The Kafr Kassem Job is another massacre, a routine massacre, another act of evil carried out by Jews with guns. Nazis are nicer. Was Adolf wrong about them? Ben Gurion was a murderous rogue who incited Sharon the Jew to further massacres.
KAFR KASSEM Massacre [ 29 October 1956 ]
Jews killed 49 Arab peasants, half being women and children. Also see In this way were the 49 inhabitants of Kafr Kassem slaughtered Killed for giggles knowing them to be harmless.
THE KAFR QASSEM MASSACRE - this source seems plausible - it may have been scanned from a book
On 29 October 1956, on the eve of the Israeli military invasion of the Sinai Peninsula, as part of its joint campaign with Britain and France to topple the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the IDF completed its preparations for controlling the Palestinian areas that were deemed the most problematic in case of a war with Arab neighbors: the
villages of the Triangle, the Muthalath.
Colonel Issachar Shadmi, a former commander of a POW labour camp of Palestinian prisoners in the 1948 war, and now commanding a brigade, asked and received permission to impose a curfew at 5 p.m. rather than 9 p.m., the time previously announced to the villagers under his command. In a meeting with his soldiers he repeated the general instruction for an Israeli curfew: shoot on sight without warning its violators. Soldiers noted the time difference and asked what they should do with those who were late in returning from the fields or their work. According to their evidence at the trial later, Shadmi retorted 'Allahu irbmaum', 'May they rest in peace; the Arab blessing for the dead.
Major Shmuel Melinki was the battalion commander of the border police in Kafr Qassem. He too, according to evidence given in court, was asked by his subordinates what to do with the men, women and children labouring in the fields, unaware that the time of the curfew was brought forward. 'Act without any sentimental hesitations. Do as the commander of the Brigade told us.' It seems soldiers wanted clear instructions. Melinki reread the brigade commander's orders which said, 'the rule [of shooting violators] applies to everyone']
The change of timing did not only occur in Kafr Qassem, it applied to all the villages which were under Shadmi's command and quite a few others all over Israel. But in Qalanswa, Taybeh, Ibtin, Bir al-Saqi, Jalulya and Kafr Qara, the local commanders allowed latecomers to return until 9 p.m. The court records have a curious but not untypical remark by the commander in Kafr Qara: 'I was somewhat ashamed the next day that nobody in my village was killed.'
Shalom Offer was commanding the main checkpoint at the entrance to Kafr Qassem. Ahmad Fariig and Ali Taha alighted from their bicycles and were greeted sarcastically by the officer with the question, 'Are you happy (mabsustin)?' [Presumably meaning, 'Are you happy with yourselves for being late?' 'Yes,' they replied. They were ordered to stand and were shot. 'Enough,' said the officer to his soldiers after a while, 'They are already dead. We have to spare the bullets.' This account was given by Mahmoud Farij and Abdullah Samir Badir who witnessed the event and managed to escape, although they were shot and wounded.
Other villagers who came later were shot in a similar way. Among them was Fatma Sarsur, eight months pregnant, who had just finished picking olives nearby. For an hour the shooting continued, according to the evidence given by Hannan Suleyman Aamer, the only woman who survived from the group that was massacred. Forty-eight villagers met their deaths in that hour, including twelve young women, ten male teenagers and seven boys. Thirteen others were badly wounded.
It took time before the authorities reacted. Two weeks after the massacre the first official Israeli acknowledgement was published. In hindsight it seems it seems to be less an admission of the facts, and much more a pre-emptive attempt to provide immunity to the perpetrators of the crime. On 11 November, the government message to the press blamed it all on the Palestinian *Fidayi* (literally 'volunteer') forces. These were Palestinian refugees who came secretly into Israel, first in an attempt to retrieve lost property or herds, but soon to carry out more sustained acts of sabotage and guerrilla warfare against the Israeli army and civilians: they were supported by the Egyptian army in the Gaza Strip and to a lesser extent by the Syrian and Jordanian military establishments. The government statement read as follows: 'Increased Fidayi action on 29 October 1956 led to the imposition of military rule on the villages adjacent to Jordan in order to protect them.' This cynical and insincere double-talk would accompany the Palestinians in Israel for years to come.
Three weeks passed before outsiders could come to the village and see what had happened with their own eyes. The first visitors were the Communist members of the Knesset, Tawfiq Tubi and Meir Vilner, and Latif Dori, a member of Mapam, who managed to bypass the police roadblocks that barred any approach from all the village's entrances. They started collecting evidence from the traumatized and grief-stricken people and later tried to publicize their statements in the local press. This was prevented by the military censor, but Tawfiq Tubi did not give up and wrote a memo which he distributed among hundreds of well-known public figures in Israel.
This created some sort of public pressure, which resulted in the establishment of an inquiry commission. That commission concluded that Melinki, the commander of the battalion, and some of his subordinates should be brought to justice for enforcing an illegal command and it recommended compensating the families with 1,000 Israeli pounds each.
The committee's recommendations were described by Tawfiq Tubi as a whitewash and cover-up exercise. He blamed the government for producing the atmosphere which encouraged the border police to perpetrate the massacre. In language that tells us something about the assertiveness and sense of injustice Palestinians displayed,
notwithstanding the trauma and the oppression, he compared the massacre with that of the Czech village Lidice, all of whose inhabitants were slaughtered by the Nazis in 1942.
The trial validated his apprehensions. None of the accused received any significant punishment, leaving an impression that future atrocities would be treated in a similar way. The Palestinians' sense of fear was augmented by the other, lesser-known killings that took place on that day. In Kafr Tira, in the Triangle, a labourer who worked
as a night watchman in the fields, Nimr Abd al-Jaber, sixty years old, was shot by the border police for being late. In the village of Taybeh, also in the Triangle, a fourteen-year-old, Mahmoud Aqab Sultan was shot by the troops on his way home, running an errand for his father that evening. Another fourteen-year-old boy disappeared in the nearby village of Baqa al-Gharbiyya and has never been found. The failure of the state was further compounded by the light sentences meted out to the perpetrators.
During the trial for the first time Operation Hafarferet or, as it was named in official code, Blueprint S-59, was exposed. Some of the defendants justified the massacre as the implementation of the Blueprint, which, as they understood it, meant them to deal harshly with the Palestinian population. But when their lawyers tried to push forward this argument, they were silenced by the judges. The plan was top secret and its publication would have embarrassed the government. Shalom Offer's lawyer, David Rotlay, managed to say that the Blue print envisioned imprisoning the Arabs in pens and then forcing them to flee east - towards Jordan - in the chaos of war.
As mentioned, the plan which has been fully researched by the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha, was indeed a contingency scheme for the expulsion of the Palestinians in the Triangle in the case of a war with Jordan. 28 Most researchers think that Shadmi gave the orders under the assumption that he was beginning to fulfill the plan. 29 This was also the opinion of the late David Horowitz, Israel's leading political scientist for many years and a reporter for the Mapai daily at the time Davar. He thought the operation was based on the assumption that one could provoke the Palestinians to violate the law, and then retaliate by expulsion (this was the logic of the first stage of the ethnic cleansing in 1948).
But in the long run, the Kafr Qassem massacre did have an impact. It highlighted the immorality of the military regime and sent shock waves across the country: it led the government to change its position eventually and abolish military rule in 1966. Public criticism was not aimed at the decision-making apparatus itself as much as at the lenience shown to the murderers. Moreover, the inability of the secret service to expose collaboration with the Egyptian army during the Sinai operation - a ludicrous allegation - convinced many that the military regime was useless ands even harmful. It was sold to the public at large as a pre-emptive means to prevent the Palestinians from joining the enemy in a time of war. The 1956 war, the first round of fighting since the creation of the state, passed without any desirer attempt on the part of the Palestinians to 'join forces with the enemy' and the only visible result of the imposition of military rule [in 1956] was the massacre.
Even the head of the Israeli secret service, Isar Harel, tried to convince Ben-Gurion that, from a security point of view, abolishing military rule would be much more constructive than retaining it. In this he was fully supported by the director-general of the Defense Ministry, Shimon Peres. However, nothing was to happen until Ben-Gurion lost his premiership in 1963