Was the Israeli military attack on the village of Qibya in 1953 justified ?
Before talking about the massacre, let’s skim through the history of the Palestinian village, Qibya.
Introduction:
Qibya is a Palestinian village in the West Bank, located 30 kilometers northwest of Ramallah. It is part of the Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate. It is bordered by Ni'lin to the east, Shuqba to the north, the Green line to the west, and Budrus and Ni'lin to the south. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, it had a population of approximately 6,090 in 2017.
The name Qibyā is Aramaic, and means “The cistern”.
Potsherds from the Roman/Byzantine, Byzantine Empire, Mamluk and early Ottoman period have been found in the village.
A building, possibly dating to the Crusader era have been found here.
Qibya, like the rest of Palestine, was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517, and in the census of 1596, the village was located in the Nahiya of Ramla of the Liwa of Gaza. It had an entirely Muslim population of 29 households. They paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on wheat, barley, summer crops, olives, fruit trees, lintels, goats and/or beehives, in addition of taxes for a press for olives or grapes; a total of 6,000 akçe.
According to Marom, in the 18th or early 19th centuries, residents of Qibya affiliated with the Yamani camp during the Qays and Yaman conflicts, alongside residents of Dayr Tarif and part of the residents of Bayt Nabala. They fought several skirmishes against rivals from Deir Abu Mash'al and Jayyous.
In 1882, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described the village (then named Kibbiah), as "a very small hamlet with olive-trees, on high ground".
In the 1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the British Mandate authorities, the village, (named Kibbia), had a population of 694 inhabitants, all Muslims. In the 1931 census the population of Qibya was 909, still all Muslim, in 204 inhabited houses.
In the 1945 statistics, the population of Qibya was 1,250, all Muslims, who owned 16,504 dunams of land according to an official land and population survey. 4,788 dunams were used for cereals, while 32 dunams were built-up (urban) land.
In the wake of the 1948 War, and after the 1949 Armistice Agreements, Qibya came under Jordanian rule.
After the 1995 accords, 21.5% of Qibya land was classified as Area B, the remaining 78.5% as Area C.
With regards to Areas C: These areas were to be gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction in three phases, each to take place after an interval of six months, to be completed 18 months after the inauguration of the Council (the Oslo accords in 1993). Areas C constitute the majority of the West Bank making up approximately 61% of the land. Israel strictly limits Palestinian settlement, construction and development in Area C, while ignoring the needs of the Palestinian population. It is in these areas where the majority of illegal Israeli settlement activity takes place, as they are abundant in land and resources while containing a relatively small portion of the Palestinian population. Israel controls all of them fully until this very day.
The massacre:
On the evening of 14 October 1953, Israeli forces in the Palestinian West Bank village of Qibya carried out a massacre following an attack by feda’iyin on October 12, 1953, that killed three Israeli settlers, a woman and her two children in the colonial settlement of Yehud located in historic Palestine. The Yehud colony is built on the lands of Palestinian natives who were ethnically cleansed and dispossessed from their lands and properties in 1947–1950. On October 14th, the Israel-Jordan Armistice Committee condemned the operation by the feda’iyin , and John Gloster, the commander of the Arab Legion, promised to apprehend the perpetrators.
The Israeli army named the Qibya massacre "Operation Shoshana". Later sources state the force involved consisted of at least 130 IDF troops of whom a third came from Unit 101. The American chairman of the Mixed Armistice Commission in his report to the UN Security Council estimated that between 250 and 300 Israeli soldiers were involved in the attack. Other sources put the number at about 600 Israeli soldiers—half of an infantry battalion—who participated in the Qibya massacre.
The attack began at 9:30 pm with a mortar barrage on the village until Israeli forces reached the outskirts of the village. Israeli troops employed Bangalore torpedoes to breach the barbed-wire fences surrounding the village, and mined roads to prevent Palestinians or Jordanian forces from intervening. At the same time mortar shells were fired by Israelis into the neighbouring Palestinian villages of Budrus, and Ni’lin. Other Israeli forces headed for nearby Palestinian towns such as Shuqba, Badrus and Na’lin in order to distract them and prevent any aid from reaching the people in Qibya.The Israeli troops simultaneously entered the village from three sides. Israeli soldiers encountered resistance from soldiers and village guards, and in the gun battle that followed, 10–12 soldiers and guards defending the village were killed and an Israeli soldier was lightly wounded.
Israeli special forces Unit 101, under the command of Ariel Sharon, blew up forty-five homes with their inhabitants inside, murdering more than sixty-nine Palestinian civilians (the majority, two thirds being women and children). The massacre was compared by American newspapers to Lidice. Forty-five houses, a school, and a mosque were destroyed. The village has been reduced to a rubble.
At dawn, the massacre was considered complete, and the Israelis returned home.
The raid, which was condemned by the UN Security Council, was launched despite the unceasing efforts of Jordan (then in control of the West Bank) to preventarmed Palestinian activity, which included imprisoning and even killing would-be infiltrators. Jordanian troops were often deployed in ambushes against Palestinian freedom fighters, and were under orders to fire on anyone attempting to enter the newly founded state of Israel on historic Palestine.
On the night of October 14- 15 / 1953 , this village was the object of a brutal terrorist Israeli attack which was carried out by 250 to 300 Israeli soldier from the regular army as part of a pre-meditated plan and in which a variety of weapon types were used
Israeli Foreign Minister Sharett (born Moshe Chertok) noted in his diary on October 15:
A reprisal of this magnitude... has never been carried out before. I paced back and forth in my room perplexed and completely depressed, feeling helpless.
Sharett had rather halfheartedly tried to halt the operation. But had he known in advance that there would be "so much killing," he subsequently wrote, "I would have screamed to high heaven."
Sharon and the IDF subsequently claimed the villagers had hidden in cellars and attics and the troops had been unaware of this when they blew up the buildings. But in truth the troops had moved from house to house, firing through windows and doorways, and Jordanian pathologists reported that most of those murdered had been killed by bullets and shrapnel rather than by falling masonry or explosions. In any event, the operational orders, from CO Central Command to the units involved, dated October 13, had explicitly ordered"destruction and maximum killing." Hence no one criticized Sharon or his troops—though there were questions about how the original general staff order, which had called for "blowing up a number of houses ... and hitting the inhabitants," had changed, while proceeding down the chain of command, into an order for "maximum killing ".
Ariel Sharon later wrote in his diary that he had received orders to inflict heavy damage on the Arab Legion forces in Qibya:
"The orders were utterly clear: Qibya was to be an example for everyone."
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.”
Sharon received his orders from Moshe Dayan, at that time chief of the operations branch of the General staff. Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon gave the order, in coordination with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
Original documents of the time showed that Sharon personally ordered his troops to achieve "maximal killing and damage to property", and post-operational reports speak of breaking into houses and clearing them with grenades and shooting. UN observers noted that they observed bodies near doorways, and bullet marks on the doors of demolished houses, and later concluded that residents have been forced by heavy fire to stay in their homes. The UN observer who inspected the scene 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.”
Palestinian residents returning to Qibya, 1953.
There was a particular sight the memory of which remained in the minds of all who saw it: A Palestinian woman sitting on a pile of debris and casting a forlorn look into the sky. From beneath the rubble one could see small legs and hands which were the remains of her six children, while the bullet-maimed body of her husbandlay in the road before her.
The Qibya massacre triggered a wave of strident international condemnation. Whitehall issued a veiled threat to activate its treaty with Jordan; Washington suspended economic aid to Israel (officially linking the suspension to a dispute in the Israel-Syria DMZs). Even American Jewry, normally quick to defend Israel, right or wrong, distanced itself from the massacre. In Jordan there was an uproar, specifically directed against Britain—seen as Israel's "ally"— and the Arab Legion, which had failed to protect Qibya. The Israeli public was left ignorant of the facts by the heavily censored press and the government-controlled radio.
The international outcry caused by the operation required a formal reply by Israel. Intense discussions took place, and Moshe Sharett (born Moshe Chertok) summed up, in his diary on 16 October, the opinion that:
Now the army wants to know how we (the Foreign Ministry) are going to explainthe issue. In a joint meeting of army and foreign ministry officials Shmuel Bendor suggested that we say that the army had no part in the operation, but that the inhabitants of the border villages, infuriated by previous incidents and seeking revenge, operated on their own. Such a version will make us appear ridiculous: any child would say that this was a military operation.
Notwithstanding Sharett's advice that broadcasting this version would make Israel appear patently "ridiculous", on October 19, David Ben-Gurion (born David Grün)went on the air with a statement supported by his majority of ministers with a wholly fictitious account of what had happened. In line with past disclaimers of IDF responsibility for or knowledge of reprisals, he announced that after the attack on the settlers in Yehud, the patience of Israel's frontier settlers had been exhausted and they had taken the law into their own hands, attacking Qibya:
"None deplores it more than the Government of Israel, if... innocent blood was spilled.... The Government of Israel rejects with all vigor the absurd and fantastic allegation that 600 men of the IDF took part in the action.... We have carried out a searching investigation and it is clear beyond doubt that not a single army unit was absent from its base on the night of the attack on Qibya.“
On Israeli Radio that same day, Ben-Gurion addressed the nation, repeating the accusation that the massacre had been perpetrated by Israeli civilians:
The [Jewish] border settlers in Israel, mostly refugees, people from Arab countries and survivors from the Nazi concentration camps, have, for years, been the target of (...) murderous attacks and had shown a great restraint. Rightfully, they have demanded that their government protect their lives and the Israeli government gave them weapons and trained them to protect themselves. But the armed forces from Transjordan did not stop their criminal acts, until [the people in] some of the border settlements lost their patience and after the murder of a mother and her two children in Yahud, they attacked, last week, the village of Kibya across the border, that was one of the main centers of the murderers' gangs. Every one of us regrets and suffers when blood is shed anywhere and nobody regrets more than the Israeli government the fact that innocent people were killed in the retaliation act in Kibya. But all the responsibility rests with the government of Transjordan that for many years tolerated and thus encouraged attacks of murder and robbery by armed powers in its country against the citizens of Israel.
But everyone understood that the military was responsible and that the operation had been authorized by the government. 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 act was condemned by the U.S. State Department, the UN Security Council, and by some Jewish communities worldwide. The State Department described the raid as "shocking" and used the occasion to confirm publicly that economic aid to Israel had been suspended previously, for other non-compliance regarding the 1949 Armistice Agreements.
Despite the U.S. request that those involved be brought to account, Sharon was not prosecuted. The independence of Unit 101 was cancelled and several weeks later it was dismantled altogether. In fact, not a single person involved in the massacre or its cover up was ever tried. Some of them, like those from Unit 101, turned into cultural assets. Ariel Sharon became prime minister, and a different commander, Meir Har Zion, became an Israeli hero on whose principles today’s commanders are being raised.
Unit 101, was active between August and December 1953. Those five months were enough for IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan to write:
“101’s activity was excellent. Its accomplishments were an example for the rest of the IDF units.”
Uri Avnery, founder and editor of the magazine HaOlam HaZeh, relates that he had both his hands broken when he was ambushed for criticizing the massacre at Qibya in his newspaper.
Israeli Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon's words to the General Staff in July 1954 were:
"Guys, you have to understand [that] there can be the greatest and most successful military operation, and it will turn into a political failure, meaning eventually a military failure as well. I'll give a simple example: Qibya."
At the end, I want to tell you that the massacre remains present in the hearts and minds of Palestinian people in Qibya and it will not be forgotten.
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