| Deir Yassin and Kfar Shaul,an Israeli Orthodox public psychiatric hospital. | ||||||||
| Deir Yassin Ethnically cleansed |
"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)."
Summary of a Testimony by Amnon Neumann Part 7
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.
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
http://palestinefreevoice.blogspot.com/2010/09/interview-with-palmachs-member-part-6.html
“When we proceeded to challenge the step with the liaison office and police, they claimed that the lands belong to the state and that the settlers rented it from the government, even though we have documents registered since the time of the British Mandate, and we used to and still do cultivate this land,” he said.
Continue..
Amnon Neumann: Oh, experiences of this kind? Yes. I did but I wasn’t
shocked anymore. I used to be shocked by what I’d been through.
Question: Can you maybe tell us?
Lia Tarachansky: You don’t want to talk?
Amnon Neumann: Come on! Do you want me to tell you that I shot at a pickup
truck full of people? (coughing) Nonsense. It didn’t change the essence of the
whole Nakba.
From the audience: But if we can understand how you repressed it, maybe
we’ll be able to understand how the whole people of Israel still doesn’t know
about the Nakba?
Woman in the audience: How come you, members of the battalion, never tried
to sit together, to talk, to bring back memories?
Amnon Neumann: No. Uh, no, we had reunions years later.
Woman continuing: To try, after you sobered up didn’t you try…
Amnon 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’t 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.
Eitan Bronstein: But now you said something important. You keep saying all
the time that it’s a war and that in a war terrible things happen.
Amnon Neumann: That’s right.
Eitan 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’s not exactly the description of a war. Is this what you
mean by “war”?
Amnon 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’s called “moraot” [horrors] in Hebrew. Not “me’oraot”
[events], but “moraot” of the war. The horrible things of war.
(Page 16)
Eitan Bronstein: You mean, cases where civilians get killed. Are you referring
to these kinds of things?
Amnon Neumann: Exactly.
Question: 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?
Amnon Neumann: There was no method.
Question continuing: The method of the expulsion, how it was done.
Amnon 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’t, and that was all.
Question continuing: And what would you do after that, leave the village? Burn
it down?
Amnon 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… 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.
Amir 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?
Amnon Neumann: Yes, yes. They were usually allowed to run away. If there
were cases…
From the audience: There weren’t any prisoners or things like that?
Amnon Neumann: Egyptian prisoners?
From the audience: No, villagers.
Amnon Neumann: No. If there were prisoners they would be killed
immediately.
From the audience: Can you tell about the occupation of Beersheba?
Amnon Neumann: There wasn’t much of an Egyptian force there, and
wherever the Egyptians were attacked they didn’t hold out. I saw it in the
(Page 17)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’t know, they had never in their life seen a cannon.
Amir Hallel: From the cannons did you continue into the town?
Amnon Neumann: No, it was enough. From the second company so many
were killed, from the “Negev Animals”. You don’t move forward just like that.
From Beit Hanoun. It wasn’t Beit Hanoun then.
Woman 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?
Amnon Neumann: That’s 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.
Woman in the audience: But they understood that it’s the only direction.
Amnon Neumann: They knew they had to get to Gaza, and they knew the
directions better than us.
Eitan 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’s 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?
Amnon Neumann: It wasn’t difficult. Who was it difficult for? For the squad
commander who gave the order, for the soldier who pulled the trigger? It
wasn’t difficult. It was completely natural—we had to do it. If not, they would
slaughter us. Don’t 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.
[1] Between today’s Otzem and Negba
[2] Near today’s Moshav Kochav Michael.
[3] Next to today’s Heletz Intersection.
[4] Today part of Ashkelon.
[5] Today’s Moshav Mavki’im.
[6] Next to today’s Zikim Intersection.
Page 18
[7] Today part of Kiryat Gat.
[8] Two kilometers north of Sderot.
[9] Between today’s Or HaNer and Gvar’am.
[10] Today “Havat HaShikmim”, between Dorot and Sderot.
[11] Two kilometers northwest of Kibbutz Yagur.
[12] Today part of Nesher.
[13] Medium-size machine gun.
[14] About two kilometers northeast of today’s Moshav Nir 'Akiva.
[15] Between today’s Moshavim Zrua and Yakhini.
[16] Three kilometers east of today’s Gvar’am.
End of the interview with Amnon Neuman,a member of Palmach.
________________________________________
Palmach the underground terrorist group of Haganah was established May 15 1941,during the British Mandate of Palestine.(compare to the Jewish terrorist groups of Irgun and Lehi,the"Stern Gang").
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