Qibya Massacre: History of Terrorists

Sabbah's Blog

This year’s 14-15th October, marks the 53rd anniversary of the massacre in the Palestinian village - Qibya. Every fall in Qibya during the olive harvesting season, the memory of the attack is kept alive in a mourning ceremony. A memorial plaque behind the village mosque honors Sharon’s victims. [Flore de Préneuf, “An Eye for an Eye,” Salon.com, 2001]

At about eight o’clock on a warm autumn evening Ahmed al-Badoui was standing guard in a grove of olive trees on a rocky slope just beneath his village of Qibya. It was dusk and people were settling down for the night. Moonlight picked out the jagged limestone crags typical of the rolling hills and valleys north of Jerusalem. The city itself was only about 10 miles away but could not be seen. The first warning came when al-Badoui saw a dark shape flicker across the rocks at the edge of the olive field.

At first, he thought it was someone trying to steal olives. He gripped his wooden cudgel tightly and shouted a challenge. His answer came in a hail of bullets. One smashed into his wrist, another into his side. The impact of the heavy rounds knocked 22-year-old al-Badoui, a strapping 6ft farmer, into the dusty earth.

As he staggered to his feet he screamed to wake his village: ‘The Jews are coming, the Jews are coming.’

It was mid-October 1953. Within eight hours al-Badoui’s home was rubble. By dawn the next morning Israeli special forces would have dynamited much of the village and killed 69 people. Their leader was Ariel Sharon […] The people of Qibya certainly think they know Sharon. ‘He is a man with killing in his blood,’ al-Badoui told The Observer last week. ‘I do not know why God has let him live.’

[…] Safia Hussein Teeb, 83, remembers al-Badoui’s screamed warnings as Sharon’s crack troops poured through the olive groves. ‘I was at home getting ready to go to sleep when I heard the shouting,’ she said last week. ‘Everything was confused and we hid downstairs where the animals were. All night we could hear explosions as the Israelis blew up houses. My daughter and her husband and my nephew were killed.’

Sharon’s orders were to blow up some public buildings to make a point. He could, his superiors said, blow up a few houses as well if he felt it was really necessary. But the young commander had equipped his men with 600kgs of explosives and was determined to use them. In all, nearly 50 houses were destroyed. Most villagers died when their buildings were blown up. [The Observer]

The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote this about the massacre in his book, The Iron Wall:
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The order to attack was given by the acting defence minister, Pinhas Lavon, following the murder of an Israeli mother and her two children by infiltrators who had crossed the armistice line near Qibya. Lavon did not consult the cabinet and only casually informed Sharrett of the order. At the meeting of the MAC on 13 October, the Jordanian representative denounced the murder, promised full co-operation in tracking down the perpetrators, and conveyed Glubb’s request to Israel to refrain from retaliation. On hearing this report, Sharrett telephoned Lavon and asked him to call off the attack. Lavon replied that he would consult Ben-Gurion. Lavon later claimed he did indeed consult Ben-Gurion, who agreed with him - and that this meant it was two against one. Ben-Gurion himself later stated that he was on leave at the time and was not consulted but that had he been consulted he would have supported retaliation.

Lavon’s order to attack was executed by Unit 101, a small commando unit created in August to carry out special tasks. Unit 101 was commanded by an aggressive and ambitious young major named Ariel (’Arik’) Sharon. Sharon’s order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses, and inflict casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out this order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to a pile of rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses. The UN observer who inspected the scene reached a different conclusion: ‘One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them.’

The Qibya massacre unleashed against Israel a storm of international protest of unprecedented severity in the country’s short history. The cabinet convened on 18 October under the chairmanship of Ben-Gurion, who had just completed his three months’ leave. Sharrett, horrified by the scale and brutality of the action, proposed an official statement expressing regret over the action and its consequences. Ben-Gurion was against admitting that the IDF carried out the action and proposed issuing a statement to say that it was the irate Israeli villagers whose patience had been exhausted by the endless murders who took the law into their own hands. The majority of the ministers supported Ben-Gurion, and it was decided that he should draft the statement. In a radio broadcast the following day, Ben-Gurion gave the official version. He denied any IDF involvement, placed responsibility for the action on the villagers who had been provoked beyond endurance, and expressed the government’s regret that innocent people had been killed. This was not Ben-Gurion’s first lie for what he saw as the good of his country, nor was it to be the last, but it was one of the most blatant.

The official version was not believed, and it did nothing to reduce the damage to Israel’s image. On 24 November the Security Council passed a resolution condemning Israel for the Qibya operation and calling on it to refrain from such operations in future . . .

The principal perpetrators of the attack on Qibya, however, remained unrepentant. Lavon told the cabinet that he gave the order on the basis of a cabinet decision in June that empowered him to order reprisals. He also claimed that this reprisal was necessary in order to prevent the murder of more Israelis in the future. Ariel Sharon was well pleased with his handiwork. He thought the operation did a power of good to IDF morale. He also claimed that Ben-Gurion congratulated him on this operation. According to Sharon, the outgoing prime minister said to him, ‘It doesn’t make any real difference … what will be said about Kibbiya [sic] around the world. The important thing is how it will be looked at here in this region. This is going to give us the possibility of living here.’ (Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, Penguin, 2001, pp.91-92.)
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Sharon’s history offers a monochromatic record of moral corruption, with a documented record of war crimes…

According to the diplomat’s account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies were still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the neighbouring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel. [Source: Counterpunch - The Crimes of Ariel Sharon, 2001]

Ariel Sharon wrote in his autobiography that, although the civilian casualties were regrettable, after the Qibya operation “it was now clear that Israeli forces were again capable of finding and hitting targets far behind enemy lines.”

The original orders issued by the Israeli General Staff were to “carry out an attack - with the aim of temporary occupation and the demolition of houses, and to harm the inhabitants”. Down the command chain, the orders changed to demand “maximum killing” [Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 258-9.].

Ariel Sharon wrote in his autobiography Warrior (1987):
“I couldn’t believe my ears. As I went back over each step of the operation, I began to understand what must have happened. For years Israeli reprisal raids had never succeeded in doing more than blowing up a few outlying buildings, if that. Expecting the same, some Arab families must have stayed in their houses rather than running away. In those big stone houses […] some could easily have hidden in the cellars and back rooms, keeping quiet when the paratroopers went in to check and yell out a warning. The result was this tragedy that had happened.”

Israeli historian Benny Morris expresses doubt in this claim, considering the nature of the orders Unit 101 received. He also points to the fact that U.S., U.N., and Arab Legion reports indicate that villagers were killed before the demolition of the houses began. The U.N. observer who inspected the scene, Major General Vagn Bennike, chief of staff of the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization (which investigated the scene the next day) said: “one story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them.” [Source: wikipedia]

The Israeli troops “in moving through the village, had indiscriminately thrown grenades through windows, knocked down doors, and sprayed the interiors with automatic fire.” [Morris, p. 262 - via: dissidentvoice]

Even Moshe Sharrett, the acting prime minister in Israel’s Labor Party government at the time, was shocked. “[In the Israeli cabinet meeting], I condemned the Qibya affair that exposed us in front of the whole world as a gang of blood-suckers, capable of mass massacres, regardless, it seems, whether their actions may lead to war,” Sharrett wrote in his diary. [Source: socialistworker]


Minutes of U.N. Security Council meeting, 16 November 1953:


Mr. Haikal, representative of the Hashemite Kingdom of the Jordan […] 25. During the night of 14-15 October 1953, a force of about 300 well trained Israeli soldiers, accompanied by a demolition engineering squadron, crossed into Jordan territory and carried out a well-planned attack against the village of Qibya. The assailants were uniformly described by witnesses as Israelis in military uniform with full equipment.

26. These Israeli soldiers carried out their offensive action with the use of standard Israeli army equipment, such as Bangalore torpedoes to blast pathways through barbed wire; they used at least seventy demolition bombs, a number of incendiary bombs, and two-inch mortars against the village of Qibya. Numerous previous complaints have proved that this equipment was used only by military forces. Let us refer to what General Bennike says in his report [630th meeting, para. 26], when he quotes commander Hutchison’s report:

“The evidence noted indicated that this raid was well planned and carried out by men expertly trained in the fundamentals of sudden and sustained attack. It seems highly improbable that other than active military forces could have carried out this raid without suffering heavy casualties from their own fire, or from the explosions of their demolition charges.”

27. To cover the withdrawal of these Israeli armed forces other Israeli support troops -began shelling the neighboring villages of Budrus and Shuqba, damaging a number of houses.

28. The Israelis immediately claimed that they had victoriously carried out a mission of retaliation against Qibya. All occupants of dwellings had been murdered at, close range. In all, there were sixty-six innocent victims, most of them women and children; forty houses, the village ’school, the mosque, the water reservoir, had been razed to the ground and one more, Jordanian village rendered uninhabitable.

[…]

32. The Qibya massacre has been described and condemned by most leading newspapers and reviews, by ranking political leaders, and by religious beads all over the world. In order not to lengthen this exposition by too many quotations, I will limit myself to two. Ti4im (I guess they mean ‘Time’) magazine of 26 October 1953 describes the incident in these terms:

“At 9.30 one night, most of the people were just going to bed in the Jordanian village of Qibya…a mile and a half beyond the Israeli frontier… On this quiet night, as usual, everyone put his trust in the U.N. ‘truce’ and 30 skimpily armed Jordanian national guardsmen. Suddenly, Israeli artillery, previously zeroed onto target, opened tip, and a 600 man battallion of uniformed Israeli regulars swept across the border to encircle the village. For the next 2 and half hours the town shuddered under shell bursts and smallarms fire; villagers, screaming and milling, rushed out to the surrounding fields and olive groves.

“Then the guardsmen’s ammo (25 rounds per man) gave out, and the Israelis moved into Qibya with rifle and Sten guns. They shot every man, woman and child they could find, then turned-their fire on the cattle. After that they dynamited 42 houses, a school and a mosque. The cries of the dying could be heard amid the explosions. The villagers huddled in the grass could see Israeli soldiers slouching in the doorways of their homes, smoking and joking, their young faces illuminated by the flames. By 3 a.m., the Israelis’ work was done…Sixty-six died that night…It was the bloodiest night of border warfare since the 1949 armistice…In the slaughter of Qibya, Israel made peace harder than ever to attain.”

33. The New York Times of 6 November 1953 reported that “The Archbishop of York… spokesman for the Church of England… condemned Israel for the cruel massacre of Arab men, women and children in the Jordanian… village of Qibya… He said there was ‘little doubt’ that the raid on Qibya had been carried out by the regular forces of Israel and was not a raid by ‘a few irresponsible terrorists’. ‘For many months past,’ Dr. Garbett continued, there have been acts of violence… but this in its calculated horror is different in degree. It is well that the State of Israel should realize the disquiet and indignation caused on both sides of the Atlantic by this brutal act… He added that unless ’some strong line’ were adopted the Middle East would find itself ‘ablaze”‘.

[…]

142. First I shall read from the The Jewish Chronicle of London of 23 October. Everybody knows that that paper was very pro-Israel all along and that it is quite conservative. I now read you its comments on the happenings at Qibya:

“What standards are we to adopt in passing judgment? Surely, we have no option but to base ourselves on those ethical precepts on which our religion is founded, but the jettisoning of which will lead to the annihilation of our raison d’etre as a community. By that standard is there any possible moral justification for this cruel - assault on the Jordan villagers? This was not self-defense against armed attack. This is not my language, Mr. Eban (representative of Israel), it is the language of the The Jewish Chronicle of London “It was reprisal of the same kind that was perpetrated by our enemies in the last war. If the action was morally unjustified, can it, perhaps, be excused on grounds of expediency? Surely not.” The paper goes on to say “For what could be more stupid than to alienate the sympathy of so many of Israel’s friends at a time when, more than ever, their support is vital to its well-being if not to its existence? The deferment of American financial aid may be attributable to the River Jordan dispute, but that by itself is indicative of present Sate Department thinking and cannot but serve as a serious warning” I am not speaking for the American Government on this. I am only reading from what I see in the The Jewish Chronicle of London, which then concludes as follows-”The evil which was wrought by the fanatics who perpetrated the crime of Deir Yassin this is not my language. This is the language of the The Jewish Chronicle “has never been entirely eliminated. Unless the Israeli Government will dissociate itself from this action and punish the culprits it may well have an even more disastrous effect than the irresponsible action of the Irgun terrorists.”

Complete minutes of meeting here.

The Qibya massacre once again exposed the nature of Israel as a colonial-settler state based on the violent displacement of the native population. And it showed that behind the progressive-sounding rhetoric of the Labor Party, Zionism depended on people like Ariel Sharon to do the dirty work.

Blood-soaked history of Zionist.

Indeed.