{"id":10096,"date":"2012-10-19T18:45:59","date_gmt":"2012-10-19T17:45:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/?p=10096"},"modified":"2012-10-20T15:00:27","modified_gmt":"2012-10-20T14:00:27","slug":"october-19-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/2012\/10\/19\/october-19-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"October 19, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

EDITOR<\/strong>: The video archive of Zochrot in Israel, produced and compiled by Eyal Sivan and Ilan Pappe, is the most comprehensive oral history ever put together on the Nakba, an amazing source of historical truth about the crimes during 1947\/8\/9. While the text is being translated to English and Arabic, you can see most of the material on video, with English subtitles. This is the most important effort of writing the real history of the period, rather than being limited to mere archive materials. This is the real archive, the archive of reality. It is difficult to express the importance of this archive, it is so revolutionary and unusual!<\/span>
\nOn the right pane, you can choose from a large verity of witness evidence.<\/span><\/p>\n

One page is brought here as an example:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Amnon Neumann<\/a>: Zochrot<\/h3>\n
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17.6.2010<\/p>\n

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Excerpts from the testimony:<\/h4>\n

Amnon Neumann: I was in the Second, Eighth, and Ninth Battalions of the Palmach from February 1948 until my discharge in October 1949. I was there for this whole period, except for a few months after I had been wounded and after my father had passed away.
\nThe most significant period for me in terms of the Nakba was April-May 1948, when the battles or clashes with the locals took place, until the Egyptian Army arrived. At first we escorted convoys traveling on the road from ‘Iraq Suwaydan , from Rehovot, [through] ‘Iraq Suwaydan, Kawkaba\u00a0 and Burayr,\u00a0 to Nir-‘Am where our company headquarters were located. Then an armed group of Arabs situated itself in Burayr and didn\u2019t let us through, so we took a different route, from near Ashdod where Isdud was located, through Majdal,\u00a0 Barbara,\u00a0 Bayt Jirja,\u00a0 to Yad Mordechai. From there we drove to Nir-‘Am. Those were the two routes [we used] until the Egyptian army arrived. When the Egyptian army arrived, it was a completely different situation. The Egyptian army arrived when we had wiped out all Arab resistance, which wasn\u2019t that strong. It would be an exaggeration to say we fought against the Palestinians\u2026 in fact there were no battles, almost no battles. In Burayr there was a battle, there were battles here and there, further up north. But there were no big battles; why? Because they had no military capabilities, there weren\u2019t organized. The big battles started with the entry of the Egyptian army, and those were very difficult problems, especially from May 15th, when we were still an organized army\u2014the Palmach\u2014semi-military. But their soldiers were organized by British methods, they fought like the British. But they had no leadership and they had no motivation. So when they attacked, it was very lousy, they hardly knew how to attack, but they did know how to defend themselves. They knew they were fighting for their lives. But as far as all the rest, it was a fifth-rate army. They had terrible cannons that killed us like hell. They had all kinds of tanks of different types, and they were a problem for us. We didn\u2019t have anything, we had armored vehicles, those fluttering ones that were impossible to fight with, not against tanks and not even against a halftrack, right? But we more or less managed with them.<\/p>\n

The villagers\u2019 flight, and I understand this is the main issue here, happened gradually. I only know about what happened from the ‘Iraq Suwaydan road, [through] Majdal, to ‘Iraq al-Manshiyya . We were to the south of this area, and to its north there was the Givati Brigade. The day the Egyptians entered the war, the Negev was cut off and that was mostly our fault, my platoon\u2019s fault\u2026 I\u2019ll say more about it later. But that wasn\u2019t significant. The Egyptians\u2019 attacks were significant. They beat the hell out of us and killed us mercilessly.
\nThe villagers\u2019 flight started when we began cleaning these convoy escort routes. It was then that we started to expel the villagers\u2026 and in the end they fled by themselves. There were no special events worth mentioning. No atrocities and no nothing. No civilians can live while there\u2019s a war going on. They didn\u2019t think they were running away for a long period of time, they didn\u2019t think they wouldn\u2019t return. Nor did anyone imagine that a whole people won\u2019t return.<\/p>\n

First we expelled those \u2026 and then we started expanding sideways. To Najd , to Simsim , and that was a later stage. There were no battles, except for one battle in Burayr. In the north there were battles, with Givati, but we didn\u2019t have any battles. We did ok with them \u2026 (silence). One village was left, between Dorot and Nir-‘Am, that\u2019s Kufr Huj,\u00a0 they didn\u2019t run away and we didn\u2019t expel them. There was probably an agreement at a higher level that Huj is not to be touched.<\/p>\n

The first time I entered Kawkaba and Burayr I was amazed by their poverty. There was nothing there. No furniture and no nothing, there were shelves made of straw and mud, the houses were made of mud and straw. They lived there for thousands of years without any changes, and the only thing that happened to them was the disaster of the Nakba in \u201cTashah\u201d [1948]. Because we didn\u2019t come to collect taxes, we came to inherit the land from foreigners. That was the foundation of our thinking. We drove them out because of the Zionist ideology. Pure and simple. We came to inherit the land. Who do you inherit it from? If the land is empty, you don\u2019t inherit it from anyone. The land wasn\u2019t empty so we inherited it, and whoever inherits the land disinherits others. And that\u2019s why we didn\u2019t bring them back. It was everywhere, in the north and the south, everywhere. That\u2019s the most important point. The land wasn\u2019t empty as I was told when I was a child. I know it, because I lived with Arabs. I remember I was wounded and I went home, after April 1948, after they had expelled the Arabs in Haifa, they had run away. Our villages, Yajur\u00a0 and Balad al-Shaykh , didn\u2019t exist anymore either. They were empty. And I came home and my father told me, Come sit, son. Sit. He told me, You know what happened? And I told him, Yes, I passed through Balad Al-Sheikh and there was no one there. And he said, Yes, there was a disaster. That\u2019s not what was intended. That\u2019s not what I intended. He came with the second Aliyah. And he said: that\u2019s not what I intended. So nobody thought in these categories, maybe the Yishuv leaders did. My father was a simple man, a worker his entire life. And then I went back to the Negev and we did the same thing. At that time I didn\u2019t see anything wrong with it. I was educated to it just like everybody else. And I followed through with it faithfully, and if I was told things I don\u2019t want to mention\u2014I did them without the least of a doubt. Without thinking twice. For fifty or sixty years I\u2019ve been torturing myself about this. But what\u2019s done is done. It was done by order. And I won\u2019t go into that, these are not things that \u2026 (long silence).
\nIn the north they fought. In the south they didn\u2019t, they didn\u2019t have anything. They were miserable, they didn\u2019t have anywhere to go, or anyone to ask.<\/p>\n

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Eitan Bronstein: What happened in the village Burayr?
\nAmnon Neumann: There was a battle, and there was a slaughter\u2026<\/p>\n

Eitan Bronstein: Can you say a little bit more about that?
\nAmnon Neumann: I don\u2019t want to go into these things, leave me alone! It\u2019s \u2026 it\u2019s not things we go into. Why? Because I did it. Is that a good reason? (Long silence)
\nI can tell you about one thing. We received an order to occupy the intersection near ‘Iraq Suwaydan. There was a huge police station there which dominated the whole area. We went out with five jeeps and five armored vehicles. We stood at the intersection, and suddenly we heard the sound of tanks from the direction of Majdal. With our rifles and machine guns we couldn\u2019t stand up to tanks. The moment we saw them we fled to Kawkaba, half a kilometer away, and hid in the village. Then the tanks came, stood there and started rotating their cannons, didn\u2019t shoot or anything.<\/p>\n

Dan Yahav: Whose tanks?
\nAmnon Neumann: The Egyptians\u2019. Only they had tanks (laughing), we didn\u2019t have any tanks back then. A few minutes later they started shooting at us from all directions. We sat in the armored vehicles, the fire wasn\u2019t so\u2026 but they were shooting from all directions. Until we decided to find out who was there. We went out, looked around, ran a little. It was the villagers who had run away from Kawkaba that were shooting at us. Then our company commander, a nice guy, suddenly appeared with his pickup truck, took out a pistol and said, You abandoned the intersection, do you realize what that means?! It won\u2019t be possible to pass through to the Negev anymore. So we told him, Moishe, go ahead and drive to the intersection, look closely, can you make it to the intersection? So he relaxed a little and then the Egyptian Spitfires came, bombed us and destroyed his pickup truck. He jumped into the sabra bushes and came out alive.<\/p>\n

Eitan Bronstein: So who did the shooting, I didn\u2019t understand who did the shooting.
\nAmnon Neumann: The Arabs who had lived in Kawkaba, the saw that we were running away, so they revealed themselves.<\/p>\n

Eitan Bronstein: And then they shot at you, the Arabs from Kawkaba?
\nAmnon Neumann: Yes, that\u2019s right they shot at us from the hills, from the wadis.
\nLia Tarachansky: In Kawkaba there were no more people left anymore?
\nAmnon Neumann: There was nothing there. The only thing I remember are the terrible fleas there, they devoured us.<\/p>\n

Eitan Bronstein: How many people were you?
\nAmnon Neumann: We were a platoon, thirty people. I was in the scouting platoon. There were other platoons, in Nir-Am, in Dorot, in those places.
\nAmir Hallel: Did you get to see the Arab residents?
\nAmnon Neumann: Yes, I got to see them in one place, in two places, when we expelled them by night.
\nDan Yahav: What kind of weapons did you have?
\nAmnon Neumann: From the 15th or 17th of May, we received the Czech guns. Both that and Bazot . But until then, I had a 1904 English rifle, with a broken butt that I tied with a steel wire.<\/p>\n

Eitan Bronstein: When did you join the Palmach?
\nAmnon Neumann: I joined the Palmach in 1946, at the age of sixteen and a half.<\/p>\n

Eitan Bronstein: And since then did you train regularly?
\nAmnon Neumann: Yes \u2026 Should I start telling the details?
\nLia Tarachansky and Eitan Bronstein: It\u2019s important.
\nAmnon Neumann: We were in training in Yagur. After four months in the Palmach, all our commanders were killed in a convoy on Haziv Bridge. We became orphans.
\nAmnon Neumann: A week later, the British army surrounded us and took us into custody at ‘Atlit. After being two weeks or a month in ‘Atlit, we were released and transferred to Gvat. And from there we were transferred after a while to Heftziba. We were there for about a year, and then one day they called us for roll call and said, Tomorrow you will be discharged from the Palmach (we had been in the Palmach for a year and nine months) and driven to a kibbutz near Rehovot. The next day, trucks came and took us, we got there in the evening, they put us in the dining hall and said, Now we\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s going on. The Haganah\u2019s largest munitions factory is here. You will start working there, you\u2019re no longer Palmachniks or anything, that was the arrangement then. We worked there until the war broke out four months later.<\/p>\n

Eitan Bronstein: What did you work at?
\nAmnon Neumann: I made caps [for guns], nothing could be more boring. It was a huge factory, it\u2019s still there, for example, at Kiryat HaMada in Rehovot, in Givat HaKibbutzim. It was underground. Yes, yes, I was a member of [Kibbutz] Maagan Michael, I had no choice. Nobody asked me. The factory is really impressive, we were also impressed by it at the time. It was in Rehovot next to the train station, very close to the train station, and we worked there until the war broke out. When the war broke out we continued to work there. And then a friend of mine comes to me and says, Look, we are trained soldiers, we\u2019ve been taught and we are knowledgeable soldiers. What are we doing here making caps? So I told him, You know what? Go over to Palmach headquarters and find out, and so it was. He went and then he says, Tomorrow I\u2019m leaving the kibbutz. I said, I can\u2019t leave, and they won\u2019t let you leave here so quickly. And he said, I\u2019m leaving. He left, and a week later I told the Kibbutz I\u2019m leaving too. We thought of going to Jerusalem. They sent us to the Negev. When I got to the train station in Rehovot I heard a terrible explosion, I looked back and saw a train rolling down the slope. I understood what happened. The Etzel (Irgun) or the Lechi (Shtern Gang) did it.
\nDan Yahav: The Lechi.<\/p>\n

Amnon Neumann: They blew up the trains carrying the English army to Egypt. I ran breathless to Rehovot and then I went to the Negev.
\nDan Yahav: You didn\u2019t manufacture only caps, but also 9mm bullets, didn\u2019t you.
\nAmnon Neumann: Sure, but I made caps.
\nEitan Bronstein: What else did they manufacture there?
\nAmnon Neumann: Sten bullets, and they inspected Sten parts. They would inspect them there, there was a special place for shooting. It was a big factory, something like fifty people worked there. Going down there, seven meters, it was \u2026 you can go visit the place to this day.
\nAmnon Neumann: I did a scouting course so they put me in a scouting platoon and there was another platoon there. When we got there my friend told me, Don\u2019t you have a pit? There are cannons here. I told him, So what if there are cannons? I\u2019d never heard [of] a cannon. So he says, It\u2019s a terrible thing. Go dig yourself a pit and cover it, until midnight. We did it, we covered it. The next morning I see he\u2019s dying of fear. A brave guy, a great guy, but dying of fear. It told him, Ptachia, what\u2019s the matter? He answered, There are cannons! We wanted to go eat at eight o\u2019clock, so he told me, No, we\u2019re not going to eat at eight, we\u2019ll go later. At eight fifteen the terrible cannons of Beit Hanoun, there were something like ten there, opened concentrated fire. Now I understand that what they had done earlier was ranging. But nobody knew what a cannon was, and nobody knew what ranging was. So they ranged them a day earlier, before I even got there, and they saw\u2014they had great observation posts\u2014that everybody is getting into the dining hall, it wasn\u2019t in Nir-Am but in Mekorot, before Nir-Am, and then they opened very heavy fire. We sat there for three hours, until they finished destroying the whole place and it became quiet. We got out, the platoon commander approached me and told me, A friend of mine from Kfar Yehezkel came to visit me, he\u2019s lying in the trench, look, and then I saw all the dead. The whole trench was full of dead people. The whole dining hall was full of dead people. Whoever didn\u2019t have a head cover was either killed or escaped, managed to escape. There were some who managed to escape. That was the Egyptian army\u2019s welcome reception. After that they advanced and got to \u2026 The two-week long battle over Be\u2019erot started \u2026 near Yad-Mordechai. We tried then to bypass the Egyptians but it didn\u2019t work out. Only in the last night when it was decided that we\u2019re leaving them, that we\u2019re leaving the place, were we able to get the people out.
\nQuestion: What years are we talking about?
\nAmnon Neumann: July 48, until the first break in the fighting. By the time of the first break there were no more Arabs in the area.
\nQuestion: I don\u2019t know if you will get back later to the topic I want to ask about. You said \u201cwe expelled\u201d the villagers, can you describe an expulsion action for us, how it was done?
\nAmnon Neumann: Yes, until then some of them fled and some were expelled. We shot and they fled to Gaza. But we expelled systematically in the last day of the break in the fighting. During the break there were also a few battles. They tried to penetrate through the Gaza-Beersheba road and we stopped them. The Egyptians! There was no one else to stop.
\nEitan Bronstein: Can you say in this context, do you remember what was the order you received regarding the Arab villages?
\nAmnon Neumann: I\u2019ll tell you. I don\u2019t like it, but I\u2019ll tell you. In the last day of the break we were told that the Egyptians smuggled 20mm cannons to the villages Kawfakha\u00a0 and al-Muharraqa\u00a0 and tomorrow they would act with them and we need to destroy these villages. We drove there \u2026 and the men had fled, that was the usual practice. The men would run away first, leaving the women and the children, and then \u2026 (silence) we would expel them, right? And so it was in Kawfakha. I was in Kawfakha, others were in al-Muharraqa. It\u2019s about 15km from Gaza. We surrounded the village, started shooting in the air, and everybody started to scream, yes, and \u2026 and we drove them out. The women and the children went to Gaza.
\nLia Tarachansky: Were there people who didn\u2019t agree to go?
\nAmnon Neumann: Nobody dared. I\u2019ll tell you why: their mentality was that whoever dares will be killed anyway. They would do it too, if it were the other way around. These are no saints. It\u2019s in the people\u2019s culture, that this is how it\u2019s always been. Whoever resisted would be killed with a sword or by shooting. It\u2019s not an uncommon thing. By morning no one was there. We burned the houses that had straw roofs.
\nEitan Bronstein: Just a second, I don\u2019t understand, what exactly was the order in this context, was there an order in some villages to destroy the whole village and not in others? What exactly was the procedure?
\nAmnon Neumann: No, no, no. These villages were in our rear, and from a military standpoint it made sense. Nobody knew \u2026 we didn\u2019t find any cannon there \u2013 that\u2019s clear. But now it became an even surface, an open area that you could maneuver in.
\nAmir Hallel: Before then, if you had approached that area would it have been dangerous, would it have been disruptive?
\nAmnon Neumann: Nobody would have dared go into an inhabited village. We never entered villages to stay there but only to expel them. Someone asked earlier how they were expelled. This is how it was. Then the same thing happened with the Tarabin and with the Bedouin tribes. That was half a year later.
\nAmir Hallel: You said that in the whole area of the villages further to the north\u2014when the Egyptians shot at you from Beit Hanoun in June in the whole area except for Huj\u2014you said there were no Arabs. So what happened to those villagers?
\nAmnon Neumann: There were no Arabs, either they fled or we expelled them. We had already conquered Burayr in battle. The others, they saw that there\u2019s nothing in Hulayqat\u00a0 so they ran away. The big battle of Hulayqat was between our army and the Egyptians. There were no civilians.
\nAmir Hallel: And in Burayr, which battalion was that?
\nAmnon Neumann: That was the Second Battalion of the Palmach.
\nAmir Hallel: They attacked Burayr?
\nAmnon Neumann: Yes.
\nEitan Bronstein: But who was resisting there, who was the battle against?
\nAmnon Neumann: The villagers couldn\u2019t do anything against armed units entering the village, we called them gangs. But what does \u201cgangs\u201d mean? Those were groups of local soldiers that weren\u2019t trained at all. The battle in Burayr wasn\u2019t a big battle either, they ran away.
\nAmir Hallel: The inhabitants of the village?
\nAmnon Neumann: No, the armed people were foreigners there, they came to defend the village. Qawuqji told them, Fight, fight the Jews\u2014we\u2019ll come help you from Acre. No help and no nothing. At Sumayriyya near Regba it was the same thing. It characterized them in the south too, where I was, and also in the north. With the locals there was almost \u2026 in the north there were more battles, even difficult battles.
\nEitan Bronstein: You\u2019re saying it was a battle with armed people who were not the inhabitants of the village, in Burayr. But at the same time there were still residents of Burayr in the village?
\nAmnon Neumann: Yes!
\nEitan Bronstein: So, there was a battle?
\nAmnon Neumann: There was a battle, and there was also a small murder and similar things and then the inhabitants ran away completely.
\nEitan Bronstein: Yes, there are testimonies about a massacre having taken place in Burayr.
\nAmnon Neumann: You\u2019ve heard about it?
\nEitan Bronstein: Yes.
\nDan Yahav: I wrote about it, it appears in my \u201cPurity of Arms\u201d.
\nAmnon Neumann: It does?
\nDan Yahav: Yes.
\nAmnon Neumann: I don\u2019t want to deal with it.
\nDan Yahav: And in other villages as well.
\nAmnon Neumann: I know, I don\u2019t want to deal with it!
\nDan Yahav: Allow me a minute, I see the topic of the expulsion is a very sensitive topic. You were a soldier, I was also a soldier, and when I fought I wouldn\u2019t know exactly what was happening in the area. But there are wonderful descriptions in the Negba archive. There is a wonderful description of a kibbutz member! He sees the expulsion, he sees the convoy with the children and everything and it reminds him of terrible things the Jewish people has been through. The same thing is available at Shmaria Gutman\u2019s in Na\u2019an, regarding Lud, Lud and Ramle, about the expulsion.
\nAmnon Neumann: Oh, right, right.
\nEitan Bronstein: Today it is sensitive for you to recall it?
\nAmnon Neumann: (quietly) Yes, it is.
\nAmir Hallel: You said there was a time when you would pass through Bureir and at some point you stopped.
\nAmnon Neumann: Yes, we couldn\u2019t pass through them because the shooting was too strong, and our miserable armored vehicles couldn\u2019t handle it. So we drove through Ashkelon, Isdud, Ashkelon, Barbara, Bayt Jirja, down to Nir-‘Am. Part of the route was even a dirt road. I want to note that the people I was with over there, in our platoon everyone were born in this country. In the other platoon there were others, including immigrants and people who hadn\u2019t grown up with the country\u2019s air of decency, an air of people who knew what they were going to do, who gave their lives without thinking twice.
\nEitan Bronstein: What was the atmosphere among the people in terms of the feelings they had about what happened then, during that time?
\nAmnon Neumann: It was a horrible period: we were sure that the Egyptians would wipe us out, especially after they had cut off the Negev. We didn\u2019t know that the Ninth Battalion was getting organized in the north and would come and break the siege, we didn\u2019t know that. That was later on, in Operation \u201cYoav\u201d.
\nEitan Bronstein: So in terms of the feeling, there was a feeling that it was like the end?
\nAmnon Neumann: That\u2019s what I observed, unpleasantly. There was also a second platoon with us in Burayr. One guy, an Egyptian Jew, came here and said\u2014excuse me\u2014\u201cI fucked her and shot her\u201d.
\nEitan Bronstein: Did you hear him say it?
\nAmnon Neumann: No, I was told about this later, I didn\u2019t see him. And then they ran, the people who were there and saw her, a 17-year-old girl, he had put a bullet through her head. I approached the platoon commander, who was from Tel Yosef, and I told him, I told him, I think he should be killed. So he said, Stop it you! We\u2019re all going to die in a week or two, what are you messing around with here \u2026 that was the mood back then. Later on the situation got better. We saw the Egyptians weren\u2019t worth much, and they can be wiped out, and we really did attack the cannons and destroyed them and killed lots of Egyptians there. And after that the situation stabilized.
\nAmir Hallel: What happened to that guy?
\nAmnon Neumann: Nothing. What happened to him? Don\u2019t ask! Don\u2019t ask what happened.
\nAmir Hallel: You told me\u2026
\nAmnon Neumann: I told you? So why do you need me to say it here? It\u2019s not important. Just as I wasn\u2019t important. He was killed later, but killed in a terrible way. But why is that important? A lot of my friends were killed not in a terrible way.
\nEitan Bronstein: Can we get back to that harsh expression you mentioned. From that word you understood that there had been a rape there followed by murder?
\nAmnon Neumann: I didn\u2019t see it, but people ran and saw it. They saw that girl lying there with a bullet in her head.
\nDan Yahav: But they had washed her there, she was clean.
\nAmnon Neumann: I didn\u2019t see and didn\u2019t ask, how do you know?
\nDan Yahav: I\u2019m telling you, I know.
\nAmnon Neumann: This particular case?
\nDan Yahav: Yes.
\nAmnon Neumann: With this Egyptian?
\nDan Yahav: Yes, yes.
\nAmnon Neumann: I see you\u2019ve done some research.
\nDan Yahav: They washed her, prepared her and then did what they did. (Silence)
\nAmnon Neumann: I didn\u2019t know these details and I never wanted to go into the thick of things.
\nDan Yahav: By the way, the IDF archive is unwilling to this day to open documents related to cases of rape. It\u2019s still [a matter of] \u201cIsrael\u2019s security\u201d. (Long silence)
\nAmnon Neumann: After that I was in Beersheba. There was a short battle there. It wasn\u2019t a big battle, four or five hours and that\u2019s it. There was a chain of Egyptian military posts there, 10km after Beersheba, and we attacked them, and it was the first time I encountered, in Beersheba, what we called the \u201cFrench commando\u201d. It was a unit made up of immigrants from Morocco. They were trained in Beersheba, in the alleys of Beersheba, and they attacked there. It was ok, we drove out the Egyptians, the Egyptians didn\u2019t hold out anywhere for very long. It was the first time I saw soldiers walking around among the dead Egyptians. It turned out they had been looking for gold teeth in the officers\u2019 mouths. I went crazy. My conceptual world was different.
\nLia Tarachansky: Were there cases of disobedience to orders? Did anyone get up and leave rather than go all the way through with it?
\nAmnon Neumann: Where? With us? No. Never. Everyone went all the way through with it and to the bitter end.
\nEitan Bronstein: You know, Amnon, we once met a soldier who had fought in Beersheba and he told us they shot people who had fled from Beersheba, people ran away and soldiers shot them, shot civilians.
\nAmnon Neumann: Yes, yes, yes. They ran away to the east and the south and they were shot. That\u2019s because it was, I saw it\u2026 ok, I did that too. Are we done? Why should I go into details?
\nEitan Bronstein: But you can describe exactly this thing, how you as a soldier, you\u2019re shooting people who you see aren\u2019t shooting at you, how\u2026 how did you understand it back then? Over there? That you had the full right to do it?
\nAmnon Neumann: I didn\u2019t understand, I was 19.
\nEitan Bronstein: So you just did it?
\nAmnon Neumann: I was a fool and I didn\u2019t know. Yes. That\u2019s why I\u2019m in such despair, because soldiers are always 19-20 years old, and they never sober up until they\u2019ve been through four battles. That\u2019s the main point. And there will always be new 19-year-olds.
\nAmir Hallel: Was there an order to do it?
\nAmnon Neumann: Where I was, there was an order in one case. As I said, the horrors of war are more difficult than the battles of war, which are not easy either.
\nEitan Bronstein: I heard recently about a testimony given by a Palmachnik, [who had been] I think in Simsim, were you in Simsim?
\nAmnon Neumann: I was there after the village had been destroyed.
\nEitan Bronstein: So maybe you\u2019ve heard soldiers\u2019 testimonies saying they saved the Palestinian women from Palestinian men shooting their wives?
\nAmnon Neumann: They didn\u2019t save, our soldiers didn\u2019t save anyone. Look, in the heat of battle you don\u2019t save anyone. And save just one person, yourself. Right? You don\u2019t save anyone. After that there was the big battle over Be\u2019erot Yitzhak. Really, a big and terrible battle. Half of the men of Be\u2019erot Yitzhak were killed there. How many were there? There were 100, 40 were killed there, something like that. And we came from the direction of Sa’ad to save them and the platoons of the \u201cNegev Animals\u201d came from the other direction and then there was a battle. We shot and they shot. In the end, they fixed their machine gun and mowed down the Sudanese. It was a lucerne field there. Straight, even. And then I saw from a distance, for the first and only time, how the Egyptian officers walk with pistols with the soldiers ahead of them, shooting, lying down, getting up, shooting. That was one of the elite units of the Sudanese army, which afterwards stayed in ‘Iraq Suwaydan as well, until they conquered ‘Iraq Suwaydan.
\nAmir Hallel: What do you mean when you say that those officers walked with pistols?
\nAmnon Neumann: What reason did a poor Sudanese have for going and getting killed? For what? Did he even know? Those were the British methods, that there should be order. But the British didn\u2019t have\u2026 it was also that way in World War I, rest assured. No one wants to die just like that. What did the Sudanese have here? They were tall, giant, muscular negroes. After the battle our platoon went to collect the booty and the documents. That was our part.<\/p>\n

Eitan Bronstein: What do you mean the documents?
\nAmnon Neumann: Of the dead! What unit was it, what they did, right? We walked there among\u2026 we turned everyone over, and\u2026 all that. Back then I didn\u2019t feel anything for these dead people. They were enemies and it\u2019s good that they died, right? I didn\u2019t feel anything special.<\/p>\n

Amnon Neumann: In March 1949 the race to conquer Eilat began. We went down as far as Wadi Abiad, where ‘Ovda is. And we would kill poor Egyptians over there too, those who had got cut off from their units and we shot them from the hillside. Right? No one\u2026 they were abandoned, no one paid attention to them. After a week we were told, Operation ‘Ovda\u2014going to conquer Eilat. Our platoon split into two, there was a group that led the whole Negev Brigade. And we drove, I was the scout commander, we drove an hour after them. In one of the wadis I suddenly heard a sound that was already familiar to me, a land mine exploded, I looked back and saw the jeep behind us rising into the air and collapsing. And immediately they opened fire on us. Me and my driver\u2026 (laughing) we jumped under the jeep. I left the MG machine gun hanging there (laughing). And he told me, his name was Basri, he was from Iraq, he told me, Amnon this is the end. We had been a year together. This is the end. We saw the heads, the kafiyas of the Legion soldiers above us, about twenty meters. So I told him, there\u2019s nothing else to do; here, each one of us has a rifle, let\u2019s shoot five bullets, the whole magazine, and run, whatever happens happens. And so we did. We shot, ran and hid. A few days later our commander said we conquered Eilat and we\u2019re driving down there. We drove until we got to Wadi Paran. They I told him, Listen, let go 10km in here and see what happened to the jeep. He said ok, and then we were all tensed up, maybe there\u2019s an ambush or something. And I followed with the map and said, Here there\u2019s 300m left until we get to the jeep, and so it was. 200m before the jeep I saw a Jordanian lying dead, with his kafiyah. We went down to him, he had gotten a bullet here (point to his head), from the ten bullets we had shot. And then we saw the mines. Our jeep which first went through squeezed it with the wheel and it didn\u2019t go off. The second jeep drove over it. We got to Eilat and the war was over.<\/p>\n

Amir Hallel: Just a second Amnon, what about the Bedouins? You started saying something about them.
\nAmnon Neumann: Right, I forgot. The Azazme, and the Tarabin. We were there for two months, we marked the roads that would later be constructed on the Negev Plateau. We got to every remote corner there, really, to every corner. That was when I saw the Azazme and the Tarabin. They would be hiding in all kinds of places, in narrow wadis. I don\u2019t know what they lived off from. I don\u2019t know where they drank water. It was in the Negev Plateau, there was one well there where we would go once every two weeks to wash. Bir Malihi. The good well. Malihi in Arabic means good. It was then that I saw how they lived there. And they were terribly afraid. When we would appear with the jeeps, the men would mount their horses and run away, leaving the women and the children. We never touched them, right? These are not the people we wanted to hurt.
\nQuestion: There were no orders to expel them, to transfer them?
\nAmnon Neumann: No, no. You are reminding me of the Jahalin. The same week we conquered Eilat, our platoon had only three or four people who were taken to the conquering of ‘Ein-Gedi. When they came back, after two weeks, we all came back so I asked them, What did you do? So they said, Nothing. There were Jahalin there, we shot in the air and they ran away. We didn\u2019t kill anyone, do anything, and Ein-Gedi is occupied. Later I heard about the Jahalin from a number of places. It was a large tribe in the east of the country and part of it was also in Jordan. A year ago, I visited\u2026 how do you call this place\u2026 where Sima went.
\nDan Yahav: Ma\u2019ale Adumim, they are still there.
\nAmnon Neumann: Yes, yes, Ma\u2019ale Adumim. I visited there and saw the Bedouins. I said, Hannah, I have to approach them. And then I approached them. The youngsters received us, Hannah stayed in the car because it was a very warm day. The youngsters received us with such hatred: Get lost, why should we talk to you, are you a journalist? I told him, No, I\u2019m not a journalist. So he told me again, Are you a journalist? I told him, No. and then I saw an old man standing there, on the side. I approached him and told him, Who are you? So he says, We are from the Jahalin. I told him, Where are you from the Jahalin? So he says, From Arad. I told him, No my friend, you are not from Arad, from the Arad area. So he says to me, How do you know? I said, I know. You were in the Dead Sea. I told him in Arabic. So he says, How do you know? So I said, They expelled you 60 years ago, didn\u2019t they. He said, that\u2019s right, after that we were in Arad. But before that we were in the valley below. There weren\u2019t many to expel there.
\nQuestion: You also said they burned houses.
\nAmnon Neumann: That was in the south.
\nEitan Bronstein: So in the south the houses were demolished immediately following the occupation, when the people left them.
\nAmnon Neumann: It wasn\u2019t a problem to demolish them. These were mud and clay houses, nothing.
\nQuestions from the audience: How did they do it? How did they demolish the houses?
\nAmnon Neumann: It was enough for an armored vehicle to drive by and give it a blow and the whole building would collapse.
\nAmir Hallel: What would you do if people tried to return to their village, what did you do?
\nAmnon Neumann: Oh, yes. People who were in Gaza wanted to return to their villages. They would come back at night and do two things: first, there was special agriculture, in the sand dunes, further up north. The vines would bloom and they would need to be pruned, so they would come there at night. The didn\u2019t know they would never ever come back. And we waited for them, it was impossible to let them walk around there, so we waited for them.
\nEitan Bronstein: Wait a minute, what would they come for, you didn\u2019t say.
\nAmnon Neumann: To take care of the vine, to take all kinds of things from the village, I never looked into their sacks. And we would snipe and kill them. That was part of the horrible things.
\nA woman from the audience: One of the women-soldiers, the women who served in the Palmach, told about how during the war as well as afterwards throughout her life, the moral paralysis was so strong that it had to be accompanied by aggressiveness, and what she says is that after several decades of repressing so strongly what she had done and the demolition of the villages and the expulsion, that it took decades until she was walking in a certain forest and suddenly she remembered that she was standing in a place where a village had once stood. Have you also had experiences of this kind?
\nAmnon Neumann: Oh, experiences of this kind? Yes. I did but I wasn\u2019t shocked anymore. I used to be shocked by what I\u2019d been through.
\nQuestion: Can you maybe tell us?
\nLia Tarachansky: You don\u2019t want to talk?
\nAmnon Neumann: Come on! Do you want me to tell you that I shot at a pickup truck full of people? (coughing) Nonsense. It didn\u2019t change the essence of the whole Nakba.
\nFrom the audience: But if we can understand how you repressed it, maybe we\u2019ll be able to understand how the whole people of Israel still doesn\u2019t know about the Nakba?
\nWoman in the audience: How come you, members of the battalion, never tried to sit together, to talk, to bring back memories?
\nAmnon Neumann: No. Uh, no, we had reunions years later.
\nWoman continuing: To try, after you sobered up didn\u2019t you try\u2026
\nAmnon Neumann: No, there was no one to do it with. We had company, battalion, brigade, Palmach reunions, right? In the end I stopped going and my wife got very angry. I said, I don\u2019t want to hear them. They are always just telling about themselves. How it was here and how it was there. No one was thinking critically. How did you put it? Morally speaking, moral paralysis. It was moral paralysis.
\nEitan Bronstein: But now you said something important. You keep saying all the time that it\u2019s a war and that in a war terrible things happen.
\nAmnon Neumann: That\u2019s right.
\nEitan Bronstein: On the other hand, from your descriptions and from what you are saying and hinting here and there about having participated in horrible things as well, that\u2019s not exactly the description of a war. Is this what you mean by \u201cwar\u201d?
\nAmnon Neumann: As I told you, the horrors of war are as hard as the battles. I said it. These horrors, the horrible things that in a war are often worse than the war. Worse things, that is, when women are killed, when you kill children, all the horrors surrounding war, not surrounding the battle, they are worse than the battles. It\u2019s called \u201cmoraot\u201d [horrors] in Hebrew. Not \u201cme\u2019oraot\u201d [events], but \u201cmoraot\u201d of the war. The horrible things of war.
\nEitan Bronstein: You mean, cases where civilians get killed. Are you referring to these kinds of things?
\nAmnon Neumann: Exactly.
\nQuestion: Amnon, can you perhaps tell us after all, if not about a specific event, at least a little bit in principle about the method? Really the method?
\nAmnon Neumann: There was no method.
\nQuestion continuing: The method of the expulsion, how it was done.
\nAmnon Neumann: Oh, the method of the expulsion! They would come to a village, shoot in the air, and the villagers had no weapons, they had nothing, they packed their things and fled. Then sometimes they would shoot after them and sometimes they didn\u2019t, and that was all.
\nQuestion continuing: And what would you do after that, leave the village? Burn it down?
\nAmnon Neumann: There was so little in the village, as I said, in certain known cases we burned the village down and in other cases we would leave it. No one\u2026 there was nothing to steal. Look, there was nothing to loot there. They were as poor as church mice. There was nothing to steal. Me, the only looting I took, I found this kind of prayer rug, I put it in my pit, where I slept for three months.
\nAmir Hallel: In the south, in the area where you were in the south, in the Negev, were prisoners taken from among the villagers, or were people allowed to run away?
\nAmnon Neumann: Yes, yes. They were usually allowed to run away. If there were cases\u2026
\nFrom the audience: There weren\u2019t any prisoners or things like that?
\nAmnon Neumann: Egyptian prisoners?
\nFrom the audience: No, villagers.
\nAmnon Neumann: No. If there were prisoners they would be killed immediately.
\nFrom the audience: Can you tell about the occupation of Beersheba?
\nAmnon Neumann: There wasn\u2019t much of an Egyptian force there, and wherever the Egyptians were attacked they didn\u2019t hold out. I saw it in the cannons, when we conquered the cannons. We killed about 80 Egyptians there. So what? In two hours the cannons were in our hands, we had nothing to do with them. No one among us, even the company commander and battalion commander didn\u2019t know, they had never in their life seen a cannon.
\nAmir Hallel: From the cannons did you continue into the town?
\nAmnon Neumann: No, it was enough. From the second company so many were killed, from the \u201cNegev Animals\u201d. You don\u2019t move forward just like that. From Beit Hanoun. It wasn\u2019t Beit Hanoun then.
\nWoman from the audience: I heard about an expulsion method in which three sides of a village would be closed off and one side left open where they wanted the expulsion to go. Was that a method you also used?
\nAmnon Neumann: That\u2019s right. They would position one squad here, one squad here, one there, shoot in the air, not even straight at them, and they would run away by themselves, they had nothing to defend themselves with.
\nWoman in the audience: But they understood that it\u2019s the only direction.
\nAmnon Neumann: They knew they had to get to Gaza, and they knew the directions better than us.
\nEitan Bronstein: Amnon, I want to ask you something after all about those horrors that you find it difficult to talk about, and I understand that, but can you say something about afterward, let\u2019s say, would it come up in conversations among the soldiers, for example? After all, you did do things, and you were adults, you did difficult things. Would you later share your experiences?
\nAmnon Neumann: It wasn\u2019t difficult. Who was it difficult for? For the squad commander who gave the order, for the soldier who pulled the trigger? It wasn\u2019t difficult. It was completely natural\u2014we had to do it. If not, they would slaughter us. Don\u2019t think that if it were the other way around it would have been better. It would have been much worse. There is no doubt about it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Public hearing at Zochrot, 61 Ibn Gvirol St., Tel-Aviv, June 17, 2010. The audience consisted of about twenty people. Initiated and organized by Amir Hallel. The testimony was video-recorded by Lia Tarachansky. Miri Barak prepared the transcription. Eitan Bronstein edited, summarized, and added footnotes. Translated to English by Asaf Kedar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EDITOR: The video archive of Zochrot in Israel, produced and compiled by Eyal Sivan and Ilan Pappe, is the most comprehensive oral history ever put together on the Nakba, an amazing source of historical truth about the crimes during 1947\/8\/9. While the text is being translated to English and Arabic, you can see most of … Continue reading October 19, 2012<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10096"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10096"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10108,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10096\/revisions\/10108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}