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Ras Abu ‘Ammar Was Our Home

My grandfathers lived in Ras Abu ‘Ammar—that was their hometown until 1948, when it was, in the cold, sterile language of post-tragedy historiography, “depopulated.”

But no—it wasn’t depopulated. They were forcibly expelled, under the threat of violence. The stories of Deir Yassin—of mutilation, of rape, and of massacre—were still fresh in their minds. These horrific memories lived in the imagination of every Palestinian, and they haunted my family with dread until that doomed day: October 21st, 1948.

That’s when Israeli forces arrived and kicked them out of Ras Abu ‘Ammar.

This wasn’t a random skirmish. It was part of Operation Ha-Har, led by Yosef Tabenkin and the Harel Brigade—a military campaign that targeted Palestinian villages in the hills southwest of Jerusalem. “Ha-Har” in Hebrew means “the hill.” My family’s village stood right on that hill, and on October 21st, one day before the UN-brokered ceasefire of October 22nd, it was attacked and occupied.

Among those claim lineage to the Palmach is Itzhak Rabin, celebrated as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a symbol of peace in the iconic White House handshake, was also deeply complicit in the violence that led to the dispossession of Palestinians. As a member of the Palmach and the Harel Brigade, he played a pivotal role in Operation Ha-Har, which was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of villages like Ras Abu ‘Ammar in 1948. While his later role in peace negotiations is often highlighted, it does not erase the fact that his history, tied to the violent expulsion of Palestinians, remains inseparable from the legacy of the Nakba. Until the land is returned to its rightful owners, the history of figures like Rabin will never be absolved.

Some of the Palmach fighters who carried this out were born in Germany, some in Poland, some even in Jerusalem. Regardless of where they were born, they shared a singular purpose: to clear a path to Jerusalem for the emerging Israeli state. And they did so by driving Palestinians off their ancestral lands.

Modern international law has a name for this: ethnic cleansing.

The international community might refer to these fighters today as veterans, but by every modern legal and moral definition, these men were war criminals.

As Benny Morris documents in 1948, this was not an accident. It was not an unintended consequence of war. It was part of a deliberate strategy of land theft, organized terrorism, and ethnic cleansing—a tragedy we Palestinians call al-Nakba.

And that catastrophe still lingers. It lives in the memories we inherited, the stories passed from grandfather to grandson, from mother to daughter.