Ilan Pappe – The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine
Chapter 9 Rape
We have three kinds of sources that report on rape, and thus know that
severe cases of rape did take place. It remains more difficult to form an idea
of how many women and young girls were victimised by Jewish troops in
this way. Our first source is the international organisations such as the UN
and the Red Cross. They never submitted a collective report, but we do
have short and concise accounts of individual cases. Thus, for instance,
very soon after Jaffa was taken, a Red Cross official, de Meuron, reported
how Jewish soldiers had raped a girl and killed her brother. He remarked in
general that as Palestinian men were taken away as prisoners, their women
were left at the mercy of the Israelis. Yitzhak Chizik wrote to Kaplan in the
letter mentioned above: ‘And about the rapes, Sir, you probably have
already heard.’ In an earlier letter to Ben-Gurion, Chizik reported how ‘a
group of soldiers [had] burst into a house, killed the father, injured the
mother and raped the daughter.’
We know of course more about cases in places where outside observers
were present, but this does not mean women were not raped elsewhere.
Another Red Cross report tells of a horrific incident that began on 9
December 1948 when two Jewish soldiers burst into the house of al-Hajj
Suleiman Daud, who had been expelled with his family to Shaqara. The
soldiers hit his wife and kidnapped his eighteen-year-old daughter.
Seventeen days later the father was able to get hold of an Israeli lieutenant,
to whom he protested. The rapists appeared to belong to Brigade Seven. It
is impossible to know what exactly happened in those seventeen days
before the girl was set free; the worst may be presumed.