Benny Morris: Jews raped and murdered Palestinians | |
by Helen4Yemen | |
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BENNY MORRIS interview with ARI SHAVIT - Haaretz - 2004 | |
1) The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based | |
on many documents that were not available to me when I | |
wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel | |
Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is | |
that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I | |
had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also | |
many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948,units | |
of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the | |
precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that | |
stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, | |
expel them and destroy the villages themselves. | |
2) In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her | |
and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade | |
raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At | |
Hunin,which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and | |
then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at | |
Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at | |
Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu | |
Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were | |
four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of | |
times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one | |
soldier was involved. usually there were one or two | |
Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the | |
event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor | |
the rapists liked to report these events, we have to | |
assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, | |
which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the | |
tip of the iceberg. | |
3) In some cases four or five people were executed, in | |
others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a | |
great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted | |
walking in a field they are shot. A woman is found in an | |
abandoned village she is shot. There are cases such as | |
the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which | |
a column entered the village with all guns blazing and | |
killed anything that moved. | |
4) The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir | |
Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and | |
perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of | |
a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were | |
perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about | |
which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab | |
al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of | |
massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in | |
October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al | |
Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation | |
Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of | |
executions of people against a wall or next to a well in | |
an orderly fashion. | |
5) That can t be chance. It s a pattern. Apparently, | |
various officers who took part in the operation | |
understood that the expulsion order they received | |
permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage | |
the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no | |
one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion | |
silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who | |
did the massacres . | |
6) One of the revelations in the book is that on October | |
31, 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe | |
Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to | |
expedite the removal of the Arab population. Carmel took | |
this action immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to | |
the Northern Command in Nazareth. There is no doubt in my | |
mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion. Just as | |
the expulsion order for the city of Lod, which was signed | |
by Yitzhak Rabin, was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion | |
visited the headquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948] | |
7) From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of | |
transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, | |
there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an | |
atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is | |
in the air. The entire leadership understands that this | |
is the idea. The officer corps understands what is | |
required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of | |
transfer is created. | |
8) Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood | |
that there could be no Jewish state with a large and | |
hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no | |
such state. It would not be able to exist. | |
9) Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, | |
a state would not have come into being. That has to be | |
clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the | |
uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not | |
have arisen here. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish | |
state would not have come into being without the | |
uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was | |
necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to | |
expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the | |
hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the | |
main roads. | |
Date Published: 2023-03-14 17:03:48 | |
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