Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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according to Israeli sources, 1000 according to testimonies preserved in
US State Department records—including 75 old men praying in a
mosque and 35 families, of whom only three people escaped, in a cave
outside of the destroyed town where they took refuge. The conquest of
the town—but not the massacre—was noted at once in Israel’s major
journal, Ha’aretz, in a report on the conquest of “historical sites” from
the days of Bar Kochba and the Romans, “renewing again the
connection between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel.” Israeli
military historians say that the affair is known, though not recorded. The
first report appears to be in a letter in the Labor Party journal Davar
(Sept. 4, 1979) by a kibbutz member who deplores the “ghetto
mentality” of those who refrain from expelling Arabs. He cites
eyewitness testimony by a participant who alleges that women and
children were killed by crushing their skulls with sticks and that people
were blown up in houses, among other atrocities, “not during the heat of
battle” but “as a system of expulsion and elimination.” The story was
finally unearthed by a correspondent for Hadashot in 1984 and
presented as newly discovered. Historian Yoram Nimrod writes that the
background for this slaughter, and the general attitude of the time that
“the Arabs and their possessions are fair game,” can be traced to the
attitudes of the leadership, who wanted the Galilee to be “free [literally,
“clean”] of Arabs” and asserted that “for the Arabs of the Land of Israel
there remains only one function: to flee” (David Ben-Gurion), 81 that the
country must be “homogeneous” and hence with as few Arabs as
possible (Moshe Dayan), and who insisted that the Arab civilians who
had fled or had been expelled “cannot and need not return” (Chaim
Weizmann), or even be settled nearby, even if this means rejecting
peace overtures (Ben-Gurion). 82
Nothing comparable to these early post-independence atrocities
against the indigenous population in the US and Israel can be charged