"For fifty or sixty years I’ve been torturing myself about this. But what’s done is done. It was done by order. And I won’t go into that, these are not things that … (long silence)."
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http://palestinefreevoice.blogspot.com/2010/09/interview-with-palmachs-member-ethnic.html
http://palestinefreevoice.blogspot.com/2010/09/part-2-interview-with-palmachs-member.html
.........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’ve 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’m leaving the kibbutz.
I said, I can’t leave, and they won’t let you leave here so quickly. And he said, I’m leaving. He left, and a week later I told the Kibbutz I’m 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.
Dan Yahav: The Lechi.
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.
Dan Yahav: You didn’t manufacture only caps, but also 9mm bullets, didn’tyou.
Amnon Neumann: Sure, but I made caps.
Eitan Bronstein: What else did they manufacture there?
Amnon Neumann: Sten bullets, and they inspected Sten parts. They would inspect them there, there was a special place for shooting. It was a bigfactory, something like fifty people worked there. Going down there, seven meters, it was … you can go visit the place to this day.
Amnon 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’t you have a pit? There are cannons here. I told him, So what if there arecannons? I’d never heard [of] a cannon. So he says, It’s a terrible thing. Godig your self a pit and cover it, until midnight. We did it, we covered it. The next morning I see he’s dying of fear. A brave guy, a great guy, but dying of fear. It told him, Ptachia, what’s the matter?
He answered, There are cannons! We wanted to go eat at eight o’clock, so he told me, No, we’re not going to eat ateight, we’ll go later. At eight fifteen the terrible cannons of Beit Hanoun, therewere something like ten there, opened concentrated fire. Now I understand that what they had done earlier was ranging.
But nobody knew what a cannon (Page 6) was, and nobody knew what ranging was. So they ranged them a day earlier, before I even got there, and they saw—they had great observation posts—that everybody is getting into the dining hall, it wasn’t in Nir-Am but in Mekorot, before Nir-Am, and then they opened very heavy fire. We sat therefor three hours, until they finished destroying the whole place and it becamequiet. We got out, the platoon commander approached me and told me, A friend of mine from Kfar Yehezkel came to visit me, he’s 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. Who ever didn’t have a headcover was either killed or escaped, managed to escape. There were some who managed to escape. That was the Egyptian army’s welcome reception. After that they advanced and got to … The two-week long battle over Be’erotstarted … near Yad-Mordechai.
We tried then to bypass the Egyptians but itdidn’t work out. Only in the last night when it was decided that we’re leaving them, that we’re leaving the place, were we able to get the people out.
Question: What years are we talking about?
Amnon 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.
Question: I don’t know if you will get back later to the topic I want to ask about. You said “we expelled” the villagers, can you describe an expulsion action for us, how it was done?
Amnon 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 stoppedthem. The Egyptians! There was no one else to stop.
Eitan Bronstein: Can you say in this context, do you remember what was theorder you received regarding the Arab villages?
Amnon Neumann: I’ll tell you. I don’t like it, but I’ll tell you. In the last day of the break we were told that the Egyptians smuggled 20mm cannons to thevillages Kawfakha[14] and al-Muharraqa[15] and tomorrow they would act with them and we need to destroy these villages. We drove there … and the men had fled, that was the usual practice.
The men would run away first, leaving the women and the children, and then … (silence) we would expel them, right? And so it was in Kawfakha. I was in Kawfakha, others were in al-Muharraqa. It’s about 15km from Gaza. We surrounded the village, started shooting in the air, and everybody started to scream, yes, and … and wedrove them out. The women and the children went to Gaza.
Lia Tarachansky: Were there people who didn’t agree to go?
Amnon Neumann: Nobody dared. I’ll tell you why: their mentality was that (Page 7 )whoever dares will be killed anyway. They would do it too, if it were the other way around. These are no saints. It’s in the people’s culture, that this is howit’s always been. Whoever resisted would be killed with a sword or by shooting. It’s not an uncommon thing. By morning no one was there. We burned the houses that had straw roofs.
Eitan Bronstein: Just a second, I don’t 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?
Amnon Neumann: No, no, no. These villages were in our rear, and from a military standpoint it made sense. Nobody knew … we didn’t find any cannon there – that’s clear. But now it became an even surface, an open area that you could maneuver in.
Amir Hallel: Before then, if you had approached that area would it have been dangerous, would it have been disruptive?
Amnon Neumann: Nobody would have dared go into an inhabited village. Wenever 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.
Amir Hallel: You said that in the whole area of the villages further to the north—when the Egyptians shot at you from Beit Hanoun in June in the whole area except for Huj—you said there were no Arabs. So what happened tothose villagers?
Amnon 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’s nothing in Hulayqat[16] so they ran away. The big battle of Hulayqat was between our army and the Egyptians. There were no civilians.
Amir Hallel: And in Burayr, which battalion was that?
Amnon Neumann: That was the Second Battalion of the Palmach.
Amir Hallel: They attacked Burayr?
Amnon Neumann: Yes.
Eitan Bronstein: But who was resisting there, who was the battle against?
Amnon Neumann: The villagers couldn’t do anything against armed unit sentering the village, we called them gangs. But what does “gangs” mean?Those were groups of local soldiers that weren’t trained at all. The battle in Burayr wasn’t a big battle either, they ran away.
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................to be continued Monday September 13
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