LOCAL STRUGGLE, NATIONAL STRUGGLE: PALESTINIAN RESPONSES TO THE KAFR QASIM MASSACRE AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1956–66

Extract

In late November 1957, the Hebrew and state-sponsored Arabic press in Israel printed a series of articles describing an extravagant “ceremony of reconciliation” held in the small and impoverished Palestinian border village of Kafr Qasim. The event was attended by more than 400 distinguished guests, including cabinet ministers, Knesset members from the ruling MAPAI party, military-government representatives, national trade-union officials, and “notables” from neighboring Arab villages. The idea behind the “sulḥa,” as its government-appointed organizers termed it (borrowing from the Arabic), was to heal the remaining wounds from the 29 October 1956 Israeli border-patrol massacre of forty-eight Palestinian Arab citizens, all but four of whom were residents of Kafr Qasim.¹ The day of the ceremony, 20 November, marked exactly one year and three weeks since the first day of the Sinai war and the fateful evening when village day laborers returning home were lined up and summarily shot for unknowingly “violating” a curfew that had been announced only thirty minutes earlier.