Sunday, August 28, 2016

The lies of Uri Avnery and Amos Kenan

From James: "Uri Avnery on Kenan: “Amos Kenan was a moral person.”

Amos Kenan, “The Legacy of Lydda: Four Decades of Blood Vengeance.” The Nation 248.5 (Feb. 6, 1989).
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In the afternoon, those of us who couldn't take it any more would steal off to Tel Aviv for a few hours, on one excuse or another. At night, those of us who couldn't restrain ourselves would go into the prison compounds to fuck Arab women. I want very much to assume, and perhaps even can, that those who couldn't restrain themselves did what they thought the Arabs would have done to them had they won the war.

George Habash’s response: “A Reply To Amos Kenan’s ‘The Legacy of Lydda’and An Interview With PFLP Leader Dr. George Habash.”
“My own memories of Lydda completely contradict Kenan’s lies. . . .  When I reached Lydda I found my sister seriously ill with typhoid. She was my eldest sister who was married and had six children. The curfew made it impossible to obtain medicines or even to move about. I found the Clinic had been removed to what had been the CMS Hospital and was now barely a clinic. Nevertheless I felt obliged to stay there in order to take care of patients because there were no doctors left in the city to treat the sick and the wounded. Someone managed to get to the clinic to tell me that my sister was dead. I had to go to her home which was some distance from the Clinic. When I went outside and found my way through the streets, I saw terrible sights: dozens of bodies lay on the ground in pools of blood, old and young had been shot. Among the dead I recognized one elderly man, a good old neighbor who had a small Falafel shop, a man who had never carried a gun. The Israelis were killing defenseless, unarmed people indiscriminately.”"