Ofer Aderet Why Is Israel Still Covering Up Extrajudicial Executions Committed by a Jewish Militia in '48?
Seventy years ago, on the
eve of Israel’s establishment, six Polish Christians were executed
without trial in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem by the Haganah, the
pre-independence army of Palestine’s Jews. Despite the decades that have
passed, the investigative report on these killings, which was submitted
to David Ben-Gurion, has never been made public. The state archivist,
Dr. Yaacov Lozowick, has recommended that the report documenting these
unrelated cases be made available to the public, but the military
censors are trying to block this for reasons known only to them.
Even seven decades later,
the report – a detailed summary of which is being made public here for
the first time – is difficult reading. The following, for example, comes
from the description of the first case: “Three weeks ago, a Polish
Christian was arrested in Tel Aviv and taken to Yona base [the Haganah
base in Independence Park]. He was not interrogated. His guard shot and
killed him. The body was taken and thrown into Hadassah Garden” – the
site of today’s Gan Ha’ir mall in central Tel Aviv.
According to one version of
this story, as recounted in the report, the Polish detainee attacked the
guard, who shot him in response. “The prisoner, after the shots, was
dying. Accordingly, after considerations, it was decided to liquidate
him and remove him from the base,” the report states.
A later a case involved a
“Polish Christian who was arrested in Tel Aviv on KKL Boulevard” (today
Ben-Gurion Boulevard). His interrogation, which was conducted “with
torture,” revealed him to be an underworld figure involved in robberies
from an early age, and “it was clarified that he had ties with the
Germans abroad.” As the report puts it, “There was a suspicion that he
was not sane. Executed.”
Two more Poles were killed
in similar circumstances after being arrested near Jerusalem’s Central
Bus Station because “they could not explain the purpose of their
presence there.” The report cites different accounts regarding the
circumstances of their death. According to one version, their
interrogation did not lead to charges against them, but nevertheless,
“they were executed.” In another account, “suspicion arose that they
were spying on the preparations for the convoys leaving for Tel Aviv.”
It also was claimed that “a letter recommending him as a German Nazi”
was found among the effects of one of them, though it’s not clear what
was meant by this.
Yet another Pole, also
arrested in Jerusalem, is described as an “instructor of gangs” and a
“well-known thief” who, “according to rumors,” worked for the British
criminal investigation department. But his execution had nothing to do
with these allegations. According to the report, he was put to death
mainly because it was feared that he would be able to reveal to others
the address of the site where he was interrogated by the Haganah.
“Since he was arrested with
another two [people], who were released following a brief interrogation,
and the danger existed that the police would search for him, he was
moved hastily to another place and wasn’t blindfolded,” the report
states. “For reasons related to the danger of revelations by him if he
were released, and also on the basis of the material we noted it was
decided to liquidate him.”
The circumstances of the death of the sixth Pole mentioned in the report are not cited.
Who were the victims?
Who were these Poles, why
were they in the country on the eve of Israel’s founding, and why were
they killed in quick succession? The 18-page report does not answer
these questions fully. It was written on March 1, 1948, by Yaakov
Riftin, a member of the so-called Security Committee, which approved
security-policy decisions before Israel’s establishment in May 1948.
Riftin presented the results of an examination he carried out at the
request of Ben-Gurion, the committee’s head, concerning a series of
sensitive events.
Unlike the report, Riftin’s letter of appointment has been published in several venues over the years.
“Serious complaints and
accusations have reached me about disorder and lawlessness among several
members of the organization [the Haganah] and the Palmach [the
Haganah’s elite strike force],” Ben-Gurion wrote, providing a list:
“robbery of Arabs, murder of Poles and Arabs without cause or with
insufficient cause, and in any case without trial, improper actions
toward Jews as well, cases of theft, embezzlement of funds, torture of
Arabs during interrogation and the like.”
The then-future prime
minister added, “These deeds, if they occurred, constitute a political
and moral danger to the organization and to the Yishuv [the Jewish
community of Mandatory Palestine], and the most stringent measures must
be taken to uproot them.”
Attached to the letter of
appointment was a list of incidents that had been provided to Ben-Gurion
by the head of Haganah intelligence, David Shaltiel, and which Riftin
was requested to examine. In the report, Riftin sets forth his findings
and adds a list of 15 other events that he had heard about but did not
examine.
“When the fighting started,
before the [establishment of the] state, I was a one-person committee of
inquiry,” Riftin said in 1957 in testimony that’s now in the Ben-Gurion
Archives. “I was asked by Ben-Gurion to investigate the complaints,
which came from different sides, about people being killed without
trial. He asked me to investigate several cases involving the Arabs and
not only about Arabs but also people who were suspected of espionage.
There were cases of this sort, which caused concern. I was given the
powers of a committee of inquiry, and a secretary – Nehemiah Argov.”
The conclusions of the
Riftin report on the killings have also been published in several
venues; historians have quoted from the report, even if it has never
been made public in full. Its very existence was hitherto known only
among experts on the history of the Israel Defense Forces and the
state’s creation.
No secrets
The report should have been
declassified and made accessible to the public in 1998, on the 50th
anniversary of its compilation. But two state archivists requested that
it remain sealed and received the consent of a rarely convened
ministerial committee that deals with permission to view classified
archival material.
Four years ago Lozowick, now
the outgoing state archivist, asked the cabinet secretary at the time,
Avichai Mendelblit, for permission to let the public peruse the Riftin
report. “There is a demand from the public” for the document to be made
available, he wrote Mendelblit, adding that, contrary to his
predecessors, he recommended that the report be fully declassified. That
approach was opposed by Ilana Alon, the director of the IDF and Defense
Establishment Archives. But while Alon explained her objections in a
classified letter, Lozowick’s opinion is open to everyone and represents
an extremely liberal approach rare in the Israeli archival world.
“There is no justification
for continuing to close the file,” Lozowick wrote. “Wars are the most
extreme form of policy that a government can pursue. As such, it is most
important for the documentation of wars to be open to the public. The
period of closure having passed, it is obligatory to open the
documentation. Longer closure on the documentation of war is justified
only if it contains very special content. In this file, there is none.”
He added: “A democratic
society is obliged to allow a free discussion of its wars. The
discussion is a guarantee of democratic resilience. This file perhaps
contains material for such a discussion, but that is a reason to open
it, not close it.”
Lozowick stressed that the
file contained nothing of current operational significance. “Concealment
of historical documentation after so many years shows that the state
has something to hide. If after the passage of more than half a century,
and after repeated examinations by officials and discussion by cabinet
members, the state is still concealing certain files from the public, it
is only because they contain particularly dark secrets – that is what
the reasonable individual understands,” he wrote. “But there are none.
There are no secrets at all [in the report]. The State of Israel is
strong, Israeli society is strong, and there is no reason not to allow
its citizens free research of the documentation of its wars now remote.”
The relevant ministerial
committee, consisting of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, Energy Minister
Yuval Steinitz and Culture Minister Miri Regev, rejected that argument
and blocked the report from being made available to the public. The
reasons were not published, though the committee did not order
restrictions on the perusal of the document in several Israeli archives
where copies exist.
The result, not for the first time, is an absurd
situation in which the most senior decision-making body concerning the
fate of archival documents orders their censorship, but anyone who knows
about their existence in the archives can view them.
Enter the Akevot Institute
for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, which catalogs information
about the conflict and works to promote human rights. Two years ago it
located the Riftin report – open and accessible to everyone – in the Yad
Tabenkin Archives of the United Kibbutz Movement. But at the end of
last year, when Akevot asked the military censor for authorization to
publish the report, it encountered a delay. After a two-month wait,
Akevot received a copy of the report but with each page circled and the
word “Restricted” stamped on it.
In other words, publication
was banned until a final decision by the military censor. Since then,
despite repeated requests, the censor has yet to decide whether to let
Akevot publish the 70-year-old document.
“Because it’s a document
from the pre-state period, we assumed that no delay was to be expected,”
says Lior Yavne, Akevot’s executive director. “But for the past eight
months we’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get an answer from them.”
Unprofessional conduct
Poles were not the only ones
executed without due process by the Haganah on the eve of Israel’s
creation. The Riftin report also refers to a Sudanese man who was
arrested in Tel Aviv, interrogated and executed without being charged.
The report also mentions a number of Arabs who were executed by Jews.
One of them, the report states, was a taxi driver from Tiberias, who
“was kidnapped by a Palmach unit together with his car. Put to death.”
His car was later used by the organization’s undercover unit that
impersonated Arabs, the mistaravim.
The report contains several
versions of this case. “The mistaravim unit hired an Arab taxi [driver]
from Tiberias in order to hijack his car for their operational needs,”
the document states. “Their intention was to bind his hands and feet,
leave him by the side of the road and make off with the car.”
According to one account,
during the journey, when the driver thought that his passengers were
ordinary Arabs, he boasted to them that he was active in the “gangs,” as
the report puts it. Hearing this, the mistaravim wanted “to take him
prisoner for interrogation – but he resisted forcefully, opened the door
and wanted to jump out, and our people were forced to liquidate him.”
According to a different
account, “They kidnapped a taxi driver in Tiberias with his car. On the
way they injected him with morphine, but the injections didn’t work .
They put him in the trunk but he started pounding, and then they were
forced, at the top of the hill, to shoot him three times.”
Another brutal case occurred
at Kibbutz Nir Am in the Negev. “A case of the interrogation of an Arab
by unauthorized persons, with cruel torture, and his execution amid
abuse,” the report states. “He was tortured there was harsh torture (his
genital organ was clasped with pliers) . His head was smashed against a
wall . The Arab lay in a pit, was shot and covered over.”
The report also cites complaints about looting –
of goods from both Arabs and Jews – by Haganah people. “Items of food
being transported to settlements in the Negev are gorged by people
escorting the convoys,” it says. In other cases, “money is stolen from
Arabs” and there are “complaints of theft of Arab property in fields,
orchards and warehouses.”
Beyond these specific
accounts, the Riftin report is important because it was a factor in the
decision to establish the military advocate general’s unit. The report’s
conclusions include a recommendation to improve the legal system and a
ban on executions (other than in cases of rulings by authorized courts).
“It is therefore essential
to create immediately the position of general prosecutor of the
organization, who will be responsible for implementing the investigative
mechanism and bringing matters to trial,” the report states.
One can only wonder why the
military censor is preventing Akevot from publishing this document. To
begin with, it’s not clear how state security could be compromised by
the publication of a document dating from the pre-state period. Second,
given that the report exists in a number of archives and is available to
anyone who searches for it – what is gained by preventing publication?
Also, a summary of the
document’s most interesting sections was published in 2010 in a Ph.D.
thesis filed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It is accessible to
everyone.
Much has been written about
this chaos in which, for example, in some cases a document is censored
by an entity such as the state archives and is accessible elsewhere,
such as on the website of the IDF and Defense Establishment Archives.
In addition, the censors (at
both the state and the military archives) are too prone to blue-pencil
documents or sections of them only because they might embarrass the
state or show it in a negative light. Akevot’s people say the story of
the Riftin report is part of a larger effort to prevent the publication
of archival material about harm inflicted by Israelis on innocent people
from 1948 to the present day.
Currently, for example, a
military court is considering the request by historian Adam Raz to
publish classified documents on the massacre of residents of the
Israeli-Arab village of Kafr Qasem by the Border Police in 1956. In the
past, the public was also denied access to documents pertaining to the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948.
In all these and other
cases, even though the information has been made public in the media and
in historical literature, the state strives to block the publication of
archival material about various incidents, citing security reasons and
damage to Israel’s foreign relations.
“The result is the
falsification of history and the prevention of a fact- and
document-based discussion of our recent history,” says Yavne, the Akevot
director. By concealing such documents or preventing their publication,
he notes, the state is blocking a discussion on serious events in the
history of the Israeli state and society, including “war crimes
perpetrated by IDF soldiers and defense officials over the course of
years, including in the pre-state period.”
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