samson's foxes and the refugees ¹9 3 never seen al-Koubab, a village which ceased to exist long ago, its pitiful houses leveled by bulldozers preparing the land for a new settlement. Secondly, because I had personal memories of al-Koubab. As a soldier of Samson's Foxes I had taken part in the capture of the village. We had surrounded it in the night, after firing a few rounds of ammunition. Upon entering the abandoned houses, we found ovens that were still hot, and dishes on the table. Some hundreds of persons had gone to swell the ranks of the refugees.

I took part in many operations of this kind, which I cannot but recall when the problem of the refugees comes up. I believe, therefore, that I am as qualified as anyone to give an objective account of what actually happened.

The first fact to take into consideration is that the 1948 war was not a war between regular armies of normal states. The rules of civilized warfare did not apply. It was, rather, a violent collision between two movements of almost religious fervor-one, colonizing Zionism; the other, xenophobic nationalism. Each sought to destroy the other. This kind of war degenerates easily into a battle of extermination.

The fighting may be roughly divided into three main phases. During each of these, people left their homes and became refugees for quite different reasons.

The first began on November 30, 1947, only a few hours after the General Assembly of the U.N. had adopted the partition plan. This phase was to last until the end of March 1948. During this period, the war was conducted on the Arab side by irregulars and primitive villagers, who killed and mutilated every Hebrew who fell into their hands. We all saw the pictures of the severed heads of our comrades paraded through the alleys of the Old City of Jerusalem, of unrecognizable corpses with their sexual organs stuffed into their mouths. No one can quite understand what happened later on without realizing the impact

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