"Whereas Edom (the Jews) saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the Lord of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the Lord hath indignation for ever." [1]

     The English Government as a body is to be blamed for the shortsighted, and also extremely harmful, attitude towards Palestine. At this day and time it cannot be doubted that Mr. Balfour's declaration of November 2, 1917, with regard to British support of the Zionist claim, was a clever move to keep France out of the Promised Land. The ambition of the Jews to establish a homeland of their own in Palestine was used by the British as a pretext to include that part of Asia in the orbit of British influence. Mr. Herbert Adams Gibbons was right when as far back as in January, 1919, he asserted that the Britishers "have planned, through using Zionism, to prevent condominium with France and other nations in Palestine, to establish an all-rail British route from Haifa to Bassorah." [2]

     So far, so good, or at least, so long as political Zionism, advocated by British diplomats, had a definite political object to serve, criticism was confined to the question of whether England or France, or both, ought to control Palestine and Mesopotamia. It is not impossible that Messrs Weizmann and Sokolow intended to double-cross British diplomacy, while the British intended to double-cross their Zionist friends, and it was difficult to forecast who, in the long run, would prove to be the user and who the used.

     Still there was logic in the declaration of November 2, 1917, because there was a chance for Britain to expand her influence in Asia Minor through the wise realization of the Palestine scheme. Moreover, in a way, Palestine could have been used as a new stronghold for British rule in the East, thus strengthening England's position with regard to India. Instead, England appointed Sir Herbert Samuel High Commissioner of Palestine, which renders the whole Palestine scheme hopeless.

     It is important to remember that according to Jewish sources the population of Palestine is divided thus: Mohammedans, Christians, and Jews. The bulk of the population is composed of Arabs, part of whom profess the Koran, while others have been converted to Christianity. The latter group, which is but a minor section of the total Arabian populace, is ravaged by internal strife, belonging to different denominations of the Christian Church: Roman Catholic, Protestant, Russian Greek Orthodox, etc. Nevertheless, the Arabs, whether Christians or Mohammedans, are united in their hatred of the Jew. As everywhere, the Jew in Palestine is an urban element, while the Arabs are mostly farmers. The Jew in Palestine, as all over the world, is a middleman and not a producer. He is engaged in small trade.

     The antagonism between the Arabs and the Jews is so accentuated that often the country has been on the brink of an open anti-Jewish revolt. The Ottoman Empire had great trouble in suppressing the anti-Jewish feeling among both its Christian and Mohammedan subjects. The appointment of Sir Herbert Samuel, which was so much applauded by the Zionist group in England, was a direct challenge to the Arabs. To appoint a Jew to a post which required holding the balance between the Jews and the Arabs, was a measure which was apt to ruin the very idea of British prestige. What England gained through the gallant efforts of General Allenby was now nullified by Samuel's appointment.

     It is immaterial whether Sir Herbert Samuel was good or bad, whether he was able or inefficient, the point is that he was a Jew, and as such, he could not maintain an equilibrium between the two parts of the Palestinian population which was so bitterly hostile to each other. Nor does it add to British prestige when orders were given, ad they were given by Sir Herbert Samuel, to British governmental employees to stand up when the Zionist anthem, Atikva, was played.

     When the Zionist claim was first established, and Theodore Hertzl, in 1897, came out with his specific program of a Jewish State, the world at large gave a sigh of relief as it was trusted that henceforth the Jews would have a country of their own where they would be able to develop freely and unhampered their racial peculiarities, their cultural traditions and their religious thought.

Christian countries have been so accustomed to innumerable complaints made by the Jews of their oppression, of anti-Semitism breeding through out the world, of pogroms ravaging the Jewish masses, that there was every reason to hope that the Jews would dash to Palestine, leaving those cruel Christians to their own destinies. What better scheme for a fair solution of the Jewish problem could be hoped for by both non-Jews and Jews? The enormous wealth of Jewish bankers could be easily used for the reconstruction of Palestine, which could thus be made a model state. There was a place for everybody under the sun, and there is no reasons whatsoever why the Jews should not have their place in Asia Minor, with Jerusalem once more becoming their metropolis, with the Rothschilds and Warburgs conferring the blessings of their benevolent rule on the hitherto downtrodden people.

With this understanding, the greatest statesmen of Europe, long before Mr. Balfour's declaration, promised Theodore Hertzl their utmost support to the Zionist scheme. Kaiser Wilhelm II was the first to migrate to Palestine, thus setting the example for the Jews to follow. The Turkish Sultan assured Mr. Hertzl that he would favorably look upon the Zionist efforts in the Ottoman Empire. The Russian Minister of the Interior, Mr. V.K. Plehve, promised to help to facilitate Jewish emigration from Russia. Another reason why so many non-Jews were willing to give their enthusiastic support to the Zionist movement was because it was justly argued that should the Jews build up a state of their own, they would be relieved of the necessity of bearing the burden of double-citizenship and double-allegiance on the one hand to their own nation, and on the other hand to the countries of their adoption.

This would also enable them to abandon their traditional policy of intermeddling in foreign matters, giving them a chance to enjoy genuine independence and civic freedom. From a legal point of view, then, the Jews would be considered, outside of Palestine, as aliens, just as American are considered in Japan, or the Japanese in America.

While, of course, as Jewish citizens, they would not enjoy the rights of citizenship in any other country outside of their own Jewish State, they would also be relieved of all duties to non-Jewish countries. Consequently, they would be relieved of the hardship of serving simultaneously god and mammon. But when the time came, and the restoration of Palestine was announced by the Great Powers, many people, including some of the Jews themselves, became bitterly disappointed.

Palestine has been restored not as a Jewish State, but merely as a Homeland for those restless spirits who, while residing in New York, London or Paris, would use Palestine as their summer resort, or perhaps as an additional base for their Third International. The British protectorate over Palestine converted that country into a British colony, with the British administration ruling over the population. The most representative Zionists, themselves, came out with bitter criticism against such a solution. Thus, Israel Zangwill, in The London Jewish Chronicle, violently denounced the Judeo-British pact proposing to make Palestine a purely Jewish State, with the expulsion of all Arabs to Arabia. The Jewish Guardian, referring to this situation, remarked: "Zionists were aiming for a Jewish Palestine but the Jews received a British Palestine."

Mr. Eberlin, a Jew himself, and one of the foremost leaders of the Poale-Zionist movement, in a book published in Berlin, entitled On the Eve of Regeneration, stated: "The foreign policy of England in Asia Minor is determined by its interests in India. There was a saying about Prussia that she represents the army with an admixture of the people. About England it could be said that she represents a colonial empire with a supplement of the metropolis...It is obvious that England desires to use Palestine as a shield against India. This is the reason why she is feverishly engaged in the construction of strategic railroad lines, uniting Egypt to Palestine, Cairo to Hafia, where work is started for the construction of a huge port. IN the near future Palestine will be in a position to compete with the Isthmus of Suez, which is the main artery of the great sea route from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean." [3] But this Poale-Zionist goes a step farther when he asserts that: "It is only Socialism attained in Europe which will prove capable of giving honestly and without hypocrisy Palestine to the Jews, thus assuring them unhampered development... The Jewish people will have Palestine only when British Imperialism is broken."

That was the policy towards Palestine that it was hopelessly erroneous can scarcely be denied. The Jews blamed England for making it a British colony, while the Arabs were outraged by the appointment of Sir Herbert Samuel, because he was a Jew. The British public itself was at the cross roads; whether to consider Palestine as the Promised Land for the Jews, or for the English, and so, everybody on the Thames was waiting for Mr. Lloyd George and his parliamentary secretary Mr. Sassoon, to solve the mystery of the Sphinx with regard to their Asia Minor policy.

However, there was nothing humorous in the whole situation because Lenin, the Argus of international dissension, was closely watching the developments in Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine, and his agents were hard at work inciting the Jews against the British and the Arabs against the Jews.

Moscow Soviet propagandists were always headed for political mischief; wherever there was natural cause for unrest, they stimulated it, converting it into an international scandal. All the more serious was the situation because Palestine was literally the shield for British rule in India.

It is a long story about Hindu agitation. As far back as in 1900 the International Socialist Congress at Paris took up the Hindu question, condemning "the system of brigandage in India," which, so it was alleged, for decades had been practiced by England. Next came the Amsterdam International Congress in 1904, at which the specific demand was made by the Socialists that Great Britain "introduce the simple and feasible plan for Home Rule in India under British supervision." Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, the Hindu member of the Conference, violently denounced British rule in his native country. Among other things he stated: "Just as it is an outrage for a strong man to fall upon a weaker one, so is it an equally great outrage for a strong nation to set upon a weaker one and plunder it. This system of barbarism and bandit-politics must be ended by the establishment of a representative government such as has been granted to every other English colony." [4]

A similar attitude was adopted by subsequent international Socialist gatherings at Stuttgart in 1907 and in Copenhagen in 1910. Under the guidance of Mr. Keir Hardie, British labor naturally took sides with this agitation. Meanwhile nationalist propaganda in India herself went on unhampered. In the same way, however, that the Sinn Fein movement acquired both its impetus and its legal title from Mr. Wilson's Fourteen Points, so also Hindu revolutionary incendiarism acquired its "dope" from the theory of self-determination advocated by the spokesmen of the entente.

As a result of systematic propaganda, and also because of the shortsighted policy of Great Britain, India became the Ireland of the East. Armed uprisings in India had become as much a habit as chewing gum in America. In these happy circumstances, Mr. Samuel Montagu was made Secretary for India. The fact that he was a Jew, and a cousin of Sir Herbert Samuel, was, of course, less important than the fact that in his official capacity he rendered support to the Hindu revolutionary clique, headed by Mr. Gandhi.

     The latter being a stanch admirer of Mr. Arthur Griffith, leader of Sinn Fein, succeeded in combining the inborn fanaticism of the Hindu with Irish stubbornness. His fame rose in proportion to the progress of revolutionary propaganda, reaching a climax after the riots at Jallianwalgah Bagh, when General Dyer ordered his men to open fire on a revolutionary mob. Gandhi was behind these riots, as he was behind every revolutionary manifestation which took place in India.

Mr. Montagu, however, out of friendship for Mr. Gandhi, dismissed General Dyer, as no longer "fitted to remain intrusted with the responsibilities which his rank and position imposed upon him." this case, which aroused just and almost unanimous criticism in the British press, is indicative of Mr. Montagu's whole policy in India. After all, what position could have been taken by General Dyer?

Lord Hunter's Commission, which was sent out to investigate the "Dyer case," confirmed the fact that the natives of Amritsar were in a state of open revolt against British rule. The mob was engaged in the destruction of railroad lines and telegraph wires, trains were derailed, disorderly meetings were held in spite of General Dyer's repeated warnings that all gatherings were prohibited and would be dispersed by force. Nor did Mr. Montagu deny that posters were put up in which the natives were urged to revolt against and conquer the "British monkeys." "God will grant victory;" thus read one of the fly-sheets circulated on the eve of the Amritsar tragedy.

"Leave off dealings with the Englishmen. Close offices and workshops. Fight on. This is the command of Mahatma Gandhi! Get ready soon for the war, and God will grant victory to India very soon. Fight with enthusiasm and enlist yourselves in the Gandhi army."

What other course could have been taken by General Dyer, when, in spite of his repeated warnings, the mob continued rioting? There is but one answer to this question: General Dyer was in duty bound to open fire on the mob and thus put an end to the revolutionary mischief. However, because General Dyer acted in compliance with his duties as a British soldier and a British subject, Mr. Montagu considered it his duty to force the resignation of Mr. Gandhi's opponent.

This was logical on the part of Mr. Montagu, for why should he act as a Brutus towards the Hindu trouble-maker? Friendship counts. That Mr. Gandhi was Mr. Montagu's friend was frankly admitted by Mr. Montagu himself. When speaking in the House of Commons, in defense of his policy in India, he exclaimed: "There is no man who offers such perplexity to a government as Mr. Gandhi; a man of the highest motives and of the finest character, a man whom his worst enemy, if he has any enemies, would agree is of the most disinterested ambitions that it is possible to conceive; a man who has deserved well of his country by the services that he has rendered both in India and outside it, and yet a man who his friends; and I will count myself as one of them, would wish would exercise his great powers with a greater sense of responsibility, and would realize in time that there are forces beyond his control and outside his influence, who use the opportunities afforded by his name and reputation." [5]

One more interesting detail with regard to Mr. Montagu and Mr. Gandhi; these two Ajaxes of Hindu politics. India's move for self-demoralization was the adoption of the so-called policy of non-cooperation. The aims of this Hindu movement were:

   1). The surrender of all titles of honor or honorary offices.

   2). Suspension by lawyers of practice and settlement of civil disputes by private arbitration.

   3). Non-participation in government loans.

   4). Boycott of government-schools by parents.

   5). Boycott of reformed councils.

   6). Refusal to accept any civil or military post in Mesopotamia or to refuse to offer as units for the army special in Turkish territories  being                                 administered in violation of pledges.

   7). Vigorous prosecution of Swadeshi movement, inducing people to be satisfied with India's own productions and manufactures.

   8). The public are asked to refrain from taking any service either civil or military and they are enjoined to avoid all violence. [6]

Now this was an outspoken appeal to sabotage the British rule even though represented by Mr. Montagu. Mahatma Gandhi, touching upon this point in his organ Young India, stated: "Whatever the fate of non-cooperation, I wish that not a single Indian will offer his services for Mesopotamia, whether for the civil or military department. We must learn to think for ourselves and before entering upon any employment find out whereby thereby we may not make ourselves instruments of injustice. Apart from the question of Khalifat and from the point of abstract justice, the English have no right to hold Mesopotamia. It is no part of our loyalty to help the Imperial Government in what is in plain language daylight robbery. If, therefore, we seek civil or military employment in Mesopotamia, we do so for the sake of obtaining a livelihood. It is our duty to see that that source is not tainted." [7]

The Sinn Feiner, published in New York, from which the above quotation is taken, on its own part added: "The independence of India and Ireland are involved in any plan which destroys the very backbone of England's imperialism, her militarism and her navalism, and that is why Sinn Fein, Ireland, and a Swadeshi, India, are linked up and this is why the world is so interest in them."

That Sinn Fein and Hindu revolutionary agitation were linked up is undeniable; those, however, are not the only links in the chain of a gigantic plan to ruin the British Empire in the same way that the Russian Empire was ruined. It is not insignificant that Mr. Hourwich, a co-partner of Mr. Martens, the Soviet "Ambassador" to the United States, takes such an active part in the movement for the "liberation" of India.

Mr. Hourwich is neither a British subject nor a Hindu native, but there is every reason to suspect that he was a Jew. As such, it would seem he should have nothing in common with Hindu revolutionary propaganda and the Hindu scandals which Mr. Montagu imposes upon his land of adoption. Unfortunately, however, the contrary is true. The strife for the destruction of the British Empire had much deeper causes than the mere disapproval by some Hindu or Irish fanatics of the principles of the British colonial policy.

Once more we must revert to Mr. Eberlin, the distinguished Jewish writer, who was both a Bolshevik and a Poale-Zionist; the two terms being practically identical. In his instructive book On the Eve of Regeneration he specifically refers to the question as to why the Jews ought to support the scheme of the "Red East" and the land for the disintegration of the British Empire.

"...The struggle for the social emancipation of the East has become an indispensable condition of the world's emancipation of the proletariat ...England's Imperialism, as could have been anticipated, proved to be the main, the most stubborn, and the most hypocritical enemy of the Russian social revolution. Whatever course the revolution in Russia may assume, it will be brought into conflict with England's Imperialism...The English theory of colonization is based upon the thesis of supremacy of the White Race. In other words, on the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon Race. This theory does not roughly proclaim, as the Germans did, the doctrine of 'fertilizing nations' (Dünger-Völker) but it applies this doctrine in practice, trying to build up by various means the so-called 'moral prestige' in order to veil its policy of brigandage. This moral prestige, however, is precisely the thing which in its very foundation is undermined by Soviet propaganda...Under the influence of this propaganda, which is one of the most successful undertakings of the Soviet Government in the realm of foreign policy, for which many of its sins will be pardoned, the peoples of the East, who are mercilessly exploited, have discovered in Socialism new means for their resistance against Imperialism. We (the Jews), too, must struggle against it side by side with all victims from Ireland to India as well as with the revolutionary British proletariat, ignoring the threats and disregarding the hypocritical advances made to us...By destroying British Imperialism at its principal root; in India, whose juice nourishes it, the Russian Revolution will accelerate the process of revolutionary fermentation in England herself and at the same time of the revolution throughout the all Western Europe. At this point Poale-Zionism encounters Soviet propaganda to which it must give its full assistance...It is necessary to force into the orbit of the gigantic social movement which started in Russia the advanced countries of the East, Egypt, Persia, etc. The Jewish socialistic center in Palestine is fit to play an important rôle in spreading Socialism in Asia Minor and in Africa." [8]

The Jews after: Having expelled 800,000 Palestinians from the 80% of Palestine they occupied in 1948, committed massacres against the Palestinians and plundered all Palestinian lands, homes and possessions, the Zionist leaders continued their campaign of war crime, crimes against humanity and genocide against the Palestinians and Christians. From 1948 to the present they committed these crimes according to a carefully designed and calculated policy. In her book, "Israel's Sacred Terrorism," Livia Rokach describes this policy as follows: "The personal diary of Moshe Sharett sheds light on this question by amply documenting the rationale and mechanics of Israel's 'Arab policy' in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The policy portrayed, in its most intimate particulars, is one of deliberate acts of Israeli provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion. Sharett's records document this policy of 'sacred terrorism' and expose the myths of Israel's 'security needs' and the 'Arab threat' that have been treated as self-evident truths from the creation of Israel to the present, when Israeli terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and against Palestinians and Lebanese in South Lebanon, has reached an intolerable level. It is becoming increasingly evident that the exceptional demographic and geographic alterations in Israeli society within the present generation have been brought about, not as the accidental results of the endeavor to guard 'Israel's security' against an 'Arab threat' but by a drive for lebensraum." [9]

The Haganah, the Irgun Z'vai Leumi and the Stern Gang cooperated together in committing these crimes against the Palestinian Arabs. When they formed the Israeli army some units of this army, namely the commandos and the Frontier Guards, were in charge of expelling Arab villagers and Bedouins from the areas they occupied. The Jewish National Fund and the Custodian of Enemy Property were in charge of the plunder, looting and usurpation of Arab lands, homes and worldly possessions. When Livia Rokach read Moshe Sharett's diaries in Hebrew, she extracted and translated the most important points regarding Israel's strategic aims after 1948, to be realized through the following means:

     "(a) New territorial conquests through war. Although the 1949-50 armistice agreements assigned to Israel a territory one-third larger than had the UN partition plan, the Israeli leadership was still not satisfied with the size of the state, the borders of which it had committed itself to respect on the international level. It sought to recover at least the borders of mandate Palestine. The territorial dimension was considered to be a vital factor in Israel's transformation into a regional power.

     (b) Political as well as military efforts to bring about the liquidation of all Arab and Palestinian claims to Palestine through the dispersion of the Palestinian refugees of the 1947-49 war to faraway parts of the Arab world as well as outside the Arab world.

     (c) Subversive operations designed to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement, and create puppet regimes which would gravitate to the regional Israeli power." [10]

To implement this strategic purpose the Israeli army needed special units which could operate without any conventional restraints. When General Moshe Dayan was Commander of the Southern Command, he formed a special commando-like patrol unit for raids across the border. When he became Head of Operations of the General Staff, Dayan was in favor of forming a special unit and later remarked: "We were in need of a man of daring, a man with a great deal of personal ambition, a skilled leader, who would be flexible and original enough to adapt literal orders according to the situation he found himself in. This force could not be allowed to disobey orders or change the goals that had been decreed from above. On the other hand, this was a new and special unit, a force that would have to establish and carry out novel methods of warfare. Therefore the commander of this new force had to be superior in his ability to think and perceive clearly and cool headedly. Arik Sharon seemed to fill all these requirements." [11]

Having previously experimented with the concept, and having a ruthless candidate to command such a unit, Dayan engineered the approval of the General Staff for the plan proposed by Brigadier Michael Shaham to create "a special forces unit that would operate behind the armistice lines in reprisal and preemptive strikes against the Arabs." [12]

"Thus came into being the commando force that had such an influence upon the structure and methods of action of the Israeli army today ...There was no happier man alive than Arik Sharon as he received the new appointment. He became one of the chosen few who are able to realize a cherished dream...It was with the formation of the new force, and the deviation from conventions that this implied, that Arik Sharon began his march to glory..." [13]

Called Commando Unit 101, Sharon's command was to become synonymous with infamous crimes and the depths of depravity in an armed force. They became "a group of blood-thirsty adventurers, leaping at a chance to fire at others." [14] The original nucleus of Commando Unity 101 was composed of volunteers who were "veterans of the Palmach, soldiers of the 'Golani' and 'Gvati' Brigades and paratroopers." [15] Sharon trained them to be even more proficient as killers, and imbued in them the concept that they were above and beyond any kind of moral restraints, or even any discipline except within the confines of Commando Unit 101.

On one occasion when a member of Commando Unity 101 was apprehended by military policemen for a minor motor vehicle infraction, a squad of the unit's goons raided the military police station in Tiberias and "beat up three policemen so severely that they required hospitalization." Sharon "punished" the culprits "by granting them two weeks leave." [16] Sharon further encouraged contempt for any kind of authority by "addressing his superiors with an impudence bordering on insubordination ...Arik regularly referred to the senior commanders of the IDF and the more well-known members of the government as 'dumb shits' or 'assholes,' adding vivid descriptions of the sex life that he assumed they must lead. [17] Within two months, the 40 men of Command Unity 101 had been turned into a group of soldiers that craved battle. Gradually, Arik began sending small groups on reconnaissance missions and ambushes over the border." [18]

In September, 1953, Command Unit 101 was given the task "to remove the Bedouin tribe of Azama from the Negev Desert." When even some of his men "voiced their reservations about using a top army unit to fight a group of defenseless civilians," Sharon responded: "By removing the Bedouins, the country is preserving its sovereignty. The Bedouins were growing accustomed to seeing our land in the desert as their own, and had we not acted now, it would have been very difficult in the future to build new settlements, or a road. [19] Finally, Commando Unit 101 was authorized to organize and carry out a raid against the Palestinian refugee camp El-Burj in the Gaza Strip. Arik's plan was to trap Arab refugees in a crossfire between two groups of soldiers, killing a large number of them. One member of the 101st, Shmuel Falah, objected.

     As they sat around the fire discussing the operational plans for the raid, Falah announced, 'I'm not going to take part in this kind of raid. We should be attacking military targets within Egypt and not civilian targets. After we're successful on this mission, the Egyptians and the guerrillas will only intensify their activities against our own civilian population...' Arik did not respond directly to Falah. Instead he offered him a smaller role, to blow up the home of the Egyptian commander who lived near the refugee camp. Falah, together with two other soldiers, accepted this assignment, while the others set out to complete the main part of Arik's plan. The results were lethal. Fifteen residents of the camp were killed, including a number of women and children. At the summary of the mission, a number of men voiced their reservations: 'Are a few hundred miserable refugees, including women and children, our real enemy?' they asked incredulously. Arik replied, 'The women are the whores of the Arab infiltrators who have been attacking our civilians. If we don't act forcefully against the refugee camps they will turn into comfortable nests for murderers.'" [20]

Having molded his men into a bloodthirsty unit rationalizing the most heinous acts, Sharon set his sights on a new target: bringing the Israeli paratroopers under his command. Sharon's opportunity to assume control of the paratroopers soon came, when David Ben-Gurion, Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, the Chief of the General Staff, Mordecai Maklef, and the Chief Operations Officer, Moshe Dayan, concocted the notorious raid against Kibya. A General Staff officer, Meir Amit, the only officer to later hold the post of Head of Military Intelligence and then Head of Mossad, "carried Dayan's operational order to the Central command to be translated into action. [21] Even acting Prime Minister Moshe Sharett had only a vague idea of the evolving action. No one had bothered to inform him about what it would entail or listen to his reservations about any kind of military action." [22]

With the exception of acting Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, practically all of the top Zionist leadership of the time were thirsting for war. In his diary entry for October 11, 1953, Sharett sarcastically recorded that Yitzhak Ben Zvi, then President of Israel, "raised as usual some inspired questions...such as do we have a chance to occupy the Sinai and how wonderful it would be if the Egyptians started an offensive which we could defeat and follow with an invasion of that desert. He was very disappointed when I told him that the Egyptians show no tendency to facilitate us in this occupation task through a provocative challenge on their side." [23]

But the conspiracy of Ben-Gurion, Lavon, Maklef, and Dayan to attack Kibya across the Jordanian border was implemented. In his diary entry for October 15, 1953, Sharett recorded his reaction: "I was simply horrified by the description in Radio Ramallah's broadcast of the destruction of the Arab village. Tens of houses have been razed to the soil and tens of people killed. I can imagine the storms that will break out tomorrow in the Arab and Western capitals." [24]

In his diary on the following day, October 16, Sharett wrote: "I must underline that when I opposed the action I didn't even remotely suspect such a bloodbath. I thought that I was opposing one of those actions which have become routine in the past. Had IU remotely suspected that such a massacre was to be held, I would have raised real hell. Now the army wants to know how we at the foreign ministry are going to explain the issue. In a joint meeting of army and foreign ministry officials. Shmuel Bendor suggested that we say that the army had no part in the operation, but that the inhabitants of the border villages, infuriated by previous incidents and seeking revenge, operated on their own. Such a version will make us appear ridiculous: any child would say that this was a military operation." [25]

In his diary entry for October 17, Sharett reports the opinion of Yehoshafat Harkabi, then Assistant Chief of Military Intelligence, that "It is impossible that the Jordanians did not get the impression that the bombing of Kibya means, if not a calculated plan to cause war, then at least the willingness to have one starting as a consequence of this action." [26]

Of the Israeli cabinet meeting on October 18, 1953, Sharett writes: "I condemned the Kibya affair that exposed us in front of the whole world as a gang of blood-suckers, capable of mass massacres regardless, it seems, of whether their actions may lead to war. I warned that this stain will stick to us and will not be washed away for many years to come...It was decided that a communiqué on Kibya will be published and Ben-Gurion was to wrote it...Ben-Gurion insisted on excluding any responsibility of the army...I said that no one in the world will believe such a story and we shall only expose ourselves as liars." [27]

Former Knesset member Michael Bar-Zohar, a biographer of Ben-Gurion, confirms that Ben-Gurion lied: "Ben-Gurion believed that under certain circumstances, it was permissible to lie for the good of the state. But Moshe Sharett was astounded by his behavior. 'I told my wife Zipporah that I would have resigned if it had fallen to me to step before a microphone and broadcast a fictitious account of what happened to the people of Israel and to the whole world." [28]

Sharon's personal war to gain control of the Israeli army's paratroopers had a victorious outcome as a result of the Kibya raid. When the operational plan for the raid was presented at Central Command's headquarters, the deputy commander of the paratroop battalion balked at accepting the assignment. Moshe Dayan had intended for the paratroop battalion to attack Kibya, while Commando Unit 101 was to "be responsible for the diversionary action in Shukba and Nahalin." [29] The refusal of the paratroop battalion's command to participate in the Kibya raid resulted in Sharon's gaining total command of the raid, combining his own Commando Unit 101 with all of Israel's paratroopers. The head of the paratroopers, Lt. Col. Yehuda Harari, was subsequently forced to resign and Sharon amalgamated Commando Unit 101 and the paratroopers into one command, "designated Unit 202." [30] From that day until today, when every senior Israeli army officer has served in the paratroopers, the paratroopers became the "murder" arm of the Israeli army, carrying out raids against civilians and murdering defenseless women and children. Only by sharing in this type of guilt with his fellow paratroopers can an Israeli officer hope to reach a senior rank.

Participation in the crimes perpetrated from 1948 to 1967 against Palestinians became a qualification for promotion for the Israeli officer corps. No career officer could achieve promotion until he had first taken part in the commission of these crimes. The Records of the United Nations Security Council from 1948 to 1967 include letters, verbatim records of Security Council Meetings, and Reports of the United Nations Truce Supervision units containing hundreds of reports documenting these crimes.  They include the following:

   1). The assassination of UN Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte.

   2). Expulsion of Palestinian villagers.

   3). Attacks on Palestinian villages, destroying houses and murdering civilians.

   4). Attacks on civilian aircraft.

   5). The massacre of Kibya.

   6). Dragging a doctor from his car on the Behtlehem-Hebron road; shooting him and killing him.

   7). The Nahalin massacre.

   8). Attacks on Palestinian villages in the Syruian truce zones and on Syrian villages.

   9). The massacre of Hussan.

   10). Attacking a Lebanese aircraft.

   11). Expelling Bedouins.

   12). Shelling and air attacks against villages in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The following crimes were investigated by the United Nations Truce Supervision personnel, and Israeli guilt was verified.

                                                                   Massacres Committed by the Jews in Palestine

                                                                                                         A Partial List

The worst of the massacres were the King David Hotel, the Semiramis Hotel, Deir Yassin, Dawayma, Kibya, Kafr Kassim, the attack against the USS Liberty and the Libyan Boeing 727 Airliner, and the massacres against Sabra and Shatila and other  refugee camps in Lebanon. Following are just a few of the many massacres committed by the Jewish/Zionists; specifically the Hagana, Irgun and Stern Gangs of Israel: The Massacre of

1. King David Hotel, July 22, 1946.

2. Sharafat, Feb. 7, 1951.        

3. Deir Yassin, April 10, 1948.

4. Naseruddine, April 14, 1948.

5. Carmel, April 20, 1948.

6. Al‑Qabu, May 1, 1948.

7. Beit Kiras, May 3, 1948.

8. Beitkhoury, May 5, 1948.

9. Az‑Zaytoun, May 6, 1948.

10. Wadi Araba, May 13, 1950.

11. Falameh, April 2, 1951.        

12. Quibya, Oct. 14, 1953.         

13. Nahalin, March, 28, 1954.      

14. Gaza, Feb. 28, 1955.           

15. Khan Yunis, May 31, 1955.

16. Khan Yunis Again, Aug. 31, 1955.

17. Tiberia, Dec. 11, 1955.

18. As‑Sabha, Nov. 2, 1955.

19. Gaza Again, April 5, 1956.

20. Houssan, Sept. 25, 1956.

21. Rafa, Aug. 16, 1956.

22. Qalqilyah, Oct. 10, 1956.

23. Ar‑Rahwa, Sept. 12, 1956.

24. Kahr Kassem, Oct. 29, 1956.

25. Gharandal, Sept. 13, 1956.

26. Gaza Strip, Nov. 1956.

July 2, 1946: The King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed. Killing 91 people. Menachem Begin, who was recently given the so‑called Nobel Peace Prize (It seems this prize is given to the people who can kill the most Christians and get away with it!), and is the same Begin who planned the destruction of the King David Hotel and the massacre of Deir Yassin. Ex prime minister, Shamir, was originally a member of the Jewish terrorist gang called Irgun, which was headed by none other than Menachem Begin. Shamir later moved over to the even more radical "Stern Gang," which committed many vicious atrocities. Shamir himself has defended the various assassinations committed by the Irgun and Stern gangs on the grounds that "it was the only way we could operate, because we were so small. So it was more efficient and more moral to go for selected targets." The selected moral targets in those early days of the founding of the state of Israel included bombing of the King David Hotel and the massacre of Deir Yassin.

1946: Treaty. President Truman ordered the augmentation of U.S. Troops along the zonal occupation line and the reinforcement of air forces in Northern Italy after Yugoslav forces shot down an unarmed U.S. Army transport plane flying over Venezia Giulia. Earlier U.S. Naval units had been dispatched to the scene. The Irgun Gang murdered almost 100 British by bombing the King David Hotel. Terrorism also was (and still is) routinely practiced against Arabs to stampede them out of Palestine, thereby reducing their demographic strength even as uninvited Jews stream into the country.

The King David Hotel explosion of July 22, 1946, which resulted in the deaths of 92 Britons, Arabs and Jews, and in the wounding of 58, was not just an "extremist act" of "Jewish extremists," but a premeditated massacre conducted by the Irgun in agreement with the highest Jewish political authorities in Palestine, the Jewish Agency and its head David Ben-Gurion. According to Yitshaq Ben-Ami, a Palestinian Jew who spent 30 years in exile after the establishment of Israel investigating the crimes of the "ruthless clique heading the international Zionist movement." "The Irgun had conceived a plan for the King David attack early in 1946, but the green light was given only on July first. According to Dr. Sneh, the operation was personally approved by Ben-Gurion, from his self-exile in Europe. Sadeh, the operations officer of the Hagnah, and Giddy Paglin, the head of the Irgun operation under Menachem Begin agreed that thirty-five minutes advance notice would give the British time enough to evacuate the wing, without enabling them to disarm the explosion." [31]

The Jewish Agency's motive was to destroy all evidence the British had gathered proving that the terrorist crime waves in Palestine were not merely the actions of "fringe" groups such as the Irgun and Stern Gang, but were committed in collusion with the Haganah and Palmach groups and under the direction of the highest political body of the Zionist establishment itself, namely the Jewish Agency.

That so many innocent civilian lives were lost in the King David massacre is a normal part of the pattern in the history of Zionist outrages: A criminal act is committed, allegedly by an isolated group, but actually under the direct authorization of the highest Zionist authorities, whether of the Jewish Agency during the Palestine Mandate or of the Government of Israel thereafter.

The following is a statement made in the House of Commons by then British Prime Minister Clement Attlee: "On July 22, 1946, one of the most dastardly and cowardly crimes in record history took place. We refer to the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Ninety-two persons lost their lives in that stealthy attack, and 45 were injured, among whom there were many high officials, junior officers and office personnel, both men and women. The King David Hotel was used as an office housing the Secretariat of the Palestine Government and British Army Headquarters. The attack was made on July 22 at about 12 o'clock noon when offices are usually in full swing. The attackers, disguised as milkmen, carried the explosives in milk container, placed them in the basement of the Hotel and ran away. The Chief Secretary for the Government of Palestine, Sir John Shaw, declared in a broadcast: 'As head of the Secretariat, the majority of the dead and wounded were my own staff, many of whom I have known personally for eleven years. They are more than official colleagues, British, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, Armenians; senior officers, police, my orderly, my chauffeur, messengers, guards, men and women, young and old, they were my friends.

     No man could wish to be served by a more industrious, loyal and honest group of ordinary decent people. Their only crime was their devoted, unselfish and impartial service to Palestine and its people. For this they have been rewarded by cold-blooded mass murder.' Although members of the Irgun Z'vai Leumi took responsibility for this crime, yet they also made it public later that they obtained the consent and approval of the Haganah Command, and it follows, that of the Jewish Agency." [32]

The King David Hotel massacre shocked the conscience of the civilized world. On July 23, 1946, Anthony Eden, leader of the then British opposition Conservative Party, posed a question in the House of Commons to Prime Minister Atlee of the Labor Party, asking "the Prime Minister whether he has any statement to make on the bomb outrage at the British Headquarters in Jerusalem." The Prime Minister responded: "Hon. Members will have learned with horror of the brutal and murderous crime committed yesterday in Jerusalem. Of all the outrages which have occurred in Palestine, and they have been many and horrible in the last few months, this is the worst. By this insane act of terrorism 93 innocent people have been killed or are missing in the ruins. The latest figures of casualties are 41 dead, 52 missing and 53 injured. I have no further information at present beyond what is contained in the following official report received from Jerusalem:

     'It appears that, after exploding a small bomb in the street, presumably as a diversionary measure, this did virtually no damage, a lorry drove up to the tradesmen's entrance of the King David Hotel and the occupants, after holding up the staff at pistol point, entered the kitchen premises carrying a number of milk cans. At some stage of the proceedings, they shot and seriously wounded a British soldier who attempted to interfere with them. All available information so far is to the effect that they were Jews. Somewhere in the basement of the hotel they planted bombs which went off shortly afterwards. They appear to have made good their escape.

     Every effort is being made to identify and arrest the perpetrators of this outrage. The work of rescue in the debris, which was immediately organize, still continues. The next-of-kin of casualties are being notified by telegram as soon as accurate information is available. The House will wish to express their profound sympathy with the relatives of the killed and with those injured in this dastardly outrace.'" [33]

As a result of his massacre it was said: "Root of regicide, master robbers, sinister, carrion birds of humanity, hateful, oriental slavers, puppeteers, plague, revolutionaries, subversives..."

April 9, 1948: Deir Yassin Massacre. The first major massacre in the 1948 War was the massacre of Deir Yassin on April 9/10, 1948. It was designed to spread terror and panic among the Palestinian population in every city and village of Palestine in order to frighten them into fleeing, so that their homes and land could be confiscated for the use of Jewish colonialist settlers. The tactics of the Zionist Jews were to frighten defenseless people into fleeing their homes out of fear for their lives.

A combined force of Irgun and Stern Gangs committed a brutal massacre of 260 Arab residents of the village of Deir Yassin. Most of whom were women and children. The Israeli hordes even attacked the dead to satisfy their bestial tendencies. In April, 1954, during Holy Week, and on the eve of Easter, The Christian cemeteries in Haifa were invaded, crosses broken down and trampled under the feet of these miscreants, and the tombs desecrated. The Israeli military conquest, therefore was made against a defenseless people, who had been softened up by such earlier massacres as Deir Yasin (250 Arabs; men, women and children were massacred there).

The Jew, Weizman, referred to the massacre as this "miraculous simplification of our task" and Ben Gurion said "without Deir Yasin there would be no Israel." Americans are not told that 10% of the Arabs killed by the Israeli's in 1948 were Christian and that 10% of the Arab property confiscated belonged to Christians. Nor are they told the fact that Israel's massacres and military actions forced 100,000 Christians to become refugees. Accounts by Red Cross and United Nations observers who visited the scene, said that the houses were first set on fire and the occupants were shot down as they came out to escape the flames. One pregnant woman had her baby cut out of her stomach with a knife. Reminiscent of the acts committed by their brother Jews in Russia during and after the Bolshevik (Jewish) take over. The head of the International Red Cross delegation in Palestine, Jacques de Reynier, drove into the village and was met by a detachment of Irgun terrorists. In his report of the massacre the previous night, he wrote: "All of them were young, some even adolescents, men and women armed to the teeth: revolvers, machine‑guns, hand‑grenades, and knives, most of them still blood‑stained. A beautiful young girl with criminal eyes showed me her (knife) still dripping with blood, she displayed it like a trophy."

Two hundred and fifty people were slaughtered. Mutilating the bodies, even before death, the culprits cut off parts and opened the bellies of others. Nursing babies were butchered on the bosoms of helpless mothers. Of those two hundred and fifty people, twenty-five pregnant women were bayoneted in their abdomens while still alive. Fifty-two children were maimed under the eyes of their own mothers, and then they were slain and their heads cut off. Their mothers were in turn massacred and their bodies mutilated. About sixty other women and girls were also killed and their bodies mutilated. Such are the historical facts concerning the horrible crime perpetrated against the Arab village of Deir Yassin.

On the night of April 9/10, 1948, the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, a suburb of Jerusalem, was surprised by loudspeakers calling upon the inhabitants to evacuate the village immediately. The villagers woke up and, in a state of turmoil and fear, proceeded to investigate what was going on, only to find themselves surrounded on all sides by Jewish gangs. The Jews made use of the prevailing state of fright and disorganization by killing and mutilating people who had been deprived of every opportunity to defend themselves.

The marauders were not satisfied with the crimes they had committed in the village. They gathered together the women and girls who were still alive, and after removing all their clothes, put them in open cars, driving them naked through the streets of the Jewish section of Jerusalem, where they were subjected to the mockery and insult of the onlookers. Many took photographs of those women. The crime of Deir Yassin shocked the world, which called upon the International Red Cross Society to establish the truth.

The representative of the Red Cross, Mr. Jacques Reynier, asked the Jewish Agency for permission to visit the site of the massacre. The granting of this permission was delayed twenty four hours while the Jews tried to erase the traces of their crimes. They gathered together all that was possible to collect of the parts of the mutilated bodies of their victims, dumped them in the cistern of the village and locked it up.

They did all they could to obliterate any traces that the representative of the Red Cross could come across. On visiting the site of the crime, however, the representative of the Red Cross discovered the cistern, and found one hundred and fifty maimed bodies of women and children. He could express his horror, disgust and fright at the sight only by declaring that "the situation was horrible."

In addition to the bodies that he had found in the cistern, the representative of the Red Cross discovered many other corpses scattered throughout the backstreets of the village and buried under the debris of the destroyed homes. Mr. Reynier found under a mound of dead bodies a girl of six who had been seriously sounded, but was not yet dead. He extracted the girl from under the human debris and carried her with him to the hospital.

All the Jewish Agency (the body responsible at that time for the activities of the Jewish gangs) did was to express its sorrow and condemn the affair as if it had been completely unaware of it. David Shaltiel, Commander of the Haganah, released a communiqué about Deir Yassin on April 10, in which he stated: "This morning the last Lehi and Etzel soldiers ran from Deir Yassin, and our forces entered the village. We were forced to take command of the village after the splinter forces (Irgunists and Sternists) opened a new enemy front and then fled, leaving the western neighborhoods of the city open to enemy attack. The splinter groups did not launch a military operation...They could have attacked enemy gangs in the Jerusalem area and lightened the burden which Jerusalem bears. But they chose one of the quiet villages in the area that has not been connected with any of the gang attacks since the start of the present campaign; one of the few villages that has not let foreign gangs in. For a full day, Etzel and Lehi soldiers stood and slaughtered men, women and children, not in the course of the operation, but in a premeditated act which had as its intention slaughter and murder only. They also took spoils, and when they finished their work, they fled..." [34]

The communiqué denied Irgun and Sternist claims that a Palmach force had participated in the attack. Enraged by this declaration, Raanan and Zetler released the text of the letter Shaltiel had sent them guardedly approving the attack in advance. Israel Galili, the Haganah commander, then asked Shaltiel about this letter, which Tel Aviv had never sanctioned. Shaltiel cabled back on April 15: "I learned they were preparing action against Deir Yassin. As I didn't want to meet them I sent a letter. I would stop to the extent possible future operations of dissidents." [35] Two days after this maneuver of the Jewish Agency, the newspaper "Hamashekev," the organ of the Irgun, replying to the Jewish Agency's condemnation of the Deir Yassin massacre, published the fact that the Commander of the Haganah (the organized forces of the Jewish Agency) had been fully aware in advance of the details of the plan and had already contemplated the occupation of Deir Yassin by the Irgun Terrorists. Meanwhile, Menahem Begin, the leader of the Irgun gang, himself admitted on December 28, 1950, in a press interview in New York, that the Deir Yassin incident had been carried out in accordance with an agreement between the Irgun and the Jewish Agency and the Haganah.

Four criminals who had taken part in the deir Yassin massacre and had been badly injured demanded remuneration from the Jewish authorities in occupied Palestine on the basis of a government decision to compensate all persons who suffered injuries during the fighting in Palestine. The authorities refused the request on the grounds that the Deir Yassin incident had not been perpetrated on orders from responsible Jewish authorities. The four culprits raised an action before the District Court at Tel-Aviv. They produced evidence that the Deir Yassin massacre had been carried out on the orders of the Jewish Agency, and in agreement with the Haganah. The District Court considered the evidence produced to be genuine and irrefutable and ruled that the plaintiffs should be compensated by the state.

By the criteria established in the International War Crimes Tribunals after World War II, the Irgun and Stern gang members directly responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre would receive death sentences for committing such an atrocity. The leaders of both gangs, including Menachem Begin of the irgun and Yitzhak Shamir of the Stern Gang, would have been convicted with a death sentence for their Command Responsibility for the massacre. Moreover, the senior commanders of the Haganah, especially Chief of Staff Yaacov Dori and Commander David Shaltiel, and the political authority responsible for the discipline of the Jewish armed units, the Jewish Agency leaders and its head David Ben-Gurion, would have borne ultimate responsibility and would have been hung like their Nazi political counterparts after World War II.

1948: The following testimony of a soldier who participated in the occupation of the Palestinian village of Dawayma (in Haifa sub-district) on October 29, 1948 is only the most recent disclosed item in a long chain of evidence: "They killed between eighty to one hundred Arab men, women and children. To kill the children they (soldiers) fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one home without corpses. The men and women of the villages were pushed into houses without food or water. Then the saboteurs came to dynamite them. One commander ordered a soldier to bring two women into a building he was about to blow up...Another soldier prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered 'good guys'...became base murderers, and this non in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The fewer the Arabs who remain, the better." [36]  

1948: The Semiramis Hotel Massacre, in the Katamon section of Jerusalem, by the Jews against the Palestinians. The Jewish Agency escalated their terror campaign against Palestinian Arabs. They decided to perpetrate a wholesale massacre by bombing the Semiramis Hotel in the Katamon section of Jerusalem, in order to drive out the Palestinians from Jerusalem. The massacre of the Semiramis Hotel on January 5, 1948, was the direct responsibility of Jewish Agency leader David Ben-Gurion and Haganah leaders Moshe Sneh and Yisrael Galili. If this massacre had taken place in World War II, they would have been sentenced to death for their criminal responsibility along with the terrorists who placed the explosives. A description of the massacre of the Semiramis Hotel from the United Nations Documents follows, as well as the Palestine Police report on the crime sent to the Colonial Office in London: "January 5, 1948, Haganah terrorists made a most barbarous attack at one o'clock in the early morning of Monday, January 5, 1948, at the Semiramis Hotel in the Katamon section of Jerusalem, killing innocent people and wounding many. The Jewish Agency terrorist forces blasted the entrance to the hotel by a small bomb and then placed bombs in the basement of the building. As a result of the explosion the whole building collapsed with its residents. As the terrorists withdrew, they started shooting at the houses in the neighborhood. Those killed were: Subhi El-Taher, Moslem; Mary Masoud, Christian; Georgette Khoury, Christian; Abbas Awadin, Moslem; Nazir Lorenzo, Christian; Mary Lorenzo, Christina; Mohammed Saleh Ahmed, Moslem; Ashur Abed El Razik Juma, Moslem; Ismail Abed El Aziz, Moslem; Ambeer Lorenzo, Christian; Raof Lorenzo, Christian; Abu Suwan Christian family, seven members, husband, wife and five children. Besides those killed, 16 more were wounded, among them women and children." [37]

The following is a text of a cable by the High Commissioner for Palestine to the Colonial Office about the massacre: "Jerusalem. 0117 hours, Urban. At approximately 0117 hours, a grenade was thrown into the Semiramis Hotel, Katamon Quarter, causing superficial damage but no casualties. During the ensuing confusion, a charge was placed in the building and it exploded about one minute later, completely demolishing half the hotel. Witnesses have stated that the perpetrators arrived by way of the Upper Katamon Road in two taxis. Four persons are reported to have alighted from he first taxi, and one person, who apparently covered the main party, from the second. All were wearing European clothes.

     The following are the known casualties: Dead - Manuel Allendesalazar y Traveseda - Spanish Consul at Jerusalem; Nazira Lorenzo; Mary Lorenzo; Abbas Ahmed Awadin, an Egyptian waiter, and Ashur Abdul Razzik Juma. (The last two named have not yet been extricated from the debris). Seriously Injured - Mrs. Georgette Khouri, aged 38, of Jaffa. Slightly Injured - Silvo Lorenzo; Eddy Lorenzo; Rene Lorenzo; Rita Lorenzo; Joseph Lorenzo; Dr. Abu Sawan; Cyril Abu Sawan; Matier Abu Sawan; Friek Batawi; Daoud Khadoush; Mohammed Ahmed Abdul Najib; Ibrahim Nicola; Hassan Mohammed; Awad Mohammed; Hassan Ibrahim; and No. 874 F.P.C. Hamil Ragheb Dajani.

     The following are believed to be buried underneath the debris: Raouf Lorenzo and his wife; Lutfi Abu Sawan (62) and his wife (45); Labibeh Lorenzo (40); Hubert Lorenzo (25); Subhi Taha (25); Amneh Abdul Azziz Zorob (34); Ismail Zaid Abdo (15), son of Amneh Zorob; and Gharviayeh Saoud Abu Yunis (30). The bodies of two of these persons have been extricated from the debris but have not yet been identified. Heavy firing broke out in the Katamon area after the first explosion, and Mohammed Ahmed Saleh of Beit Rima, who was near the hotel in the company of another Arab, was shot in the head and killed." [38]

May 1948: The U.S. appointed Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden to mediate between the Arabs and the Israelis. In his first progress report (of Sept. 16, 1948) he recommended that the U.N. should affirm "the right of the Arab refugees to return to their homes in Jewish controlled territory at the earliest possible date." The Israelis responded in their own quiet way. The following day Bernadotte was murdered in Jerusalem.

The spectacular assassination which caused an International outcry was claimed, the, by an unknown "Fatherland Front," but that was a cover for Shamir's Stern Gang. Yoshua Zeitler and Meshlam Markover of Stern told Israeli Television earlier this year (1989) that, they respectively directed and led the operation that killed the Swedish diplomat and his French aid‑de‑camp. Zeitler, 71, said he decided to speak now because of fear that the U.N. and the "goyim" (non‑Jews) are again trying to force Israel into concessions.

                               Vol XXX, No. 3, Spring 2001, Issue 119

                 THE TANTURA MASSACRE, 22‑23 MAY 1948

                 On the night of 22‑23 May 1948, a week after the declaration of the State of Israel, the

                 Palestinian coastal village of Tantura (population 1500) was attacked and occupied by units of

                 the Israeli army's Alexandroni Brigade. The village, some thirty‑five kilometers south of Haifa,

                 lay within the area assigned to the Jewish state by the UN General Assembly's partition

                 resolution. In its occupation, depopulation, subsequent destruction, and seizure of all its lands

                 by Israel, the fate of Tantura was similar to that of more than 400 other Palestinian villages

                 during the 1948 war. But it also shared with some two score of these villages the additional

                 agony of a large‑scale massacre of its inhabitants.

                 Word of the Tantura massacre was completely overshadowed at the time by the fighting

                 between Israel and the regular armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, which had entered the

                 country after the state had been proclaimed. The first written reference to it was made by Haj

                 Muhammad Nimr al‑Khatib, a Muslim cleric who had been an active member of the Arab

                 National Committee of Haifa (the highest local political body) before its capture by the

                 Haganah on 23‑25 April. In about 1950, Khatib published in Damascus under the title Min Athar

                 al‑Nakba (Consequences of the Catastrophe) a compendium of writings, including his own

                 memoirs on Haifa and several eyewitness accounts by Palestinian refugees from various parts

                 of the country. Khatib's work, along with those of two other Arab authors, was translated into

                 Hebrew in 1954 by the Israel Defense Forces, General Staff/History Branch, and published

                 under the title Be'einei Oyev (In Enemy Eyes). Khatib's references to the Tantura massacre

                 comprise a short account by Iqab al‑Yahya (a notable of the village) and a longer and more

                 detailed account by his son Marwan (pp. 118ff. in Min Athar). Khatib also reports cases of

                 Tantura female rape victims being treated in a Nablus hospital. Later, using Marwan's

                 testimony, Walid Khalidi referred to "the methodical shooting and burial in a communal grave of

                 some forty young men in Tantura village" in the famous triangular Spectator correspondence

                 between Erskine Childers, Jon Kimche, and himself (12 May‑4 August 1961; republished in 1988

                 in JPS 18, no. 1). Nonetheless, the entry under Tantura in Khalidi's, All That Remains

                 (Washington: IPS, 1992), inadvertently omitted mention of the massacre.

                 The issue of the Tantura massacre has come into recent prominence because of the work of

                 an Israeli researcher, Teddy Katz, who dealt with it at length in his 1998 master's thesis at

                 Haifa University. A summary of his research, particularly his finding that more than 200 Tantura

                 villagers, mostly unarmed young men, had been shot after the village surrendered, was

                 published in an article in the Hebrew press in January 2000. The article unleashed a storm in

                 Israel, culminating in a 1 million shekel libel suit brought by veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade

                 against Katz (though his research was based on taped testimonies not only of survivors but

                 also of members of the brigade). What happened at the December 2000 trial is dealt with in an

                 article in this issue by Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who also discusses the research itself and

                 its ramifications.

                 The fate of Tantura was sealed long before the night of its fall. It was one of the tens of

                 Palestinian villages and towns inside and outside the boundaries of the UN‑envisaged Jewish

                 state specifically targeted for capture under the notorious Plan Dalet, the Haganah master

                 plan for the military establishment of Israel on the largest area possible of Palestine (see JPS

                 28, no. 1 for the full text). Tantura itself fell within the zone of operation of the Alexandroni

                 Brigade, one of the erstwhile Haganah's six Khish (field force) brigades (to be distinguished

                 from its strike force, the three Palmach brigades). The official history of the Haganah, Sefer

                 Toldot Haganah (vol. 3, pp. 1474‑75), summarizing the operational orders to the brigades

                 under Plan Dalet, lists the assignments of the four battalions constituting the Alexandroni

                 Brigade. These include the "occupation of al‑Tantura and al‑Furaydis" as well as the capture

                 of "twenty villages in enemy territory" (i.e., land assigned to the Arab state under the UN

                 General Assembly partition plan). Plan Dalet was put into operation in the first week of April,

                 six weeks before the end of the Mandate and the entry of the Arab regular armies. The task of

                 capturing Tantura was assigned to the Alexandroni Brigade's 33d Battalion.

                 After the fall of the village and the massacre, the women and children were taken to the

                 nearby village of Furaydis, which had already fallen but whose inhabitants had not been

                 expelled. The surviving men were held in prison camps and were eventually transported under

                 prisoner exchanges out of Israel; their families followed. Today most live in refugee camps in

                 Syria or in the al‑Qabun quarter of Damascus. In June 1948, a few weeks after Tantura's fall,

                 the kibbutz of Nachsholim was established on its lands by Holocaust survivors. The village

                 itself was razed, except for a shrine, a fortress, and a few houses. The site of the village is

                 now an Israeli recreational area with swimming facilities, and the fortress houses a museum.

                 The evidence provided by the testimonies published below supplements the evidence of the

                 two Yahyas and the research of Katz, albeit from the inevitably fragmented and narrow

                 perspective of individual villagers caught in the vortex of events beyond their capacity to

                 comprehend. The testimonies were selected from tens of interviews collected during the

                 summer of 2000 by Mustafa al‑Wali, a Palestinian researcher living in Damascus. First published

                 in the autumn 2000 issue of Majallat al‑Dirasat al‑Filastiniyya, JPS's sister quarterly, they form

                 part of a larger oral history project on 1948 to be published later this year.

                 THE TESTIMONIES

                 Muhammad Abu Hana, born in 1936, resident of the Yarmuk camp

                 We were awakened in the middle of the night by heavy gunfire. The women began to scream

                 and ran out of the houses carrying their children, and they gathered in several places in the

                 village.

                 I also left the house during the fighting and went around the streets trying to see what was

                 going on. Suddenly a woman shouted to me, "Your uncle is wounded! Quick, bring some

                 alcohol!" I saw my uncle with a wound in his shoulder and the blood gushing out like a

                 fountain. Because I was young, I didn't know fear. I grabbed an empty bottle and ran to the

                 clinic. The nurse, a Christian from the village named Zahabiyya, filled the bottle with rubbing

                 alcohol and I ran back to my uncle. The women cleaned the wound and took my uncle to our

                 house, where they hid him from the Israelis in the grain attic.

                 But the soldiers saw the trail of blood and soon burst in, asking my grandfather where my

                 uncle was. My grandfather said he didn't know. They left but came back several times with

                 the same question. At some point my uncle, who was in pain, asked for a cigarette, and my

                 grandmother gave him one. When the soldiers came back again, the smell of burning tobacco

                 clinched the matter. They grabbed him and took him away. On their way out they insulted my

                 grandfather, shouting that he was a liar, and he answered back that he had only tried to

                 defend his son, as anyone would.

                 My uncle survived thanks to the intervention of the mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov. He had good

                 relations with my grandfather, who was the mukhtar of Tantura.

                 By morning, the shooting had stopped and the attackers rounded everyone up on the beach.

                 They sorted them out, the women and children on one side, the men on the other. They

                 searched the men and ordered them to keep their hands above their heads. Female soldiers

                 searched the women and took all their jewelry, which they put in a soldier's helmet. They

                 didn't give the jewelry back when they expelled us toward Furaydis. During the entire

                 operation, military boats were offshore.

                 On the beach, the soldiers led groups of men away, and you could hear gunfire after each

                 departure.

                 Toward noon we were led on foot to an orchard to the east of the village, and I saw bodies

                 piled on a cart pulled by men of Tantura who emptied their cargo in a big pit. Then trucks

                 arrived, and women and children were loaded onto them and driven to Furaydis. On the road,

                 near the railroad tracks, other bodies were scattered about.

                 Muhammad Ibrahim Abu `Amr, born in 1935, resident of the Yarmuk camp

                 We had gathered at the center of the village, in the house of Hajj Mahmud al‑Yahya. When

                 the village fell and the soldiers entered, they herded us to the beach. On the way, near the

                 house of Badran on the street leading to the mosque, I counted the bodies of seven young

                 people from the village.

                 A woman, `Izzat Ibrahim al‑Hindi, started to scream at the horror of the sight, but a burst of

                 gunfire silenced her for good. This woman was the mother of the martyr `Abd al‑Wahhab

                 Hassan `Abd al‑`Al, who had been killed at the end of 1947 by bombs planted by the Jews at

                 the Haifa market.

                 When they loaded us onto trucks, we saw bodies piled along the road like stacked wood. A

                 woman recognized her nephew among the dead‑‑it was Muhammad Awad Abu Idriss. She

                 started to scream. She didn't know yet that her three sons had met the same fate. Her sons,

                 Ahmad Sulayman, Khalil, and Mustafa, had been killed, but we only learned this later, in exile.

                 But the mother always refused to believe it and insisted that they had escaped to Egypt and

                 would come back to find her one day. She spent the rest of her life waiting for them.

                 Amina al‑Masri (Umm Mustafa), born in 1925, resident of the Qabun quarter of

                 Damascus

                 From the time that the village of Kafr Lam was captured after the fall of Haifa, we began to

                 fear an attack on Tantura. The night of the assault, men were on guard duty at the various

                 entrances to the village, but they were poorly armed. I heard gunfire and thought it came from

                 al‑Bab [the gate], that is to say from southeast of the village. I woke up my husband. At first

                 he thought I was dreaming, but the firing grew louder, and there were explosions and all. They

                 came from the hill of Umm Rashid in the south and from the direction of al‑Burj [the tower], on

                 the coast to the north where the Roman ruins are located. We got the children out and hurried

                 to the house of my parents. They were terrified. The shooting had died down a little and

                 people thought that the battle was over. How naive we were! Abu Khalid `Abd al‑`Al even

                 believed that the Jewish attack had been countered, and cried out, "We won! We got them!"

                 A few minutes later the gunfire resumed with a vengeance, accompanied by shelling. People

                 began running in all directions shouting, "The Jews are inside the village! The Jews are in the

                 village!"

                 In the morning, when they were leading us to the collection point on the beach, they killed

                 Fadl Abu Hana at the place known as the Marah. Fadl was unarmed, but he wore a khaki

                 jacket. Before our eyes, they took a group of men away and shot them all except for one. To

                 him they said, "Go tell the others what you saw."

                 In their search for money and gold, they even went through the swaddling clothes of our

                 infants, and when a little girl tarried in taking off an earring, a woman soldier ripped it off, and

                 the little one began to bleed.

                 They then herded us to a piece of land that belonged to the Dassuki family. We had walked

                 there barefoot over stones and brambles, and then they loaded us onto trucks which took us

                 to Furaydis. There, my grandfather, Hajj Mahmud Abu Hana, sent one of his daughters to find

                 him a shroud in `Ayn Ghazal or Ijzim, for he sensed that his hour had come. She couldn't find

                 one in either place and returned empty‑handed. But he had already drawn his last breath after

                 having bowed to the ground twice and read verses of the Qur'an, calling on the Almighty not

                 to let him die outside Palestine. We then found a coverlet, which we split open to remove the

                 wool filling to make a shroud with the material and wrapped him in it for burial.

                 In Furaydis, a military vehicle driven by a female soldier purposely ran down a woman of

                 Tantura, Amina Muhammad Abu `Umar, the wife of Falih al‑Sa`bi, who had been returning from

                 the field with a bundle of wheat on her head that she had gathered to feed her children. A

                 woman who witnessed the scene rushed to pull the dead woman's body off the roadway.

                 Another vehicle barrelled toward her. It missed her but ran over the dead woman a second

                 time.

                 That day, I told myself that the End of Days had come and that none of us would survive

                 these events.

                 We spent a month in Furaydis. A child was born there, the first child of Tantura born after the

                 massacre. The family, the Abu Safiyyas, had lost most of their menfolk the day the village fell.

                 Farid Taha Salam, born in 1915, resident of the Qabun quarter of Damascus

                 After we heard the news that Haifa and the surrounding villages had fallen, we took up a

                 collection to buy arms. What we had was a few rifles and one automatic weapon, a Brenn.

                 Most of the weapons were English, guns that had been owned by the police demobilized by

                 the English. We also had a few hunting guns.

                 We organized ourselves for night watches but had more men than guns. The guard posts were

                 Qarqun, Talat Umm Rashid, the water tower, the church, al‑Bab, al‑Burj, and al‑Warsha. At

                 each lookout post, there were only a few men, as many as there were weapons. Our training

                 didn't go beyond the stage of assembling and disassembling rifles, and even then, those who

                 had mastered this skill were practically seen as professionals. The best were the ones who had

                 served in the English police.

                 When the attack began, our guards returned fire until the ammunition ran out. Because of our

                 lack of experience, a lot of ammunition was wasted with firing too quickly. Most of the

                 defenders fell back toward the center of the village, others managed to get out of Tantura

                 altogether, and a third group did not leave their posts until they were martyred on the spot or

                 taken prisoner and liquidated.

                 The population had been rounded up by the victors. Groups of men were led away one by one,

                 and we didn't know what happened to them. I remember that the last group counted about

                 forty men. Taha Mahmud al‑Qasim was one of the ones who came back alive. He told us that

                 a Jew had asked his group, "Who here speaks Hebrew?" When Taha said he did, the Jew said,

                 "Watch how these men die and then go tell the others." Then they lined up the other men

                 against a wall and shot them.

                 Later Yaacov, who was the mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov, came on the beach where we were

                 being held. My father, who knew him, said, "Abu Yussef, the village has fallen, and you have

                 taken all the weapons. What more do you want?" He replied, "Taha, we have to reconcile you

                 with the Haganah in order to be able to stop the fighting."

                 Later, when we were prisoners at the Sarafand camp, I got to know a young Jew who must

                 have been about seventeen years old. One day I said to him, "Where are you from? Why did

                 you come to Palestine?" He told me he had come from Russia and added, "If someone hears

                 that he now has a state, who wouldn't rush to go there?" I then remembered Rothschild, who

                 had visited Tantura one day in the 1920s. When he found only Arabs there, he reproached the

                 Jews of Zichron Yaacov because they hadn't succeeded in buying any of the land of our

                 village. Even Musa, who was Jewish, who had come to our village, who had lived there, worked

                 the land, built a house there, and whom we called "Musa the Tanturi"‑‑even he left because

                 he felt like a stranger among us.

                 Musa `Abd al‑Fattah al‑Khatib, born in 1924, resident of Yarmuk camp

                 The night of 23 May 1948, Muhammad al‑Hindi, who was the head of the guard of the village,

                 had me called to take position at Dabbit al‑Bi'r, between the water tower and the school.

                 There I found Issa al‑Fakhri, who had a hunting rifle, `Abd al‑Jabbar Taha al‑Shaykh Mahmud,

                 who had a German rifle and fifty bullets, the son of the mukhtar of Qisarya, also armed with a

                 hunting rifle, and Hasan Faysal Abu Hana, who was unarmed.

                 I had an English gun and seventy‑five bullets. At midnight I gave my weapon to the man who

                 came to replace me, and I was about to go home when `Abd al‑Jabbar suddenly told me to be

                 still and listen. Voices speaking in Hebrew reached us from the field close by. We left our

                 position and crept toward the field to investigate. Suddenly a volley of fire rang out from the

                 direction of the water tower and Qaqun. We hastily regained our position and started firing

                 toward the fields in the east.

                 After a few minutes, we thought that the attackers had withdrawn. But then we saw vehicles

                 unloading armed men near the school, and the attack on this last position began. We were a

                 few dozen meters from the school, and at one point I thought that our position there had

                 fallen. Then I saw military vehicles advancing on the road from al‑Bab.

                 `Abd al‑Jabbar and I thought the village had fallen. It was then that `Abd al‑Rahman Zaydan

                 reached us with 300 bullets, which he gave to me. I stopped firing to take stock of the

                 situation. I then heard Faysal Abu Hana say to Issa al‑Hamdan, "Brother, I'm hit, I'm dying."

                 Sulayman and Ahmad al‑Masri came at that moment and said they were going back into the

                 village to see what was happening. I warned them, but they left anyway and never returned.

                 Later I learned that both had been killed.

                 Soon `Abd al‑Jabbar had only five bullets left. There were only three of us now, and only my

                 gun had ammunition. An armored vehicle started coming down the dirt track nearby, and we

                 thought we had been spotted. Two men got out, and we fired on them and hit them. A second

                 armored vehicle with a white flag approached, and they tried to pick up the two bodies but

                 couldn't because we were firing on them with our only gun. Then intensive shelling of our

                 position began, and the armored vehicle pulled off the dirt track and onto the plowed fields. A

                 man from the village had hidden himself under some straw, and the vehicle crushed his leg, but

                 he didn't even cry out so as not to be discovered.

                 It was then that I suggested to `Abd al‑Jabbar that we change position. We came back to

                 the first hill, where Issa al‑Hamdan joined us. The soldiers were advancing toward us. Issa

                 asked me for my gun and gave me his, which had jammed. I tried to get it working again, but

                 couldn't. That's why it was Issa who began firing on them after taking cover.

                 Little by little, we were falling back toward the water tower. We reached a cave, where we

                 found `Atiyya `Amshawi and Muhammad Shihada. We remained there until nine in the morning,

                 when we left our two comrades and advanced toward the water tower a few dozen meters

                 from the cave. Suddenly I heard Hebrew and someone say to `Abd al‑Jabbar, "Hands up!" We

                 hit the ground instantly and managed to get to a crevasse in the quarry, where we hid. We

                 didn't move and could not be seen from their side. But Issa had continued to fire on them until

                 he was out of ammunition. They ordered him to put up his hands and asked where the other

                 gunman was. He said he was alone. They asked if he had served with the British police. He

                 said yes. Then they ordered him to undress and led him to an unknown destination.

                 Soldiers had taken up position a few meters from our hiding place. We held our breaths. At

                 sundown, they left the position and moved toward the water tower. We then decided to try to

                 make it to the village of Furaydis, where `Abd al‑Jabbar's uncle lived. That's where we learned

                 the fate of our village. We stayed at Furaydis for three days, spending the day at Mount

                 Carmel and the night in the village. Then we left for `Ayn Ghazal, where we found others who

                 had withdrawn from Tantura‑‑`Ali Taha, Nimr al‑Jamal, Mahmud `Abd al‑Rahim, Yahya al‑Hindi,

                 and Kamil al‑Dassuki.

                 `Adil Muhammad al‑`Ammuri, born in 1931, resident of Yarmuk camp

                 Lots of things happened before the attack on Tantura the night of 23 May 1948. I especially

                 remember watching the train go by loaded with armored vehicles, supplies, and ammunition for

                 the colonies of Khudeira, Ramat Gan, and Netanya. During the same period, armed men would

                 fire at Tantura villagers working their fields. As`ad Abu Mdayriss was killed during one of those

                 incidents.

                 The night of the attack, I was in our house at the center of the village. I tried to go to the

                 southern part but was stopped by machine‑gun fire. People were rushing about, old men and

                 children, asking God to grant us victory. They weren't so much in a state of panic as

                 confused, not knowing what to do and what was really happening.

                 During the earlier clashes, the villagers of the Haifa district had gone to the aid of the others.

                 This time, we thanked God that the neighboring villagers didn't come, because they would

                 have been cut down at the Israeli positions set up on all the roads leading to our village. Later

                 I learned that the inhabitants of Jaba` and `Ayn Ghazal had tried to come to our aid but had

                 been unable to reach the village.

                 When they rounded us up on the beach, the Jews asked us, "Are there any Syrians among

                 you? Have you received Syrian help from the sea?"

                 Once we were captured, we were taken to the camp that had been set up in Umm Khalid.

                 Later they transferred us to the Jalil prison camp, where a Red Cross representative registered

                 our names and informed us of our rights as prisoners of war. The soldiers then made us

                 harvest Arab fields on behalf of a Jewish army contractor. They paid us with coupons with

                 which we could get food items at the canteen. This allowed us to satisfy our hunger, because

                 our daily prison rations were woefully insufficient. One day, several buses arrived in the camp

                 loaded with men. They were made to get down so they could drink at the camp's only water

                 tank. Because they were parched with thirst, they were pushing and shoving to get to the

                 tap. The soldiers opened fire on them and blood mixed with water. Tens of men fell dead

                 before our eyes. It was only later that we learned that the men were from Lydda and Ramla.

                 When we left the camp for exile, we had to cover the distance between Wadi al‑Milh and Jinin

                 by foot. I saw numerous Arab corpses along the road.

                 Mahmud Nimr `Abd al‑Mu`ti, born in 1930, resident of Yarmuk camp

                 My father and I took turns on sentry duty. The night of the attack, it was my father's shift,

                 and he was posted at Qarqun, south of the village. When the attack began I left the house,

                 and people were running in all directions, congregating in groups. I ran into Muhammad Shihada

                 near the Marah. He gave me his rifle and told me that our position at al‑Warsha had not yet

                 fallen. I ran to join the defenders.

                 On the road, my uncle stopped me and told me that al‑Warsha had fallen. We returned to the

                 village, and he hid my weapon in the tomato patch inside the walled garden of our house.

                 When we were coming out we ran face‑to‑face into Israeli soldiers. They searched us and

                 confiscated my identity card as well as seven Palestinian pounds. Then they took us and other

                 prisoners to bury our martyrs, one of whom was Mustafa al‑Salhud. Later I learned that they

                 had already killed his two brothers. One of those who had been spared was Taha Muhammad

                 Abu Safiyya, but when they sent him back his hair had turned white, even though he was only

                 sixteen. On the road leading to the cemetery, I saw a number of bodies that I was not able to

                 identify.

                 I also remember seeing an old man from the Yahya family known as Abu Rashid. He had been

                 badly wounded and had leaned up against a stack of sugar cane. He died in a sitting position

                 and looked like he was alive, and seemed to be smiling. I saw one of the Jewish soldiers take a

                 picture of him.

                 Later, they took us from the camp at Umm Khalid to the Jalil prison camp, where they

                 exploited our labor by making us take in the harvest. A number of groups that had been taken

                 out to work in the fields never came back. One day while we were still at the Umm Khalid camp

                 we were ordered to dig a big pit, which we did at gunpoint. The Jewish soldiers were talking

                 among themselves in Hebrew, and some of us understood that they were intending to finish us

                 off. One of us managed to get word to the camp commander, who immediately had them

                 replaced.

                 One day they took us to the village of Qaqun, where the stench of corpses was overpowering.

                 We began digging a hole to bury the dead, but suddenly an Iraqi mortar shell landed

                 nearby‑‑the Iraqis were positioned five kilometers from there. A Jewish soldier was killed. I

                 myself was hit by shrapnel, but I didn't realize how badly until Issa `Abd al‑`Al told me I was

                 bleeding from my hand, chest, and shoulder and I lost consciousness.

                 They treated me along with their wounded and plastered my arm. The Red Cross visited us a

                 little later in the camp. They asked me about my wound. The man in charge of the camp,

                 whose name was Punstein, said that I had been wounded while fighting against his men in

                 Tantura. But the Red Cross delegate was not satisfied with his answer and asked if any of us

                 spoke English, and Fuad al‑Yahya told him what really happened.

                 The Red Cross then told me that I was to be freed, but at first I didn't believe it. As for Fuad

                 al‑Yahya, he was punished for speaking up.

                 The men from Tantura started writing letters to their loved ones. But I was at a loss‑‑where

                 to hide all these letters? My clothes were in rags and the only pocket was small. One of my

                 companions suggested my arm sling, and that's where we hid the letters.

                 The Red Cross turned me over to the Iraqi army, which closely questioned me. How many

                 Iraqis had been killed at Qaqun? How many tanks did the Jews have? How many machine guns,

                 how many artillery pieces?

                 I was afraid that they would discover the letters, since it was very easy then to be accused

                 of espionage or working with the enemy. Once I was released, I managed to get the letters,

                 one by one, to the ones they were for. I remained in Jordan into 1949, and then we were

                 moved to Syria.

                 Yusuf Salam, born in 1924, resident of Yarmuk camp

                 A week before the attack, my brother Mustafa and my cousin Muhammad, who were staying

                 with some of our relatives at Kafr Lam, were killed by the Jews in an attack on the village. My

                 father was wounded while trying to bring back their bodies.

                 I was awakened by the sound of bullets. I asked my aunt, who was staying with us to take

                 care of my wounded father, what was happening. She said: "Don't worry, it's not very

                 serious."

                 I saw them enter the village and even though a white flag had been hung from the minaret of

                 the mosque, they killed every man who crossed their path.

                 While we were being held on the beach, and after they had selected a last group for

                 execution, the mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov arrived and spoke to Samson and warned him

                 against killing them. Samson replied that he had orders to kill the whole lot. Yaacov left and

                 soon returned with a piece of paper and handed it to Samson. That's how this last group,

                 which numbered about forty men, escaped death.

                 Besides the bodies that I saw in the mass grave that had been dug in the Dassukis' field, I

                 myself counted twenty‑five bodies of our people.

                 In Umm Khalid, the deserted village they had transformed into a prison camp, some people

                 from Zichron Yaacov came one day and tried to convince the head of the camp, whose name

                 was Ashkenazi, to treat us more kindly and with less insults and humiliation, but he refused to

                 listen and made them leave.

                 While we were being kept at Umm Khalid, `Arif Salam and Muhammad al‑Malah managed to

                 escape, so they decided to punish us collectively. We were then transferred to Jalil. One day,

                 a soldier started firing and killed a number of prisoners. Yusuf Abu `Ajjaj was one of the

                 victims. Later we learned that the soldier wanted to avenge the Israeli losses at the battle of

                 Tirat Bani Sa`b against the Iraqis.

                 Another time, the guards became very nervous. A group of Irgun wanted to occupy the camp

                 to liquidate all the Arab prisoners. I remember hearing threatening words between the Haganah

                 and the Irgun people at the entrance of the camp.

                 When I learned from my comrades that the Jews were taking prisoners to work outside the

                 camp and that a number of them never came back, I resolved to escape. So one night I went

                 near the bungalow of the Egyptian prisoners, because it was unlit. Three other prisoners had

                 decided to flee with me: Anwar Farhat, Ahmad al‑`Ammuri, and a man from the village of

                 Yazur. We were counting a lot on the Yazuri because he knew his way around the area. Three

                 rows of barbed wire surrounded the camp and my companions held back. I got through the

                 first row without difficulty. My face and chest got cut up going through the others, but I

                 plunged ahead until I got out. I had no idea about the region, and the weather was cold and

                 wintery. I wandered aimlessly around for three days until I was stopped by soldiers who turned

                 out to be Iraqi. A Palestinian was with them who knew my village and confirmed my account of

                 what had happened. They took me to Tirat Bani Sa`b. When the villagers saw me coming,

                 bleeding and accompanied by soldiers, they thought I was an Israeli prisoner captured by the

                 Iraqis and tried to attack me, but an officer stopped them.

                 Life was not easy there, either. There wasn't enough food or bedding, and no clothing.

                 Muhammad Kamil al‑Dassuki, born in 1935, resident of Raml camp, Lattakieh

                 People were screaming: "The Jews are attacking, the Jews are attacking!" Bullets were

                 whistling all around, and you could hear explosions in the village. At dawn, I saw boats

                 unloading soldiers near al‑Burj, north of the village, and they advanced toward the various

                 entrances of Tantura.

                 While we were carrying the dead, a young man‑‑it was Mustafa al‑Salbud‑‑started to weep. A

                 soldier asked him what was the matter. He replied, "My two brothers have been killed. Here's

                 the body of my brother Khalil, and here is my brother Muhammad. My mother has no one but

                 me now." "What use is your life then?" the soldier asked. And he shot him.

                 In the cemetery, I saw cars filled with Jews, some of them laughing and singing, but others

                 were terribly silent.

                 When we were rounded up on the beach, young Jews, boys and girls, climbed on the fishing

                 boats and began crowing their victory, while their chief, a tall man with pale skin, asked us:

                 "Where are the Syrian soldiers? Were you fighting alone?" Later, he turned us‑‑that is, the

                 women and children‑‑over to the mukhtar of the village of Furaydis. The people of Furaydis

                 welcomed us as best they could, and the people of the nearby villages of Jaba`, Ijzim, and

                 `Ayn Ghazal sent food and blankets for us.

                 We spent a month at Furaydis. One day, an old Jewish man came to the village. He gathered

                 all the boys between twelve and fourteen and led us to Tantura to harvest the garlic and

                 potatoes, under the guard of Jewish soldiers.

                 A soldier approached me: "You're from Tantura. Do you know anyone from the Dassuki family?"

                 "Me," I replied. "Do you know Abu `Aql?" "He's my mother's brother." He put down his rifle and

                 said, "Where is he?" I said he was at Furaydis. He then started to cry, "Greet him for me. I

                 know him, I'm the son of Abraham Hallaq, the train conductor on the Haifa‑Jaffa line and my

                 father is a friend of your uncle!" Then he asked after my cousins and I told him that Salim and

                 Nimr had been killed. He immediately cursed the murderers and added, "Me, too. Two of my

                 brothers were killed." Later, he came to Furaydis to visit my uncle.

                 My father, who was one of the defenders of the village, had managed to get to `Ayn Ghazal. I

                 decided to try to join him. I started walking, barefoot. When I got to my father, a man from

                 `Ayn Ghazal, Hajj Hasan, seeing that I was barefoot, took me with him and bought me a pair

                 of shoes.

                 Abd al‑Razzaq Nasr, born in 1931, resident of Raml camp, Lattakieh

                 The night of the attack, I was on guard duty north of the village, at Bi'r Jamus, not far from

                 Dibbit al‑`Ijra. Shots were coming from the south near Talat Umm Rashid and then got closer

                 to our position. About 2:30 A.M., a train brought soldiers who took position above us, where

                 they started firing and shelling us. We attempted to withdraw but lost two men. I stayed with

                 Muhammad `Awad. During our failed retreat, I saw two other bodies. One of them was

                 Muhammad Shihada. When we got near al‑Burj, we passed a group of our people‑‑if my

                 memory serves, there was Hasuna Sa`id Salam, Hadi Abu Ghazala, Abu Subhi `Ashmawi, Hajj

                 `Abd al‑Rahman al‑Dassuki, and Fayiz Ayyub. The hajj was wounded in the head and Sa`id

                 Salam in the shoulder. I tried to help them. When we got near the hajj's house, near the

                 Marah, he asked us to leave him there. It was about six in the morning.

                 I went home and hid my gun and asked where people were. I learned that many were at the

                 house of `Iqab al‑Yahya but that soldiers had found them there. They had burst through the

                 front entrance facing the sea and the back door at the same time, firing in all directions and

                 shouting, "Get out, out!"

                 Everyone was herded to the beach. Their officer, Samson, came and asked for Muhammad

                 Yusuf al‑Hindi. He put a revolver to his temple and asked where weapons were hidden.

                 Muhammad was forced to give a few names, including mine. They led me, my arms tied with

                 my shirt, so I could find my rifle, and they took it. On the way I saw bodies near the Abu

                 Safiyya house, and on the way back, at the Marah, I saw the bodies of Fadl Abu Hana, Fawzi

                 Abu Zamaq, and Muhammad `Awad Abu Idriss. In the alley by Abu Juayd's barbershop, I saw a

                 long trail of blood running some twenty meters to where more than ten bodies had been piled

                 up.

                 Yusra Abu Hana, born in 1915, resident of Yarmuk camp

                 The shooting began near midnight. Mudallala arrived from Zuluf. She told us, "Issa al‑Dassuki is

                 wounded, maybe dead. And when Su`ad al‑Filu ran to him to give him something to drink, they

                 fired at her and killed her."

                 One of my brothers, Fadl, also was killed; the other, Faysal, was wounded. He had hidden in

                 the stable, but he was caught: he was smoking, and the smell of his cigarette gave him away.

                 They wanted to kill him, but the mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov, who had good relations with my

                 father, interceded for him. It should be remembered that we treated the people of his colony

                 well when they came on the beach of Tantura.

                 Hasan al‑`Ammuri was an only child and his mother had been forty‑five years old when she

                 gave birth to him. He took part in the fighting. They promised him his life if he surrendered, but

                 they shot him the minute he gave them his weapon.

                 On the beach where we were assembled, they stripped us of everything: watches, bracelets,

                 money, identity papers. On the way to the beach, the door of one of the houses was open,

                 and I saw a pile of bodies inside. Not to mention the people they had gathered and executed

                 in the cemetery. More than fifty. All the ones they killed had no weapons, shot down in the

                 streets of the village or inside houses. On the beach, they led men away in groups, but no one

                 came back. Toward noon, the killing ended when the mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov came with a

                 written order. Some forty men who had just been led away thus were saved.

                 Wurud Sa`id Salam, born in 1937, resident of Yarmuk camp

                 It was Saturday night, and we were sleeping when the battle began. We immediately got up

                 and my mother called on God for protection. My father was a member of the Resistance. We

                 hurried to a house where a lot of people had gathered. Then soldiers arrived and ordered us

                 out. We walked along the Marah. My mother suddenly started to scream: she had recognized

                 the body of my uncle, Fadl Abu Hana. A Jew aimed his gun at her and threatened to kill her if

                 she didn't shut up.

                 Leaving our house, we took a few things with us for fear that the Jews would steal them‑‑a

                 gold pen, a ring with the name of my father engraved on it, some earrings, and eight

                 Palestinian pounds. When we got to the beach, my mother buried them in the sand, marking

                 the hiding place. Later, at Furaydis, a colonist from Zichron Yaacov who had a restaurant that

                 my father supplied with fish recognized us. My mother told him where she had hidden our

                 valuables, and he brought them to us. Nothing was missing. I remember that his name was

                 Lolik.

                 To come back to the massacre, when we were passing the cemetery, my mother said,

                 "There's the body of Salman al‑Shaykh!" In my panic, I had almost stepped on him, but my

                 mother held me back by my clothing. It was also near the cemetery that we saw my father

                 carrying the body of Hajj `Abd al‑Rahman al‑Dassuki, but he didn't get very far and laid the

                 body down among the prickly pears for fear of being shot himself. He was already wounded.

                 Near the low wall of Umm Fakhriyya, we saw twelve bodies, all from the Abu Safiyya family.

                 After we were handed over to the Red Cross at Tulkarm, we had to set off again. We were

                 barefoot. The asphalt burned so hot that we were hopping about like sparrows.

                 Sabira Abu Hana, born in 1933, resident of Raml camp, Lattakieh

                 We had spent the evening at our neighbor's, Umm Khalid, the wife of Sa`d al‑Din Abu

                 al‑Hasan. We were preparing the charcoal fire to boil the laundry, because in the morning we

                 had to help with the harvest. Nimr Frahat suddenly burst in and shouted, "What are you still

                 doing here? The Jews are already at Talat Umm Rashid!" We ran toward the center of the

                 village where my maternal uncle, Sa`id Salam, had his house. We stayed there until six in the

                 morning. An hour later, we saw a Jew tie up a man from the village and take him away at

                 gunpoint.

                 My grandfather, Mahmud Abu Hana, was shot in front of the entrance of the house. My

                 paternal uncle, Fadl Abu Hana, was liquidated after the fall of the village and rolled in a straw

                 mat. Amina `Awad Abu Idriss discovered the body of her brother near the cemetery. She

                 smoothed his hair, kissed him, and yelled her grief. The bodies that I saw at the cemetery in

                 the first lot were more than fifty. On our way there, I saw Abu Jawdat al‑Samra carrying his

                 dead son on a bier he had fashioned from a ladder.

                 Those who died after leaving Tantura were more than forty in number, most of them children.

                 This was on the road between Furaydis and the towns of the West Bank, including Tulkarm

                 and Khalil. Every hour you would hear that the child of so‑and‑so had died. I remember that in

                 the village of the Russian monastery, we buried more than twenty bodies.

                 What happened to our village isn't less horrible than the massacre of Dayr Yasin, but by the

                 time our village fell people were more preoccupied with the fate of the living and the loss of

                 the country, and no one talked about the massacre of Tantura, until recently.

                 Back to the Journal of Palestine Studies index.

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February 1949: Israel launched an offensive across the Armistice lines with Egypt which brought its forces to the Gulf of Aqaba, occupying the Palestinian police post of Umm Rashrash which they afterwards named Eilat.

1950: Israelis seized the Al‑Uja de‑militarized zone on the Egyptian side and Baqqara on the Syrian side, expelling their Arab inhabitants and razed their homes to the ground by bulldozers.

July 24, 1950: A fighter aircraft of the Israeli air force violating the Lebanese frontier and the armistice boundaries established by decision of the Security Council attacked over Lebanese territory a Lebanese civil aircraft of the Campaign Generale Transports on regular service between Beirut and Jerusalem, in the following circumstances:

The Lebanese aircraft, carrying twenty-four civilian passengers, men, women and children, fourteen of whom were Jordanians, eight Americans and two Daines, left Kalandia Airport at 1530 GMT on July 24 and set it course 080 in the direction of Amman, flying over Jerusalem at 7,000 feet KFF, then continuing in the same direction as far as Amman at altitude 8,500 feet, then set its course at 350 degrees in the direction of Hermon leaving it thirty kilometers to the left and flying over the foothills of Hermon.  After reducing its height for about three minutes to altitude 7,000 feet, and at about seventeen minutes from Beirut, it saw a fighter aircraft bearing a star on a colored background with horizontal bands on the rudder. This aircraft approaching very near the Lebanese aircraft seven or eight times, lowering and raising its landing gear; the Lebanese aircraft, being over mountainous Lebanese territory, proceeded towards Beirut, its nearest aerodrome. At this moment the fighter attacked it from the rear with a machine gun, and it was hit by several bursts and pursued to altitude 2,000 feet near Saida.

One passenger was killed, seven were wounded and the radio navigator, who was seriously wounded, died later. The French pilot, who was wounded, was able to continue as far as Beirut, avoiding disaster. The weather was very fine and the sky clear; therefore, the registration markings on the Lebanese aircraft were fully visible. This unwarranted and premeditated attack over Lebanese territory against a defenseless civil aircraft constitutes a flagrant violation of the armistice conditions laid down by the Security Council and shows total disregard for United Nations principles, the laws of war and the most elementary principles of humanity.

1950‑1955: Israeli forces unleashed more than 40 acts of armed aggressions against Arab states, almost all causing a heavy loss of life. This included attacks and massacres in Qibya, Huleh 1953, Nahalin, Kfar Qassem in 1954, Gaza and a Syrian outpost on Lake Tiberias in 1955.

March 30, 1951: On March 30, 1951, Israeli police (illegally evacuated) the Arab inhabitants of the village Baqqara, numbering, with the neighboring refugees living in the same village, about 980. The village of Baqqara is situated within the demilitarized zone on the western side of the Jordan River in the Huleh area. It goes without saying that such an action is a flagrant violation of article V, paragraph 2 of the General Armistice Agreement, which stipulates that no hinderance to the restoration of normal civilian life by the inhabitants could be allowed in the demilitarized zone.

April 10, 1951: A detachment of Israeli police, who had illegally entered the demilitarized zone, opened fire on the Arab village of Nuqueib with the intention of occupying it in conformity with the Israel plan of systematic and progressive occupation of the demilitarized zone.

May 2, 1951: An Israeli patrol seized cattle, which were grazing near the demarcation line in the demilitarized zone. The Israeli patrol, they said, had fired on Arab shepherds. Small-arms fire was heard in that village and Arab villagers armed with rifles attempted to recover the cattle. The Israel patrol had by that time driven the cattle well within Israel territory and had already killed fifteen cows.

May 6, 1951: Intense mortar fire lasting fifteen minutes was opened on the Arab positions above Shamalne village, with several rounds falling on the village itself. There was in addition considerable rifle and automatic weapons fire. Shamalne village was shelled with heavy mortar and field artillery guns, at least 100 rounds falling in the village or its close proximity. Shamalne village in the demilitarized zone was the target of the fire. The mortar fire decreased and shells landed on an adjoining hail. Numerous casualties have been reported, the observer seeing three Arab dead and two wounded.

May 7, 1951: The Israeli Army had violated the general Armistice Agreement by attacking with artillery, air force and infantry, the Arabs of Shamalne village who were expelled from the demilitarized zone, leaving behind six killed and forty-seven wounded.

May 9, 1951: Israeli forces started shelling and machine-gunning the village of Shamalne. Several bombs fell on the Buteiha area (Syrian territory), and on the Syrian outpost of Al-Hassel; and one woman was killed.

September 1951: Incidents in the Gaza strip area, in so far as they could not be disposed of by a sub-committee of the Mixed Armistice commission, have been considered by the Mixed Armistice Commission itself. At a meeting held on September 23, 1951, it examined an Egyptian complaint alleging that on September 19 Israelis had shelled the Beit Hanum area in the Gaza strip and that they had blown up a number of houses, killing and injuring some Arabs. The Commission adopted the following resolution by unanimous vote: "The Mixed Armistice Commission. Having examined the Egyptian complaint dated September 19, 1951 and the report of the investigation carried out by the United Nations observer. Decided that the action carried out by the Israelis on September 19, 1951 is a violation of article II, paragraph 2, of the Egyptian/Israel Armistice Agreement."

October 19, 1951: A raid during the night of October 19 resulted in the destruction of the Gaza ice factory, the death of one Arab boy and the injury of eleven other persons.

September 2, 1953: The Israeli authorities started works to change the bed of the River Jordan in the central sector of the demilitarized zone. The purpose of these works was to divert the river into a new channel, in order to make it flow through territory controlled by the Israeli authorities. These acts were accompanied by military operations, also in the central sector of the demilitarized zone. Partial mobilization has been carried out behind the sector in question.

October 14, 1953: A battalion scale attack was launched by Israeli troops on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The Israelis entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of many houses, using automatic weapons, grenades. and incendiaries, and dynamited houses over victims' heads. On October 14 the bodies of 42 Arab civilians were recovered. Four men and 38 women and children bore small arms or grenade wounds. Several more bodies were still under the wreckage. Forty house, the village school, and a reservoir were destroyed. Twenty-two cattle were killed and six shops looted. Approach roads from neighboring villages were mined.

October 14, 1953: was a continuation of such brutal, inhuman massacres as the King David Hotel, Semiramis Hotel and Deir Yassin. But it was also a watershed in one of the most sinister grand designs in military history - a deliberate turning of an entire officer corps into a cabal with shared personal guilt for vicious war crimes. The Nazis organized a separate all-volunteer army, under Heinrich Himmler, the Waffen SS. The SS was responsible for the majority of the German war atrocities