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Haifa
The editors of David Ben Gurion's diaries expressed their bewilderment at his lack of interest in the military campaigns in April 1948. Israel's first prime minister (1) was preoccupied with internal political matters, such as the new state's relationship with Zionist bodies abroad,
as if the fate of the state depended on them. His diaries do not even hint at an "imminent catastrophe" and certainly do not convey the impression that Israel faced a "second holocaust", terms he used frequently in his public speeches and addresses (2).
In inner circles Ben Gurion spoke very differently. At the beginning of the month, at a special meeting of the secretariat of MAPAI (the leading party), he listed proudly the names of the Palestinian villages already occupied by the Hagana and the other Jewish paramilitary groups. In a long speech, he explained that
the next objectives of the military effort would be Haifa and Jaffa. In his words, these principal urban centres were "islands" in the midst of a Jewish sea. They were not islands, and calling them that diminished their spatial span;
they encompassed more than 100,000 people, and many thousands more lived in their hinterlands. The process I call
"urbicide" (destruction of urban space and expulsion of its residents), happened that April and ended with the
forced departure of more than 200,000 Palestinians from their homes up and down the land.
Another 70,000 urban Palestinians were expelled from Ramallah and Lydda in July 1948.
There are still Palestinians living in Haifa so, in that sense,
the urbicide failed. However, they live in perceived islands within the city, surrounded by a Jewish sea threatening to engulf them. The ideology remains intact, partly because Israel's Jewish majority is in denial about what happened in April 1948,
refusing to acknowledge its cruelty, inhumanity and suffering.
Comment: Mary Settegast in her book Plato Prehistorian provides some more details on this practice: See also:
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