The Israeli press and the Qibya operation, 1953

Journal of Palestine Studies

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 40-52

  Morris, Benny ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002061409     PISSN: 0377919X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2538005     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. IDF Archive, 644\56\207.
2. Ariel Sharon with David Chanoff, Warrior: The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 89.
3. Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1919-1956 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 247.
4. Moshe Sharett, Yoman Ishi (Personal diary), vol. 1 (Tel Aviv. Ma'ariv Press, 1978), pp. 39, 44.
5. Israel State Archives, ed. Yemima Rosenthal, Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel, 1953, vol. 8 (Jerusalem, 1996), editorial note, pp. 769-71;
6. Sharett, Yoman Ishi, vol. 1, p. 50.
7. Yedi'ot Aharonot, 13 October 1953.
8. Zmanim, 14 October 1953.
9. HaBoker, 14 October 1953.
10. Ma'ariv, 13 October 1953.
11. About a month after the operation, for example, a reference by the Israel correspondent of the New York Yiddish publication, Undser Zeit, to the fact that the August raid on the al-Burayj refugee camp and Qibya had been carried out by organized and well-armed military units was censored.
12. Two days later, on 18 October, The Post claimed in a front-page news report that "the history of Arab-Jewish relations is a chain of offers of cooperation by Jews, rejected for no plausible reason by the Arabs." The paper even proffered what it considered to be an "example": The Israelis tried to reach an agreement with Jordan's King Abdullah, but in the end "only a meeting of high-ranking officers materialized" and nothing came of it. This, of course, is a wholly untrue and ridiculous description of the secret Israeli-Jordanian talks of 1949-51, in which cabinet ministers from both sides as well as military officers participated.
13. Ha'Aretz and Ma'ariv, 18 October 1953. The information was apparently wrong, juxtaposing Qibya and the (abandoned) village of Qula (Salameh's birthplace, some seven kilometers northwest of Qibya), which was conquered and levelled by Israel in 1948.
14. The policy statement represented a compromise between Mapam's Marxist HaShomer HaTra'ir wing and its moderately socialist (and hard-line nationalist) Ahdut Ha'Avodah wing: ultimately, the position of the party, and hence of Al HaMishmar, on Qibya was determined in meetings of the Mapam Political Committee. At these meetings, various Al HaMishmar editorials on Qibya had been sharply debated by those who thought the newspaper should not express reservations about the government's actions and those who thought it should before the compromise formula was reached.
15. Ha'Aretz, 26 October 1953;
16. and Time, 26 October 1953, p. 26.
17. Protocols of the meetings of the Political Committee of the Progressive Party, 16, 24, and 25 November 1953, in Massuah-Tel Yitzhak Archive, party group 8/17.
18. Evans to Foreign Secretary, 27 October 1953, PRO FO 371/104790 ER1091/442.
19. For example, see Sharett, Yoman Ishi, vol. 1, p. 41,
20. describing Sharett's telephone conversation with the editor of The Jerusalem Post on the night of 15 October 1953.