Summary
The October 1956 episode in which, in The Question of Palestine’s account, 49 unarmed Arab peasants were shot by the Israeli frontier guard after a curfew was suddenly imposed, and the officer in charge was fined one piaster.
Details
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In Said’s account of the Emergency Defense Regulations in use after 1948, curfews were suddenly imposed on villages and, when it was manifestly impossible for the working people to know of the curfew, the “guilty” peasants were summarily shot; the most wantonly brutal episode took place at Kafr Kassim in October 1956, during which 49 unarmed peasants were shot by the frontier guard (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.126-127 / printed p.105-106).
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After a certain amount of scandal the officer in charge of the operation was brought to trial, found guilty, and then punished with a fine of one piaster (less than one cent) (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.127 / printed p.106).
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Pappe calls Dawaymeh (28 October 1948) the last large massacre Israeli troops perpetrated until 1956, when forty-nine villagers of Kfar Qassim were butchered (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.231).
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Yisca Shadmi, found guilty of murdering two Palestinian prisoners in the 1948 camps, was in Pappe’s account one of the principal perpetrators of the Kfar Qassim massacre, escaped punishment for it, and was acquitted eventually in 1958 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.237).
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In Pappe’s Epilogue, Kfar Qassim is placed fifteen minutes by car from Tel-Aviv University, where on 29 October 1956 Israeli troops massacred forty-nine villagers returning from their fields, in a list of killings that has never ended (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.296).
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In Manna, the massacre took place when the army declared a curfew on the Triangle villages hours before the 1956 war began on 29 October 1956 and announced it only after villagers had left to tend their fields; forty-nine people from Kafr Qasim were killed by Border Guards as they returned that evening, unaware of the curfew (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.42).
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Manna adds that the aftermath was contrary to the expectations of those who planned and executed it, as it reinforced the solidarity of those who had remained and added determination to their struggle (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.42-43).
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Manna’s Chapter 5 (part 6) gives the massacre its full place in the remainers’ story: on 29 October 1956, hours after Israel launched its attack on Egypt, a curfew was imposed on Triangle villages from 5:00 p.m. instead of the usual 6:00 p.m.; villagers who did not know of it were stopped at a Border Guard barricade at the village entrance and fired on in groups and individually, forty-nine killed in cold blood, with several others killed that evening in other southern Triangle villages (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.216).
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Manna frames it as the culmination of the routine repression policy and the killing of so-called Infiltrators: he quotes Benny Morris that Israel then implemented a border policy “of shooting at infiltrators to kill,” that soldiers, policemen and border guards “fired on everything that moved, particularly at night,” and, from Israel’s Border Wars, that “between 2,700 and 5,000 Arab infiltrators were killed” and the vast majority were unarmed (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.217).
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He places behind it Operation Mole — the army plan to expel the southern Triangle’s population to detention camps if war broke out at the end of 1956 — and the 10 October 1956 Qalqilya retaliatory operation, two weeks before; whether the massacre was part of a plan to terrorize the population into migrating is a question he leaves open, the leadership-responsibility documents being still unavailable (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.217-218).
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His Chapter 5 conclusion: despite the massacre, the residents of Kafr Qasim and neighbouring villages did not think of leaving their homes and migrating (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.219).
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The Epilogue (part 8) gives the massacre its turning-point role: Tawfiq Tubi and Mapam’s Latif Dory snuck into the village, interviewed villagers and published the news the government was trying to conceal; the perpetrators were eventually tried and punished — the first time Israeli security personnel were punished for killing Palestinians since 1948 — after Arab and Jewish public opinion forced the government to change its usual course, though the sentences were short and pardons followed (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.290).
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Manna sets the precedent against the background figure: between the 1948 war and Kafr Qasim, Israeli security forces killed an estimated three to five thousand Palestinians along the border and in Arab villages with no one held to account (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.290).
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The massacre defeated the “second round” hope of expelling the southern Triangle’s population under the fog of war: Kafr Qasim, Kufr Bara, Jaljuliyya, al-Tira and the other villages did not contemplate leaving, having learned, in Manna’s formulation, that dying at home was preferable to the humiliating life of refugees (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.291).
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Its political afterlife ran through solidarity: Maki’s 6 January 1957 mourning strike, the 27 December 1956 meeting at Elias Kusa’s house whose declaration exposed the government’s responsibility, and the solidarity that helped crystallise the Remainers’ collective identity and, in time, the Arab Front (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.283, 292, 296).
Related pages
The Question of Palestine, British Emergency Regulations, Israel