3 November 1979
The murderers in Israel’s army by Edward Mortimer
The Spectator
This has led to a general discussion of the ‘purity of arms’ theme, and some commentators have suggested that it may always have been something of a myth, or at least an ideal rather than a description of the armed forces’ actual behaviour. In Davar, the daily newspaper published by the Histadrut (the Israeli TUC), the journalist Eyal Kafakfi quoted a letter written by a member of the left Zionist Mapam Party in November 1948, which purports to pass on an eyewitness report of a massacre perpetrated by Israeli troops in the Arab village of Duwayma, west of Hebron. According to this admittedly secondhand but, it must be emphasized, Israeli account, ‘they killed some 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with clubs. In the village there remained Arab men and women who were put in the houses without food. Then the sappers came to blow up the houses, One officer ordered a sapper to put two old women into the house he was about to blow up. The sapper refused, and said that he will obey only such orders as are handed down to him by his direct commander. So the officer ordered his own soldiers to put the old women in, and the atrocity was carried out. Another soldier boasted that he raped an Arab woman and then shot her. Another Arab woman with a day-old baby was employed in cleaning jobs in the yard … she worked for one or two days and then was shot together with her baby -cultured and well-mannered commanders who are considered good fellows . . . have turned into low murderers, and this happened not in the storm of the battle and blind passion, but because of a system of expulsion and annihilation. The less Arabs remain, the better.