A ‘technical error’ led to uncovering a secret document from State Archives in Israel – which goes back to 70 years ago. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion sought to evacuate Galilee from Christians, Druze, and Circassians but the foreign minister rejected this, showed the document.
The document is a secret letter dated December 4, 1949, half a year after the official conclusion of the battles in Palestine. Its author was Walter Eytan, the first director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, and its addressee was Moshe Sharett, the foreign minister, who was in New York at the time.
In the letter, Eytan reports to his boss on a plan “to expel the Arab residents of a large number of places”. He lists the villages: Fasuta, Tarshiha, Jish, Hurfeish, Rihana, Majdal and Zakariya.
He noted that the plan called for the expulsion of more than 10,000 Arabs, most of them Christians, though some were Druze (Hurfeish) or Circassians (Rihana). The expulsion was to be carried out for “security reasons”, yet a destination wasn't specified.
Eytan writes that Ben-Gurion had already approved the transfer of the residents “by force to other places,” but wanted the agreement of Sharett and Eliezer Kaplan, the finance minister because the cost of the operation would be about a million Israeli pounds (including the resettlement of the uprooted).
The expulsion, of course, was not carried out, but in the years that followed a number of attempts were made to transfer tens of thousands of Christian Arabs from Galilee out of the country to Argentina and Brazil.
For more than 25 years, up until about six months ago, the file had been open for public perusal. But now the letter (together with an eight-page letter written by Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, Israel’s first and last minister of minorities) has been removed from the file and is no longer accessible.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
