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

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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to the Sandinistas.
Chaim Weizmann’s principle was, incidentally, also followed in
subsequent years, notably after the 1967 war when hundreds of
thousands of Arabs fled or were expelled. A report by Eyal Ehrlich
observes that “much was written, and with pride, about ‘Operation
Refugee,’ which permitted 17,000 to return,” but not about the fact,
which he discovered in interviews with soldiers and officers, that the
army was under orders, which it fulfilled, to kill returning refugees:
“Civilians, women and children were killed. No one reported, no one
counted the bodies, no one investigated and punished” these actions
taken in pursuance of “policies established by such men as” Yitzhak
Rabin (now Minister of Defense), Chaim Herzog (now President), and
Uzi Narkis (Commander of the Jordanian front, later Head of the
Department of Immigration and Absorption of the Jewish Agency, a
bitter irony). Soldiers were ordered to shoot even if they heard “the
crying of an infant.” 83
Other charges too have been levelled against the Sandinistas in the
propaganda war. President Reagan, with a representative of the Anti-
Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL) at his side, accused the
Sandinistas of anti-Semitism on July 20, 1983—somehow overlooking a
cable four days earlier from the US Embassy in Managua stating that it
could find “no verifiable ground” to accuse the Sandinistas of anti-
Semitism and that “the evidence fails to demonstrate that the
Sandinistas have followed a policy of anti-Semitism or have persecuted
Jews solely because of their religion.” 84 The charges have been
reiterated since, but are denied by human rights activists who are highly
critical of the Sandinistas in Managua, by a delegation headed by a
Rabbi who had been a leader in the struggle against the anti-Semitism
and terror of the Argentine neo-Nazis, and by a Panamanian Rabbi (a
former Minister of the government who had been honored by the Latin