'The DISINHERITED' is an EXCELLENT lengthy report on what happened to the 130,000 citizens living in the Golan Heights in June 1967 by the Haaretz Israeli newspaper!!!! The Zionist narrative is demonstrably FALSE on reading this article. Nothing new!
- 30.07.10
The disinherited
What happened to the 130,000 Syrian citizens living in the Golan Heights in June 1967? According to the Israeli narrative, they all fled to Syria, but official documents and testimonies tell a different story.
By
Shay Fogelman
Syrians fleeing the Golan Heights en route to Damascus in 1967.
In a historical-geographical lexicon published by the Defense Ministry, the entry for the Golan Heights reads: "In the Six-Day War it was conquered by the IDF and a majority of its inhabitants fled."
But throughout the years other evidence occasionally surfaced: stories told by soldiers and civilians who were in the Golan at the time, and either witnessed or played an active role in the expulsion of civilians, which they said was initiated by Israel. Surprisingly, even in the majority of the most serious historical studies, the writers tended to disregard these testimonies.
"I heard evidence that events did not really occur the way the official narrative maintained all these years," said one prominent scholar, who several years ago published an authoritative book on the Golan. "I consciously did not get into it and decided to stay with the existing narrative. I feared that all the attention that would arise around the book would focus on this issue and not on the real heart of the research." Another historian attributed his decision to go with the flow to a lack of desire to be labeled a "leftist": "There was flight and there was expulsion. Even though this is considered a controversial subject, anyone who has studied the period even a little knows very well that there was some of both. Testimonies about expulsion and being prevented from returning reached me, but I didn't have the tools to investigate them in depth ... I didn't see any point in digging into the issue, primarily so as not to be thought of forever as a historian who took a stance on this complex issue."
No return
By the end of the summer of 1967 there were hardly any Syrian civilians left in the Golan Heights. IDF forces prevented residents who'd left from returning, and those who'd remained behind were evacuated to Syria. On August 27, IDF General Command issued an order classifying 101 villages in the Golan as "abandoned," and prohibiting entry to them. Anyone in violation of this order "was subject to five years' imprisonment or a fine of 5,000 liras, or both."
Every two weeks, a report about civilian life under the military administration in the Golan was submitted. About the last half of September, one such report said: "Our forces opened fire 22 times to chase away shepherds and infiltrators who approached outposts. Three Syrian and two Lebanese infiltrators were apprehended for questioning." It is important to note that it is explicitly stated that these were unarmed civilians.
The above report also said: "Relative to the past weeks, the number of infiltrations from Syrian territory has decreased, due to the alertness of our forces who open fire at [those] who approach."
All of the events covered in the reports were banned from publication at the time by the censor, whereas incidents in which IDF forces encountered armed civilians or combatants were given extensive media coverage.
In the summary of a meeting of the committee responsible for civilian affairs in the "held areas," on October 3, in the defense minister's office, there was a rare slip of the pen: "The expulsion will be carried out on the basis of the directive to prevent infiltration (and not as written on the basis of the 'law' which applies in Israel alone )," the minutes read.
Officially, however, Israel continued to deny any evacuation or expulsion of civilians. In his piece in Life Magazine, Moshe Dayan wrote that after the war, the Red Cross approached Israel about allowing Golan inhabitants to return to their villages, but the Syrian government itself did not support this request, but rather concerned itself solely with "renewing the war against Israel."
Dayan added that if there would be a severe winter, it was doubtful whether many of the homes in the abandoned villages would remain standing, since they were damaged in the fighting. Some were damaged and partly destroyed in the fighting, and the bituminous mud shacks needed to be shored up before the rains.
Many of the houses in the Golan did not, in fact, survive that first winter. The ceilings collapsed, as Dayan predicted. By the next summer, the chiseled stones from the structures were being collected for the construction of military outposts. W
Read more at www.haaretz.com
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