"Sydney Webb" wrote in message
news:44796277.2F09275C@......
> usgrant63@... wrote:
>>
> Arguably 'never'. Some might point to the Deir Yassin massacre
It was a battle, not a massacre. The Arabs were told to surrender but
decided to shoot it out.
> as worse but
> (a) it was in the context of military action; and
> (b) the massacring forces also included IZL and Lehi so it wasn't a pure
> Haganah operation.
Part of the context would include the Arab policy of starving Jerusalem into
surrender by blocking truck transports. Then there was the Hadassah Hospital
convoy shootout.
>
> However the Balad ash Sheikh massacre, in response to the Haifa Oil
> Refinery massacre was on 31 December 1947, was during the last few
> months of Haganah's life. In an ATL where the British stay in Palestine
> longer, might Haganah be involved in other, large-scale, revenge
> killings? Or had they learnt their lesson, and as a matter of doctrine
> eschewed massacres as immoral or counter-productive?
The Jews did not carry out massacres like the Arabs did. There were drive-by
shootings and bombings but they were in response to Arab killings. There was
nothing like the Arab policy of hunting down Jews as at Haifa refinery.
Since your premise is false, it would be senseless to let Arabs kill Jews at
will with no response. If the British had stayed longer there would be more
Arab atrocities. Jewish responses would be called "massacres" and all
terrorists would be posthunously transformed into innocent civilians..
> Nevertheless, as far as death tolls by non-state forces go, it's on the
> low side. [The fact that Arabs suffered more from massacres than Jews
> during the 1947/48 War does not seem to me to be attributable to any
> moral imbalance.
That is not a fact.
> Rather the reason is the same as that for the Right
> inflicting more civilian casualties than the Left in the Greek Civil War
> of 1944-49. The winners were in a better position to do so.]
>
>> By way of comparison, if you tally up the number of Arab civilians
>> intentionally killed by the Haganah, it wouldn't even come close to the
>> number of (mostly ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist) Jewish civilians Hajj
>> Amin al-Husayni killed in one week in 1929. And he was running the Arab
>> Higher Committee (as close to a central government as the Palestinian
>> Arabs ever had) for _twenty-seven years_.
>
> So this is clearly an unfair comparison. We can't equate state-power
> with non-state ('terrorist') power. For the same reason that the IDF
> has been able to kill far more people than her predecessors in Irgun,
> Haganah, etc - state power leaves you better placed.
Non-state does not equal terrorist except in your own curious definition.
>
> That said, we can note the restraint of both Jewish non-state and state
> forces compared with some other forces in history, and their
> corresponding death tolls. And this gives us an AH model...
>
> 1. It seems reasonable toume that when a non-state forceumes
> power in a state it will kill more people than before.
>
> 2. The propensity to kill remains the same. That is a moderately
> murderous non-state force will remain moderately murderous when it
> seizes the state. And a highly murderous force will remain highly
> murderous. Thus we can conclude that the lethality of a state force is
> proportional to the lethality it had when non-state, magnified by a
> factor of, say, 'k'.
>
> Thus we can consider all the non-state forces of history that never
> achieved power, and consider what their reigns would have been like in
> ATLs where they did.
>
> A modest first candidate: Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungern_von_Sternberg
>
> - Syd
*** Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com *** |
