Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
31 August
ISRAELI ATTACK AIMED FOR 'MAXIMAL KILLING... AS AN EXAMPLE'
On this day in 1953, Unit 101, led by Ariel Sharon, attacked Bureij refugee camp and killed 43 people in their beds. Six weeks later the same Unit attacked Qibya, killing another 69 Palestinians, mainly women and children by forcing them into their homes which were then blown up. Sharon wrote in his diary, “The orders were utterly clear: Qibya was to be an example for everyone”. Sharon personally ordered his troops to achieve "maximal killing and damage to property".
"يستهدف الهجوم الإسرائيلي "انجاز اكبر عدد من القتلى ... كرادع
أغسطس.31
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1953، هاجمت الوحدة 101 بقيادة أرييل شارون مخيم البريج للاجئين الفلسطينيين (في غزة) وقتلت 43 شخصا في أسرّتهم. بعد ستة أسابيع هاجمت الوحدة نفسها قرية قبية (30 كم شمال غرب رام الله )، مما أسفر عن مقتل 69 فلسطينيا آخر معظمهم من النساء والأطفال، وتم ذلك بإجبارهم على دخول منازلهم ثم تفجيرها بعد ذلك. كتب شارون في مذكراته: "الأوامر كانت واضحة تمامًا: كان يجب أن تكون قبية عبرة للجميع". أمر شارون شخصيا قواته بتحقيق "أقصى قدر من القتل والضرر بالممتلكات".
The Zionist elite was determined from the beginning to turn all of Palestine into a Jewish state in which the local non-Jewish Arab population would be either subjugated or expelled. The Zionists were quite willing to use violence and terrorism to achieve this aim. In "State of Terror", Thomas Suarez traces the resulting unhappy history in detail, to the extent that, in places, it reads like a catalog of Zionist terror attacks. The Zionist policy is made clear in this quote from Menachem Begin, later a Prime Minister of Israel, which appears at the head of the book’s Introduction: “We intend to attack, conquer and keep until we have the whole of Palestine and Transjordan in a Greater Jewish State”...
Palestinian Arab terrorism...was then (and remains today) “a reaction to Zionist ethnic subjugation and expropriation of land, resources and labour, with non-violent resistance having proved futile”. Whereas the Palestinian terrorists were loose bands of guerillas operating in the country districts, the Zionist terrorists were organized militias operating from within urban centers under the protection of those communities.
As Palestinian terrorism died down after brutal suppression of the Arab protests in 1936, Zionist terror escalated, particularly after the 1939 White Paper which placed restrictions on Jewish immigration, “targeting anyone in the way of its political objectives – Palestinian, British or Jewish”.
General Sharon gave instructions as to how to deal with demonstrators: “Cut off their testicles.” He went a step further, telling soldiers on the northern front that “the only good Arab is a dead Arab,” as reported by Abraham Burg, son of the Minister of Interior. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, p278
90 sec video: US support for Sharon as "a man of peace" was unwavering