Predictive History

The Occupation Regime

6 min read

The Occupation Regime

Core idea: After the ethnic cleansing came the occupation regime — a system of mass imprisonment, forced labor camps, systematic looting, desecration of holy sites, and military rule over the remaining 150,000 Palestinians that became the institutional template for the post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, revealing that the methods Israel would later deploy against millions were first tested on the survivors of the Nakba.

Mass Imprisonment

A common sight in rural Palestine in the wake of the cleansing operations were huge pens in which male villagers, ranging from children of ten to older men up to the age of fifty, were held after the Israelis had picked them out in “search-and-arrest” operations. They were later moved to centralized prison camps. There were five such camps, the largest being Jalil (near today’s Herzliya) and Atlit, south of Haifa. According to Ben-Gurion’s diary, there were 9,000 prisoners. About 8,000 spent the whole of 1949 in the prison camps.

As early as February 1948, Hagana guidelines stated: “Releasing a captive or eliminating him needs an approval of the intelligence officer.” Summary executions took place from the start. Ex-Irgun and Stern Gang troops were employed as camp guards. Senior ex-Hagana officer Yisca Shadmi was found guilty of murdering two Palestinian prisoners — the same Shadmi who in October 1956 was one of the principal perpetrators of the Kfar Qassim massacre in which forty-nine Palestinian citizens lost their lives. He was acquitted in 1958 and went on to become a high-ranking official managing the state’s relations with its Palestinian minority.

Forced Labor Camps

The idea of using Palestinian prisoners as forced labor came from the Israeli military command and was endorsed by the politicians. Three special labour camps were built: one in Sarafand, another in Tel-Litwinski (today Tel-Hashomer Hospital), and a third in Umm Khalid (near Netanya).

One survivor from Tantura described the routine: working in the quarries and carrying heavy stones, living on one potato in the morning and half a dried fish at noon, complaining punished with severe beatings. At Umm Khalid, when guards discovered twenty people had escaped, “We, the people of Tantura, were put in a cage, oil was poured on our clothes and our blankets were taken away.” After one visit, Red Cross officials reported dryly that POWs were exploited to “strengthen the Israeli economy.” Some prisoners were kept in these camps until 1955.

The “Infiltrators”

Refugees who tried to return to their homes — even just to harvest their own fields or retrieve belongings — were labeled “infiltrators” and shot. Israeli intelligence reports use the phrase “successful shooting” to describe killing returning refugees. A December 4, 1948 report records: “successful shooting at Palestinians trying to return to the village of Blahmiyya and who attempted to retrieve their belongings.” The “Minority Unit,” established on January 12, 1949 and made up of Druze, Circassians, and Bedouin, was recruited for one specific job: to prevent Palestinian villagers from returning to their homes. Prevention of return became official policy from July 1948.

In August 1948, the Transfer Committee decided to destroy all evacuated houses still standing, converting their sites to Jewish settlements or national parks. The demolitions served a dual purpose: physically preventing return and diplomatically countering international pressure — Israel could state “there are no villages left” to return to. The kibbutz movement was crucial in lobbying against any repatriation. As Arab feminist academic Nahla Abdo documented: “Without any hesitation, almost all of the Palestinian women and men interviewed insisted that if they had known that they would never be returning to their homes, land, and homeland, they would never have left, and would have preferred to die there rather than become refugees.”

Systematic Looting

The looting was both systematic and official. The Israeli government itself ordered the confiscation of Palestinian property. In Jaffa, the military governor reported to Ben-Gurion that as of May 15, 1948, an average load of 100 trucks a day was being taken out. The storehouses were emptied wholesale — sugar, flour, barley, wheat, and rice that the British government had kept for the Arab population were sent to Jewish settlements.

Private looting accompanied the official theft. In Jaffa, house robberies took place in broad daylight. Looters took furniture, clothes, and anything useful for the Jewish immigrants streaming into the country. UN observers concluded that the plundering was also a means of preventing Palestinian refugees from returning. The military governor of Jaffa, Yitzhak Chizik, resigned in July 1948 because he could no longer control what he called “the uncontrollable ongoing crusade of pillage and robbery.”

Eliezer Kaplan, Israel’s minister of finance, persuaded Ben-Gurion to authorize the confiscation of all Palestinian properties to prevent the frenzied wrangling that was already threatening to break out between the predators who were waiting to swoop down on the spoils.

Desecration of Holy Sites

Officials who had promised that mosques, churches, and community centres would not be ransacked or plundered broke their pledges. Captain F. Marschal, a UN observer, reported that “the Jews violated frequently the guarantee given several times by the Jewish authorities to respect all buildings belonging to the religious community.” In Jaffa, Red Cross representatives discovered piles of dead bodies two months after the occupation — people shot by Israeli soldiers for not complying with curfew orders.

The ID Card System

The remaining Palestinians were subjected to a system of identity cards, roadblocks, and movement permits that prefigured the occupation infrastructure later deployed in the West Bank and Gaza. Not having the newly-issued ID could result in a prison term of a year and a half. Most areas were declared off-bounds, requiring special permits even to travel between Haifa and Nazareth. Only people vetted by the Israeli Secret Service received cards.

Military Rule Until 1966

The 150,000 Palestinians who survived the ethnic cleansing inside Israel were placed under military rule that lasted until 1966. The solution the Consultancy devised — concentrating them in designated neighbourhoods, restricting their movement, and placing them under a military regime — became the exact template for the post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Key Insight

The occupation regime reveals that every apparatus of control Israel later deployed in the post-1967 territories — the checkpoints, the ID cards, the mass imprisonment, the administrative detention, the house demolitions, the economic confiscation — was first invented and tested on the survivors of the 1948 ethnic cleansing, making the occupation not an aberration but the continuation of the founding logic.

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