Talk:Balad al-Shaykh massacre

Official police report

@Zero0000: hi. I have introduced the figures contained in the official British police report. I don't understand why you have reverted it.

1. You have NEVER, EVER doubted an iota of what the British authorities have put on paper. This has always been your golden standard, no questions asked.
2. It remains a massacre, but these are the real figures. It's ridiculous to accept as sources The Times, a newspaper published on another continent, and sources based on the villagers' and the Palmach fighters' declarations (mind "fog of battle", braggery, self-interest) and reject the neutral and overly detailed police report (NAMES, residence, age, hour,...).
3. "Via": I guess what you dislike is the person who posted the authentic documents online. That's neither here, nor there. You have so many times posted Mandate and cartographic material, and half of the editors might not like your point of view, but the merit of the material itself made it acceptable as a "reliable source". B. Morris started off as a "New Historian", and took a U-turn towards nationalistic Israeli positions - so what? The documents are what matters, not the interpretation and the person who publishes them.
4. A massacre is a massacre is a massacre. 7 dead and 30 injured including 2 children, constitute a massacre. There certainly were armed fighters among them, otherwise the Palmach wouldn't have had to retreat in a hurry with 3 dead and several injured, but that's neither here nor there. So the essence is not changed, but the accuracy of the numbers is increased. Win-win. No reason to revert, especially not wholesale ("Palestinian" written small, citation templates and all).

This said, I'm confident that the matter can be left as it is now. Have a nice day, Arminden (talk) 09:26, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

@Arminden: I strongly object to your characterisation of my editing. I would never ever take primary documents from an activist blog and present them as reliable sources. What you are doing is original research. How do you know that there isn't another page a few days later which gives more names? You don't. Those documents, if genuine, show people still dying two days after the massacre. Did you know that a further three days later the government hospital where most of the casualties went issued a statement that 17 had died and 34 were injured? It did. Did you know that newspapers reported on an additional death two days after that? That happened too. You see, this isn't a simple question and we must rely on qualified people to investigate properly. Investigating properly means looking at all the evidence, not finding a few pages and claiming that everything else must be dismissed unseen. That's what historians are for. So, no, it cannot stand like this. Zero^talk 12:04, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

@Zero0000: let's take it easy. I'm not accusing you of anything, I've pretty much always accepted the value of your well-researched sources to be the final argument. Still, you are using maps for various conclusions, beyond plain topography, which is perfectly fine with me. Here I'm not even touching on Collier's comments. I'm not his pal or ally and wouldn't like to be. What I'm relating to is the police file, whose authenticity is not contested. That is no more or less a primary source than a map. Maps are also made by people, some more accurate in their work than others. I can see no difference. Survey Department vs Criminal Investigation Department. I am trying to stay equidistant. Not rhetorically, but actually. I am trying to inform myself before anything else, and wouldn't like to be lying to myself.

Yes, if you do know about further deaths, that adds essential information to the issue; then please do add it to the references, otherwise others might end up where I have: not taking the figures seriously. I have no problem with a proven death toll of 100, if that's what it was, and each one would be tragic. I'm trying to get as close as possible to the truth. However, you cannot have a maximum (minding overlaps) of 9+30=39 official casualties on January 1-3, and 60-70 dead in the final count. One must believe in a continuum of miracles in the Holy Land from Jesus' fish & loaves to 1948 to accept such arithmetic developments.

I am trying my very best NOT to have an agenda, not to be anyone's mouthpiece. This goes both ways. The problem is, there are activists on both sides, and when I sense that an article is skewed to one side, I'm trying to fix it. Here for instance, it's the issue of the chicken and the egg: I'm pretty sure that the Irgun terrorists had their own motivation, some other attack committed by Arabs, who had another attack, committed by Jews as a cause, and so on all the way to the Battle of the Trench or maybe Herzl's birthday, I don't care. Choosing to start the background section with the Irgun attack is already a very significant decision. Not presenting the actual major starting point, the Partition resolution which got the civil war escalating. If there's a tendency throughout the article, I start looking at details - and sometimes, like here, things show up.

So, no reason to take things personal, but every reason to contribute whatever additional good info we have. Shame it escalated like this over an incident that didn't have the impact of, say, Deir Yassin; that's arguably a topic worth more dispute (for others, not for me), here it's more academic. But you of all people should give numbers the reverence they deserve, even when completely disconnected of any further meaning - just because they reflect a dry, physical, to a degree palpable reality. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 13:09, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Arminden. In addition to the technical reservations Zero makes. It's frustrating, knowing there are partial snippets of authentic archival sources occasionally out there, but one can't use them because it's beyond our remit. If a POV pushing hyperZionist reproduces one or two archive photos of material, then yes, that is pertinent, but one just has to wait for the serious scholarly world to revisit the whole archival picture and publish the result in a peer reviewed journal.

In this case, in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, a large number of those villager families fled to Acre, Nablus and Jenin. Were they interviewed, in these dispersed locations, by the British authorities? etc. Any historian worth his salt would measure the utility of conflicting archival resports by examining whether or not those people were interviewed, or who supplied the details. We don't know.

Apart from the technical abuse of using an inept source like Collier, you have misused him in writing:-

According to the British Mandate police files kept at The National Archives at Kew in Greater London, on the Arab side 7 adult males and 2 children were killed,

No! One of two files in British Mandatory archives would have been neutral. On Collier's blog he cites 2 archival documents from that source, which contradicts each other- One says 14 died, the other (b) 5 with (c) 4 succumbing later (9) He discounts (a) because it is an Arab narrative, though the British archive report specifically write that this number (14): 'given by villagers believed authentic.' Note that the British report naming the victims identify only 2 children, and no women, unlike the Haganah reports which would have every reason not to mention women and children killed, and note that 2 women and 5 children were killed). You just concur with one archive version, discard the Haganah versions, in the face of a patent internal conflict in both the British and Haganah archives, all because you blindly led credence to a Brit blogger over standard historians.

This is therefore another endless case of primary document conflict, and you just happen to prefer Collier's confused spin on a couple of days ('several days') in the Kew archives ('for reasons I cannot currently mention' -oh, how hush-hush). C'mon! Collier's blog is notable only for its highly selective use of archives, and he makes ridiculous generalizations that show he hasn't the faintest grasp on the details of the period. I've told you on my page the precise figures about land possession in 1948. This is Collier's puerile spin:

The Jews bought land. The Arabs violently objected to the Jewish presence. The Arabs sought conflict, lost their gamble, and now they want Jews to compensate them for lands that in some cases, the Jews already bought 100 years ago. It’s absurd. It doesn’t matter that the Jews acted in a shitty way a times too. The Jews won the fight, they have spent 100 years turning a backwater into a diverse and dynamic nation, and the gamblers want ‘compensation’ for a gamble they lost

I think Goofy could write a more neutral spin than that. The man's incompetent. Sorry, but you should at a minimum get some consensus for stuff like that before plunking it on a wiki page and reverting it when contradicted on policy grounds.Nishidani (talk) 13:24, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

(Somebody was faster than me, I had written this as a PS, but drove straight into an "edit conflict"/simultaneous contrib.) I only saw it now: this has been discussed already once on this talk-page. It might even have been by Collier, since it's anonymous. I think I brought a few new angles into it. Beyond anything else, 39 cannot become 60-70. And let's be serious, at least half of the sources we use on I/P are books published in the 19th century or the early 20th, period newspapers, maps from Napoleon's time onwards, and when we want to feel safe, books written by historians who change their angle by 180 degrees mid-career (Morris) or others who don't even come close to what is considered to be some kind of consensus (Pappé). The British police report shines like a diamond among such material.

I've drawn my own conclusions and made my peace with battles not worth fighting, so I'll insist no more on this topic. There isn't anything to lose or gain here except theoretical accuracy on the one hand, and a good working atmosphere with you on the other, so I'll let it rest. Arminden (talk) 13:30, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm sorry about this tiff and it won't disturb our work here. I constantly get pissed off by sighting reliable sources that are inaccurate or just miss so much of either the documented record, or the primary source riches. Of course I have a strong private view about this area's history: I think it grossly underreported or flawed. In the 1930 Hebron massacre, the figures of those who died, not only from the merciless blades of Arab fanatics, but heart attacks, -if you go to contemporary newspaper reports - varies from 59 to 62-64, but a large number of sources give 67.(that is the end figure, including victims of heart attacks in the aftermath, from the horror witnessed, and other causes. 59 died on the day directly from wounds, several lingered on). I thought that important detail, though it's hard to source with top-tier RS. No, that desire for precision was shouted down by editors who I expect thought I was trying thereby the undercut the dimension of the slaughter (compare giving the ascertained 5,300,000-5,500,000 figure for Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust -only an anti-Semite can say that, even if Hilberg and Bauer go for the more conservative figure rather than the round 6,000,000 provided by a Nazi figure in an interview). An estimated 13,000 Palestinians died in the conflict from 1947-1948 vs 6,000+ Jews. We know a considerable amount regarding the latter, names etc., but almost nothing of the former. I don't fight these battles, and trust that eventually, somewhere down the short future left to humanity, the consensus towards precision will be established. Wiki's frustrating enough without pushing something which, however archivally probable, still hasn't reached the RS highbar. There are 30 kilometres of tunneled archives conserving the French bureaucratic documentation on their occupation of Lebanon/Syria under mandatory terms, if I recall correctly. I'd reckon less than 1% of that has an echo in historiography. It's extremely grating to know huge volumes of info are out there, and we are compelled to admit the frailty of our awareness, however much we burrow broadly and deeply into the available RS. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:56, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

[Edit conflict, again. TWICE! Must have stepped into... something here :)) Quick!] ... and now I see it was @Nishidani:. Hi! Wait a minute. You're (half) knocking at open doors. The guy is not the issue, he's as beyond the pale as Morris in his 2nd incarnation. Which doesn't mean he can't hit on something every now and then - auch ein blindes Huhn Huhn findet mal ein Korn. The figures don't add up. The gap between 39 and 70 is unbridgeable. The Balad al-Sheikh article probably acknowledged this and goes with "14-60", adding further details left out here ("combination of Palmach and Haganah forces who entered the town and fought mostly inside the houses, resulting in mostly non-combatant casualties.") It also states: "Following the attack, on January 7, 1948, part of the residents of the village left and were replaced by Arab volunteers who came from Haifa to defend the village." They didn't rush out the next day, dead & injured in their backpacks to take care of or bury in Acre, Nablus or Jenin. (Which weren't, by the way, as now, part of a different entity, with the CIP losing track of things.) You don't normally pack and go with severely injured relatives. So stating the figure "70" as a fact and the background presentation is what set me off, which I already regret, as I don't really care much. Something in the range of 100 people from Haifa & surroundings were killed within 24 hours due to murderous instincts and jungle laws. With bullets, grenades, fists and boots, working tools, stones and chains, whatever came in handy. Butchery after the Great Butchery of WWII. I do sometimes care about understanding facts and mentalities, but not enough as to justify putting in so much time & effort and arguing with people I don't want to argue with. I'll keep my conclusions to myself and take Wiki as seriously as it deserves. Arminden (talk) 14:01, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

In Collier's position what I for one would do is notify an area expert on the period, preferably resident in England, provide the documentation, and suggest this be chased up by someone. One should be humble in these things and not keep for ourselves on an unquotable blog research which deserves investigation to correct a flawed record. Don't put down Wikipedia too much. It's flawed, but, despite recent rumours about egos, anonymous people put in a huge amount of collective private time in unpaid attempts to get facts right. It's frustrating etc., but in the end, this moronic planet gets a somewhat better picture than tabloids and TV allow.Nishidani (talk) 14:11, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

[4th "edit conflict"! :)) Which is none, misnomer.] I see we were basically writing the same thing simultaneously. Big words like "honouring every dead person" is nice, but figures on a page remain figures, be it the Holocaust or Balad al-Sheikh. To the relatives and the diffuse common memory of larger groups, yes, it's personal and it takes a completely different dimension, but that's far beyond an encyclopaedia's range. Only tendencies set by agendas are not acceptable, as they offend and hurt those subjectively involved, misinform the others, and lead to much more misery in the future - and may it be somewhat longer than you predict! Cheers, Arminden (talk) 14:15, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

The prediction’s not mine. I have long been a regular listener to Late Night Live, and over the last decade followed and learnt from Satyajit Das, whose economystic ideas were on the cusp of 'liberal rationality', though I thought them shortsighted. So listening to this latest interview the other day, I was surprised to see him pessimistic about post 2100 centuries. That particular nook in the global woods is well worth checking on regularly. The conversation is what conversation used to be, alert, vernacular, and deeply informed. May ease the tedium, pal, at the expense of exacerbating one's existential angst. So weigh up the pros and cons before listening in. Cheers

Perfect proposition, perfect as in "ideal": far too remote from my reality. Unless you do know someone to call in London? Someone who can have the result published in more than a blog? Which I actually trust you can. I certainly don't. Wiki serves two purposes for me: as a source of information, also "on the go", when I don't have all my books and files with me; and as an intellectual challenge, of which the daily routine offers close to none. But what takes over more often than not is some kind of compulsion. This article pressed several of my buttons at once. Not anymore. If you do manage to find a researcher, I'd be more than happy to hear about it, that would make it real again. Thanks, Arminden (talk) 14:27, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

@Nishidani: Thank you for the edits! Horrible subject, bad enough however you look at it; the more context, the better one can start remotely relating to the events. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 15:57, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I don't know anyone in that research (I/P) area. When I read an author like Morris, on a topic like this, 'my buttons get pressed' nearly every paragraph. Just on this, I wondered whether Hawassa was just a quarter of Haifa or an independent village; why we have no real details on the specific actions there in December '47., etc.etc. The archives have all the details, but Morris is, despite his wide and at times minute coverage, very often scarce with them, (as perhaps not fitting his narrative). Most of real history goes unrecorded. Regards Nishidani (talk) 18:27, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Haganah reports

From Professor Uri Ben-Eliezer of the U of Haifa in 2019: Ben-Eliezer, U.; Vardi, S. (2019). War over Peace: One Hundred Years of Israel's Militaristic Nationalism. University of California Press. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-520-30434-5. The Palmach responded to the reprisal by launching an attack on Balad a-Sheikh, a village near Haifa, killing dozens of Palestinian residents of the village (Avigur, 1955: 1414).

His source is Shaul Avigur's report in volume 3 of ספר תולדות ההגנה (the official History of the Haganah), page 1414.

@Arminden: do you have access to this?

Onceinawhile (talk) 13:43, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Benny Morris, in the quote currently in our article under the "Incident" section, cites: ‘01011’ to HIS-AD, 6 Jan. 1948, HA 105\32 aleph. and ‘00001’ to HIS-AD, ‘Subject: The Attacks on Balad al Sheikh and Hawassa’, 9 Jan. 1948, HA 105\32 aleph.. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:42, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

@Onceinawhile: hi. I can't read Hebrew, so sorry, but no. Arminden (talk) 16:49, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Onceinawhile. There is nothing about it on page 1414 of volume 3. The next page describes a different operation in the Hula valley. This book can be found here [1]. Alaexis_¿question? 21:33, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Thank you @Alaexis:. This is the 1972 version; Ben-Eliezer is quoting the 1955 version, so the page numbering must be off. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:46, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I tried to search for Balad al-Shaykh but the search doesn't work unfortunately. Alaexis_¿question? 21:53, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Avigur was one of the editors of this work. I don't think it is correct to call it Avigur's report. Morris and Milstein both cite original reports, and Milstein also interviewed participants. Zero^talk 00:00, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

To editor Alaexis: To editor Onceinawhile: It is on page 1383. Here is the relevant paragraph and a Google-assisted translation. Alaexis, please feel free to correct any OCR errors and improve the translation in situ.

הטבח בבתי הזיקוק בי״ז בטבת תש״ח (30.12.47 ), שבא כתוצאה ממעשה תגובה בלתי אחראי של אנשי האצ״ל, הביא את פיקוד ה״הגנה" לפעולת תגמול גדולה בכפר ממנו באו רוב המרצחים - בלד־א־שיך. 4 מחלקות מהגדוד הראשון של הפלמ״ח ושתי מחלקות חי״ש מחיפה (בסך־הכל כ־170 איש) יצאו מיגור אור לי״ח בטבת (31.12) ופקודה ניתנה "להקיף את הכפר, לפגוע במספר גברים גדול ככל האפשר, לחבל ברכוש, להימנע מפגיעה בנשים ובילדים" (דוח). בהגיעם לכפר נתקלו הלוחמים באש שבאה ממנו ומחיילי "הלגיון" שחנו במחנות סמוכים. האנשים פרצו לכפר והחלו בפעולה. "בגלל אש שנורתה מתוך החדרים, אי־אפשר היה להימנע מפגיעה גם בנשים ובילדים". אבידות הערבים הגיעו כדי למעלה מ־60 הרוגים. בקרב נפלו חיים בן־דור, איש פלמ״ח שהתנדב לפעולה זו, עמוס גלילי, סגן מפקד פלוגות חי״ש של הסטודנטים בטכניון, ומפקד חי״ש באזור יגור, חנן זלינגר, שהיה בין המפקדים על הפעולה. כשנה לאחר מכן, כאשר יושבה בלד־א־שיך בעולים יהודים׳ נקרא המקום על שמו, תל־חנן.

The massacre at the refineries on 17 Tevet 5768 (December 30, 1947), which came as a result of an irresponsible action by Irgun members, led the Haganah command to a large retaliatory operation in the village from which most of the murderers came - Balad-a-Sheikh. Four divisions of the First Palmach Battalion and two divisions of Haifa from Haifa (a total of about 170 people) went out at dusk(??) on 18 Tevet (31.12) and an order was given to "surround the village, harm as many men as possible, sabotage property, but to avoid harming women and children" (report). Arriving at the village, the fighters encountered fire coming from it and Arab Legion soldiers stationed in nearby camps. The men broke into the village and began action. "Because of fire coming from the rooms, it was impossible to avoid harming women and children." The casualties of the Arabs amounted to more than 60 dead. In the battle were Haim Ben-Dor, a Palmach man who volunteered for this operation, Amos Galili, deputy commander of the students' HIS companies at the Technion, and HIS commander in the Yagur area, Hanan Zellinger, who was among the commanders for the operation. About a year later, when Balad-a-Sheikh was inhabited by Jewish immigrants, the place was named after him, Tel Hanan.

The value of 60 deaths is the largest I have seen, though this is complicated by the possibility that they included Arab Legion soldiers. Zero^talk 02:18, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

This is fascinating thank you. My observations:

• They accept Haganah responsibility for the Haifa refinery massacre. Not entirely balanced though: the Irgun were just "irresponsible" throwing grenades into a crowd, not "murderers" which they use later in the same sentence.
• The Balad al-Shaykh massacre was a formally ordered operation. "Harm as many men as possible" is authorization for murder of innocent people.
• The Tel Hanan area of Nesher, which was built on top of Balad al-Shaykh, was named after one of these murderers.

I look forward to seeing David Collier write about these points in his blog. Onceinawhile (talk) 07:51, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

They accept Haganah responsibility for the Haifa refinery massacre no, they don't. They say the Haifa refinery massacre happened due to an irresponsible retribution attack by Irgun. Alaexis_¿question? 16:26, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

References & Bibliography need fixing

Two Morris titles, not one, so year needs to be added. Once there's a "Bibliography" section, it must be used. Can't do it myself right now. Arminden (talk) 16:55, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Death toll

On the Haifa Oil Refinery Massacre page (which links here), it says that this death toll was between 21-70 Arabs, but here it says 60-70. Why do they not match?

Arh726 (talk) 12:19, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Fixed. Thank you, IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 16:50, 23 August 2024 (UTC)