war has been hijacked to turn it into a Jew vs Arab struggle for supremacy in the land. It was really a Jew vs. those who wanted to kill Jews struggle. Jews only had issues with those who sought their demise, not Arabs in general.

Ironically if you want to discuss ehtnic cleansing 1948, Arab League did have a policy of making Arab areas Judenrein and I shudder to think if they had won

The Arab Liberation Army logo…quite clear…

And that’s the key difference between the Hebron pogroms, where the goal was to “itbach al yehud” (kill the Jews) in Hebron- all Jews and not for survival but in order to take their wives and property.

Pure evil. Those who participated.

Footnotes

[1] Dutch Journalist's First-Person Account of the Hebron Massacre