{"id":91809,"date":"2021-12-20T17:05:07","date_gmt":"2021-12-20T15:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=91809"},"modified":"2021-12-20T12:31:39","modified_gmt":"2021-12-20T10:31:39","slug":"27-05-72","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=91809","title":{"rendered":"Jews Were Massacred in 1948 Too, So Why Dwell Only on the Nakba?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Jews Were Massacred in 1948 Too, So Why Dwell Only on the Nakba?<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Uri Misgav<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Aftermath of the attack on the Hadassah hospital convoy, April 13, 1948. Eighty of the 105 passengers were murdered. Credit: Marlin Levin<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

On April 13, 1948, an aid convoy left the center of Jewish Jerusalem for the besieged and isolated enclave on Mount Scopus, site of Hadassah Hospital and the campus of the Hebrew University. The convoy consisted of ambulances, armored vehicles, supply trucks and buses carrying physicians, nurses, medical students and academic faculty. Near the village of Sheikh Jarrah, the convoy hit a land mine and was attacked by machine-gun fire, before being stormed by Palestinian militiamen who shot the passengers individually and torched the buses. Eighty of the 105 travelers were massacred.<\/span><\/p>\n

Three weeks earlier, a similar fate had befallen an aid convoy that tried to reach Kibbutz Yehiam, in the north of the country, which was under siege and being shelled. That convoy was attacked by Arab gangs near Kibbutz Kabri, and 47 of its 86 passengers were killed. Some of the bodies could not be identified because they had been mutilated. In January 1948, all 35 fighters from the Palmach strike force of the Haganah militia, and from Hish, the Haganah\u2019s field corps, were similarly killed on their way to bring aid and reinforcements to the besieged Etzion Bloc settlements south of Jerusalem.<\/span><\/p>\n

A number of additional aid convoys dispatched to the Etzion Bloc also did not manage to escape a bitter fate. Kibbutz Kfar Etzion fell on May 13, 1948, the day before the termination of the British Mandate; 242 members of the kibbutz and Palmach and Hish fighters were killed in the battle. A few dozen more fighters and civilians, including women, were slaughtered by Palestinian fighters after the battle had been decided; only four managed to flee. The three other kibbutzim in the area surrendered, and their residents were spared a slaughter thanks only to the intervention of Jordan\u2019s Arab Legion, which took them to POW camps in Jordan. Immediately afterward, the four settlements were razed to the ground.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the total war of existence that began to rage in Palestine following the adoption of the United Nations\u2019 partition resolution of November 1947, that was the certain fate of every Jewish settlement that fell to the Arabs: the killing of fighters and civilians alike, mutilation of their bodies, looting of property and destruction of the houses and other buildings. The pattern repeated itself at Beit Ha\u2019arava, Nitzanim, Moshav Atarot, in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem that were attacked and in other mixed cities.<\/span><\/p>\n

In some cases, this was part of a chain of events and reactions, a bloody cycle typical of the militia and local warfare that characterized the war\u2019s first half year, until the invasion of seven Arab armies into the territory of the Jewish state upon its declaration. Thus, for example, it\u2019s argued that\u00a0the attack on the Hadassah convoy<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0was perpetrated in reaction to the\u00a0massacre in the Arab village of Deir Yassin<\/a>.<\/strong><\/span> And after members of the Irgun underground threw bombs from a moving vehicle at Arab workers in the Haifa oil refineries, murdering 11 of them, their friends, aided by local reinforcements, fell upon the Jewish workers \u2013 most of them clerks and white-collar staff \u2013 killing 39 of them with sticks and stones in a massacre that went on for about an hour.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a life-and-death war, brutal and bloody. The Jewish community lost fully 1 percent of its population (6,000 killed out of a population of 600,000), and a 10th of the remainder became refugees in their own country. Their unknown and suppressed story is documented in a 2014 book by the historian Dr. Nurit Cohen-Levinovsky, \u201cJewish Refugees in Israel\u2019s War of Independence\u201d (in Hebrew). However, with time\u2019s passage, it has become politically incorrect to talk about Jewish fighters who were killed (some of them were young, others were older and had families, there were new immigrants with no military training who hadn\u2019t even managed to learn Hebrew, Holocaust survivors, women and in some cases teenagers), or about civilians who were murdered or settlements that were evacuated and destroyed, and whose residents became refugees.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"RepresentativesRepresentatives of the Arab Legion and the IDF meet near Latrun for a prisoner exchange, November 11, 1948.<\/span>Credit: GPO<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n
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