Interview with a Palmach's member( Part 6) - The Ethnic cleansing process resulting in NAKBA

"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)."

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;

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
http://palestinefreevoice.blogspot.com/2010/09/interview-with-palmachs-member-part-3.html
http://palestinefreevoice.blogspot.com/2010/09/interview-with-palmachs-member-part-4.html
http://palestinefreevoice.blogspot.com/2010/09/interview-with-palmachs-member-part-5.html

Summary of a Testimony by Amnon Neumann Part 6

Amnon Neumann: Of the dead! What unit was it, what they did, right? We
walked there among… we turned everyone over, and… all that. Back then I
didn’t feel anything for these dead people. They were enemies and it’s good
that they died, right? I didn’t feel anything special.

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… they were abandoned, no one paid
attention to them. After a week we were told, Operation 'Ovda—going 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… (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’s nothing else to (Page 13)do; here, each one of us has a rifle, let’s 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’re 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’s an ambush or something.

And I followed with the map and said, Here there’s 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’t go off. The second jeep drove over it. We got to Eilat and the war was over.

Amir Hallel: Just a second Amnon, what about the Bedouins? You started
saying something about them

.
Amnon 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’t know what they lived off
from. I don’t 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.

Question: There were no orders to expel them, to transfer them?

Amnon 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’t 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… how do you call this
place… where Sima went.

Dan Yahav: Ma’ale Adumim, they are still there.

Amnon Neumann: Yes, yes, Ma’ale 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’m not a journalist.
 

(Page 14) 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 asked 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’t they. He said,
that’s right, after that we were in Arad. But before that we were in the valley
below. There weren’t many to expel there

.
Question: You also said they burned houses.

Amnon Neumann: That was in the south.

.
Eitan Bronstein: So in the south the houses were demolished immediately
following the occupation, when the people left them.

Amnon Neumann: It wasn’t a problem to demolish them. These were mud and
clay houses, nothing.

Questions from the audience: How did they do it? How did they demolish the
houses?

Amnon Neumann: It was enough for an armored vehicle to drive by and give it
a blow and the whole building would collapse.

Amir Hallel: What would you do if people tried to return to their village, what
did you do?

Amnon 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’t 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.

Eitan Bronstein: Wait a minute, what would they come for, you didn’t say.

Amnon 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.

A 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
(Page 15 ) 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?

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