(Author: Kenneth D Penkin, Vol. 70, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2015)
In the Chanukah 2014 issue of Jewish Affairs (‘Deir Yassin – The Massacre that Wasn’t’), I wrote about the research which clearly proved the mendacity of worldwide allegations claiming the battle of Deir Yassin to have been a massacre.
On 13 May 1948, one month after the attack on Deir Yassin on 9 April, the massacre at Kfar Etzion took place. Both villages were south of and close to Jerusalem.
It is significant to briefly review the history of Kfar Etzion. This is the area where our Father Abraham pitched his tent when he entered the Land of Promise and grazed his flocks. It is the oldest and largest of the four settlements of the Etzion Bloc, where the settlements flanked the road from Hebron to Bethlehem. Orthodox Jews purchased the area of Kfar Etzion from an Arab sheik in 1928. Before the Arabs drove the Jews out in 1929, it was a fruit plantation; in 1936, another Arab uprising destroyed it. After the repurchase by Jews in 1939, sixty concentration camp survivors arrived. In 1947, the community was flourishing, with the fruit trees being productive. Early that year, attacks on it began. These led to Kfar Etzion being cut off from Jerusalem.
The United Nations partition resolution for Palestine (29 November, 1947) placed the Gush Etzion Bloc in the interior of the intended Arab state. Very soon afterwards, the Arabs launched attacks against the Jewish settlements in many parts of Palestine. Although the heavily armed Arab Legion in Palestine was theoretically under British command, they began to operate more and more independently. The Etzion Bloc was strategically placed in the defence and relief of Jerusalem.
On 15 January, 1948, 35 Haganah members under the command of Danny Mass made their way on foot from Har Tuv (near Beit Shemesh) to re-supply Gush Etzion. However, there were not enough hours of darkness to get them to their destination. Arab shepherds from Tzurif spotted them at dawn and summoned a large group of armed locals to block their way. The battle lasted all the next day and the soldiers fought to the last bullet until, at about 16h30, the last of the group was killed. The Arab attackers mutilated the bodies of “the 35” (Hebrew: Lamed Hey). A British soldier who took pictures of the mutilated bodies of the Lamed Hey convoy left his roll of film to be developed in Jerusalem, but never came back for it. Several decades later, the negatives were discovered, but it was decided not to publicize the atrocities.
Lamed Hey Memorial, commemorating the 35 soldiers who fell while coming to the defence of Gush Etzion.
In March 1948, a Jewish convoy from Jerusalem seeking to supply the Etzion Bloc was ambushed, and fifteen soldiers of the Haganah died before the remainder were extricated by the British. There were many similar incidents involving both sides. Starting early in May the Arab Legion, together with thousands of irregulars (mostly local Arab villagers) began a series of assaults on the Etzion settlements. Haganah command in Jerusalem was unable to provide any useful assistance.
On 12 May, two days before the proclamation of the State of Israel, thousands of Arabs and Arab Legionnaires attacked the Etzion Bloc. Kfar Etzion’s 600 settlers, including women and children, were no match against two Arab Legion infantry companies, with armored cars and light artillery, and thousands of local Arab irregulars. The fighting went on for nearly three days. On 13 May, when the hopelessness of their position became undeniable, the remaining defenders of Kfar Etzion laid down their arms. The following day, the three other kibbutzim making up the Gush Etzion Bloc also surrendered. The number of people killed and the perpetrators are in dispute. According to one account, the main group of about fifty defenders were captured by a large number of Arab irregulars, who shouted “Deir Yassin!” They ordered the Jews to sit down, stand up, and sit down again. Suddenly, a legionnaire opened fire on the prisoners with a machine gun from an armoured car, and Arab irregulars joined in the killing. Those Jews not immediately cut down tried to run away but were pursued and killed.
Almost the entire population of Kfar Etzion was massacred, soldiers and civilians alike. The last fifty survivors escaped to the cellar of an old German monastery within the grounds. An Arab pulled the pin of a hand grenade, handed it to a Jewish woman and forced her to throw it inside. Further grenades were thrown into the cellar, completing the blood bath.
According to Itzhak Levy (Jerusalem in the War of Independence, Tel Aviv, 1986), a total of 157 defenders died in the battle of Gush Etzion, about two-thirds of who were residents and the remainder Hagana or Palmach soldiers. The remainder were taken to Jordan as prisoners. The four kibbutzim were totally destroyed. In total, 240 settlers and Haganah and Palmah fighters were killed at the Etzion Bloc during five-and-a-half months of war. Bodies lay in the fields for a year-and-a-half before Jordan allowed Israel to retrieve them, for burial with full military honours at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
In my article on the attack on Deir Yassin, I defined a massacre with various alternative semantics. How do these terms bear comparison with what happened at Gush Etzion?
- annihilation – yes, the members of the Kfar Etzion Kibbutz were annihilated.
- Was it a blood bath, a mass slaughter? Could anything be more of a blood bath than the throwing of grenades into a cellar crowded with civilians?
- Was it a wipe out, a killing, an extermination, a mass slaughter – virtually all the members of the Kibbutz Kfar Etzion were indeed destroyed.
In short, this was certainly a massacre, one of extreme proportions. And as we have seen time and again, it was neither an unusual nor an unprecedented act on the part of the Arabs. According to Abba Eban, the United Nation described the attack as an act of defiance against the law of nations and the judgement of the world.
Nineteen years after the fall of Gush Etzion, during the Six-Day War of June 1967, the Israeli Defence Force recaptured the area. The settlements were rebuilt and new ones added.For almost half a year, the battles of the four Etzion Bloc kibbutzim twenty kilometres from Jerusalem tied up large Arab forces from all over the Hebron hills – forces that consequently were unable to take part in the attacks on the Jews in Jerusalem. The battles of the Etzion Bloc thus helped save Jewish Jerusalem. Prime Minister David Ben Gurion recorded the importance of Gush Etzion, saying, “I can think of no battle in the annals of the Israel Defence Forces which was more magnificent, more tragic or more heroic … If there exists a Jewish Jerusalem, our foremost thanks go to the defenders of Gush Etzion”.
Kenneth D Penkin, a retired Chartered Accountant, has been active for many years in Jewish communal affairs in Cape Town. This includes serving on the committees of various shuls, Highlands House, Herzlia High School and the Cape committee of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies, and as chairman of the United Communal Fund (Cape) for one campaign.
