PART 2: Interview with a Palmach's member - 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)."
 
Summary of a Testimony by Amnon Neumann

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.

" In the north they fought. In the south they didn’t, they didn’t have anything."



Continue..
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They were miserable, they didn’t have anywhere to go, or anyone to ask.

Eitan Bronstein: What happened in the village Burayr?

Amnon Neumann: There was a battle, and there was a slaughter…

Eitan Bronstein: Can you say a little bit more about that?

Amnon Neumann: I don’t want to go into these things, leave me alone! It’s … it’s not things we go into. Why? Because I did it. Is that a good reason? (Long silence)

I can tell you about one thing. We received an order to occupy the intersection near 'Iraq Suwaydan. There was a huge police station there which dominated the whole area. We went out with five jeeps and five armored vehicles. We stood at the intersection, and suddenly we heard the sound of tanks from the direction of Majdal. 

With our rifles and machine guns we couldn’t stand up to tanks. The moment we saw them we fled to Kawkaba, half a kilometer away,and hid in the village. Then the tanks came, stood there and started rotating their cannons, didn’t shoot or anything.

Dan Yahav: Whose tanks?

Amnon Neumann: The Egyptians’. Only they had tanks (laughing), we didn’t have any tanks back then. A few minutes later they started shooting at us from all directions. We sat in the armored vehicles, the fire wasn’t so…but they were shooting from all directions.Until we decided to find out who was there. We went out, looked around, ran a little. 

It was the villagers who had run away from Kawkaba that were shooting at us. Then our company commander, a nice guy, suddenly appeared with his pickup truck,took out a pistol and said;You abandoned the intersection, do you realize what that means?!It won’t be possible to pass through to the Negev anymore.

So we told him, Moishe, go ahead and drive to the intersection, look closely, can you make it to the intersection? So he relaxed a little and then the Egyptian Spitfires came, bombed us and destroyed his pickup truck. He jumped into the sabra bushes and came out alive.

Eitan Bronstein: So who did the shooting, I didn’t understand who did the shooting.

Amnon Neumann: The Arabs who had lived in Kawkaba, the saw that we were running away, so they revealed themselves.

Eitan Bronstein: And then they shot at you, the Arabs from Kawkaba?

Amnon Neumann: Yes, that’s right they shot at us from the hills, from the
wadis.

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Lia Tarachansky: In Kawkaba there were no more people left anymore?

Amnon Neumann: There was nothing there. The only thing I remember are the terrible fleas there, they devoured us.

Eitan Bronstein: How many people were you?

Amnon Neumann: We were a platoon, thirty people. I was in the scouting platoon. There were other platoons, in Nir-Am, in Dorot, in those places.

Amir Hallel: Did you get to see the Arab residents?

Amnon Neumann: Yes, I got to see them in one place, in two places, when we expelled them by night.

Dan Yahav: What kind of weapons did you have?

Amnon Neumann: From the 15th or 17th of May, we received the Czech guns.
Both that and Bazot[13]. But until then, I had a 1904 English rifle, with a broken butt that I tied with a steel wire.

Eitan Bronstein: When did you join the Palmach?

Amnon Neumann: I joined the Palmach in 1946, at the age of sixteen and a half.

Eitan Bronstein: And since then did you train regularly?

Amnon Neumann: Yes … Should I start telling the details?

Lia Tarachansky and Eitan Bronstein: It’s important.

Amnon Neumann: We were in training in Yagur. After four months in the Palmach, all our commanders were killed in a convoy on Haziv Bridge. We became orphans.

Amnon Neumann: A week later, the British army surrounded us and took us into custody at 'Atlit. After being two weeks or a month in 'Atlit, we were released and transferred to Gvat. And from there we were transferred after a while to Heftziba. We were there for about a year, and then one day they called us for roll call and said;Tomorrow you will be discharged from the Palmach (we had been in the Palmach for a year and nine months)and driven to a kibbutz near Rehovot.

The next day,trucks came and took us,we got there in the evening, they put us in the dining hall and said, Now we’ll tell you what’s going on. The Haganah’s largest munitions factory is here. You will start working there, you’re no longer Palmachniks or anything, that was the arrangement then. We worked there until the war broke out four months later.

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Eitan Bronstein: What did you work at?

Amnon Neumann: I made caps [for guns], nothing could be more boring. Itwas a huge factory, it’s still there, for example, at Kiryat HaMada in Rehovot, in Givat HaKibbutzim. It was underground. 

Yes, yes, I was a member of [Kibbutz] Maagan Michael, I had no choice. Nobody asked me.The factory is really impressive,we were also impressed by it at the time.It was in Rehovot next to the train station,very close to the train station, and we worked there until the war broke out....

To be continued Friday September 9 2010

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