Israeli gunners say no regrets over Qana shelling

[Alireza BANAEI]

Israeli gunners say no regrets over Qana shelling

(Adds details, Israeli army, government spox comment) By Susan Sappir
JERUSALEM, May 10 (Reuter) - Israeli gunners
have said they had no regrets over killing more than 100 civilians
sheltering in a U.N. base in southern Lebanon because the
dead were "just a bunch of Arabs".

A soldier identified as Sergeant "Y" was quoted by the Jerusalem weekly
Kol Ha'ir as saying: "It's a war, in a war these
things happen...It's just a bunch of Arabs".

"Y", in his reference to Arabs, used the Hebrew derogatory term
"Arabushim" which has no English equivalent.

The soldiers said they were firing at guerrillas near the U.N. camp at
Qana and that it had been a mistake to hit the camp
where hundreds of refugees were sheltering.

More than 100 men, women and children were killed in the massacre which
took place during a 17-day Israeli blitz against
Hizbollah guerrillas last month.

A U.N. report this week said it appeared unlikely the slaughter was by
accident. Israel, which has given varying versions of
what happened, insists it was a mistake.

Another soldier from the artillery battery said the commander gathered
his troops after the shelling for a talk.

"He told us, 'This is war. For God's sake, the shits are shooting at you.
What are you going to do?' He said we were
shooting well and to continue this way, and that Arabs, you know, there
are millions of them," the soldier, identified as "A",
was quoted as saying.

An official army spokesman statement issued on Friday in reaction to the
newspaper report questioned its accuracy.

"It is impossible to know whether this is an accurate version or a
distorted hearsay testimony," the statement said.

"Either way, anonymous comments by one speaker or another don't change
the fact the tragic shooting was done by mistake
since the army didn't know there were civilians at the Qana camp." Kol
Ha'ir Editor Ruth Yovel told Reuters the newspaper
had the full names and phone numbers of each of the speakers. Yovel said
Kol Ha'ir had asked the army earlier in the week
to comment on the article but the army spokesman chose not to do so.

"The reporter said he is ready to take a polygraph test," Yovel added.
"Let the army prove it's not true." Israeli government
spokesman Uri Dromi said: "If anyone expressed themselves like this this
is terribly disturbing." He stressed all Israeli officials
commenting on the incident had expressed regret.

"And I believe they were speaking for the vast majority of Israelis,"
Dromi added.

Some soldiers and officers quoted in the newspaper explained their
indifference to the Qana deaths by saying: "We had a lot
of civilians killed too." When the reporter pointed out that no Israelis
were killed during the Lebanon operation, the soldiers
said they were referring to all the years of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Soldier "A", recalling Moslem militant suicide bombings on Tel Aviv's
main street in 1994 and 1996, said: "A bunch of Arabs
died and they made a big deal about it in the whole world. Why? When we
had dead on Dizengoff, did they also make so
much noise?"

[Murat Kutan]

GSou...@gnn.com (George Soumakis) wrote:

>And Turk, your big muslim ally, just signed a peace treaty with Israel.

Were you expecting us to sign a peace treaty with _Nazi Armenians_ or
_Greek murderers_?

INTERCOM, International Studies and Overseas Programs at University
of California, Los Angeles; Vol. 15, No. 7; 15 January 1993. Pages 1-5.

An interview with Stanford J. Shaw (History), who recently
completed two books: The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the
Turkish Republic, and Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey's Role in
Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution,
1933-45. Shaw chairs the undergraduate interdepartmental degree
program in Near Eastern Studies and has organized the Program for
the Study of Ottoman and Turkish Jewry. He is affiliated with the
G. E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Editor: How did you come to write these two books on Turkey and
European and Turkish Jews?

Shaw: Basically, I'm an Ottoman historian, but I'm also Jewish.
I've spent twenty-five years studying Ottoman history, and as
time went along, whenever I found materials on the Ottoman Jews,
I collected them. But I never did anything with them until a
couple of years ago, when I suddenly realized that 1992 was the
500th anniversary of the Jews being expelled from Spain and
coming to Turkey. Then the Sephardic Temple down on Wilshire
Avenue invited me to give a series of three lectures on Ottoman
Jewry. These lectures were greatly appreciated, and I became
motivated to undertake further research to develop a book, The
Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish) Republic. This book
is quite different from the works of most Jewish historians, who
tend to look at the Jews in any country more from the viewpoint
of the Jews and the Jewish community, and rely mainly on Jewish
sources. I view my subject as an Ottoman historian, and I
approach the Jews of the Ottoman Empire largely from the point of
view of Ottoman society, using largely Ottoman sources. After I
finished this book and sent it to the press, I came across
additional documents relating to Turkish Jews during World War
II. In the completed book, I had said that Turkey had done a good
deal to rescue the Jews during World War II, but I did not
actually have many details. Then I found a batch of documents in
the Foreign Ministry archive relating to actions taken by Turkish
diplomats to help the Jews before and during the Holocaust. It
was too late to add this new information to the book in press, so
I decided to write a second book. I conducted further research,
mainly in the archives of the Foreign Ministry in Ankara and the
Turkish Embassy and Consulate in Paris. The result was the second
book, Turkey and the Holocaust, which details how Turkey helped
rescue Jews from the Nazis.

- How exactly did they do this?

The story takes place over a number of years. The book presents
the material in three parts, first of which deals with the period
before the Holocaust. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in
1933, they immediately started dismissing Jews and anti-Nazi
Germans from universities, hospitals, scientific institutes, and
the like. Turkey at that moment was just beginning the process of
reforming its universities, and it saw in these Jews, who were
being fired from their positions in Germany, a good source of new
talent to help modernize the Turkish universities. Within three
months after the Nazis started dismissing these Jews, Turkey
arranged to take many of them in. They were brought to Turkey and
were given appointments as professors in the Turkish
universities, as heads of scientific institutes, and as medical
personnel in hospitals. About 300 to 500 major Jewish professors
came to Turkey in the 1930s. Ernst Reuter, a German political
scientist, spent the war years teaching political science in
Turkey. After World War II, he was mayor of Berlin during the
Berlin Airlift. Fritz Neimark, a major German Jewish economist,
came to Turkey and helped establish a modern school of economics
in Istanbul. A man named Reichenbach, who was rescued from the
Nazis by Turkey and spent the war years in Turkey, eventually
came to UCLA, where he became a professor of philosophy. Other
German Jewish emigres engaged in cultural activities in Turkey.
One such was Karl Ebert, who had been a leading theatrical
producer in Berlin until he was expelled by the Nazis. He went to
Turkey, where he organized the Turkish National Theater and the
Turkish National Opera Company in Ankara, with the help of Paul
Hindemuth. So the first section of the book covers this first
phase, when Jews were being persecuted in Germany and rescued by
Turkey. Oddly enough, the German emigres, when they were in
Turkey, did not seem to think too badly of Germany. They regarded
themselves more as Germans than Jews, and they did not join in
the anti-Nazi activities of the local Turkish Jewish community. I
even found letters from the Nazi representatives to Turkey
praising these German Jewish refugees for their work in promoting
the idea of German culture. Even though these people had been
persecuted by the Nazis and rescued by the Turks, they shared the
Nazis' feelings of Aryan racial superiority over the Turks. The
second part of the book deals with the Holocaust, which began in
1940 when the Nazis occupied France. In Europe at that time, and
especially in France, there were about 20,000 Turkish Jews. They
had migrated to Europe for various reasons from about the turn of
the century onward. Most of them had settled in Europe during the
Turkish war for independence after World War I, when Greece was
threatening to overrun Turkey. The Greeks had persecuted the Jews
throughout the nineteenth century, and the Jews feared what might
happen to them if the Greeks took over in Turkey. Many Jews fled
to France during the 1920s and 1930s. Many also abandoned their
Turkish citizenship and became French citizens. Suddenly the
Nazis invaded France in 1940 and started introducing all sorts of
anti-Jewish laws. The Turkish Jews soon found that it was not
worth very much to be a French Jew, but that it was worth a lot
to be a Turkish Jew.

- How so?

Turkey remained neutral through most of World War II. It retained
its embassies and consulates in all the Nazi-occupied countries
until it finally entered the war on the side of the Allies at the
end of 1944. During the war, therefore, Turkey was in a position
to defend its citizens against anti-Jewish measures, and the
actions that Turkish diplomats took form the second chapter of
the book. Turkish diplomats who were stationed in France in
particular intervened to protect Jews of Turkish citizenship from
the Nazis. For those Turkish Jews who had retained their Turkish
citizenship, there was generally no problem. If they were
arrested and sent to a concentration camp, the Turkish diplomats
would communicate with the commanders of the camp and other
officials and say in effect: "These people are Turkish citizens.
You can't do this to them." And the Turkish Jews would be
released. If their businesses were confiscated, the Turkish
diplomats would protest and the businesses would be restored.

The Nazis in general wanted to keep the friendship of Turkey.
They hoped to be able to use Turkey as a gateway for an invasion
of the Middle East, and they also wanted to obtain chromium and
manganese from Turkey. In order to keep Turkish friendship, they
usually accepted these interventions on behalf of Turkish Jews.
The Turkish diplomats sometimes went to the concentration camps
to secure the release of Turkish Jews. At times they even boarded
trains hauling Turkish Jews to Auschwitz for extermination and
succeeded in getting them off the train. Most of the foreign Jews
were sent to a concentration camp at a place called Drancy in
Paris, and that's where most of the intercession by Turkish
consuls took place.

The greater problem came with the Turkish Jews who had abandoned
their Turkish citizenship and had become French citizens. The
consuls couldn't declare that these people were Turkish citizens
because they were not. My book includes photographs of Jews
lining up in front of the Turkish consulate, either to get
passports to return to Turkey or to get a restoration of their
Turkish citizenship. This was a bureaucratic matter, so
processing the application would take some time. In the meantime
it was a real emergency, because the Nazis would arrest Jews on
the streets for almost nothing. The Nazis would even arrest them
if they had radios or telephones in their apartments, because
radios and telephones were forbidden to Jews. To take care of
these former Turkish Jews, the Turkish diplomats invented a
document called gayri muntazem vatandash, or "irregular fellow
citizen." The document said in effect "This person is a former
Turkish citizen who has applied for the restoration of his
Turkish citizenship. In the meantime we would appreciate it if
you would treat him as if he were a Turkish citizen." The
diplomats wrote the document in Turkish and put their seals on
it. Since the Nazis could not read Turkish, on the whole they
accepted these papers as certificates of citizenship. By this
means, the Turkish diplomats were able to rescue many Jews who
had relinquished their Turkish citizenship.

Actually the Nazis were of two minds about the Turkish defense of
Jews. On the one hand the Nazi Foreign Ministry, which wanted to
retain the friendship of Turkey, was in favor of accepting these
interventions. On the other hand, Himmler and Eichmann wanted all
Jews exterminated. At times Himmler and Eichmann were able to
prevail and some of the Turkish Jews were sent off to Auschwitz
before the Turkish consuls could do anything.

- Do you have statistics on how many Turkish Jews were rescued?

There were about 20,000 Turkish Jews in Europe before world War
II, about 10,000 of whom were living in France. Most of the
information in this section of the book relates to the situation
in France. I have published the letters that the Turkish consuls
sent to the Nazi officials and the letters that came back in
reply. Generally the Nazis said that if the Turkish consul would
present documents certifying that arrested individuals are
Turkish citizens, and promise to send them out of France, the
Nazis would release them from the concentration camp. The Turkish
consuls also organized special trains to take Turkish Jews from
Nazi-occupied territory back to Turkey. These trains ran
regularly in 1943 and 1944. The Nazis gave the Turkish Jews visas
so they could pass out of Nazi territory, but the trains were
often held up by the Nazi-influenced governments of Eastern
Europe - Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria - because these
governments really didn't want the Jews to escape. As a result of
the Turkish consuls' efforts, about 3,000 to 4,000 of the Turkish
Jews in France were saved. Another 3,000 were sent off to
Auschwitz, where most of them died. The remaining 3,000 either
escaped across the border into Spain or fled to the area of
southern France occupied by the Italians, who treated Jews much
better than the Nazis did. At the end of 1943, however, Italy
fell out of the war, and that was the end for those Jews as well.
Incidentally, the Turkish diplomats in Nazi-occupied Greece also
worked to rescue Jews in that country.

- The second part of your book then deals with Turkish diplomats
acting to rescue Jews of Turkish citizenship or Turkish origin
from Nazi persecution.

Yes, and there is an aside I might add here: In their
interventions on behalf of Turkish Jews, the Turks cited their
treaty with Germany which stated that Turkish citizens in German
territory would be treated the same as German citizens in Turkey.
On that basis the Turks maintained that the Nazis could not
discriminate against Turkish citizens who are Jews. The Nazis
claimed (and the Vichy government agreed) that they were not
discriminating because they were treating all Jews equally.
Turkey protested, saying, "You are dividing our citizens
according to religion, but the Turkish constitution requires that
all citizens be treated equally, regardless of religion.
Therefore, you cannot single out Turkish Jews." American consuls
in Paris, by contrast, accepted the Nazi argument and told
American Jews who were being persecuted by the Nazis that they
couldn't do anything about it, because the American Jews were
being treated the same as other Jews. The third part of the book
takes place in Turkey, which was the principal center during the
Holocaust for activities aimed at the rescue of Eastern European
Jews. The kwish Agency, an organization established by Jews in
Palestine to help resettle Jews to Palestine, set up an office in
Istanbul in 1940 under the leadership of Chaim Barlas. Other
Jewish organizations in Palestine, especially the kibbutzes, also
sent representatives to Istanbul to set up headquarters. These
groups first tried to contact Jews in Eastern Europe to find out
what was happening. Today we know about the Holocaust, but at
that time people didn't know what was going on. They didn't
imagine the Nazis could do the things they were doing. And so the
first step was to get information, and the Turkish government let
them use the Turkish mails to send letters to their relatives and
friends in Eastern Europe. The Jewish organizations found out
what was happening when they received replies. Later on when the
Nazis began to intercept such letters, the Jews received
assistance also from the Vatican nuncio, Angelo Roncali, who
served as the Vatican representative in Istanbul from 1935 to
1944 and later became Pope John XXIII. As the Vatican
representative during the war, he used the facilities of the
Catholic Church to supplement what the Turkish government was
doing to assist Jewish agencies in contacting Jews in Eastern
Europe. With the cooperation of the Turkish government, these
agencies then sent hard currency, food, clothing, and even
railroad and steamship tickets to Jews in Czechoslovakia,
Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. They weren't able to help much in
Poland because by then the Nazis had wiped out almost all the
Polish Jews. Whenever possible the rescue agencies arranged for
the Jews to get out of Eastern Europe either by train through the
so called Orient Express route to Istanbul, or by boat through
the Black Sea to Istanbul.

Turkey was not eager for all these refugees to remain within its
borders during the war, because it was being blockaded and was
suffering terrible shortages of food and clothing. The
government, therefore, facilitated the movement of the
non-Turkish Jewish refugees from Turkey to Palestine, either by
the Taurus Express Railroad through the mountains to Syria and
Palestine, or by small boats across the eastern Mediterranean
from southern Turkey to Palestine. These efforts were bitterly
opposed not only by the Nazis, but also by the British, who did
not want any more Jewish immigration to Palestine because they
feared it would hurt their relations with the Arabs. The British
constantly pressured the Turkish government to stop this traffic
and send those Jews back. In a few cases the Turkish government,
yielding to British pressure, did send the boats back. For
example, in one incident, the steamship Struma, with some 700
Jewish refugees from Romania, was sent back by the Turkish
government as a result of the intervention of the British
ambassador. When that ship was sunk by a Soviet submarine, all
were lost except one person. Nevertheless, all told, the Turkish
government allowed no fewer than 100,000 Eastern European Jews to
pass through Turkish territory and move on to Palestine during
the Second World War. The Turkish authorities also provided these
refugees with facilities and money, and gave them permission to
send money and food out of the country.

- Many of these Jews who passed through Turkey may still be
living in Israel.

Yes, and their children. But let's return for a moment to the
first group, the Turkish Jews who came from Europe. They did not
go on to Palestine; they stayed in Turkey. It was the
non-Turkish, Eastern European Jews who passed through Turkey en
route to Palestine. Their story is very interesting.

- And you have rescued it from obscurity.

Many studies have been made of the Holocaust, but most of them do
not focus on the Eastern European or Middle Eastern Jews. Most of
the scholarship has centered on the Western European Jews, of
whom 6 million were massacred by the Nazis. My study deals with a
much smaller number of people. I have tried to round out the
picture, and I hope my book will persuade other scholars to
undertake further investigations in the history of Eastern Jews.

When it comes to numbers, the German Jews were also relatively
small in number. Most of the millions slain were Polish Jews. The
rescue of 100,000 Eastern European Jews may not seem so
significant compared with the total of 6 million who were
murdered, but it meant a lot to those who were saved.

About three-fourths of the book consists of documents -
translations of many documents. They are included because the
story is not well known. Not only are people in the West unaware
of the courageous actions of the Turkish diplomats; even the
people of Turkey did not know the story. I felt that they would
not fully understand this remarkable achievement unless they
could see the documents.

- What languages are used in the documents?

Most of them are in Turkish or French; some are in Hebrew. There
is a great deal of material in Hebrew about the organization of
the boats going to Palestine, the passengers, and so on, but I
did not go into those details extensively. I describe mostly what
Turkey did, so most of my documents are in Turkish or French. A
few documents are in English. The Jewish groups in Istanbul did
not necessarily cooperate with one another to rescue Jews; in
fact, they often fought with one another. They took turns trying
to get the Turkish government to deport rival groups. For
example, some of the kibbutz groups felt that the Jewish Agency
was run by Western European Jews who were interested only in
helping Western European Jews. Finally, in 1944, President
Roosevelt sent a personal representative, Ira Hirschman, who had
been an executive of Bloomingdale's department store in New York
City, and Hirschman managed to reconcile their differences. The
documents related to his mission are in English.

I also obtained many documents from Serge Klarsfeld, a Holocaust
historian in France, who mainly worked on the French Jews. (His
father was killed by the Nazis.) He gave me materials he had
gathered in the German archives on the Turkish Jews, so I didn't
personally consult the German archives. I believe that much more
can be learned from the German archives, and I hope someone
someday will make the effort.

- This new book fits in well with your teaching, doesn't it?

Right. I'm giving a course on the history of the Jews of the
Ottoman Empire. I first gave the course two years ago. In
addition to research, writing, and teaching, I've been actively
involved in the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the
coming of the Jews to the Ottoman Empire. Among other things, I
helped organize a large international conference on the subject
which was held in Istanbul in 1992.

- Now that your books are finished and the conference has taken
place, what do you plan to do next?

I'm working on two new books. One is a history of the Turkish War
for Independence, which took place after World War I, during the
years 1918 to 1923. The Turks warded off the efforts of the
victorious European powers to occupy Turkey and end its
independence. The second book is a study of Sultan Abdul Hamid
II, the last major sultan, who ruled from 1876 to 1909. He was an
important modernizer in his own way, although he also suppressed
all sorts of political movements.

Stanford J. Shaw received a B.A. in History and an M.A. in
British History. He then shifted to Near Eastern History, earning
a second M.A. and a Ph.D. at Princeton. As a doctoral candidate
at Princeton, he spent two years abroad, studying at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; the
University of Cairo, the American University at Cairo, and the
University of Istanbul. He taught at Harvard before coming to
UCLA in 1966. His postdoctoral research has been supported by the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Research Institute
in Turkey, the Social Science Research Council, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, and ISOP. He
has received honorary degrees from Harvard University and
Bosporus University, Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey, and medals of honor
for lifetime contributions to the fields of Islamic and Turkish
studies from the Center for Research in Islamic History, Art, and
Culture in Istanbul and from the American Friends of Turkey in
Washington, D.C. In addition to undertaking many professional
service activities and public lectures in both the United States
and Turkey, Shaw has also produced eight books and one edited
volume. His History of the Ottoman Empire and Modem Turkey (2
vols.) has been published in many editions (six editions or
reprints from 1977-1991), and translated into Turkish (1983,
1991) and French (1984). His book The Jews of the Ottoman Empire
and the Turkish Republic (MacMillan, London, and New York
University Press, 1992) will be published in Turkish translation
by the Turkish Historical Society, Istanbul. His Turkey and the
Holocaust: Turkey's Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry
from Nazi Persecution, 1933-1945 will be published by Macmillan
Publishers, London, and New York University Press in 1993. A
pamphlet summarizing the book was published in Ankara, Turkey, in
1992.

Murat Kutan

<<We have never denied the Armenian crime of genocide
inflicted upon 2.5 million Muslim people between 1914
and 1920.>> {A. Zahorian -- 'Voices of Agonies', p. 91}

[g...@orausa.com]

Sergent "y" was right. It's only a few arabushim (dirty Arabs).
I feel no sorry for them

Pleae no e mail!!!!!