30 Years Ago, the Kafr Qana Massacre Shook Israel; Today, It Would Be Another Drop in the Ocean - Opinion - Haaretz.com
How naïve we were back then, and how sensitive. On April 18, 1996 – 29 years ago – an Israeli artillery battery provided cover fire to extricate the Maglan commando unit, headed by Maj. Naftali Bennett, from an ambush in the southern Lebanese village of Kafr Qana. Four shells hit a United Nations refugee camp, killing 102 civilians, many of them children.
The Israel Defense Forces spokesperson tried to lie and to obfuscate, as usual; Prime Minister Shimon Peres said we were "very sorry" but that we "do not apologize," and the world raged. A few days later, Israel was forced to end Operation Grapes of Wrath, another one of the insane military operations undertaken in Lebanon in those years. A month later, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected to his first term as prime minister, in part due to Kafr Qana. How naïve we were then, and how sensitive.
Kafr Qana became the model for the Israeli nightmare in every war: an incident in which scores of civilians are killed, forcing Israel to end the war: anything but that. But times have changed. Today, Israel can slaughter to its heart's delight, without fearing another Kafr Qana.
In the past two weeks Israel has carried out a "Kafr Qana" nearly every day in the Gaza Strip, and no one is calling for it to stop. The Kafr Qana nightmare has evaporated. There is no longer any need to be make sure not to kill dozens of innocent civilians. No one cares. The IDF spokesperson no longer needs to lie, the prime minister no longer needs to be sorry. The world and Israel's conscience have melted away.
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If Sunday's horrific bloodbath in the current phase of the Gaza war does not stop Israel; if the killing of a Rafah medical team fails to stop it, what could stop it? Nothing. Israel can carry out as many massacres as it likes. And apparently, it would like quite a lot of them.
In the opening strike of the renewed warfare in Gaza, Israel killed 436 civilians, among them 183 children and 94 women. Kafr Qana four times over and then some.
A funeral for the aid workers in Gaza, on Tuesday.Credit: Hatem Khaled / Reuters
The shocking story in Friday's Haaretz, by Nir Hasson and Hanin Majadli, showed the faces and brought the stories. They were stomach-churning. This week, details of a different horrific massacre, perhaps the most barbaric of all so far, were published: the massacre of teams of emergency responders in Rafah's Tel al-Sultan neighborhood. Fifteen bodies, one with its legs bound and one pierced by 20 bullets, were found buried in the sand one on top of the other, together with their ambulances and fire trucks.
According to eyewitnesses, at least a few had been executed. All of them were rescue workers who were trying to reach people who had been wounded in Israeli airstrikes. In normal times, the report by Hasson, Jack Khoury and Liza Rozovsky (Haaretz, Tuesday), would have been enough to bring a halt to the war. Kafr Qana pales in comparison in the level of barbarity. In the former, one could believe that Israel inadvertently killed dozens of innocent people; in Tel al-Sultan, it was clear that there was malicious and criminal intent to do so.
What happened in Tel al-Sultan is an Israeli My Lai massacre. But while My Lai marked a sea change in American public opinion against the Vietnam War, Tel al-Sultan failed to interest most of the Israeli media. The militaristic and brainwashed America of the time was in an uproar; the Israel of today has turned a blind eye to Tel al-Sultan.
Not only have these massacres not sparked any shift in public opinion or brought about a halt to the war, they seem to be encouraging more massacres. On Tuesday, the Israeli military bombed a UNRWA refugee agency clinic in the Jabalya camp, killing 19 people, including children. This is the kind of massacre that is being allowed to recur. Who would ever have imagined that we might one day look back fondly on the days of Kafr Qana, Operation Grapes of Wrath or the Peres government? Yet here we are.