Palestinian massacres details revealed in classified Israhellie documents

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An elderly Palestinian and a child can be seen during the Nakba in 1948

Details of massacres against Palestinians revealed in classified Israeli documents
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211210-details-of-massacres-against-palestinians-revealed-in-classified-israeli-documents/

Israeli government discussions on the massacres perpetrated by Israeli soldiers in 1948 were declassified for the first time this week in an investigative report published by Haaretz and the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research.

Entitled, Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in '48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew, the report  https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-classified-docs-reveal-deir-yassin-massacre-wasn-t-the-only-one-perpetrated-by-isra-1.10453626  exposes two large-scale operations launched by the army in October 1948, one based in the south, known as Operation Yoav, which opened a road to the Negev; and another in the north, Operation Hiram.

As part of the latter, within 30 hours Israeli soldiers attacked dozens of Palestinian villages, forcefully expelling tens of thousands of Palestinian residents, while thousands of others fled.

Nearly 120,000 Palestinians, including the elderly, women and children resided in the area, however, following Israel's massacre only 30,000 Palestinians were left.

"Afterward they torched the house and burned the three bodies. When Hajj Ibrahim returned with his guard, he was told that the three others had been sent to the hospital in Ramallah. Apparently he didn't believe the story, and a few hours later he too was put to death, with four bullets," added the document.

The declassified State Archives also consist of several pages of minutes from those years, including the testimony of Shmuel Mikunis, a member of the Provisional State Council (predecessor to the Knesset) from the Communist Party, who reported on the atrocities perpetrated in the Meron region.

Mikunis requested clarification from former Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion about acts that had been carried out by members of the Jewish terrorist group, Irgun.

According to the declassified documents, "A. They annihilated with a machine gun 35 Arabs who had surrendered to that company with a white flag in their hands. B. They took as captives peaceful residents, among them women and children, ordered them to dig a pit, pushed them into it with long French bayonets and shot the unfortunates until they were all murdered. There was even a woman with an infant in her arms. C. Arab children of about 13-14 who were playing with grenades were all shot. D. A girl of about 19-20 was raped by men from Altalena [an Irgun unit]; afterward she was stabbed with a bayonet and a wooden stick was thrust into her body."

The declassified documents, investigated in Haartez's report also includes details on the Hula massacre in Lebanon and the depopulated Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Though the report is lengthy, the paper highlights that many more details remain unknown; "This is not surprising, considering how much material remains locked away in the archives," it explained.

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Why is Israel allowed to own Palestinian history?
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211221-why-is-israel-allowed-to-own-palestinian-history/

An investigative report in Haaretz — "Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in '48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew" — is a must-read. It should be read in particular by all who consider themselves to be "Zionists" as well as those who, for whatever reason, support Israel, anywhere in the world.

"In the village of Al-Dawayima... troops of the 8th Brigade massacred about 100 people," reported Haaretz, although the number of the Palestinian victims later grew to 120. One of the soldiers who witnessed that horrific event testified before a government committee in November 1948: "There was no battle and no resistance. The first conquerors killed 80 to 100 Arab men, women and children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with sticks. There wasn't a house without people killed in it."

The Haaretz report of nearly 5,000 words is filled with such painful details: stories of Palestinian elders who could not flee the Zionist invasion and ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine (1947-48), and were lined up against various walls and massacred; of an older woman being shot at point-blank range with four bullets; of other elders who were crammed inside a home which was then shelled by a tank and hand grenades; of many Palestinian women raped. The devastating stories just go on and on.

Historians often refer to the way that Palestine was ethnically cleansed of its native inhabitants by making a typical assertion that Palestinian refugees were "...those who fled or were expelled from their homes". The use of the word "fled" has been exploited by supporters of Israel, who claim that the Palestinians left Palestine of their own accord.

It was also Haaretz that, in May 2013, reported on how Israel's founding father and first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, had fabricated history to protect Israel's image. Document number GL-18/17028, which was found in the Israeli military archive, demonstrated how the story of the Palestinians who "fled" — supposedly at the behest of Arab governments — was invented by the Israelis themselves. Sadly, as the latest revelations unearthed by Haaretz prove, Palestinians who stayed behind due to their disability, age or illness were not spared; they were massacred in the most horrific way imaginable.

However, something else struck me about the latest report by the Israeli newspaper. There was (and still is) a constant emphasis by delusional Israeli leaders that those who carried out the many grisly murders were few in number and do not represent the conduct of an entire army. It is important to note here that "army" refers to Zionist militias, some of whom operated under the title of "gang".

Moreover, much emphasis has always been attached to the concept of "morality" when it comes to those who don uniforms representing the occupation state. Thus, "Israel's moral foundations" were, according to those early "ethical Zionists", jeopardised by the misconduct of a few "soldiers", for which read militiamen and women, and even "terrorists".

"In my opinion, all our moral foundations have been undermined and we need to look for ways to curb these instincts," Haim-Mosh Shapira, the then Minister of Immigration and Health, was reported by Haaretz as saying during a meeting of the government committee.

Shapira, who represented the voice of reason and ethics in Israel at the time, was not arguing about Israel's right to be established on the ruins of colonised — and eventually destroyed — Palestine. Nor was he questioning the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians or the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands during the Nakba. Instead, he was referencing and protesting against the violent excesses which followed the Nakba, once the future of Israel and the destruction of Palestine were assured.

Needless to say, very few Israelis, if any, have been held accountable for the crimes of the past. Seventy-three years later, Palestinian victims continue to cry out for a justice that continues to be deferred.

Shapira's brand of "humanistic" Zionism, with its selective and self-serving morality, continues to exist to this day. As odd as this may seem, the editorial line of Haaretz itself is the perfect manifestation of this supposed Zionist dichotomy.

Some may find this conclusion to be somewhat harsh. Zionist or not, they may protest that Haaretz has at least exposed these massacres and the culpability of the Israeli leadership. Such assumptions, however, are grossly misleading.

Generation after generation of Palestinians, along with many Palestinian historians — and even some Israelis — have known about most of these "previously unknown" massacres such as those at Reineh, Meron (Mirun) and Al-Burj, as reported by Haaretz. The assumption here is that these massacres were "unknown" until unacknowledged by the Israelis themselves. Since Haaretz's editorial line is driven by Israel's own misconstrued historical narrative, the killings and destruction of these villages simply didn't happen officially until an Israeli researcher acknowledged that they did.

Walid Khalidi, one of Palestine's most authoritative historians, has been aware, as have many others, of these massacres for decades. In his seminal book, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Khalidi speaks of Al-Burj, of which the only sign of its existence now is "one crumbled house... on the hilltop."

The Palestinian historian discusses what remains of the village of Meron (Mirun) in detail: "While the Arab section of the village was demolished, several rooms and stone walls still stand. One of the walls has a rectangular door-like opening and another has an arched entrance." His records are very precise.

This is not the first time that an Israeli admission of guilt, although always conditional, has been considered as the validation of Palestinian suffering. Every Palestinian claim of Israeli misconduct, even though it may be verified by eyewitnesses and survivors, or even filmed, remains questionable until an Israeli newspaper, politician or historian acknowledges its validity. Why is Israel allowed to own Palestinian history in this way?

Our insistence on the centrality of the Palestinian narrative is becoming more urgent than ever, because marginalising Palestinian history is a form of denial of that history altogether; the denial of the bloody past and the equally violent present. From a Palestinian point of view, the fate of Al-Burj is no different to that of Jenin; the fate of Mirun is no different to that of Beit Hanoun; and the fate of Deir Yassin is no different to that of Rafah — in fact, the whole of the Gaza Strip.

Reclaiming history is not an intellectual exercise, it is a necessity. Yes, there are intellectual and ethical repercussions, but there are political and legal consequences too. Palestinians do not need to re-write their own history, because it is already written. It is time for those who have paid far more attention to the Israeli narrative to abandon such sophistry and, for once, listen to Palestinian voices. The truth conveyed by the victim is very different to that claimed by the aggressor.

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The Secret Israeli Files Revealing Massacres of Palestinians. LISTEN

Israeli historian Adam Raz joins the podcast to discuss his explosive report on declassified documents from 1948, showing how Israel's early leadership grappled with the moral and political questions arising from a series of massacres against Palestinians.

What did the government know in real time, how were the soldiers responsible treated, and why did David Ben-Gurion try to bury the subject? The conversation starts at time code 17:45. 

Listen here:  https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/podcasts/PODCAST-secret-israeli-files-reveal-massacres-of-palestinians-listen-1.10464164