Seventy-five Palestinian men, women and children died in what is remembered as the Qibya Massacre. And while neither Palestinians nor Israelis have ever doubted the sheer audacity of the mission, they read the moment in mutually exclusive narratives.
For Israel, the night represents prototypical payback for terror. The national myth holds that though civilians were never meant to die, the Arabs — Palestinian was not yet a word Israelis could bring themselves to use — had to be taught a lesson for those early Fedayeen raids that harassed innocent Israelis.
Sharon's Unit 101 provided the ruthless answer, just a few days after the killing of an Israeli mother and her two infant children in the nearby town of Yehud. And for his actions, he was rewarded with his first audience with Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.
At no time in Potter’s article does he refer to the “national myth” aka Israeli narrative of events that led up to the offensive on the Jordanian West Bank village of Qibya other than a brief reference to the death of an “Israeli mother and her two infant children”. But the slaughter of a defenseless Israeli woman and her infants from the town Yehud by “Fedayeen” represented the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back and was not than a single catalyst leading up to the Israeli offensive on West Bank village of Qibya as Potter suggests.
In fact, “those early Fedayeen raids that harassed innocent Israelis” were not raids of harassment unless you consider the murder of Israeli civilians “harassment.” Let me speak plainly. In 1951, 137 Israelis were murdered by “Fedayeen” terrorists infiltrating the Israeli side of the 1949 armistice line from Jordan in search of Israelis to “harass” and than fled back to safety in Jordan.
In 1952, the death toll for Israelis reached 162, by October 1953 the death toll from “harassment” reached 160 souls while the Jordanian government continued to turn a blind eye from the “Fedayeen” harassment activity. But then again, according to the Jordanian point of view, they were only Jews, and it was only Jewish blood that was split. So what, right? Arabs murder Israelis and its harassment, but Arab deaths are always a massacre or an atrocity.
Early Arab accounts of the alleged massacre of Qibya had the death toll reached as high of 600. Qibya would be archetype of the massacre motif that would play over and over again in Palestinian Arab narratives throughout the decades and used as recently in 2002 in Jenin. The Israelis maintain that the 101st Unit (lead by then 25 year old Ariel Sharon) issued warnings for the villagers to evacuate their homes and sent soldiers to confirm that the building targeted for demolition were in fact empty. Out of the 41 buildings the Israeli soldiers missed less than a 100 people hidden throughout the village. The Arab narrative maintains that no such warnings or searches were given, but if that is so; how did almost the entire village of 2,700 Arab civilians managed to leave without harm?
Potter writes that “Palestinian was not yet a word Israelis could bring themselves to use” but he never stops to consider that in 1953 the concept of “Palestinians” referred to all those who were born in the British Mandate of Palestine regardless of ethnicity or religion. It would be at least another 20 years before Arafat and his PLO movement would fully hijack the term Palestinian to describe themselves, and only themselves. In fact, I am quite sure that Ariel Sharon being born before the birth of the Jewish state would have his nationality listed as Palestinian on his British issued birth certificate. Albeit a Jewish Palestinian, but a Palestinian nonetheless, and certainly more entitled to the term Palestinian that the Egyptian born Yassir Arafat.
I suppose in Toronto Star speak this article is what passes for fair and honest reporting but in my world I call it blatant attempt to promote anti-semitism.
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