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Raphael Mimoun רפאל מימון

If you're new to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you may think that what we're seeing in Gaza is fundamentally different from what we saw in the past. It's not.

Isaac Steinberg's words after the Qibya massacre in 1953 ring just as true today about Gaza:

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A bit of context first. Isaac Steinberg was the leader of a group of breakaway Zionists called the Territorialists. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Territorialists thought that it wasn't a good idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine because 1) there were already people there and it would inevitably lead to conflict and 2) a state wouldn't be established fast enough to save the Jews of Europe from Nazism. On both accounts, they were right.

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So the Territorialists look for land elsewhere in the world that would not be inhabited to establish a Jewish autonomous region (not a sovereign state). They explored British New Guinea, Kimberley in Australia, etc. Evidently, they failed.

After Israel was established in 1948, Steinberg predicted that Israel would become a militarized society (he was right again) and he criticized Israel's aggressive policy against its neighbors and against the Palestinians.

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After 1949, there was a lot of cross-border violence: Palestinians fighters crossed into Israel to attack Israelis, and Israel launching bloody retaliatory raids against Palestinian villages. In 1953, in response to an attack in Israel that killed 3 Israeli civilians, Israel launched a raid against Qibya, a village in the West Bank (which was at the time under Jordanian control).

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The Israeli army's instructions were "to attack and temporarily to occupy the village, carry out destruction and maximum killing, in order to drive out the inhabitants of the village from their homes." The raid was conducted with 130 soldiers, headed by Ariel Sharon (who many years later would be responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres).

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Israel killed 69 people, most of them women and children. It also destroyed 45 houses, a school, and a mosque. Isaac Steinberg called the massacre "a symbol and a warning to the conscience of our people."

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He wrote: "The fact that Jews—be they soldiers or citizens at large—could in cold calculation murder dozens of innocent men, women & children in the Arab village of Qibya, is in itself a hair-raising crime.But far worse is the indifferent or satisfied reaction to this event on the part of the Jewish population in Israel & almost everywhere else in the world.It has been made “kosher” by all possible strategic, political, sentimental arguments—and the moral issue has been completely ignored."

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