Summary
West Bank village attacked on 14 October 1953 in what Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace calls a massacre of about 50 civilians, the best-known of Israel’s “reprisal actions”, in which David Ben-Gurion publicly denied any IDF participation — a denial the government’s own 1960 Hasbara pamphlet contradicted by listing Qibya among “an entire series of IDF reprisal actions” (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.191-193).
Details
- The attack on 14 October 1953 killed about 50 civilians, including women and children, and wounded many (PDF p.191-192).
- Ben-Gurion’s Kol Israel speech of 19/10/53 attributed the attack to border settlements whose patience ran out after the murder of a mother and two daughters in Kfar Yahud, and laid all responsibility on the government of Transjordan; he “emphatically rejects the foolish and fantastical account according to which 600 men of the IDF participated in the action against Kfar Qibya” and said no military unit was missing from its base that night (PDF p.192).
- The January 1960 Hasbara pamphlet “Upon your departure and your arrival” lists Qibya with Husan among IDF reprisal actions on the Jordanian border that “struck at centres from which the Fedayeen were sent, or from which fire was opened on Israel”; the authors conclude one of the two accounts must be false — either the pamphlet distributes “foolish and fantastical accounts”, or the Prime Minister was knowingly lying (PDF p.193).
- The raid did not reduce infiltration: Jordanian-inflicted Israeli casualties in 1954 were only 5.6% smaller than in 1953, and a UN publication showed 12 Israeli victims in the quarter after the raid, identical to the preceding quarter, while reported Jordanian ceasefire violations rose from 36 to 315 (PDF p.193).
- Le Monde (21/10/53), as quoted, read Qibya’s basis as twofold: to draw the Western world’s attention to the gravity of the situation and to compel the USA to change its position after John Foster Dulles’s Middle East tour; the Security Council condemned Israel most harshly on 24/10/53, and a month later Ben-Gurion resigned and retired to Sde Boker — “Ben-Gurion departed with the mark of Qibya on his forehead” (Kol Ha’am, quoted PDF p.194).
Related pages
Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, David Ben-Gurion, Fedayeen, Watchdog state, West Bank