I wish I hadn't read the following story. Not today. It's too horrible. But now I have it haunts me.
In August 1949, an army unit stationed at Nirim in the Negev shot an Arab man and captured a Bedouin girl with him. Her name and age remain unknown, but she was probably in her mid-teens.
In the following hours she was taken from the hut and forced to shower naked in full view of the soldiers. Three of the men then raped her.
After the Sabbath meal the platoon commander, identified by Ha'aretz as a man called Moshe who had served in the British army during the second world war, proposed a vote on what should be done with her.
One option was to put her to work in the outpost's kitchen.
Most of the 20 or so soldiers present voted for the alternative by chanting: "We want to fuck".The commander organised a rota for groups of his men to gang rape the girl over the next three days. Moshe and one of his sergeants went first, leaving the girl unconscious. Next morning, she complicated matters by protesting about her treatment. Moshe told one of his sergeants to kill her
.
When the girl realised what was about to happen she tried to run, but only made it a few paces before she was shot by a Sergeant Michael.
Her body was buried in a grave less than a foot deep. A few days later the battalion commander, Yehuda Drexler, asked Moshe if he had carried out an order to return the girl to her village.
"They killed her," replied Moshe. "It was a shame to waste the petrol."
When I finished I felt ill. I wanted to write something more or less thoughtful. Like how could Jews do that only four years after the end of the Holocaust? When they of all people should know that when you want to massacre a people ....first you have to dehumanize them. Or why Palestians call the events of 1948 the Al Nakba or Catastrophe.
But all I have the strength to say is some men are PIGS. War turns all men into animals.That's why so many of them like it so much. That's why guns and missiles look like dicks.
The poor little girl.
And when oh when will women rule the world?
Because it can't come soon enough....
