Letters to the Editor
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When I read stuff like this
It does not make me hate Jews...
It does make me question the policies of my government, the government of the United States, and the State of Israel. It should make ay decent human being do the same.
"Another Israeli historian, Uri Milstein, said there were many incidents in the 1967 war in which Egyptian soldiers were killed by Israeli troops after they had raised their hands in surrender.
"It was not an official policy, but there was an atmosphere that it was okay to do it," Milstein said. "Some commanders decided to do it; others refused. But everyone knew about it."
The following is from an article ("HISTORIAN ALLEGES POW DEATHS IN 1956, 1967") posted by the Jewish Telegraph Agency on August 17, 1995:
"An Israeli military historian has said he knew of hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war who were killed during the 1967 Six-Day War by Israel Defense Force troops, including a unit headed by the current Israeli housing minister. Military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki of Bar-Illan University told Israel Radio on Wednesday that the killings involved a crack unit led by now Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer. Yitzhaki said the executions of 300 to 400 Egyptian commandos in El Arish was the worse case he knew, given that many of the Egyptians had surrendered. They were killed by members of the Shaked commando unit under the command of Ben-Eliezer, a lieutenant colonel at the time, he said. Ben-Eliezer said he was unaware of any prisoner killings.
"Referring to the Six-Day War, Yitzhaki said not only were the executions known, but a report he prepared in 1968 on the deaths was not released under instructions from higher authorities. Responding to the reports, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said he thought such incidents were exceptions to the norm and that they should be condemned by all."
The following is from a front page article ("DEBATE TAINTING IMAGE OF PURITY WRENCHES ISRAELIS: A MORE OPEN SOCIETY TAKES UP KILLING OF POWS DURING WARS") in The Washington Post on August 19, 1995:
"This week, as more soldiers came forward to say they saw fellow Israelis kill unarmed enemies in decades past, a long-suppressed public reckoning began. The stakes are profound for an army whose "purity of arms" has been the core of its self-image through five wars. . . . Also Wednesday, military historian Arye Yitzhaki of Bar Ilan University accused a storied reconnaissance unit, known as Shaked (Almond), of killing hundreds of Egyptians who had abandoned their weapons and fled into the desert in the 1967 Middle East war. . . . One day after Yitzhaki's charge came a first-person account by Gabi Brun of Yedioth Aharonoth, the country's most widely read tabloid. He wrote of watching Israeli troops execute five Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai Desert town of El Arish in 1967. The first of the five, he wrote, was forced to dig the grave. Each of them in turn was shot dead in it. "For a Jew to read this description, I don't know what to say," said left-wing activist Uri Avinery, who is demanding prosecution of Israeli war criminals. "This is the typical SS technique. This is a Nazi story in the most literal sense of the word." . . . . [Ariel] Sharon, interviewed at home today, [described] the sudden debate of old war crimes as "a kind of national suicide. Israel doesn't need this, and no one can preach to us about it - no one," he said. "The Israeli armed forces are a model and symbol of high moral values . . . We speak about an event that took place 40 years ago. Now, when all of us live in a different condition, it's very hard sitting in armchairs and air-conditioned rooms to try and understand what happened on those battlefields. . . . I'm not justifying things like that." . . . . Rabin, too, described this week's traumatic debate as akin to 'national suicide.'"
http://fas.org/sgp/eprint/bamford.html
Just an excerpt of Bamford's response to FAS.