The Looting of Palestinian Jerusalem in 1948

Throughout their conquest of Palestine, Zionists adopted propaganda storylines that they took over a “land without a people” and “made the desert bloom” upon creating their state in 1948. It was a way of turning their wholesale theft and ethnic cleansing of an inhabited land into a miraculous tale of hard work by a battered, long-suffering but determined group of European Jews. Adam Raz’s meticulously researched Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property demonstrates in distressing detail that, far from taking over a barren, uninhabited landscape, Zionist forces and Jewish settlers violently and brazenly looted the well-furnished homes, stocked businesses, and lovingly tended farms and orchards of displaced Palestinians. In the words of Thomas Suarez, “Israel took over an intact, ready-made country—houses, assets, money, orchards, quarries, 10,000 acres of vineyards, 25,000 acres of citrus groves, 10,000 business establishments, olive groves, and machinery.”1 For these conquerors, it was all theirs for the taking.

Drawing from more than two-dozen state, army, and kibbutzim archives, in addition to journals of key figures, Raz illustrates in painstaking and often hard-to-read detail the extent to which Zionist Jewish settlers were able to confiscate the homes and properties of terrorized Palestinians who had fled the war—temporarily, they thought, having no reason to believe that their departure would be permanent. Whatever these Zionists saw, they coveted and plundered. They descended like jackals on well-maintained homes and stripped them of their furnishings; they stole from people they knew, like their neighbors, and from residents in other towns; they went on foot individually and in groups and took what they could carry, hauling larger items on trucks. They were civilians, as well as soldiers and police officers.

When they finished helping themselves to home furnishings, they started to dismantle the homes themselves, taking windows, roof shingles, and tiles. Often they just destroyed what they could not move, leaving utter devastation behind. The United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commission estimates that Palestinian moveable assets—homes, furnishings, machinery, and businesses—were worth 18.6 million Palestinian pounds in 1948.2 The obvious contradiction between the claim that the land was empty when Zionists took it over and the assessment of the wealth that that empty land had somehow generated has never been explained.

The plundering of Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods of Qatamon, Talbiyya, and al-Baq‘a continued for months after the city fell to the Zionists in May 1948 (see The West Side Story, Part 3: From Bourgeois Comfort to Untenable Peril: The Emptying of the New City). These were wealthy suburbs, home to the city’s Palestinian elites (see The End of Arab Qatamon—A Memoir), and the homes there were lavish. To many impoverished Jewish settlers, the ability to plunder these homes with no consequence was too good to be true.

Jacob Nammar, one of the few Palestinians to remain for a couple of years in what became West Jerusalem after the state was established, recounts his family’s ordeal walking the streets of Upper Baq‘a following the expulsion of its Palestinians. He writes:

Beyond food, Zionist forces and Jewish settlers lifted Palestinians’ invaluable personal belongings. In letters to her daughter explaining her life in Jerusalem before and during the war, for example, Zakia Hajjar recounts:

John Rose, an Armenian in al-Baq‘a, remained there during the war and described what he witnessed in his memoir. He said that Arabs were put under curfew, but Jews were allowed to roam and thieve freely. Raz quotes Rose as saying that he saw pillaging “on a fantastic scale, accompanied by wholesale vindictive destruction of property.”5

Before 1948, Qatamon was one of Jerusalem’s richest neighborhoods (see The West Side Story, Part 1: Jerusalem before “East” and “West”). Jewish pillaging of Qatamon began even before the war ended in May 1948 (see The West Side Story, Part 3: From Bourgeois Comfort to Untenable Peril: The Emptying of the New City); in some cases, it began within a few hours of the owners’ departure and it continued for months after the city was occupied. Palmach soldier Yoram Kaniuk describes what he witnessed:

Another Palmach soldier, Dov Doren, described in an interview his commandeering of a Palestinian home in Qatamon:

One Zionist company commander wrote in his diary: “It is hard to imagine how much wealth people found in all those many homes.”9 Another described the frenzy with which soldiers and civilians looted as a “debauched atmosphere.” They helped themselves to whatever they saw and took everything that could be removed—fine china, Persian rugs, pianos, bed sheets, refrigerators, furniture.

When they encountered things they could not remove, they broke them. One example cited in the book is a piano, smashed to pieces, whether in frustration at the task of removal or in an assertion of power. An eyewitness described the appearance of ransacked apartments during that time as the aftermath of a pogrom.10 Not only Arab homes—Jewish homes, too. According to Raz, a Jewish resident told a Jewish reporter visiting the Jewish neighborhood of Talpiot that the looters caused more destruction than the shelling.

Destruction included book burning, which made some observers a little queasy, evoking other memories of book burning in Europe. A military officer who went in search of village property tax records went to the building that housed them and was told they had been reduced to ashes. Incredulous, he asked: “You burned everything?”

The looting of Palestinian homes also contributed to developing new Israeli settlements. Yoram Bar-Gal, who later taught at the Hebrew University, described in his diary that the conquest of Qatamon brought with it “salvation to the city. They brought back endless spoils from there.”12 Looters also did so in other parts of the country, such as the wealthy cities of Jaffa and Safad. Home furnishings were certainly valuable, but the farming equipment they stole also benefited agricultural kibbutzim (Jewish farming communities).

In an interesting contrast, Raz reports on the experience of Jewish residents who had to leave their homes during the fighting. A labor movement leader reported:

This was not an isolated incident: In “not an insignificant number of cases . . . Arab neighbors meticulously protected the property of Jewish neighbors.”14 As Loot makes abundantly clear, that courtesy was not reciprocated.

In Talbiyya, Raz reports, a Jewish mukhtar tried to stop the looting of Arab apartments in his neighborhood. But because Arab apartments were large, two Jewish families could be housed in them. In at least one instance, the mukhtar insisted that the furnishings and personal possessions of the owners be placed in one room, and it was sealed shut. But in a few years’ time, the space was needed, so the seal was broken and the space used. The whereabouts of the belongings that had been stored in that room are unknown but undoubtedly found ready takers—a case of delayed plunder.

By May 1948, the looting was well-known to the Jewish residents of the new state—not because it was reported in the press, which it wasn’t, but because it had been so widespread. As one Israeli writer cited in Loot says, the “inheritance bequeathed to our state by the 440 abandoned villages turns out to be quite large.”15 One can’t help but think that his use of the term “inheritance” was a reference to biblical myths used to justify the state.

In the final third of Loot, Raz delves into the internal discussions among Israeli officials about how to handle the plunder. Evidently, some made distinctions between plunder for personal benefit, deemed as bad, and plunder to benefit the collective, considered useful. And whenever the crimes they committed throughout 1948 came to light, there was always some handwringing. After all, it was hard to overlook the parallels between their actions and those of the European countries they had recently come from in the years surrounding World War II. Some worried about how Jewish avarice in Palestine would come across to the world that had accepted them as victims. The magnitude of the wanton greed was impossible to deny.

Raz explains that in the early days of the state, Jewish communities worried about what they would tell Palestinians who returned to their homes and found them plucked clean. This is worth pondering: It suggests that the looters had the expectation that the owners of the properties to which they helped themselves would one day return. One can imagine a collective sigh of relief emanating from Jewish Israelis when it became increasingly clear that the absence of the Palestinians would be made permanent.