Why has Israel Become a Mirror Image of Nazi Germany and why has Yad Vashem, the Zionist holocaust memorial museum, joined the ranks of holocaust deniers?

Who would have believed that Israel would set about creating a ‘humanitarian’ concentration camp in Gaza?

Israel, Gaza, and the Empire of Lies: Dr. Gabor Maté on Truth and Trauma 

When I brought out Zionism During the Holocaust in 2022, the central theme of which was Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, many people, even some Palestine supporters, thought I was going too far in my comparisons of the Zionist movement with the Nazis.

In 2019 when I declared that Israel was Hitler’s Bastard Offspring, the Jewish Chronicle reported it as ‘Infamous anti-Israel activist Tony Greenstein called Jewish state 'Hitler's bastard offspring'. Owen Jones responded to the arguments about Zionist collaboration by saying ‘No, Jews did not collaborate in their own genocide’ which is of course true. But the Zionists certainly collaborated and worse.

"They're Arresting You For THOUGHTS": The UK's Descent into a Police State – Deep Dive Perspective

At that time Jones equated Zionists and Jews as one and the same.  I hope that today, after having opposed Israel’s genocide and being called an anti-Semite himself, Jones has had second thoughts.

Katie Halper interviews John Mearsheimer About His Statement  That Israel is Behaving Like the Nazis

Today comparisons between Israel, Zionism and the Nazis are commonplace. When John Mearsheimer, the Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, was interviewed by Katie Halper, he confessed that

the more time goes by... the Israelis look like the Nazis, their rhetoric, their behaviour is truly appalling. The Jewish State is behaving like the Nazis did.

Everything I’ve been saying for years has suddenly become commonplace, respectable even. How has this come about? Why is it that I saw in Israel an incipient Nazism that people have only just started to recognise with the Genocide in Gaza?

My awakening was my realisation that the Zionist narrative which placed them at the centre of resistance to the Nazis was one long lie. Whereas most Jews were horrified at the rise of the Nazis and immediately launched a Boycott of Nazi Germany, the Zionists were gleeful. Their movement could only profit at the expense of the Jews.

That was why the Zionists were so vehemently opposed to the Boycott. As the German Zionist Federation wrote in a letter to Hitler, on 21 June 1933, ‘Boycott propaganda… is in essence unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build’.  This letter can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader.

No-one forced the Zionists to write this obsequious letter. It was purely voluntary, an attempt to get themselves in the good books of the Nazis. The Zionist leadership saw the rise to power of the Nazis as a ‘golden opportunity’ that must not be wasted.

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist and a lecturer at Sheffield University wrote in Modern History of Israel that:

 ‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’ 

In October 1942, at the height of the Holocaust, Ben-Gurion surveyed the prospects for Zionism remarking to the Zionist Executive that:

Disaster is strength if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation.

Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership prioritised building a ‘Jewish’ state over rescuing Jews. They went so far as to sabotage rescue attempts that didn’t involve Palestine as a destination. If the Zionists could do this to Jews it doesn’t take much imagination to understand what they are capable of with respect to the Palestinians.

Little Nazi Becky Explaining the Need to Destroy Palestinian Children

And what is worse is that the Nazi holocaust has become the justification for Gaza’s holocaust. The Palestinians of Gaza are described by Israelis as Nazis as justification for the genocide they are perpetrating. A moment’s reflection would show how absurd this is.

It was the Nazis not their victims who had heavy weapons, aircraft and bombs. It was the Nazi military and the SS formations that carried out the most brutal of atrocities not civilians. Yet Palestinian civilians are routinely called ‘Nazis’ as a justification for their murder and obliteration. Zionism depoliticises Nazism and reduces it simply to is anti-Semitic components. Fascism is left absent.

In 1948 Ben-Gurion and his compatriots coldly planned the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in order that they could create a Jewish state. Even in the 55% of the portion of Palestine the UN had allotted to the Zionists there was a rough parity of Jews and Arabs. For a Jewish state to remain ethnically Jewish it was essential to expel the Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing and massacres were their only choice.

Zionism has always been something of a Nazi reprise. Did not Hitler start off with ethnic cleansing? Contrary to the Zionist belief that Nazism was solely about murdering Jews, it was dedicated to the racial resettlement of the whole of Europe and the colonisation of the East with German settlers. Just like the Nazis, the Zionists talk of  ‘lebensraum’ or living space.

For 19 years Israel was able to sell itself as a western social democratic state in the Middle East. It could do this because it had reduced the Arabs in Israel to less than 20% of the population. But with the 6 Days War in 1967 and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank the demons were released. Labour Zionism had been wedded, no less than the Revisionists, to the idea of a Greater Israel.

It was Israeli Labor politicians who promoted the first settlers in the West Bank. Yigal Allon, the leader of the Palmach shock troops, Yisrael Galili and Yitzhak Tabenkin, all from the left of the Zionist movement helped found the Greater Israel movement.

It was but a matter of time before the settlers gained a critical mass in the West Bank. Zionism is a form of political messianism which seeks the End Days every bit as much as the Christian Evangelicals. To the messianic right in Israel’s government, the Ben Gvirs and Smotrichs, the days of redemption and the return of the Messiah are at hand.

All that is needed is the building of the Third Temple and the resumption of animal sacrifices to complete the task. Of course that means the demolition of Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. That will also come to pass unless Zionism is stopped in its tracks.

Up till 1967 Israel was able to hide its apartheid nature behind a facade of granting its Palestinian citizens a vote knowing full well that in an ethnocracy they would be permanently excluded from power. Today they can’t hide it nor do they want to.

In 2015 Isaac Herzog, the then leader of the Israeli Labor Party and now President, told a gathering at Herzliya that

In about a decade, the Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean will be a majority and the Jews a minority. The Jewish national home will become the Palestinian national home. We will be again, for the first time since 1948, a Jewish minority in an Arab state. I want to separate from the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel. I don’t want them to change my flag and my national anthem. I don’t want them to change the name of my country to Isra-stine. (my emphasis)

And there you have it. When it comes to racism, the Labour Zionism of Herzog is no different from that of Netanyahu. Perhaps it’s just that Netanyahu is more honest when he says that ‘Israel is a state of its Jewish citizens not a state of all its citizens.’

Ethnic cleansing is as integral to Zionism as water is to life. You cannot have one without the other. When ethnic cleansing is no longer feasible then Zionism, like Hitler, turns to genocide. Genocidal views of the Palestinians are shared by the majority of Israeli Jews.

The question is why the Israeli state has become the Nazi state of the 21^st century. The answer is simple. Israel was founded on the same principles that the Nazis espoused.

Zionism sought to establish a racially based Jewish state. The definition of ‘Jew’ that Israel uses in the Law of Return is almost identical to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. The Nuremberg Laws banned Jews and non-Jews from marrying and having sexual relations. In Israel too it is impossible for Jews and non-Jews to marry.

New Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely supports Lehava, an anti-miscegenation organisation whose head is being tried for terrorism & anti-Arab incitement.

Their website says they aim to "save Jewish girls" relationships with "Arabs, non-Jews, & foreign workers"

#TzipiTalk pic.twitter.com/nzMWMuvNgV

— Palestine Solidarity Campaign (@PSCupdates) June 15, 2020

Although Israel doesn’t outlaw sexual relations between Jews and Arabs, Jews who have a relationship with an Arab are ostracised. The present Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotoveli, was particularly concerned to combat intermarriage or miscegenation. It is called ‘national treason’. When a Jewish woman and an Arab man had a wedding there were demonstrations outside the reception. 

It should have been obvious that in a Jewish state, anyone who isn’t Jewish was going to be seen as an outsider. Israeli Palestinians are not even second class citizens. According to opinion polls the majority of Israelis, including most members of the present government, would like to expel them.

Israel likes to portray itself as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ but following the Jewish Nation State Law of 2018 Israel is officially a state of its Jewish not all its citizens.

The most enthusiastic participants in the Nazi holocaust were the Christian ethno-nationalist states of Eastern Europe, like Romania, Slovakia and Croatia. Why expect Israel to be any different?

Given the right set of circumstances any group of people can become extreme racists and genocidaires. Why should Jewish people be any different?  Racism isn’t something that is biologically inherited.

Ethno-religious states are a relic of feudalism which is why Zionism hated Jewish Emancipation. Zionism was a Jewish Supremacist settler colonial movement. It used to be able to pass itself off as having a left-wing and a right-wing but during the genocide we have not had a peep out of the ‘left’ Zionists in the Jewish Labour Movement.

The goal of Netanyahu and the Israeli government, aided by Trump, is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. However whether they are able to get away with it remains to be seen. Hitler also began with wanting to expel the Jews and ended up exterminating them. 

The IDF is deliberately killing as many Palestinians as possible. Which is why Bobby Vylan was absolutely right to say ‘Death to the IDF’.  Those who object would have objected to ‘Death to the SS’.

Zionism was in essence a Jewish Racial Preservation Project that sought the equivalent of the thousand years Reich. It was prepared to sacrifice millions of Jews during WW2 in order to ensure the permanent life of the Jewish people-race. Ben-Gurion explained his thinking in January 1933 when he warned that

Zionism… is not primarily engaged in saving individuals’ and that if there was ‘a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first. [Shabtai Teveth, The Burning Ground 1886-1948), p. 855]

Chaim Weizmann, the President of the Zionist Organisation and the first President of the Israeli state was explicit in his speech to the 20^th World Zionist Congress (1937) in Zurich that

The old ones will pass, they will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust, in a cruel world…. Two millions, and perhaps less She’erith Hapletah- ‘only a remnant shall survive.’ We have to accept it.

In the Autumn 1937 issue of New Judea Weizmann elaborated:

We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us. We want only the educated to enter Palestine for the purpose of increasing its culture. The other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them.  These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and they may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine.

When Roosevelt called the Evian Conference in July 1938 to try and find a solution to the Jewish refugee problem the Zionists were worried, lest the conference might succeed!

Ben-Gurion at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 26 June 1938 was unremittingly hostile to Evian:

‘No rationalizations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.'

At the same meeting Menachem Ussishkin, a member of the Zionist Executive  said that:

He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains the main venue for Jewish emigration. All other emigration countries do not interest him… The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration.

If Zionism was prepared to sacrifice Jews to the Nazis to achieve its aims then it isn’t likely to have much difficult in killing Palestinians.

Last week it seemed as if the world woke up to Israel’s lies and realised that what we have been saying for nearly two years was true. Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza and that includes starving the population, including children.

People are beginning to realise just what monsters Zionism has produced. The Heidi Bachrams and Victoria Bhogals of this world, with their self-serving lies and Netanyahu with his description of the SS, sorry IDF, as ‘the most moral army in the world’ are now seen for what they are – supporters of the new Auschwitz that is Gaza today.

There are even Israelis who talk of introducing gas chambers to complete the job. This is where Zionism has ended up.

Noone cut a more absurd figure than that prime piece of gammon, David Mencer, with his absurd statement that it was Hamas that was starving the people of Gaza and that the IDF was doing its best to act as wet nurse to Gaza’s babies.

When the Daily Express of all papers leads on successive days with pictures of the emaciated bodies of Palestinian babies even the most stupid Zionist knows or should know that the game is up.

Alistair Campbell admits that its genocide in Gaza & says false accusations of antisemitism are preventing debate!

Even people like Piers Morgan and Alistair Campbell now accept that Israel is carrying out a genocide and are beginning to understand that they have been on the wrong side of history.

No one should doubt that it is a holocaust in Gaza. When the dust settles on the rubble, it is likely that the number of deaths will be in the hundreds of thousands.

The only people who are unmoved are Starmer and Trump.  Trump is still blaming Hamas for what is happening in Gaza but the United States too is losing. The leader of the ‘free world’ is actively complicit in a Nazi-style genocide and yet Trump and Starmer, to say nothing of the Germans, are still supplying Israel with weapons.

Israeli leaders have been open about their intentions. It is the intention to wipe out and destroy a people that made this a genocide.

Israel Deliberately Burns the Food That It Prevented From Being Distributed

It is not as if the genocide deniers weren’t warned. On 9^th October Defence Minister Yoav Gallant spelled out exactly what Israel’s strategy was going to be when, in an an echo of Himmler’s description of the untermenschen he declared:

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed, ... We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly

Gallant was not alone. Netanyahu compared the Palestinians to Amalek, who God commanded the Israelites to wipe out – to the very last child and suckling infant. President Isaac Herzog stated that there were no innocents in Gaza and Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, of the Bnei Moshe yeshiva openly advocated  the murder of Palestinian children because they are the future generation of Palestinian fighters.

Today's terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them alive. The women are essentially the ones who are producing the terrorists,... It's not only the 14 or 16-year-old boy, the 20 or 30-year-old man who takes up a weapon against you but also the future generation. There's really no difference

Mali and Israel’s other Nazi Rabbis have long been making the same argument that Himmler made about  Jewish children. At Posnan on October 6, 1943 Himmler told the SS Generals:

For I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men—in other words, killing them or having them killed—and then allowing their children to grow up to wreak vengeance on our children and grandchildren.

Bob Geldof Asks How Israel Can Betray Its History by Starving Children - But This is Its History

When Bob Geldof was quizzed by Trevor Philips on Sky about the claims of Netanyahu that there was no famine he simply responded ‘he’s a liar’. One suspects that the BBC, which would have both sided the Nazi holocaust, would have edited it out.

The tide has turned, at least for now, as Israel’s Nazi leaders realise that their lies are no longer believed. Perhaps the final straw was setting up the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, run by mercenaries, who killed those seeking food along with the IDF.  The GHF is a death trap run by a Christian Evangelist, the Rev. Johnnie Moore.

Over one thousand Palestinians were murdered in their attempt to stave off starvation yet still the Zionists and Mencer blamed Hamas which was doing its best to protect the food from the criminal gangs Israel had armed, as Netanyahu has admitted.

Although food has begun to enter Gaza Israel has not let up on its bombardment of civilians. Compared to the IDF, Hamas are the equivalent of Sunday school teachers. They have sought, against the odds, to protect the people of Gaza from the Nazi wolves that have descended upon the Gaza Strip. Their proscription is an outrage.

It is no wonder that Starmer’s Labour has plumbed new depths of unpopularity. It has nothing to say, still less do because it is tied at the hip to Trump’s lawless regime in the US. Starmer’s promise to recognise a Palestinian state by September is an empty gesture. There is no Palestinian state so how can one recognise one? It is symbolic at best. If he were serious he would stop the supply of arms.

However even the more intelligent sections of the British ruling class realise that whereas Blair was, at least until the Iraq war, a sophisticated advocate of their interests, Starmer and his clique of self-serving careerists are both inarticulate and corrupt. Starmer managed to secure the most freebies despite being a millionaire.

Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action is also beginning to haunt her.  If she had heeded the advice of Home Office officials she would have ignored the pressure of the Israeli government and the Zionist lobby. Yvette Cooper is a stupid woman, a rich, white ‘feminist’ who hypocritically identifies with the Suffragettes, who not only damaged property but also had a bombing campaign. They were called criminals and terrorists in their time.

Such is the groundswell of opposition to the ban that the heavy handed tactics of the Metropolitan Police and the Liverpool Police, far from frightening people off are causing them to defy this law in ever greater numbers.  It will be interesting to see whether Judge Chamberlain has a sensitive antennae or whether he will do what judges often do which is to rail at anything approaching subversion.

Either way August 9^th on which date Defend Our Juries have called for 500 people to hold signs supporting Palestine Action is likely to be oversubscribed. Police this week in Totnes, Devon and Edinburgh decided not to arrest the ‘terrorists’ including George Monbiot.

When a law lacks public support and is seen to attack the most basic of all liberties, the right to protest, people have no option to break the law. The law has become an instrument of coercion and oppression and it is an illegitimate law as Martin Luther King called it.  Or in the words of Dame Heather Hallett it is an oppressive law.

Israel may think it has won a military victory but the reality today is that it has drained away its support. It has shown that it is a failed, genocidal state which no more deserves to exist than the Nazi state or the Apartheid South African state.

Perhaps the final straw is the plan of the Israeli state and its Defence Minister, to establish what even Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister has described as a concentration camp.

The holocaust in Gaza has exposed like nothing before it the moral vacuum and sheer hollowness of the Holocaust industry. All its clichés about learning from the holocaust are seen to be nothing but empty words aimed at legitimising Zionism and its bastard child.

The former Chair of Yad Vashem, Avner Shalev, denied that Israel was perpetrating a genocide in Gaza. The present Chair of Yad Vashem, the former fascist and member of the anti-Arab Tehiya party, Dani Dayan, doubled down on this claiming that such a comparison ‘desecrates the memory of the victims.’

What desecrates the memory of Jewish holocaust victims is shooting children in the head and starving them to death, creating torture camps and razing Gaza to the ground in the same way as the Nazis raised the Warsaw Ghetto to the ground. What really defiles the memory of the holocaust victims is when one in two Jewish Israelis, indeed more than that, support the extermination of all Palestinians.

However Yad Vashem was not founded to draw universal lessons from the Nazi holocaust. Its purpose was to use the holocaust in order to justify the establishment of a racist Jewish state. It would appear that its attempts to defend the indefensible are coming apart at the seams. Those who deny the genocide in Gaza are no better than those who deny the Nazi holocaust.

Zionism, like Nazism and Apartheid belongs in the dustbin of history.  It is based on the subjugation of the other and it is to be hoped that Jews outside Israel will shake off the lobby and its rabbinical clique and join the human race again.

Tony Greenstein

At last – the truth about Kafr Qasem – the village in which Israel murdered 51 people

The massacre at Kafr Qasem was supposed to be the Prelude to Transfer

Photographs of Victims of the Massacre at Kafr Qasem

On October 29 1956, on the eve of the Suez War and Israel’s attack on Egypt, martial law was declared in the Arab village of Kafr Qasem on the border with Jordan.  The orders of the Border Police Unit were to shoot to kill anyone breaking a curfew which was imposed at 5 pm. Villagers coming back from working in the fields were not to be excepted. 

Up till now the accepted Israeli version of this  story has been that this was a tragic series of misunderstandings combined with the normal Israeli contempt for Arab life. Israel was about to engage in its first war of expansion, colluding in an attack on Egypt with Britain and France and it didn’t want the Arabs of the Triangle to play the part of a fifth column in the event of war with Jordan.

At the subsequently trial of Colonel Shadmi, the Israeli Defence Forces Commander of the Border Police, Major Shmuel Malinki testified that:

'[Shadmi said] anyone who left his house would be shot. It would be best if on the first night there were 'a few like that' and on the following nights they would be more careful. I asked: in the light of that, I can understand that a guerilla is to be killed but what about the fate of the Arab civilians? And they may come back to the village in the evening from the valley, from settlements or from the fields, and won't know about the curfew in the village - I suppose I am to have sentries at the approaches to the village? To this Col. Issachar replied in crystal clear words, 'I don't want sentimentality and I don't want arrests, there will be no arrests'. I said: 'Even though?'. To that he answered me in Arabic, Allah Yarhamu, which I understood as equivalent to the Hebrew phrase, 'Blessed be the true judge' [said on receiving news of a person's death]'.

Shadmi

Shadmi has always denied this conversation. Israeli historian Adam Raz has now written a history of the Affair which points to a different explanation.  Israel hoped to use what is normally called the fog of war in order to expel the Arabs of the Triangle, a group of Arab villages near the Jordanian border, into Jordan.  This would solve the ‘problem’ of a major concentration of Israeli Arabs in the Galilee.  The murders in Kafr Qasem were supposed to be the start of such a transfer. The only problem is that there never was a war with Jordan.

It is also now abundantly clear that the ‘trial’ of Colonel Shadmi was never intended to be anything other than a show trial for the benefit of the international community. He was in the end fined one-tenth of one shekel.

Tony Greenstein

Kafr Qasem Memorial

 General's Final Confession Links 1956 Massacre to Israel's Secret Plan to Expel Arabs

'Yiska' Shadmi, the highest IDF officer tried for the Kafr Qasem massacre, admitted before his death that his trial was staged to protect military and political elites. Historian Adam Raz believes that behind the horrific 1956 event was a secret plan to transfer Israel's Arabs

By

Ofer Aderet

Oct 13, 2018

In mid-July, a strange performance played out in the Military Court of Appeals at the Kirya, the defense establishment’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. The judge, an Israel Defense Forces general, called Meretz MK Esawi Freij, from the Israeli Arab town of Kafr Qasem, to the witness stand, and asked him just one question: Would publication of classified documents relating to the massacre in his village in 1956 be likely to stir up its residents?

Freij, several of whose family members were among the dozens of victims killed by the Border Police, responded that the anger has not dissipated in the 62 years that have passed since the incident. However, the MK emphasized, the villagers are not looking for revenge.

“We have no interest in disrupting the security of the state or the life of any person,” he said, adding that people know exactly where Brig. Gen. (res.) Issachar “Yiska” Shadmi, the highest-ranking officer to be brought to trial after the event, lives.

Shadmi, the commander of the brigade responsible for that area at the time – and under whose orders the massacre was carried out – was not far away at the time, sitting in his spacious home in the upscale neighborhood of Ramat Aviv. He didn’t know that his name was once again being raised in connection with the affair that had hounded him for his entire adult life, like a mark of Cain imprinted on his forehead.

The trial, which is still ongoing, involves a lawsuit by historian Adam Raz, who is demanding that the IDF and Defense Establishment Archives declassify documents relating to the affair. “Most of the material is still classified,” says Raz, 35, who works for the Berl Katznelson Foundation, in a recent interview with Haaretz. “I was surprised to discover that it’s easier to write about the history of Israel’s nuclear program than about Israel’s policies regarding its Arab citizens.” The court has yet to hand down its judgment, but Raz’s Hebrew-language book “Kafr Qasem Massacre: A Political Biography,” is being published this month by Carmel Press. It is the first such comprehensive study of the affair.

Issachar “Yiska” Shadmi testifying at his 1957 trial, as reported in the weekly Haolam Hazeh. Haolam Hazeh

One of the people Raz interviewed was Shadmi, who died last month at the age of 96. Back in the summer of 2017, this writer joined Raz for the conversations with Shadmi, which took place at the latter’s home. With the frankness often reserved to those who have reached a ripe old age, Shadmi provided a rare, troubling behind-the-scenes look at one of the formative events in the history of the State of Israel, and especially of its Arab community. Among other things, the incident gave rise to the concept of a “blatantly illegal order,” and led to an exceptional apology by the president of Israel for a crime that the state’s soldiers committed against its citizens.

Now, in the wake of Shadmi’s death and the publication of Raz’s book, we are publishing the former IDF officer’s testimony for the first time. At its center is his contention that the 1958 court case against him was nothing more than a show trial, staged in order to keep Israel’s security and political elite – including Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, and GOC Central Command (and later chief of staff) Tzvi Tzur – from having to take responsibility for the massacre.

Shadmi told us that the trial, in which he was initially accused of murder but later acquitted, was intended to mislead the international community with regard to Israel’s ostensible pursuit of justice. For his part, Raz is convinced that the background to ostensibly staging the trial was pressure from above to conceal “Operation Mole” (Hafarperet), a secret program to expel to Jordan the population of the so-called Triangle of Arab towns, located southeast of Haifa – details of which have never been revealed.

Shadmi was blessed to have been able to age in dignity. In his final years, he was lucid and enjoyed good health. When he died, he was buried in the cemetery of the kibbutz of which he had been an early member, Sdot Yam in Caesarea. In our long conversations with him, he recalled minute details of the formative incident in his life.

“This subject has always disturbed me. Why? Because when people say ‘Kafr Qasem,’ they say ‘Shadmi.’ ‘Shadmi, the guy from Kafr Qasem,’” he said. “There are those who step on a land mine and lose their legs. I stepped on a land mine. Its name was Kafr Qasem.”

‘Good Arabs, bad Arabs’

Yiska Shadmi’s life was replete with all the episodes one would expect in the biography of a member of the so-called 1948 generation, the generation that founded the state. Were it not for the stain of Kafr Qasem, he would have entered the history books as one of the first senior commanders of the IDF, and perhaps he would even have gone into politics, like his friend and peer Yitzhak Rabin.

Shadmi was born in 1922, the sabra son of two immigrants from Eastern Europe, Shoshana (née Goldberg) and Nahum Kramer. The family name, meaning “grocer” or “peddler” in German, was Hebraicized to Shadmi, a derivation of the biblical word shdema, or field. “Agriculture, not commerce and the stock market. This was the Zionist revolution,” he wrote in his memoir.

Nahum had served in the Red Army, and became one of the first commanders of the Haganah pre-state army and then of the nascent IDF. Yiska, an only child, spent his earliest years on the agricultural settlement Bitanya, near Lake Kinneret, before moving with his parents to the nearby community of Menahemia.

As a boy, he received initial training for the Haganah. In his memoir, he writes of his first military operation, serving as aide de camp to Haganah officer Yigal Allon, who would later serve as the legendary commander of the elite Palmach strike force. At about the same time, during the years of the Arab Revolt (1936-1939), Shadmi became aware for the first time of the Jewish-Arab conflict.

“I grew up together with Arab children. We were friends and would play together. To me, Arabs were not foreigners that one needed to hate or fear. I grew up with them, I spoke with them, they spoke Hebrew and Yiddish, and I spoke Arabic mixed with Yiddish,” he wrote in his personal diary. “When the riots broke out, a rift was opened. There were good Arabs, who worked, and bad Arabs, who shot guns. In the context of the fears that gave rise to the conflict, I began to discover the figure of the Jewish hero, riding a horse with a keffiyeh and an abaya [robe].”

In a different entry, from 1938, he wrote:

“Today we are in a terrible situation in this land, a whirlpool of blood. Self-restraint is weakening and acts of vengeance are taking its place. We don’t have the strength to bear it any longer. The beast-like instinct within us is awakened by the scene of blood flowing throughout the land… The rifle is the tool that gives every one of us the privilege of living. Were it not for the rifle, we would not be able to stay alive in this cruel world… I respect the device that kills!!!”

In 1939, Shadmi joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam, which had initially been founded in 1936 north of Haifa but moved south to Caesarea in 1940. He served in the British Mandate’s coast guard, and later as a Palmach platoon commander at Beit Ha’arava, near the Dead Sea, and as a commander in the Haganah Field Corps in Samaria. During “Black Sabbath” in 1946 (when Mandatory forces rounded up several thousand Jewish soldiers and officials, following a spate of violent actions by Jewish forces), he was arrested and taken to a British detention camp. In the War of Independence, he commanded the Fifth Battalion of the Harel Brigade and the Seventh Battalion of the Negev Brigade. Afterward, he climbed the ranks in the IDF and served, among other positions, as commander of the Officers Training School and of the Golani Brigade.

Then 62 years ago this month, Shadmi stepped on his land mine. It all began on October, 29, 1956, the first day of what would be called the Sinai Campaign. Shadmi, then responsible for a Central Command brigade, was tasked with defending the area abutting the Jordanian border, and ordered the ongoing curfew that was then in effect, under martial law, to begin earlier than usual that day on the Arab villages in the vicinity, among them Kafr Qasem.

The soldiers accused of perpetrating the Kafr Qasem massacre. The commander of the battalion, Shmuel Malinki, is on the left.

The commander of the Border Police battalion, Shmuel Malinki, said later during the trial held for him and the soldiers involved in the events, that Shadmi’s order said to shoot at anyone who violated curfew. The words that he attributed to Shadmi have since entered the history books:

“During the hours of the curfew, they can be in their homes and do as they desire… but whomever is seen outside, who violates curfew, will be shot. Better that a few go down, and then they will learn for the next time.”

Malinki also said that in response to his question: “What will be the fate of the civilians who return to the village after the curfew [takes effect],” Shadmi said: “I don’t want sentimentality; I don’t want detainees.” When Malinki persisted in his request to receive a straight answer, he claimed that Shadmi said, “Allah Yerhamu” – Arabic for “God have mercy [on their souls].”

At his trial, Shadmi denied ordering the killing of curfew violators. Whatever the case, the result was a disaster. Between 5 P.M. and 6 P.M. on that fateful day, 47 Arabs who were returning to their homes in Kafr Qasem – boys and girls, women and men – were shot to death by Border Guard troops. An additional victim, who was elderly, had a heart attack after he learned that his grandchild had been killed. In the end, according to the villagers, the total number of victims was 51.

Eight of the 11 IDF officers and soldiers put on trial for the shootings were convicted and sent to prison for varying terms, but later their sentences were commuted, by the president and chief of staff, among others. By 1960, all had been released without having served most of their jail terms. Some were even awarded desirable state jobs – Malinki, for instance, was appointed chief of security at the nuclear reactor at Dimona by Ben-Gurion.

A little more than two years after the bloody massacre at Kafr Qasem, Shadmi became the highest-ranking officer to be brought to trial for it. He was accused of the murder of 25 villagers (half of the victims, because there was no proof that the order to shoot violators of the curfew had been intended to include women and children, as it was interpreted). In the end, Shadmi was exonerated of the murder charges: The judge determined that the accusations against him were “unproven and unsubstantiated generally and in principle.” The ruling stated that “the orders to shoot violators of the curfew could not be understood in any way as orders to shoot people returning from work to the area under curfew.”

Shadmi was convicted on only one procedural and technical charge – of “exceeding his authority” and giving orders regarding the hours and parameters of the curfew, when only the military governor was authorized to do so. The punishment he received infuriated the residents of Kafr Qasem: a symbolic fine of 10 prutot, or one-100th of an Israeli pound, and a reprimand.

When he left the courthouse, Shadmi excitedly waved his hand, grasping a 10-prutot coin. A photo of this was published in the press and Shadmi’s coin thus became a watchword among Arab citizens of what they saw as the cheapness of their lives in the eyes of the regime.

Issachar “Yiska” Shadmi, after his trial, holding the 10-prutot coin he had to pay as a symbolic fine. Residents of Kafr Qasem were infuriated by the punishment.

‘Not Don Quixote’

Shadmi celebrated his “victory” with Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, who described in his own diary how “we drank to his exoneration.” A party was held at Sdot Yam, with Chief of Staff Haim Laskov and other IDF generals in attendance. Yet in retrospect, Shadmi told Adam Raz and myself, the expressions of joy were mostly for public consumption; he was not at all surprised by the verdict he received. He told us that the outcome of the trial, which he called a “play” and a “show trial,” was fixed from the start. From his descriptions – some of which also appear in his self-published memoir – it seems that the legal proceedings were conducted in defiance of all accepted norms.

From the start, he claimed, he was promised the best legal defense. The state appointed the highly respected attorney Yaacov Salomon – and paid for his services. In light of this, Shadmi said he felt the balance of power between the weak military prosecutor and the superlative defense he was awarded was always tilted in his favor.

Moreover, according to Shadmi, “I was told that I could object to the judges that were appointed if I didn’t trust them.” He also received assurances from another senior IDF and legal figure, Meir Shamgar, deputy military adjutant general at the time and later president of the Supreme Court. Shamgar, Shadmi recalled, “took me aside and said: ‘Listen, this is a show trial,’” and urged him not to worry. Shadmi added that “Shamgar whispered to me that this was to my benefit.”

Asked now for his response to Shadmi’s comment, former justice Shamgar told Haaretz that he did not remember saying such things.

Eventually, Shadmi said he understood that he had truly become an actor in a grand performance – after his attorney, Salomon, “tried to brainwash me and persuade me to take a defensive position that I didn’t like and didn’t match the facts as they were known to me. Facts that gave me moral courage in asserting the justice of my case and of my honest and simple claims.”

For some two weeks before the trial opened, he and Salomon stayed at a Tel Aviv hotel, working on their arguments “every day until 2 A.M.,” Shadmi recounted. “He wanted to break me, so that I would accept the version that he would dictate to me, what I should say in court…. He tried to plant things in my head.”

Behind his words hid Shadmi’s most serious criticism, according to which Salomon, as Ben-Gurion’s emissary, tried to use Shadmi as a means to distance senior IDF commanders and the political echelon from the Kafr Qasem massacre – as a kind of punching bag to stand trial in their stead and prevent the indictments of others.

In the center of the drama stood Tzvi “Chera” Tzur, who was Shadmi’s superior officer at the time of the massacre and later became the IDF’s sixth chief of staff. Shadmi was convinced that the judges “needed to protect Chera” and that his attorney “was not protecting me, but protecting the IDF and Tchera and the rest of those…. So this wouldn’t climb any higher,” in his words. 

David Ben-Gurion. GPO

These comments may sound conspiratorial, but Raz found support for them from yet another source. In a meeting of the cabinet on November 23, 1958, about a month before the opening of Shadmi’s trial, Ben-Gurion was already predicting, “From talking with Shadmi, I assume that he will not say that he received an order like that, that one needs to fire…. Tzur isn’t on trial. Shadmi won’t say such a thing.”

Shadmi also noted that his father, who until 1958 was president of the Military Court of Appeals, was a friend of Shamgar’s: “Shamgar told my father ‘Explain to your son that they aren’t out to get him, but want to protect the IDF.”

According to Shadmi, Ben-Gurion, by means of his underlings, made sure that the military judges appointed to conduct the trial would be among those who had been under Tzur’s command in the Givati Brigade, so they would not exactly feel comfortable incriminating him. “They were not chosen by chance,” Shadmi told us. “And in their outlooks and political positions, they were aligned with the same party of which Ben-Gurion was an admired leader.”

On this point, however, Shadmi qualified his statement: “I am not at all convinced that the judges consciously saw themselves as someone else’s emissaries.” And indeed, according to him, “those who dispatched them to the court intended, quite clearly, that they would assist naturally in building an obstacle against accusations, even partial ones, involving the most senior ranks.”

Ultimately, as Shadmi admitted, he went along with his attorney’s game and adapted himself to the defense dictated to him.

“I also set a barrier for myself at the beginning of the trial, because I knew the legal rule – that if someone with a higher rank than mine is implicated in the accusations, that doesn’t relieve me of responsibility. And that is also the reason I did not try to press my attorney to call the general [Tzur] to testify at the trial.”

Added Shadmi,

I was an IDF man, and if needed, I would keep silent about all sorts of things about which I knew more or differently. I didn’t sally forth like Don Quixote to fight for my justice, because I knew what they wanted from me.

Wrapped in cotton

Shadmi thought that his trial was intended to prevent the case from reaching the International Court of Justice, which had been established by the United Nations in The Hague following World War II. “They explained to me that they needed to put me on trial, because if I had tried in my own country and convicted, even if I was fined only a penny, I wouldn’t go to The Hague…. If they didn’t prosecute me… I would be tried at The Hague. And that is something that neither I nor the country were interested in.”

It bears mentioning here that in those days, the ICJ did not operate in a way that would made it possible to put Israeli officers or politicians on trial. However, as historian Raz notes, “the fact Shadmi was mistaken about the international judicial system, didn’t mean that there wasn’t real concern in the Israeli upper echelons about an international response.” According to Raz, from Ben-Gurion’s response to the affair, it appears that the Israeli leadership was in fact “very worried about the potential international response.” But if there is any documentation of this in the state archives, it is not accessible to the public.

Shadmi’s account, as we heard it last year in his home, are borne out by the facts appearing in the archival documents. Indeed, Raz did encounter other testimony in the army archives suggesting that already then, people were calling for more senior figures than Shadmi to stand trial.

Thus, for instance, Transportation Minister Moshe Carmel wrote:

“We will not be able to avoid asking questions and won’t be able to flinch from investigating if indeed the final and ultimate responsibility falls upon Col. Shadmi, and on him alone…. A commander does not operate, in the end, on his own say-so, but within a framework of plans, orders and guidelines, formed somewhere else, invented for him by a higher commanding authority…. The public seeks to know, and rightly so, what orders and guidelines were given to Col. Shadmi by his superiors, according to which he operated and dispatched subsequent, more particular directives…. And also from whom he received his orders.”

Later on, the grandson of Yitzhak Greenbaum, Israel’s first interior minister, related the following:

“When the Kafr Qasem massacre occurred, my grandfather explained to me how an order for a massacre is handed down from the senior members of government to operational personnel, without the senior ranks saying anything explicit that might seem like an order.”

In 1986, in an article by Dalia Karpel in the Tel Aviv weekly Ha’ir, Malinki’s widow was quoted as saying:

“Part of the trial was conducted behind closed doors and it was clear that it was impossible to go up the chain of command looking for responsible parties, and to reveal the part of the GOC Central Command, chief of staff or even the government in this affair. It would mar the image of the state in the world. Ben-Gurion told my husband: ‘I am asking for a human sacrifice on behalf of the state, just as there are sacrificial casualties, people who fall in war. I promise you that your status and rank will be returned to you.”

On the basis of testimonies, written and recorded, that he gathered, Raz is convinced of Shadmi’s version of events, according to which the whole trial was fixed:

“Ben-Gurion sought an insurance policy that would enable him to point to Shadmi as the one who gave the order, and to stop there.... Shadmi would be prosecuted because Ben-Gurion and his colleagues needed to prove to the public and the political establishment that the chain of command led no further than the brigade commander. And in the end, as noted, [Shadmi] was also exonerated.”

Shadmi’s silence with respect to those above him paid off, even if not immediately. On the military level, his promising career came to an end in 1962, and he was not promoted to the rank of full general like his peers. He continued to serve in the reserves, fighting in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, in which he was seriously wounded in a helicopter crash.

Brig. Gen. (res.) Issachar “Yiska” Shadmi at home in Sdot Yam, in 2017. Ofer Aderet

Behind the scenes, though, as Shadmi claimed, a deal was cooked up that paid off later for both sides. “Chera wrapped me up in cotton,” he said, referring to Tzvi Tzur. “I got anything I wanted,” he recalled candidly.

The details of the entire affair, had they surfaced today, would have been tagged immediately as being tainted by corruption and liable to land people in court. Nonetheless, all these years later, Shadmi was quick to acknowledge that because of the “debt” that Tzur owed him, for not revealing all he knew in the courtroom, he was well compensated as a civilian: “I turned into a major Defense Ministry building contractor.”

Shadmi went into some detail regarding the lucrative work from his defense work, but requested that these parts of the interviews not be recorded. He added that Tzur took care of him “with an open hand” in this regard. The reason, he emphasized time and again, was that, “I kept quiet, I didn’t speak out against the IDF. Tzur understood that I saved him.”

‘Operation Mole’

Adam Raz is convinced that there was a reason that Shadmi’s trial was staged and aimed to protect his superior officers, as well as for other reasons. Raz believes there was an effort at the same time to hide the existence of a secret program called “Operation Mole,” whose goal was the expulsion of Arabs from the Triangle, which included Kafr Qasem, to Jordan.

Historian Adam Raz.

“The public is familiar with the ‘Mole’ program only as a rumor,” says Raz, noting that it has been mentioned in the press only a handful of times over the years, since the 1960s. In 1991, the journalist and linguist Ruvik Rosenthal dealt with the subject in the newspaper Hadashot, and later expanded his article in a collection of essays he edited about the Kafr Qasem massacre. But details of the program were never fully revealed, and much of the documentation remains classified in the IDF archive. The evidence includes closed-door discussions held during the Kafr Qasem trials. The speakers used only code, referring to a “famous order” dealing with “an animal of the mammalian family.”

Still Raz managed to follow the scent of the secret scheme by means of other sources, among them lawyers involved in the trial of Malinki and the soldiers, other testimony, interviews with the “heroes of the affair,” etc. In a meticulous archival investigation, he unearthed tidbits, such as: “A. Surround the village; B. announce the evacuation to the village elders and the option to cross the border within the established period (three hours).”

In addition, Raz was able to find the written testimony of Gen. (res.) Avraham “Avrasha” Tamir, the architect of the program, according to which “Ben-Gurion requested a plan to deal with the Arab population of the Triangle” in the event that a war would break out with Jordan. Tamir’s account accords with the explanation given by Ben-Gurion himself, in 1953, at a cabinet meeting on the subject of martial law – to the effect that there was a solution to the ostensible problem of the Arabs in the Triangle, and that it “depended upon whether there would be a war or not.”

Tamir’s testimony states:

“The plans were more or less mine… I took what the Americans did to the Japanese in World War II [imprisoning them in internment camps out of concern that they would constitute a “fifth column”]. To put it simply, if war broke out, whoever did not flee to Jordan would be evacuated to concentration camps in the rear; they wouldn’t stay on the border. These were the plans, to evacuate them to the rear so that they wouldn’t impede the war effort…. The way to Jordan would remain open for their flight if they so chose. But whoever remained – we would need to evacuate them to the rear to facilitate freedom of action in which the defense forces could maneuver.”

To understand the historical context connecting Operation Mole, the Sinai Campaign and the Kafr Qasem massacre, one must remember that in roughly that same period, up until the Six-Day War, when Israel conquered the West Bank, Arab villages like Kafr Qasem were situated very close to the border with Jordan. In the weeks before the massacre, tensions rose and many infiltrators penetrated Israel. The IDF was increasingly worried about cooperation between the latter and their countrymen in the Israeli villages. Until 1966, martial law was in effect in those communities, among them Kafr Qasem.

The massacre occurred on the day the Sinai Campaign began: In it, Israel, England and France joined forces in fighting against Egypt, and eventually the IDF conquered the Sinai peninsula. In a certain sense, the massacre was part of that same war, but took place on a completely different front, as Rubik Rosenthal wrote in his 2000 book “Kafr Qasem: Events and Myth” (Hakibbutz Hameuchad), the first book about the massacre.

In the period prior to the Sinai Campaign, Israel launched a diversionary operation, in the context of which forces were concentrated along the Jordanian border, including the area of Kafr Qasem, to create the impression that Israel was preparing an attack on its eastern front. “The lower ranking officers and troops that participated in the operations thought that war really was breaking out on the eastern border,” writes Rosenthal.

Raz thinks one must see the Kafr Qasem massacre in this context:

“The massacre wasn’t perpetrated by a group of soldiers who were out of control, as has been argued until today. From their point of view they were following orders, which in essence would lead to the expulsion of the villagers,”

he says. Or, in other words, they were operating in line with the directives of Operation Mole, as they understood them.

Raz’s study presents much testimony that supports this view. In his book he reconstructs the hour-by-hour chain of events that led to the horrifying outcome on that fateful day, and thus proves his claim that there is a connection between the massacre and the secret operation.

Thus, for example, he provides authoritative documentation about meetings prior to the massacre between the battalion commander, Malinki, and other top brass, which dealt with the secret scheme – sometimes explicitly and sometimes without actually naming it. On October 24, five days before the killings in Kafr Qasem, Malinki met with the GOC Central Command Tzur.

According to Malinki’s testimony, he was told that, with war approaching, one of the missions of his battalion would be to deal with the Arab villages in the Triangle. “There is a complex portfolio at the Operations Directorate and I must prepare the mission,” he said.

On October 25, Malinki met with the military governor, Zalman Mart, who emphasized that “the issue is how to motivate them [the Arabs] to leave the country.” Several hours later, Malinki met with Tamir, then chief of Central Command’s operations branch. The latter conveyed the directives of the plan.

“A plan was conveyed to me,” said Malinki. “The general context was explained, and the urgency…. We must prepare the plan as quickly as possible so that it will be ready for immediate implementation…. This is a most secret plan.”

He later testified that on October 28, the day prior to the massacre, he met with Shadmi, the brigade commander, who asked him to wait until he received orders from Central Command about Operation Mole, “which I was supposed to execute,” as Malinki put it. “The Mole commanders discussed issues concerning the treatment of the Arab minority in the area under martial law…. Execution of arrests…. Imposition of curfew…. Complete evacuation of the villages if the need arises.”

On the morning of October 29, Shadmi announced that the plan had not been authorized in its entirety, but particular clauses would “of course” be authorized by the afternoon. As to what happened in the meeting between Shadmi and Malinki, a few hours later, it emerges that a dispute broke out that dogged them both until their final days.

הנשיא ריבלין באירוע לציון הטבח בכפר קאסם

Malinki, as noted, testified that Shadmi ordered him to fire “without sentimentality” in order to kill whoever violated the curfew. Shadmi denied this. Later on, when meeting his soldiers just before the massacre, Malinki explained to them that war was about to break out. In other words, the secret plan, whether officially or only as something hovering in the background, was in the minds of troops of every rank – from the highest commander to the lowliest foot soldier. After the massacre, Shadmi also admitted himself that

“the final proposal before embarking on the day of the operation took the form of an Operation Mole directive passed down from Central Command. That order specified in detail the method of evacuation of the population from the area along the border during the first stage of the deployment of forces.”

According to Shadmi, in testimony he gave to the police, prior to being charged,

“I showed [Malinki] immediately the Mole orders... according to which we were to prepare the operation. Malinki answered me … with a self-satisfied smile and informed me that the entire portfolio of the secret operation was all planned out. Therefore, I saw him at that moment as an expert about everything that had been discussed.”

Two months after the massacre, Malinki claimed that he had not been comfortable under Shadmi’s command, but didn’t do anything about it.

“I thought about calling the commander of the Border Police, but that seemed like an act of disloyalty with regard to the officer in question. I didn’t know [Shadmi], but as I was a witness to his conversations with the general [Tzur] with regard to the Mole and as I had personally received the order for that operation from headquarters – I was stunned by the drastic approach that had been decided upon, but didn’t doubt that this was a decision of the highest authority, and I saw the brigade commander as a pipeline,”

Malinki later wrote to Ben-Gurion.

General Tzur himself responded to the secret plan, in testimony before the investigative commission that Ben-Gurion convened immediately after the massacre, prior to the trial. He explained that Operation Mole “relates to the entire country and all are working according to the same methodology,” adding that the operation was part of an overall plan of war vis-a-vis Jordan.

In this context, Raz believes that plans for Operation Mole “fulfilled a central purpose in motivating the troops to succeed in their mission [in Kafr Qasem].” According to him,

“they correctly understood the harsh curfew order as an initial stage in the expulsion of the residents of the villages, and acted to the maximal degree to follow their orders ... They were correct in their interpretation: They indeed imposed the curfew, whose objective was the expulsion of the Arabs in the event that Israel and Jordan found themselves in a state of war.”

Here is where the staged trial that Shadmi claims was conducted, enters the picture. In its course, as noted, he covered for his superiors and did not open his mouth about Operation Mole.

Raz:

“What did they want of Shadmi? They wanted him not to tell the truth. And the truth is that the plan for which the troops and officers were training, and the plan that was put into action, in large part, was Operation Mole.”

The option of expelling the Arabs of the Triangle in a future time of war with Jordan, he adds, “was a policy that could be implemented, from the perspective of Ben-Gurion, Dayan and others.” Indeed, much of the testimony the historian found from a variety of sources support that view, including that of Dayan, who said at one point: “I hope that in the coming years there will perhaps be another opportunity to effect a transfer of these Arabs from the Land of Israel.” According to Raz, “the conditions on the eve of the Sinai Campaign enabled them to progress toward realization of the plan.”

Based on the vast array of materials Raz compiled, a small portion of which are detailed here, he declares: “The fact that Shadmi ordered implementation of parts of the plan [i.e., Operation Mole] – up to the expulsion order itself – is not, according to my analysis, in doubt. But it’s clear that the order for this arrived from on high.” Shadmi, says Raz, “understood that he was being used as a main character in a performance intended to cover for those truly responsible: Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan and Tzvi Tzur.”

At present Raz is waiting for the decision of the military appeals court as to whether he will be allowed to examine all the classified documents relating to the affair of the massacre at Kafr Qasem, and more generally those relating to Operation Mole. For its part, the army claims that declassifying these documents will impair the security of the state, its relations with foreign entities, and also the privacy and well-being of various individuals.

As for Shadmi himself, he raised four children with his wife, Pnina, a math teacher who died in 2013; there are also grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Their son, Col. (res.) Yiftah Shadmi, served as a fighter pilot in the air force.

Shadmi’s memoir was eventually self-published, unlike his personal diary. Leafing through them, one finds these comments about death:

“Consciously, I force myself not to be afraid [of it], and have also begun to believe that there is nothing to fear. For at the very worst, one could be killed. Indeed, it’s a pity to give up on life, but the awareness that one fell for the sake of the homeland is the reward and the atonement for the life one gives up. In one sense, I have no desire to die before I fulfill my obligation, to do the maximum in my power for the country and the nation. I want there to be no distinction between the benefit that I can bring during my lifetime, and that which I can bring in sacrificing myself upon the altar of defense.”