ISRAEL: Day of Atonement

On the day of the Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956, the army commander in central Israel ordered a 5 p.m. curfew enforced in Arab villages near the Jordan border. Colonel Issachar Shadmi told Major Shmuel Malinki of the border police that this order was to be strictly enforced, that any villager found abroad after the curfew hour was to be shot. In midafternoon Major Malinki passed the order along to his company commanders, adding, “May Allah have mercy on their souls.” On the stroke of 5, Lieut. Gabriel Dehan deployed his constables in three groups around the Arab village of Kfar Kassim. In the next hours his cops shot and killed 43 men, women and children as they cycled and trudged homeward, unaware of the sudden curfew order, from afternoon visits across the fields and from work in the fields and in nearby Tel Aviv.

In a nation that feels itself menaced on all sides by Arab nations sworn to its destruction, so ugly an episode might have been disregarded or forgotten. But six weeks after the Sinai invasion, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion publicly confirmed the massacre of Kfar Kassim’s villagers “coming home in all innocence” and led Parliament in a solemn expression of contrition. The government paid indemnity to the victims’ families ($2,500 to $3,500), brought the killers to court. Last week, after a trial that lasted through 102 sittings and took 5,000 pages of evidence, a special military court sentenced Major Malinki, Lieut. Dehan and six subordinates to prison terms ranging from seven to 17 years.

In pronouncing sentence, Judge Benjamin Halevi said: “There are important considerations for not imposing the severest sentence [life imprisonment], the main consideration being that none of the eight men found guilty initiated the order, but all acted as instruments in transmitting and implementing it.” But the judgment added, it is Israeli criminal law, inherited from the British, that an Israeli soldier must disregard an order to commit a “manifestly unlawful” act—one so monstrous that “it blinded the eyes and stabbed at the heart” of the “average” person.