Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Please Be Serious posted by Richard Seymour
Post from johng:A necessary history lesson.
Interview with General Gur of the IDF, hero of Entebbe, and of Israel in 1978:
Q-Is it true [during the March 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon] that you bombarded agglomerations [of people] without distinction.
A-I am not one of those people who have a selective memory. Do you think that I pretend not to know what we have done all these years? What did we do the entire length of the Suez Canal? A million and a half refugees! Really: where do you live? …we bombarded Ismailia, Suez, Port Said, and Port Faud. A million and a half refugees…Since when has the population of South Lebanon become so sacred? They knew perfectly well what the terrorists were doing. After the massacre at Avivim, I had four villages in South Lebanon bombed without authorization.
Q-Without making distinctions between civilians and noncivilians?
A-What distinction? What had the inhabitants of Irbid [a large town in northern Jordan, principally Palestinian in population] done to deserve bombing by us?
Q-But military communiqués always spoke of returning fire and counterstrikes against terrorist objectives.
A-Please be serious. Did you not know that the entire valley of the Jordan had been emptied of its inhabitants as the result of the war of attrition?
Q-Then you claim that the population ought to be punished?
A-Of course, and I have never had any doubt about that. When I authorised Yanouch [diminutive name for the commander of the northern front, responsible for the Lebanese operation] to use aviation, artillery and tanks [in the invasion] I knew exactly what I was doing. It has now been thirty years, from the time of our Independence War, until now, that we have been fighting the civilian [Arab] population which inhabited the villages and towns, and everytime that we do it, the same question gets asked: should we or should we not strike at civilians?[Al-Hamishmar, May 10, 1978]
I have transcribed the interview from “The Question of Palestine” by Edward Said and published in 1979 which contains the fullest version of the interview I have seen (the subject of much contemporary comment). I have placed Edward Said’s interpolations in square brackets as in his book. Al-Hamishmar was a liberal left Israeli newspaper no longer in existence. It seems to me that General Gur provides an honest and straightforward account of his actions and deserved to be applauded for that. He also provides a context for understanding the Israeli way of war which does not seem to have changed very much.
If anyone is aware of a larger or more comprehensive account of this interview anywhere please let me know. There are snippets all over the web but it seems to me that a fuller account would be useful.