Kfar Kassem: Israel's My Lai

By Richard Curtiss

"Villagers were hauled out of trucks, lined up, and shot. Ofer ordered that women and children be shot repeatedly until none remained alive."—David K. Shipler, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, Times Books, 1986.

"It was the bloodiest massacre ever carried out by soldiers of the Jewish state and a bitter symbol of the inferior status of the country's 600,000 Arab citizens"—Glen Frankel, Washington Post, Oct. 30, 1986.

"In a tragic mix-up, Arabs returning from work had not been informed of the curfew. Israeli soldiers, not aware of this failure of communication, followed orders to shoot violators. But they were tried, convicted, and sentenced."—Hyman Bookbinder, Through Different Eyes, Adler & Adler, 1987.

"Forty-seven Arabs were killed in cold blood by the Israelis before the slaughter ended. All were Israeli citizens. No one—neither officers nor enlisted men—spent more than three and a half years in jail for their crimes."—Senator James Abourezk, Through Different Eyes, Adler & Adler, 1987.

Even for the Arab-Israeli dispute, where each new outrage is always "retaliation" for a previous tragedy, the chain of events that led to the October 29, 1956 massacre at Kfar Kassem was a long one. Starting in late 1954, through American intermediaries, Egypt's new strongman, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had been exploring peace with Moshe Sharett, Israel's moderate second prime minister. Then, Sharett's predecessor and political rival, David Ben-Gurion, returned to the Israeli Government as defense minister. Two weeks later, on Ben-Gurion's orders, Ariel Sharon on Feb. 28, 1955, killed 37 Egyptians and wounded another 30 in a "retaliatory" night raid against an Egyptian army post in the Gaza strip.

Stunned at the raid, but heartened by US co-sponsorship of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning it, Nasser requested $27 million in US arms to protect Egypt against what he saw as a return to Ben-Gurion's hard-line tactics to delay peace until Israel had acquired more territory. The US told Nasser he would have to pay for the arms with cash, which the US knew he did not have. After a second devastating Israeli raid in September 1955, Nasser bartered Egyptian cotton to the Soviets in exchange for Czechoslovakian arms.

This set off a downward spiral in US-Egyptian relations which bottomed out in July, 1956 when the US abruptly withdrew an offer to help finance Egypt's proposed high dam at Aswan, and Nasser retaliated by nationalizing the British and French-run Suez Canal Company.

France had for some time been fighting burgeoning nationalist rebellions in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, all of which drew moral support, and perhaps material support as well, from Nasser's Egypt. France, therefore, was secretly arming Israel, in contravention of US-UK-French agreements not to upset the Israeli-Arab arms balance. In late 1956, while Britain and France lodged their complaints about the Suez Canal with the UN, France and Israel began planning a surprise attack.

Israel had no designs on Sinai, but ever since the first round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting had ended in 1948, Ben-Gurion had sought an excuse to wrest the West Bank from the Jordanian army and complete the Israeli occupation of Palestine. France, on the other hand, was only interested in humbling Nasser. Israel suggested an initial "diversionary" attack on Jordan, to be followed by an Israeli attack on Egypt, which would give France a pretext to seize the canal in the guise of separating the combatants. Jordan's King Hussein got wind of the plan and appealed to Iraq and Britain for help. Britain threatened to send aircraft against Israel if it attacked Jordan, but at the same time agreed to join the French in re-occupying the Suez Canal.

Accordingly, on October 29, Israeli paratroops dropped into Sinai to secure the Mitla pass, 40 miles east of the Suez Canal, until Israeli tanks could race across the Sinai desert to link up with them. On that same day, perhaps still hoping for a provocation that would permit it to attack the Jordanian army ont he West Bank, the Israeli army ordered a curfew on all Israeli-Arab villages near the Jordanian border from 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. the following morning. Violators were to be shot.

When the Israeli army commander in the area, Colonel Yissachar Shadmi, relayed the harsh orders to Major Shmuel Malinki, who commanded Israeli troops in eight villages, it was already mid-afternoon and all able-bodied villagers were working in their fields and orchards. Malinki later told a military court that he asked Shadmi: "What shall I do with a person who returns home after the curfew is imposed and does not know about it?"

"I don't want any soft-heartedness and I don't want any arrests made," Malinki said Colonel Shadmi replied.

"Bearing this in mind, what shall I do?" Malinki persisted.

"May Allah have mercy on their souls," he said Shadmi told him.

Malinki then told subordinate officers, according to testimony before the military tribunal, "to shoot and kill at all curfew-breakers without any discrimination and without mercy."

When Malinki was asked what should be done about women, children, and other villagers returning home from work, the court record quotes Malinki as saying "there was to be no sentiment and no favorable discrimination."

In seven villages Malinki's subordinates ignored or changed the orders, or escorted villagers home, and there were no massacres. In Kfar Kassem, however, the orders were obeyed—literally.

Jamal Freij, a survivor still living in the village, describes how he and more than a dozen fellow workers returning in a van from their vegetable gardens were pulled over by three young soldiers carrying automatic weapons. The men were ordered to line up outside the van. When they did, Freij said, the soldiers stepped back and opened fire. Some died where they fell. Freij stumbled into a cactus field from which he watched the soldiers systematically pump bullets into the wounded. Then he watched the soldiers kill everyone in a car filled with women.

Whether or not it's a media conspiracy, when there's good news about Israel or bad news about an Arab state, it's on Page 1. Conversely, bad news about Israelis or good news about Arabs is on Page 65. Editors who break the rule lose advertisers and, eventually, their jobs. Here's some information you may have missed if your local newspaper doesn't have a Page 65.

Israeli Lance Corporal Shalom Ofer, a 27-year-old deputy squad commander, told the court his squad only killed villagers who ran away when they were told to halt. Unfortunately, every villager his squad stopped ran away. he testified:

"I did not open fire until 5:20. Then about 15 villagers, riding bicycles, approached. I stopped them and told them to dismount. They began to run away. I opened fire with my rifle, and the other two men in my section opened fire with their weapons. We killed them.

"A truck with villagers came. I wanted to escort them to the village, but they began to run away. We shot them.

"Another truck came with seven or eight persons. The same thing happened."

"A truck came with four persons. The same thing happened."

"A wagon with five villagers came. The same thing happened."

Private Shalom Porado said he waved off three or four women he found filling water jugs when he arrived in the village at 5:10 p.m. "because I felt that they were unaware of the curfew." At 5:20 p.m., however, when two men and a teenaged boy approached, he shouted and waved and, when they ran away, he ordered his men to shoot. All three were killed.

When the shooting stopped, 33 men and boys and 14 women and girls were dead. Israeli censors suppressed any mention of the massacre for six weeks.

Eleven border policemen were tried, however. All used the same defense offered by German death camp guards only a decade earlier.

"I shot because I was ordered to," Lance Corporal Gavriel Uliel testified. "If I received an order to shoot my own family, I would obey."

Eight of the accused were convicted, but all of their sentences were reduced. Malinki and Lieutenant Gavriel Dehan served three and a half years, Ofer served three, and the others less.

Colonel Shadmi, who denied having issued the orders, was not prosecuted. He was subsequently promoted to brigadier general. In 1982 he was honored at a reception for soldiers wounded in Lebanon by President Yitzhak Navon. The Jerusalem Post described him at that time as "a near legendary figure in the army."

Mohammad Faik, a Kfar Kassem school teacher, was only two when his 65-year-old grandmother and 12-year-old sister were killed. He recalls showing two Jewish fellow students from Beersheba University a picture of his dead sister, Rashika, holding him shortly before the massacre.

"They said they had never heard about this before," Faik says. "It made me so sad."

Another villager, Mustafa Hamis Amir, a 19-year-old field hand when he narrowly escaped the soldiers' bullets, summed up the intervening years in an October 1986 interview, 30 years after the massacre:

"Nothing has changed. Every day they wait for us. Whenever they make me get out of the car I remember 1956."

If nothing has changed for Palestinian Arabs in their homeland, much has changed in both Israel and the United States. In 1956, a resolute President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke up the tri-partite sneak attack by sending the US Sixth Fleet literally into the path of the French-British invasion fleet. Then, when Ben-Gurion at first ignored Eisenhower's demand that the Israeli army withdraw from Sinai, Eisenhower quickly persuaded him by threatening to withdraw US tax exemptions for private contributions to Israel.

By contrast, in 1982, when President Reagan requested the Israelis to end their siege of West Beirut by letting the Palestinians and Syrians withdraw in peace and the Lebanese Army take over the city's defense, Israel refused unless US Marines landed to oversee the withdrawal. When the Marines departed, Israel broke its pledge to the US, invaded the undefended city, and permitted a massacre of the Palestinian civilians left behind. Their safety had been personally guaranteed, as a condition of PLO withdrawal, by President Reagan's special envoy, Philip Habib.

Between one and two thousand Palestinian men, women and children died in the Sabra-Shatila massacre while Israeli officers watched and Israeli troops provided logistical support. No Israeli was prosecuted.

Nor was there any reaction in 1982 from the American president whose personal pledge was broken and whose country was discredited—the same Ronald Reagan who had promised, when he was elected, to help America again to "stand tall."

Richard Curtiss is chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and the author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.