Classified Israeli Documents Reveal Details of Massacres against Palestinians
Category : Refugees News / Palestinians of Lebanon Published Date: 11 Dec
2021
Classified Israeli Documents Reveal Details of Massacres against Palestinians
Palestine, Tulkarem district, 1948. A group of around one thousand people,
including many mothers and children, forced to flee their homes during the
first Israeli invasion. (File photo: ICRC)
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 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.
"Within less than three days, the IDF [army] had conquered the Galilee and
also extended its reach into villages in southern Lebanon. The overwhelming
majority of them took no part in the fighting," reported Haaretz.
The investigation also revealed accounts regarding previously unknown
massacres that took place in the villages of Al-Reineh, just north of Nazareth,
Meron and in Al-Burj.
Before the brutal attacks against Palestinians during Operation Hiram, the
village of Al-Burj, presently known as Modi'in Illit, a large ultra-Orthodox
settlement in the occupied West Bank, was raided in July 1948.
According to a document found in the Yad Yaari Archive, four elderly men
remained in the village after its capture. "Hajj Ibrahim, who helped out in the
military kitchen, a sick elderly woman and another elderly man and elderly
woman."
Eight days after the village was raided by Israeli occupation forces, Ibrahim
was sent on an errand to pick vegetables by an Israeli soldier, in order to
keep him away from the atrocity the soldiers were ready to commit.
"The three others were taken to an isolated house. Afterward an anti-tank
shell was fired. When the shell missed the target, six hand grenades were
thrown into the house. They killed an elderly man and woman, and the elderly
woman was put to death with a firearm," according to the document.
"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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Haaretz -
Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in '48 – and What Israeli
Leaders Knew
Testimonies continue to pile up, documents are revealed, and gradually a
broader picture emerges of the acts of murder committed by Israeli troops
during the War of Independence. Minutes recorded during cabinet meetings
in 1948 leave no room for doubt: Israel's leaders knew in real time about the
blood-drenched events that accompanied the conquest of the Arab villages
Dec. 9, 2021
The discussions were fraught with emotion. Cabinet minister Haim-Moshe
Shapira said that all of Israel’s moral foundations had been undermined.
Minister David Remez remarked that the deeds that had been done remove
us from the category of Jews and from the category of human beings
altogether. Other ministers were also appalled: Mordechai Bentov wondered
what kind of Jews would be left in the country after the war; Aharon Zisling
related that he had had a sleepless night – the criminals, he said, were
striking at the soul of the whole government. Some ministers demanded that
the testimonies be investigated and that those responsible be held to
account. David Ben-Gurion was evasive. In the end, the ministers decided on
an investigation. The result was the establishment of the “committee to
examine cases of murder in [by] the army.”
It was November 1948. Testimonies of massacres perpetrated by Israel
Defense Forces soldiers against Arabs – targeting unarmed men as well as
elderly folk and women and children – were piling up on the cabinet table. For
years these discussions were concealed from the public by the military
censors. Now, an investigative report by Haaretz and the Akevot Institute for
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research for the first time makes public the sharp
exchanges between the ministers on this subject and reveals testimonies
about three previously unknown massacres, as well as new details about the
killing in Hula, Lebanon, one of the most flagrant crimes of the war.
•••
In October 1948, the IDF launched two large-scale operations: In the south,
Operation Yoav, which opened a road to the Negev; and in the north,
Operation Hiram. In the latter, within 30 hours, dozens of Arab villages in the
north were overrun and tens of thousands of residents fled or were expelled
from their homes. Within less than three days, the IDF had conquered the
Galilee and also extended its reach into villages in southern Lebanon. The
overwhelming majority of them took no part in the fighting. Most of the
exchanges of fire were between the IDF and the Arab Salvation Army,
consisting of volunteers from Arab countries.
At the time of Israel’s campaign to conquer the Galilee, 120,000 Arabs
remained in the area, half the number who had resided there on the eve of
the United Nations’ adoption of the partition plan, in November 1947. The
IDF’s rapid advance toward the northern border brought the soldiers into
contact with the population that remained in the villages, among whom were
elderly folk and women and children. The Palestinians’ fate was now in the
hands of the Israeli forces. That was the background to the massacres that
were perpetrated against civilians and against Arab soldiers who were taken
captive. At the war’s end, some 30,000 Arabs remained in the north.
The atrocities of the 1948 war are known from diverse historical
documentation: soldiers’ letters, unpublished memoirs written in real time,
minutes of meetings held by political parties, and from other sources.
Reports about military and governmental investigations are for the most part
classified, and the heavy hand of military censorship continues to obstruct
academic research and investigative reporting. Still, the open sources
provide a picture that is slowly becoming clearer. For example, testimonies
about previously unknown massacres that took place in Reineh, at Meron and
in Al-Burj, which are discussed below.
Reineh killings
Burying the Nakba: How Israel systematically hides evidence of 1948
expulsion of Arabs
'Unpleasant' war crimes: The secret docs Israel insists on censoring
The village of Reineh, near Nazareth, was conquered even before Operation
Hiram, in July 1948. A few months later, Aharon Haim Cohen, from the
department of the Histadrut labor federation that dealt with the Arab
population, demanded that a representative of the parallel section in Mapam,
a left-wing party that was part of the government, clarify the following: “Why
were 14 Arabs murdered in the village of Reineh at the beginning of
September, among them a Bedouin woman and also a member of the Land
of Israel Workers Alliance, Yusuf al-Turki? They were seized next to the
village, accused of smuggling, taken to the village and murdered.” Sheikh
Taher al-Taveri, one of the leaders of the Palestinian community in the north,
maintained that the Reineh massacre “is not the only one” and that these
acts were “being carried out for the purpose of robbery.” The victim’s families
claimed that those murdered had been carrying hundreds of liras, a very
substantial amount.
The village of Al-Burj (today Modi’in) was also conquered in July 1948, in
Operation Dani. According to a document, whose author is unknown, that
was found in the Yad Yaari Archive, four elderly men remained in the village
after its capture: “Hajj Ibrahim, who helped out in the military kitchen, a sick
elderly woman and another elderly man and [elderly] woman.” Eight days
after the village was conquered, the soldiers sent Ibrahim off to pick
vegetables in order to distance him from what was about to occur. “The three
others were taken to an isolated house. Afterward an antitank shell (‘Fiat’)
was fired. When the shell missed the target, six hand grenades were thrown
into the house. They killed an elderly man and woman, and the elderly
woman was put to death with a firearm. 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.”
According to the testimony of Shmuel Mikunis, a member of the Provisional
State Council (predecessor to the Knesset) from the Communist Party, and
reported here for the first time, atrocities were also perpetrated in the Meron
region. Mikunis got around the censors in real time by asking the prime
minister a parliamentary question, which ended up in the Knesset Archive.
He demanded clarification from David Ben-Gurion about acts that Mikunis
said had been done by members of the underground Irgun militia: “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.”
At Meron, it was reported, ‘They took as captives peaceful residents, among
them women and children, ordered them to dig a pit, pushed them into it...
and shot the unfortunates until they were all murdered. There was even a
woman with an infant in her arms.’
This is the place to emphasize that we have no additional testimony that
reinforces the brutal descriptions of the events in Reineh, Al-Burj and Meron.
This is not surprising, considering how much material remains locked away in
the archives. With regard to Mikunis’ testimony, there are additional reasons
to suspend healthy skepticism. In that same parliamentary question to Ben-
Gurion, Mikunis provided a minutely detailed description of the massacre in
the Lebanese village of Hula, and it turned out later, in court, that his sources
were reliable. (There is no evidence of a response from the prime minister.)
‘Some still showed signs of life’
The ministers appear to have been especially perturbed by the Hula
massacre. The village was conquered by a company of the Carmeli Brigade,
22nd battalion, under the command of Shmuel Lahis. Hundreds of residents,
a majority of Hula’s population, fled, but about 60 people remained in the
village and surrendered without resistance. After the conquest, two
massacres were perpetrated there, in two successive days. On the first day,
October 31, 1948, 18 villagers were murdered, and on the following day the
number of victims stood at 15.
Lahis, the company commander, was the only combatant who was tried on
murder charges in Operation Hiram. He was acquitted by reason of doubt in
the first episode, but was convicted of the second day’s massacre, which he
carried out himself. The Lahis verdict was later relegated to the law archive of
Tel Aviv University, and a short excerpt from the ruling on his appeal is here
published for the first time.
Lahis ordered the removal “of those 15 Arabs from the house they were in
and led them to an isolated house which was some distance from the
village’s Muslim cemetery. When they got there, the appellant [Lahis]
ordered the Arabs to be taken into one of the rooms and there he
commanded them to stand in a line with their faces to the wall… The
appellant then shot the Arabs with the Sten [gun] he held and emptied two
clips on them. After the people fell, the appellant checked the bodies and
observed whether there was life in them. Some of them still showed signs of
life and the appellant then fired additional shots into them.”
Lahis stated in his defense that he had operated in the spirit of the battalion
commander, who told him that “there is no need to burden intelligence
[personnel] with captives.” He explained that he felt a powerful need for
revenge because of the death of his friends, even though his victims had not
taken part in the fighting. He was sentenced to seven years in prison; on
appeal the prison term was reduced to one year. He served it in quite
comfortable conditions in a military base in the north.
Over the years, the judges offered various explanations for the light
sentence. Judge Gideon Eilat justified the sentence by noting that Lahis was
the only person brought to trial, even though graver murders had been
committed. Judge Chaim Dvorin said, “As a judge it was difficult for me to
come to terms with a situation in which we are sitting behind a table and
judging a person who behaved during battle as he behaved. Could he have
known at the time who was innocent and who was an enemy?”
Following his release, Lahis was pardoned by President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.
Three decades later he was appointed director general of the Jewish Agency.
In that capacity he conceived the idea of Jerusalem Day, commemorating the
re-unification of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, which has since been
marked annually.
Open gallery view
A 1949 cabinet meeting. Ben-Gurion chided his ministers: “It’s easy to sit
here around this table and cast blame on a small number of people, on those
who fought.”
A 1949 cabinet meeting. Ben-Gurion chided his ministers: “It’s easy to sit
here around this table and cast blame on a small number of people, on those
who fought.” Credit: Hugo Mendelsohn / GPO
Deir Yassin
Millions of documents from the state’s founding are stored in government
archives, and banned from publication. On top of this there is active
censorship. In recent years personnel of the Malmab unit (Hebrew acronym
for “director of security of the defense establishment”) have been scouring
archives around the country and removing evidence of war crimes, as an
investigative report by Hagar Shezaf in Haaretz revealed in 2019. However,
despite the efforts at concealment, the accounts of about massacres
continue to accumulate.
The groundwork was laid by the historian Benny Morris, who conducted
comprehensive, pioneering research in archives, starting in the 1980s. To this
was later added the work of another historian, Adel Manna, whose focus is
oral history and who studied the history of the Arabs of Haifa and the Galilee.
Manna described, among other events, the execution squad that massacred
nine residents of Majd al-Krum (his own birthplace). Additional publications
over the years, such as the testimonies reported here, are gradually filling in
the missing pieces of the puzzle.
Morris recorded 24 massacres during the 1948 war. Today it can be said that
the number is higher, standing at several dozen cases. In some of them a few
individuals were murdered, in others dozens, and there are also cases of
more than a hundred victims. With the exception of the massacre in Deir
Yassin, in April 1948, which has resonated widely over the years, this gloomy
slice of history appears to have been repressed and pushed aside from the
Israeli public discourse.
Among the major massacres that took place during Operations Hiram and
Yoav were the events in the villages of Saliha, Safsaf and Al-Dawayima. In
Saliha (today Kibbutz Yiron), which lay close to the border with Lebanon, the
7th Brigade executed between 60 and 80 inhabitants using a method that
was employed a number of times in the war: concentrating residents in a
building in the village and then blowing up the structure with the people
inside.
In Safsaf (today Moshav Safsufa), near Safed, soldiers from the 7th Brigade
massacred dozens of inhabitants. According to one testimony (subsequently
reclassified by the Malmab unit), “Fifty-two men were caught, tied them to
one another, dug a pit and shot them. Ten were still twitching. Women came,
begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men. There were 61 bodies. 3
cases of rape.”
In the village of Al-Dawayima (today Moshav Amatzia), in the Lachish District,
troops of the 8th Brigade massacred about 100 people. A soldier who
witnessed the events described to Mapam officials what happened: “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.” According to an
intelligence officer who was posted to the village two days later, the number
of those killed stood at 120.
An article published by an anonymous soldier in the journal Ner after the war
indicates that the phenomenon of killing non-combatants was widespread in
the IDF. The writer related how his comrades in the unit had murdered an
elderly Arab woman who remained behind during the conquest of the village
of Lubiya, in Lower Galilee: “This became a fashion. And when I complained
to the battalion commander about what was going on, and asked him to put a
stop to the rampage, which has no military justification, he shrugged his
shoulders and said that ‘there is no order from above’ to prevent it. Since
then the battalion just descended further down the slope. Its military
achievements continued, but on the other hand the atrocities multiplied.”
‘This is a Jewish question’
In November-December 1948, when the war pressure had abated somewhat,
the government turned to discussing the reports of massacres, which
reached ministers in different ways. A perusal of the minutes of these
meetings leaves no room for doubt: The country’s top leaders knew in real
time about the blood-drenched events that accompanied the conquest of
the Arab villages.
In fact, the minutes of cabinet meetings from this period were made available
for public perusal as early as 1995. However, the sections of the discussions
that were devoted to “the army’s behavior in the Galilee and the Negev” – the
term on the cabinet’s agenda – remained redacted and censored until only a
few days ago. The present report was made possible following a request to
the state archivist made by the Akevot Institute.
Even now, the transcripts are not available in full. It is evident that the direct
mentions of war crimes remain redacted. However, the exchanges between
the ministers about the question of whether to investigate the crimes or not –
exchanges that were concealed for 73 years – are now available to
researchers, journalists and curious citizens. Here, for example, is what the
cabinet meeting of November 7, 1948, sounded like:
Morris recorded 24 massacres during the 1948 war. Today it can be said that
there were several dozen cases. In some of them a few individuals were
murdered, in others dozens, and there are also cases of more than a hundred
victims.
Minister of Immigration and Health Haim-Moshe Shapira (Hapoel Hamizrahi):
“To go that far is forbidden even in times of war. These matters have come
up more than once in cabinet meetings, and the defense minister
investigated and demanded, and orders were given. I believe that in order to
create the impression that we take this matter very seriously, we must
choose a committee of ministers who will travel to those places and see for
themselves what happened. People who commit these acts must be
punished. The matter was not a secret. My proposal is to choose a
committee of three ministers who will address the gravity of the matter.”
Interior Minister Yitzhak Gruenbaum (General Zionists): “I too intended to ask
a question along these lines. I have learned that an order exists to cleanse
the territory.” At this point Gruenbaum tells about an officer who transported
residents in a bus to enemy lines, where they were expelled, and adds, “But
apparently others lack the same intelligence and the same feeling.
Apparently the order can be executed by other means.”
At this point many lines are redacted.
Labor Minister Mordechai Bentov (Mapam): “The people who did this
claimed they had received orders in this spirit. It seems to me that we have
not been as helpless about any issue as we are, apparently, about this issue.
In my opinion this is not an Arab question, it is a Jewish question. The
question is which Jews will remain in the country after the war. I see no way
but to eradicate the evil with a strong hand. As we have not seen that strong
hand in [army] headquarters or in the Defense Ministry, I support Mr.
Shapira’s proposal for a committee to be chosen, which will be given the
authority by the government to investigate every person it wishes. It’s
necessary to investigate the chains of command, who received orders from
whom, how things are being done without written orders. These things are
done according to a particular method. It turns out that an order is one thing
and procedure another.”
Prime Minister and Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion (Mapai): “If they flee,
there is no need to run after them. However, it is different with regard to
residents who remain in their places and our armies chase them away. That
can be prevented. There is no need to chase them away. In Lod and Ramle
explicit orders were given not to chase away the inhabitants and it turned out
that they were forced [to leave]. I wanted to go to Lod in the first days after
the conquest, and I was given a few excuses as to why I shouldn’t go. The
first time I accepted them naively. A more serious matter is that of the theft.
The situation in that regard is horrible.”
‘Fools’ paradise’
The November 7, 1948, meeting ended with a decision to appoint a
committee of three ministers to examine the testimony about massacres. The
committee consisted of Haim-Moshe Shapira, Bentov and Justice Minister
Pinhas Rosenbluth (Rosen), from the Progressive Party. A week later they
informed the cabinet that the meager powers they had been given did not
enable them to get to the truth of the matter. Three more days passed, and
the cabinet met again to discuss the investigation of the crimes.
Bentov: “It is known to me that there are circles in the army who want to
sabotage the government’s decisions.”
Shapira: “We must find the best way to stop the plague. The situation in this
matter is like a plague. Today the committee heard one witness, and I buried
my face in my hands, in shame and disgrace. If this is the situation, I don’t
know from which side a greater danger exists to the state – from the side of
the Arabs or from our own side. In my opinion, all our moral foundations have
been undermined and we need to look for ways to curb these instincts. We
have reached this state of affairs because we did not know how to control
things when this first started. My impression is that we are living in a fools’
paradise. If no shift occurs, then we are undermining the government’s moral
basis with our own hands.”
Agriculture Minister Aharon Zisling (Mapam): “I received a letter from a
certain person about this matter. I have to tell you that I knew about the
situation in this matter, and I placed the subject on this table more than once.
After reading the letter I received, I couldn’t sleep the whole night. I felt that
something was being done that was affecting my soul, the soul of my home
and the soul of all of us here. I could not imagine where we had come from
and where we are going. I know that this is not a chance thing but something
that determines the nation’s standards of life. I know that this could have
consequences in every area of our life. One transgression generates another,
and this matter becomes people’s second nature.”
Open gallery view
Arab residents flee the Galilee toward Lebanon.
Arab residents flee the Galilee toward Lebanon. Credit: Fred Csasznik
Police Minister Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit (Sephardim and Oriental
Communities): “Already in the first days of the People’s Administration [pre-
May 1948 temporary legislative body], I demanded a stringent approach on
this matter, and you didn’t listen to me. You are overwrought about their
grave deeds. I put forward several proposals on this subject, and to this day
not one of them has been accepted.”
Transportation Minister David Remez (Mapai): “We have slid down a terrible
slope – true, not the whole army, but if there are deeds like these and they
are recurring in quite a few places, they are undoubtedly horrific to the point
of despair.”
Following the discussion, Ben-Gurion declared incisively: “Since the
committee did not fulfill the role it was tasked with, it is hereby abolished.” To
which Gruenbaum retorted, “We are burying the matter.” Minister Shapira,
who had been the one to call for the committee in the first place, commented
that he felt the earth give way beneath his feet.
In fact, the ministers grasped very quickly that the prime minister had no
interest in a through investigation of war crimes. He refused to grant the
committee of three the authority to subpoena witnesses, and blamed its
members’ laziness for its failure. Whereas some ministers demanded the
establishment of a committee with teeth and urged that those responsible be
brought to justice, Ben-Gurion pulled in a completely opposite direction. The
meeting ended with the following decision: “The government assigns to the
prime minister [responsibility for] investigating all of the claims made about
the army’s behavior vis-a-vis Arabs in the Galilee and the south.”
Two days after the meeting, on November 19, 1948, he appointed the
attorney general, Yaakov-Shimshon Shapira, to investigate the events. The
prime minister noted in the letter of appointment that the attorney general “is
hereby requested to take it on himself to examine and investigate whether
harm was inflicted by soldiers and the army on the life of Arab residents of
the Galilee and the south, which was not in accordance with the accepted
rules of war.”
Two weeks later, the attorney general submitted his report to the prime
minister. In the cabinet meeting of December 5, Ben-Gurion read out its main
points, but this section of the minutes remains redacted. In the 1980s,
historian Morris petitioned the High Court of Justice, requesting that the
report be made available to him, but the petition was rejected. The Akevot
Institute has been working for several years to have the report declassified.
The report is mentioned only a few times in the academic literature – so few
that some have questioned its very existence. The historian Yoav Gelber, the
author of one of the most informative books about the War of Independence
(“Independence Versus Nakbah: The Arab-Israeli War of 1948,” in Hebrew),
wrote that he did not find “Shapira’s investigative report or any reference to
it, or any other evidence to the effect that an investigation was conducted in
the matter of the irregular actions that took place in the Galilee.”
Nevertheless, the report does exist, and the minutes now made available
show that the cabinet ministers were not at all pleased with its content or its
recommendations.
After reading out the main points of the report to the cabinet, Ben-Gurion
said, “I do not accept everything he [Shapira] wrote, but I think he has done
something important and has said things that others would not have dared
say.” He then took the opportunity to criticize his fellow cabinet members.
“Of course, it’s easy to sit here around this table and cast blame on a small
number of people, on those who fought.”
Haim-Moshe Shapira: “The attorney general has indeed presented a report
from what he was told, but that is not his job. In my opinion, the only thing
that it’s still possible to do, is to select on behalf of the government a public
committee that will investigate the matter and go fully into its details. But if
these deeds are covered up, the blame lies with the entire government if it
does not being the offenders to justice.”
Remez: “These deeds remove us from the category of Jews and from the
category of human beings altogether. Precisely on these grave matters we
have been silent to this day. We must find a way to put a stop to these deeds,
but we must not silence our conscience by placing the whole gravity of the
blame on boys who were dragged in the wake of deeds that were done
earlier.”
The public at large appears not to have been disturbed by any of this. The
philosopher Martin Buber termed the frame of mind that dominated Jewish
society at the time a ‘war psychosis.’
Bentov: “People get used to the fact of turning away and start to understand:
there is no justice and no judge.”
Code of silence
Throughout the cabinet meetings, there were several mentions of a code of
silence existing among soldiers about war crimes. Minister Shapira stated:
“The fact is that the soldiers are afraid to testify. I asked one soldier whether
he would be willing to appear before the committee. He asked me not to
mention his name, to forget that he spoke with me and to consider him
someone who doesn’t know a thing.”
Ben-Gurion also addressed the difficulty of breaching the circle of silence:
“In regard to the Galilee, a few things have been published. Not all the rumors
fit the facts. Several things have been confirmed. What happened in
Dawayima cannot be confirmed. There is a cover-up. The matter of the
cover-up is extremely serious. I assigned someone to conduct a clarification
about a certain matter, and an organized operation was mounted against him
not to do the clarification. He was under great pressure.” Ben-Gurion
asserted that it was impossible to ascertain the truth, not in the north and not
in the south. He added that in the Negev, “deeds were done that are no less
shocking than the deeds in the Galilee.”
The code of silence helped those who wished to sweep the crimes under the
carpet and avoid investigations and indictments. Indeed, Shmuel Lahis, the
commander of the unit that perpetrated the Hula massacre, was among the
few who were accused of murder in the War of Independence. Not even the
Al-Dawayima massacre, which was investigated internally by the IDF,
produced indictments.
The intensity of the cover-up in the army comes through in a book by Yosef
Shai-El, a soldier in Lahis’ company, who testified in the trial against his
former commander. In his unpublished memoir from 2005, “The First Eighty
Years of My Life,” Shai-El writes: ‘After the trial verdict was handed down, I
went through hard times for a while. People would grab me in cafés and
various places in the city and hit me. I made it a habit to go out with a pistol in
my pocket. I’d found the pistol in an abandoned house in Acre long before.
Everyone knew I was a sniper, and I enjoyed quiet for some time. The police
informed my father that there was a plan to kidnap me from the house, and I
hid in a friend’s home.”
Even those who did not have the benefit of silence and a cover-up, and were
tried for crimes committed in the war, were finally let off the hook. In
February 1949 a retroactive general pardon was issued for any crimes
committed during the war. The public at large appears not to have been
disturbed by any of this. The events described above took place during the
period when the military justice system was being created. This might explain
why the military internalized an organizational culture that goes easy on the
killing of Palestinians by soldiers during operations. The philosopher Martin
Buber termed the frame of mind that dominated Jewish society at the time a
“war psychosis.”
Half a year later, the first Speaker of the Knesset, Joseph Sprinzak, appeared
before the parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Mentioned in
the meeting were two items that had appeared in the press that day, which
epitomized the attitude toward the acts of murder during the war. One report
referred to an officer who during the fighting had ordered the murder of four
wounded individuals; the second report was about a person who sold stolen
army equipment. The former was sentenced to six months in prison, the
latter to three years. Sprinzak, in any event, was under no illusions. “We are
far from humanism,” he told the committee. “We are like all the nations.”
Adam Raz is a researcher at the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict Research."
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