A collective crime

Mike Phipps reviews Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property, 

by Adam Raz, published by Verso.

 

HubMP2012

NOVEMBER 24, 2024

This is the first book whose primary focus is the plunder of Palestinian property, says the author says his Introduction. This looting was not out of compliance with some political order from above: “the looting of moveable assets was voluntary, and many people engaged in this criminal behaviour.”

While looting and theft are almost standard practice in wartime, the plundering that took place during the Independence War that created the State of Israel was different. The Jewish population plundered the property of neighbouring Arab inhabitants. “These were not abstract ‘enemies’… They were yesterday’s neighbours.”

The first half of the book documents in detail the scale of the looting of Palestinian property. In Tiberias, the fall of the city to the Zionist army meant the complete exodus of the Palestinian inhabitants, never to return. A huge amount of property was left behind and looting took place on a unprecedented scale. One Jewish National Fund official was appalled, writing in his diary: “Ten by ten, in groups, the Jews moved about and robbed Arab homes and stores… There was a competition between the different Haganah platoons… who arrived in cars and boats and loaded up all types of things… The soldiers assigned specifically to protect property ignored what was going on around them, and it is rumoured that they were accepting bribes. A moral collapse.”

Another observer noted: “‘These scenes were familiar to me, but I was always used to associating them with what others did to us during the Holocaust, during the world wars, and during all the pogroms…  And here – here we were doing these horrible things to others.”

Tiberias would serve as a model for other cities throughout the country. In Haifa, looters did not even wait for properties to be abandoned. A government minister reported that mostly Arab properties were targeted, but even Jewish homes were being attacked: “During the various home invasions, there were cases where the invaders used force, hit men and women, knocked down doors, gathered up the furniture that they removed from rooms, and took people from their homes and put them in the street… It is clear that the home invasions were organized by army officers. There were officers among the invaders who removed their rank insignia.”

Unrestrained looting also took place in Jerusalem. The pillagers had taken so much plunder from Palestinian homes that they needed to protect it from other Jewish civilians who had also come to loot: “Blood began to flow.” The plunder reportedly went on for days – even months – in both Arab and Jewish neighbourhoods. It stopped only when there was nothing left to steal. What could not be taken, or was considered valueless, was smashed up. Entire libraries were torched.

In Jaffa, it was British soldiers who began the looting of shops for days on end. Others soon joined them. Communist Party member Ruth Lubitz noted: “All along the way, there is not a home, a store or a workshop that has not had everything taken from it.” In a twelve-day period in June 1948, over 5,000 tons of goods were taken out of the city on trucks.

Around 550 Palestinian villages were conquered in the Independence War. In some, mass looting, involving “people from every social stratum”, took place. “Machines, work animals, homes, and granaries that could have been of use to the army itself and the state treasury were destroyed, killed, and burned,” complained one government department.

Mosques and churches were also targeted. Israel’s Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett, described it in 1949 as “wild vandalism, desecration of holy sites worthy of savages, not Jews.” Notably, the Dormition Abbey of the Benedictine community, on Mount Zion, considered to be one of their holiest churches, was thoroughly looted. Monasteries and mosques were routinely destroyed.

A great moral failure

It could be argued that the stealing of furniture and household goods is trivial compared to the massacres perpetrated at the time, such as the execution of dozens of Palestinian prisoners in Ein Zaytun – an atrocity that was concealed for years. But the involvement of so many civilians – including children – in the pillaging had far-reaching consequences.

Some saw this: “I am afraid of the loss of innocence, the loss of the idea that man needs to live by his labour rather than by plunder and robbery, because there is something here that smacks of great moral failure.”

Another: “Booty does more than just destroy the victim. It damages the perpetrator’s soul; if its influence rears its head even slightly during wartime, much of its poison spreads through society’s arteries during subsequent times of peace.”

 Politically, the involvement of so many people in the pillaging was critical. It integrated them into a collective crime and made it easier to lock them into support for the ongoing atrocities committed by the nascent Zionist state. As Raz puts it, “It turned looters… into political collaborators.”  He goes on: “The plunderer became an unwilling advocate of a policy agenda that strove to create a condition of perpetual war between Israel and the Arab world.”

Moreover, inasmuch that the Israeli leadership appears to have ignored the warnings about mass looting expressed to it from within its own government and later granted a blanket amnesty, this may have been deliberate government policy: “It served Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s policy of removing Arab residents from the State of Israel and helped him realize it.”

After the war, the Israeli Prime Minister appointed his Attorney General “to look into whether the army and its soldiers harmed the lives of Arabs in the Galilee and the south in ways that run counter to the rules of war.” To this day, the findings remain confidential. “Even though Israeli soldiers committed numerous atrocities,” notes the author, “only one, accused of murdering fifteen Arabs, was put on trial.” He received a one-year prison sentence and a short time later was pardoned.

Adam Raz has amassed an amazing amount of detail in his research of this subject. Given the ongoing efforts to erase Palestine’s past and conceal Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, this book is an important contribution to uncovering the reality on which the Zionist state was founded.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.