What was the reason for the 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre of Christian Palestinians ?
Before going into the details of the massacre carried out at Kafr Qasim, let’s talk about Kafr Qasim, and its history.
- History:
Kafr Qasim is now a hill-top city in historic Palestine (now modern day Israel) with a predominantly Palestinian Arab population. Kafr Qasim lies in the southern portion of the land that Jordan surrendered to Israel in the wake of the armistice agreement signed in Rhodes in April 1949. Referred to as the “Little Triangle,” the area spreads from Kafr Qasim in the south all the way to Umm al-Fahm and its sister villages in the north.
The town's area was populated in ancient times, based on remains from the Middle Paleolithic period found in the Qesem Cave. Cisterns, a winepress and terraced fields have also been documented, together with remains from the Byzantine era.
In 1838, during the Ottoman period, it was noted as a Muslim village, Kefr Kasim, in Jurat Merda, south of Nablus.
Charles van de Velde visited the site in 1851–52, noting:
"the many ancient stones used in the construction of the present houses and many other remains indicating an ancient site."
In 1870 Victor Guérin visited the village, which he called Kafr Kasim. He found the place to be "the site of a more ancient town, as is shown by cisterns and the mass of rubbish found outside the present village". The village had about four hundred inhabitants.
In 1882, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described the village as being of moderate size, with buildings constructed principally of adobe, on low hill in open ground. The survey also noted the existence of a rock-cut tomb to the south of the village.
In 1917, during World War I, Kafr Qasim (together with the rest of the area) was captured from the ruling Ottoman Empire by the British Army and was later placed under the British Mandate of Palestine.
In the 1922 census of Palestine Kufr Quasem had a population of 661, all Muslims, increasing in the 1931 census to 989, still all Muslims, in a total of 241 houses.
In 1945 the population of Kafr Qasim was 1,460, all Muslims, who owned 12,765 dunams of land according to an official land and population survey. 239 dunams were for citrus and bananas, 491 were plantations and irrigable land, and 8,980 were planted with cereals, while 58 dunams were built-up (urban) land.
Israeli military advances into historic Palestine came to a halt at Kafr Qasim during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Jordan surrendered Kafr Qasim to Israel in the wake of the armistice agreement signed in Rhodes in April 1949.
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, the town had 21,100 mostly Muslim inhabitants at the end of 2012. There are 936 females for every 1,000 males. The population increases at an annual rate of 2.7%.
The social-economic rank of the town is relatively low (3 out of 10). Only 50.2% of 12th graders were eligible for graduation (Bagrut) certificates in 2000. The average monthly wage in 2000 was 3,633 NIS, as opposed to the national average of 6,835 NIS at that time.
On February 12, 2008, Israeli Minister of the Interior Meir Sheetrit declared Kafr Qasim a city in a ceremony held at the town.
In 2022 its population was 25,285.
- The massacre:
The Kafr Qasim Massacre differs from other massacres that Israel committed against the Palestinian people since 1948: the scene of the crime was a Palestinian village within the state's territory, and the victims were peaceful civilians who were also Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. The massacre occurred the day the Tripartite Aggression was launched against Egypt, but the site of the incident was quite far from the battlefront in the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula. Israeli border policemen massacred Palestinian villagers on orders from Israeli military commanders, who imposed a sudden curfew on residents – including people returning home from work, who could not have known the ban had already gone into effect.
Israel's Palestinian citizens (whose population numbered 160,000) were subjected to military rule and were viewed as a hostile potential fifth column by Israel. They suffered a range of restrictions. including repeated pressures to leave their homeland. A number of Israeli leaders were waiting for an opportunity (for instance, a new round of war with Arab states) to trigger a mass exodus. The hope was that a major international conflict would divert attention and provide sufficient cover for the occupation state to expel more of the indigenous population in its unrelenting takeover of Palestine. The 1956 massacre — which was perpetrated during the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt — was deliberate, planned at the highest levels, and aimed at terrorizing the population of the southern triangle so that they would flee. However, this goal was not achieved; residents did not leave.
On Monday, 29 October 1956, the Israeli government and military decided to impose a curfew on the Arab villages near the border with Jordan. At 4:30 p.m. that day, a border police sergeant informed the mukhtar (mayor) of the village of Kafr Qasim that a curfew would be imposed starting at 5 p.m. that evening. The mukhtar asked what would happen to the about 400 villagers working outside the village in the fields that were not aware of the new time. An officer assured him that they would be taken care of. When word of the curfew change was sent, most returned immediately, but others did not. Hundreds of villagers who had left home in the morning to go to work had no way of knowing about the curfew until they returned home. The soldiers tasked with carrying out the order in Kafr Qasim were informed that they “should shoot to kill at any person seen outside their home after 17:00, making no distinction between men, women, children and those returning from outside the village.”
Major Shmuel Malinki, who was in charge of the Border Guard unit at the village of Kafr Qasim, asked Shadmi – the highest-ranking officer, on how to react to those villagers who were unaware of the curfew.
Malinki later testified as follows:
'[Shadmi said] anyone who left his house would be shot. It would be best if on the first night there were 'a few like that' and on the following nights they would be more careful.
I asked: in the light of that, I can understand that a guerilla is to be killed but what about the fate of the Arab civilians? And they may come back to the village in the evening from the valley, from settlements or from the fields, and won't knowabout the curfew in the village – I suppose I am to have sentries at the approaches to the village?
To this Col. Issachar replied in crystal clear words:
'I don't want sentimentality and I don't want arrests, there will be no arrests'.
I said: 'Even though?'.
To that he answered me in Arabic, Allah Yarhamu [May God have mercy on them], which I understood as equivalent to the Hebrew phrase, 'Blessed be the true judge' [said on receiving news of a person's death]'.
Shadmi, however, denied that the matter of the returnees ever came up in his conversation with Malinki.
Malinki issued a similar order to the reserve forces attached to his battalion, shortly before the curfew was enforced:
"No inhabitants shall be allowed to leave his home during the curfew. Anyoneleaving his home shall be shot; there shall be no arrests."
When villagers returned to their homes after 5 p.m., border police stopped them on the western side of the village. Soldiers made them get out of their vehicles and cars, or off their bicycles, and began shooting at them at close range. Between 5 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., in nine separate shooting incidents, the platoon led by Lt. Gabriel Dahan that was stationed in Kafr Qasim committed the massacre by killing forty-nine residents of Kafr Qasim (including women and children; 6 were women and 23 were children aged 8–17, in addition to an unborn child of one of the women) in cold blood in less than 2 hours.
One survivor, Jamal Farij, recalls arriving at the entrance to the village in a truck with 28 passengers:
'We talked to them. We asked if they wanted our identity cards. They didn't. Suddenly one of them said, 'Cut them down' – and they opened fire on us like a flood.'
One Israeli soldier, Shalom Ofer, later admitted:
'We acted like Germans, automatically, we didn't think', but never expressed remorse or regret for his actions.
The stories are told and retold in the village--from grandfathers to grandsons, from aunts to nieces--and they are harrowing.
They describe the 9-year-old girl who was shot 28 times by Israeli soldiers. The 11-year-old boy, a bullet wound in his chest gushing blood, who died in his grandfather's arms. The truckload of workmen ordered off their vehicle and mowed down where they stood, execution-style.
One survivor reports how an Israeli officer told his men to “harvest” the unarmed workers lined up before them.
Another recounts:
“My brother began crying … the soldier came and pointed the gun at his head and shot him … I swear by God he did not say a thing but hiccuped and hiccuped and he began to press, press on me … then he suddenly let go. And I knew he was dead and I continued to pretend to be dead, even though I was badly wounded.”
The many injured were left unattended, and could not be succoured by their families because of the 24-hour curfew. Those killed were collected and buried in a mass grave by Palestinians, taken for that purpose, from the nearby village of Jaljuliya. When the curfew ended, the wounded numbering in the dozens were picked up from the streets and trucked to hospitals.
Hundreds more Palestinians were also massacred by Israeli troops in the towns and refugee camps of Khan Younis and Rafah in the Gaza Strip in the following days.
- Aftermath:
When the Israeli government and military command learned that such a huge number of villagers had been killed, including men, women, and children, they used a variety of tactics to attempt to cover up the horrific massacre. The military censor imposed a total ban on newspaper reportage on the massacre. But slowly, news spread that a massacre had been carried out by soldiers in their military uniforms and under clear orders from the high military command to fire on citizens returning home. Journalists, activists, communist members of the Knesset, and others went to the village (despite the presence of military checkpoints) to investigate and inform the public. The news of the massacre leaked out after communist Knesset Members Tawfik Toubi and Meir Vilner managed to enter the village two weeks later and investigate the rumours. However, it took two months of lobbying by them and the press before the government lifted the media blackout imposed by David Ben-Gurion. To limit publicity, a military cordon was maintained around the village for months, preventing journalists from approaching. Eventually, the Israeli government was forced to bring the perpetrators to court. However, instead of bringing the high command to trial, the soldiers in the field were put on trial and given very light sentences only.
Nevertheless, both the trial and verdicts were milestones in the history of Palestinians' political and legal status in Israel. During the eight years between the end of the Nakba and the Kafr Qasim massacre, Israeli security forces had killed dozens of Palestinian citizens every year, and none of the killers were brought to court or faced consequences for their criminal acts. The trial and imprisonment of the perpetrators of the Kafr Qasim massacre created a legal precedent. It sent a message that killers could pay a price for their actions; the argument that they were merely carrying out orders would not protect them from consequences.
But consequences for Israelis remained minimal. The massacre did not change the government hostile policy targeting the Palestinian minority in Israel, nor did it lead to an easing of Israel's repressive policies. The commander found to be responsible for the Kufr Qassim massacre where 49 Palestinians were murdered in cold blood was fined 10 measly pennies for giving the order to open fire on civilians. His accomplices were sentenced to very light jail time, but were all pardoned and set free within a year. So even when these insulting sentences are given, it’s rare for an Israeli soldier to actually serve their full sentence. Members of the cabinet, including the prime minister, expressed solidarity with the killers, and “compensated them” for their time in prison by giving them official appointments, including to positions of responsibility over Palestinian Arabs with Israeli citizenship in the cities of Lydda, Ramle and elsewhere. The sentence given to Colonel Yishkhar Shadmi – the highest-ranking officer, and the one responsible for ordering a strict curfew punishable by shooting violators after 5 p.m. – is a mockery of justice, and a clear example of Israel's disregard for the lives of Palestinian citizens. He was given a reprimand and paid a fine of a single pruta (a thousandth of the Israeli pound before 1960).
Shadmi described his trial as staged so as to:
"Keep Israel’s security and political elite – including Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, and GOC Central Command (and later chief of staff) Tzvi Tzur – from having to take responsibility for the massacre."
The purpose was to portray the perpetrators as a group of rogue soldiers, rather than people acting under higher orders.
In the first 20 years following the massacre, when Palestinian citizens lived under military rule, the military governor would issue arrest warrants for activists in order to prevent them from marching to commemorate the massacre.
In 2017, historian Adam Raz appealed to the military appellate tribunal for release of documents relating to the massacre, including the trial minutes. In 2021, the tribunal refused the request and imposed a gag order on the entire case, even including the fact that a ruling had been made. One year later, it became legal to note the existence of a ruling, but not its content. Former state archivist Yaacov Lozowick, who is familiar with the material sought by Raz, told Haaretz that "the degree of imbecility of this decision is so great, that no further comment is needed." In May 2022, following the negative publicity, the court permitted publication of the ruling and many, but not all, of the primary documents related to the massacre.
Approximately 1/3 of the court hearings were held in secret, and the transcript was not published until July 2022. According to journalists Tzvi Joffre and Ruvik Rosenthal, the court received descriptions of a secret plan called Operation Hafarperet ("mole") to expel Palestinian Arabs of the Little Triangle in case of a war with Jordan, apparently planned by Avraham Tamir by request of Ben-Gurion. A similar opinion is held by historian Adam Raz, who described the massacre as pre-planned and part of an Operation which would result in the expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs from the region. The same opinion is held by Palestinians who now live in Kafr Qasim.
The trial transcript, released for publication in 2022, reveals that company commanders were briefed before the start of hostilities that there was an official plan to push the inhabitants of Kafr Qasim across the Green Line to the Jordanian-occupied village of Tira. For this purpose, checkpoints were not placed on the eastern side of Kafr Qasim.
According to the trial transcripts of Chaim Levy, who commanded the Israeli army in Kafr Qasem, the troops knew their victims were unarmed civilians who had not been informed about the curfew.
"The same goes for them as anyone else," Levy said he was told by a commander regarding the civilians.
In one exchange during his trial, Levy was asked:
"Doesn't your reason tell you that 'violating a curfew' means by someone who knows that there is a curfew?"
Levy said he agreed.
Later he was asked:
"How can you say that someone told you to kill people who don't know that there is a curfew?"
To which he replied:
"Because I was given such an order... Today I find this unreasonable. At the time, I thought it was reasonable."
Levy's testimony offers a detailed account of how Israeli officers appear to have used tensions during the Suez crisis to orchestrate the removal of Palestinians from their villages.
Levy refers to plans of "creating enclosures" and "transporting people," which could be interpreted to mean the detention of Palestinians in camps or expulsion from their homeland.
He also said he was informed by his commander not to station troops along the village's eastern border facing Jordan, in an effort to push fleeing Palestinians out of Israel:
“we were told not to put lookouts and checkpoints on the eastern side [of Kafr Qasim] so that if the Arabs decided to flee, they could and would be allowed to go over the Jordanian border [Armistice Line].”
"I understood that it would be no great calamity if they took this opportunity togo away."
Levy said he understood there was a direct link between shooting curfew violators and changing Israel's demographic make-up:
"The connection is that, as a result, part of the population would get scared and decide that it's best to live on the other side. That's how I interpret it."
The testimony of district commander Issachar Shadmi appeared to corroborate Levy's understanding of the massacre. Shadmi said it was no secret Israel "heavily encouraged" Palestinians to leave its borders:
"The killing of a few people as an intimidation measure can encourage movement eastward, as long as we hint to them [the Palestinians] about the movement eastward."
Levy also said, according to the court documents, he had been told by battalion commander, Shmuel Malinki:
“It is desirable that there be a number of casualties.”
Another Israeli soldier said the intention of the curfew was to intimidate the Palestinians:
"The immediate goal is to keep them in their houses, and the second goal is to not need to intimidate them in the future, as well as to require less manpower because they will eventually be like innocent sheep."
He added that a major-general in the Israeli army said it would be "desirable" to have casualties to instil fear in the Palestinian population, to which he replied:
"It would be best to knock out a few people... so that in the future there would be quiet, and we would not need to have this much manpower overseeing these villages."
For Palestinians, the murder of dozens of innocent people in Kafr Qasim stirred memories of Deir Yasin and many other massacres that were carried out during the ethnic cleansing in the year of the Nakba. In the eyes of some it was worse than the massacres perpetrated in 1948, because it was carried out by state actors (border police) against citizens, under military orders they received from their commanders, in an area in which no hostilities were taking place.
According to Palestinian historians, the massacre at Kafr Qasem mirrored the typical Israeli blueprint of terrorising Palestinians into fleeing. In his book Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966, Dr Salman Abu Sitta lists at least 232 places where atrocities, massacres, destruction, plunder and looting were carried out by the Zionists between 1947 and 1956. Almost every one of thirty military operations were accompanied by one or two massacres of civilians. There were at least seventy-seven reported massacres, half of which took place before any Arab regular soldier set foot in Palestine during the 1948 Israeli-Arab war.
The pattern of expulsion was consistent, regardless of the region, date or the particular battalion involved in attacking a town or village. The imposition of a curfew was common practice prior to a massacre. Villagers would be gathered in the main square or nearby field in separate groups, while the village itself was surrounded on three sides, leaving the fourth open for escape or expulsion. The gap left open for Palestinians to flee in the Galilee region pointed towards Lebanon and Syria; towards the West Bank and Jordan in central Palestine; and towards Gaza and Egypt in the south.
The Kafr Qasim massacre became an important element in rebuilding the collective identity of Palestinians in Israel. When the details of the crime were exposed, members of the Communist Party intensified their opposition to the government and its domestic and foreign policies. Al-Ittihad newspaper took an unequivocal stance in a front-page headline, in which it called for “the need to stop national oppression and aggression against peaceful Arab residents.” The consequences of the Kafr Qasim massacre were intertwined with the political fallout of the Tripartite Aggression, which was to Israel's detriment. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser's star was rising in the Arab world. He had significant support from Palestinians, particularly among those who remained in Israel. Communists and nationalists grew closer as a result of the massacre and began to work together, leading to the establishment of an Arab front to resist Israeli policies, and bustling demonstrations on 1 May 1958 in Nazareth, Umm al-Fahm, and elsewhere.
In Kafr Qasim itself, villagers were forced to accept a deeply traumatizing, fake, and undignified “sulha” (a traditional reconciliation ceremony) imposed on them by the Israeli government and military in November 1957. They only succeeded in thwarting the authorities' attempt to bring the accused murderers to the sulha ceremony. The ‘’sulha’’ was staged by the Israeli government for the purpose of escaping its responsibilities and lightening the weight of the court's verdict. In a 2008 academic article, Professor Susan Slyomovics corroborates this perspective on a ceremony "forced upon the villagers." In this paper, Slyomovics notably relies upon Ibrahim Sarsur's testimony, which concluded:
"Until today in Kafr Qasim, there is no one who agrees with the manner of treatment of the government of Israel concerning the massacre and its consequences."
In the early days of military rule, people were afraid of establishing a popular, political commemoration of the massacre. In the years shortly afterward, remembrances were small in scope. In 1976, the Land Day massive mobilization changed the political climate; a memorial was erected in the village that year and repeated thereafter.
The anniversary of the Kafr Qasim massacre, and later the celebration of Land Day, became two of the most important markers of collective and national identity for Palestinians in Israel. The first became a symbol of perseverance and survival in the face of policies of intimidation in the 1950s, and Land Day has become an intifada against policies of land grabbing and constant repression of Palestinians who remain in the country. In recent decades, residents of Kafr Qasim established a museum to preserve the massacre in Palestinian memory. They have also worked to commemorate the event in partnership with activists and political leaders. In 2016, for example, there was a large demonstration in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre, including marches led by many Palestinian members of the Knesset and leaders of local government.
In 2007, President Shimon Peres issued a meaningless apology for the Kafr Qasem massacre and in 2014, President Reuven Rivlin attended annual commemorations for those killed. As recently as 2021, attempts to have the massacre officially recognized in Israel have failed. A bill presented by the Joint List to achieve that end was overwhelming defeated in a Knesset vote on 26 October 2021, with a 93/12 voting majority. The proposed bill included provisions to incorporate information on the incident in school syllabuses and for the declassification of all archival documents related to it.
Photos of some of the victims of the Kafr Qasem massacre
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