As Israel celebrates her sixtieth birthday here’s a look at some of the gifts she has lovingly given to her neighbours.
This is only a small sample of Israel’s wonderful kindness to its closest neighbours
Deir Yassin: 9-10 April 1948: The massacre that
became the symbol of Zionist aggression of the Palestinians as
well as Zionist treachery. The Mukhtar of the village had
agreed with the Zionists to provide information on the movement
of strangers in the area as well as other intelligence, provided
their village is spared. The Zionists were not to keep their
side of the promise. In an operation which was called Operation
Unity, the Haganah cooperated with the Irgun and the Stern
Gang in this operation. At 4:30 am on Friday 9th April 1948 they
surrounded the village which was overlooked by two Jewish
settlements, Givat Shaul and Montefiore. For two days Zionist
terrorists killed men women and children, raped women and stole
their jewelry. A chilling account of the massacre is given by
a Red Cross doctor who arrived at the village on the second day
and saw himself, the, “mopping up” as one of the terrorists put
it to him. He says that the “mopping up” had been done with
machine guns, then grenades and finished of with knives.
Women's bellies were cut open and babies were butchered in the
hands of their helpless mothers. Around 250 people were
murdered in cold blood. Of them 25 pregnant women were
bayoneted in the abdomen while still alive. 52 children were
maimed under the eyes of their own mothers, and they were slain
and their heads cut off. The Jewish Agency and the commander of
the British ground troops knew of the massacre while it was
going on, however, no one intervened to stop it.
The Dahmash Mosque Massacre: 11 July 1948, after the Israeli
89th Commando Battalion lead by Moshe Dayan occupied Lydda, the
Israelis told Arabs through loudspeakers that if they went into
a certain mosque they would be safe. In retaliation for a hand
grenade attack after the surrender that killed several Israeli
soldiers, 80-100 Palestinians were massacred in the mosque,
their bodies lay decomposing for 10 days in the midsummer
heat. The mosque still stands abandoned today. This massacre
spread fear and panic among the Arab population of Lydda and
Ramle, who were then ordered to march out of these towns after
they were stripped of all personal belonging by Israeli
soldiers. Yetzak Rabin, Brigade Commander then says: There
was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in
order to make the inhabitants march ten to fifteen miles to the
point where they met up with the legion. Most of the 60,000
inhabitants of Lyda and Ramble came to refugee camps near
Ramallah, around 350 lost their lives on the way through
dehydration and sun stroke. Many survived by drinking their own
urine. The conditions in the refugee camps were to claim more
lives.
Kafr Qasem: 29 October 1956 Israeli frontier guards
started at 4pm what they called a tour of the Triangle
Villages. They told the Mukhtars of those villages that the
curfew from that day onwards was to start from 5 PM instead of
6 PM. They reached Kafr Qasem around 4:45 and the
Mukhtar protested that there are about 400 villagers working
outside the village and there is not enough time to inform them
of the new times. An officer assured him that they will be
taken care of. Then the guards waited at the entrance to the
village, 43 Kafr Qasem inhabitants were massacred in cold blood
by the army as they returned from work, their crime was
violating a curfew they did not know about. On the northern
entrance of the village 3 were killed and 2 were killed inside
of the village. Amongst the dead were men, women, and children.
An officer called Danhan was touring the area in his jeep reporting the
massacre, on his wireless he said "minus 15 Arabs" after a
while his message on the radio to his H.Q. was "it is difficult
to count".
Sabra and Shatila: 15-18 September 1982, after
the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon Phalangist puppets of the
Israelis massacred over 2000 Palestinian men, women and
children under the watchful eyes of the Israeli army. A body
count by the International committee of the Red Cross revealed
2750 dead, the real figure is thought to be much higher and may
never be known. Some figures of the death toll is as low as 460.
Eretz Checkpoint: 17 July 1994, Palestinian sources reported that the occupation forces had committed that Sunday morning a disgusting massacre against Palestinian workers at Eretz checkpoint. Eyewitnesses and Israeli sources reported that 11 Palestinians have been shot dead and 200 injured. Israeli sources also reported that 21 Israeli soldiers including 1 settler were injured. Two soldiers were shot by bullets, one died. As reported by Palestinian and Israeli sources, the scene was described as a war zone which lasted for 6 hours. Four Israeli tanks and helicopters were brought in by the occupation forces, while a number of settlers were taking part in firing at Palestinians. Protests had spread all over the Occupied Territories. In Gaza, Palestinians raised black flags and called for revenge.
The First Qana Massacre as reported by Robert Fisk: 18 April, 1996, Qana, southern Lebanon - It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Shatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disemboweled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.
In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey- haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child.
"The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area," a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank them?" In the remains of a burning building - the conference room of the Fijian UN headquarters - a pile of corpses was burning. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand...
Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive - 206 by last night - has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 - the youngest was a four- day-old baby - when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home.
Shortly afterwards, three Israeli jets dropped bombs only 250 metres from a UN convoy on which I was travelling, blasting a house 30 feet into the air in front of my eyes. Travelling back to Beirut to file my report on the Qana massacre to the Independent last night, I found two Israeli gunboats firing at the civilian cars on the river bridge north of Sidon.
Every foreign army comes to grief in Lebanon. The Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians by Israel's militia allies in 1982 doomed Israel's 1982 invasion. Now the Israelis are stained again by the bloodbath at Qana, the scruffy little Lebanese hill town where the Lebanese believe Jesus turned water into wine.
The Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres may now wish to end this war. But the Hizbollah are not likely to let him. Israel is back in the Lebanese quagmire. Nor will the Arab world forget yesterday's terrible scenes.
The blood of all the refugees ran quite literally in streams from the shell-smashed UN compound restaurant in which the Shiite Muslims from the hill villages of southern Lebanon - who had heeded Israel's order to leave their homes - had pathetically sought shelter. Fijian and French soldiers heaved another group of dead - they lay with their arms tightly wrapped around each other - into blankets.
A French UN trooper muttered oaths to himself as he opened a bag in which he was dropping feet, fingers, pieces of people's arms.
And as we walked through this obscenity, a swarm of people burst into the compound. They had driven in wild convoys down from Tyre and began to pull the blankets off the mutilated corpses of their mothers and sons and daughters and to shriek "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great") and to threaten the UN troops.
We had suddenly become not UN troops and journalists but Westerners, Israel's allies, an object of hatred and venom. One bearded man with fierce eyes stared at us, his face dark with fury. "You are Americans," he screamed at us. "Americans are dogs. You did this. Americans are dogs."
Of course, there have been many other acts of kindness by Israel, the shelling of a Palestinian family as they had a picnic at the beach, Beit Hanoun (at least twice) and of course the second Qana massacre.
So, I raise my glass to Israel and wish her a happy birthday, but even more, I wish that all her leaders from first to last and all the people who supported them burn in the depths of hell, along with the Hitler’s, Stalin’s and Pol Pot’s of this world.
Shalom Aleikhem !!!
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