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Dov Raphael's avatar

This is a very important article, but I think your implication that very few atrocities were perpetrated by the Arabs is an understatement. The best known in the cold-blooded murder of 127 defenders of Kfar Etzion on 13 May 1948 after they surrendered. In the battle of Sejera June 1948, the bodies of Golani soldiers killed in combat were mutilated by the Arab forces and their genitals stuck in their mouths. My mother-in-law, who served with Golani as a nurse, had to recover the bodies, and it traumatized her for life.

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An Historian's avatar

A good article on an important, though I would suggest, rather problematic book.

Take the allegations of rape. One of the key sources is an excerpt from a dossier of reports compiled in the aftermath by British law enforcement investigators. Tauber contends that the document states that the women would not talk to the officer and he assumed they had been raped. If we turn to the actual words, as transcribed in Collins and Dominique O Jerusalem, then a subtly different picture emerges. While the women were indeed traumatised and reticent, they 'need great coaxing before they will divulge any information' -- the clear implication being that, with effort, he *was* able to gather testimony from them and they revealed that they had been raped.

The document also states that 'corroborating physical evidence obtained through medical examination of survivors’. This again confirms that the officer, contrary to Tauber's reading, was able to elicit testimony from the female survivors and that medical evidence confirmed what they told him.

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