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Some textbooks, especially more recent ones, explain massacres as "routine battles or successful military operations." Others present them as "transgression(s)" or diversions "from official plans" but nonetheless legitimated by their positive outcome, benefitting Jews over Arabs.
Yet massacres are defined as barbarous wanton murder of "usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty," Israeli history strewn with examples, worst of all its so-called "war of independence," but many others also, involving cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians.
An earlier article covered some of the most egregious, accessed through the following link:
Today, they're sanitized and forgotten. Earlier they were wrongly justified as they are today, including decades of extreme repression, ethnic cleansing, imperial wars, and repeated attacks against noncombatants, ideologically committed for an ethnically pure Greater Israel, the end justifying the means no matter how barbaric or criminal.
For example, the October 1953 Kibya massacre, ordered by Ariel Sharon, when Israeli forces attacked the Jordanian village, northwest of Jerusalem. Using mortars, machine guns, rifles and explosives, they blew up 42 houses, local schools and the mosque, killing every man, woman and child found - in total, 75 noncombatant villagers, slaughtered in cold blood, an atrocity by any standard portrayed as a "success (that) restored the morale and dignity of the army and helped it become a deterring vigorous (force) whose long arm can reach the enemy deep in its own territory."
The moral - killing is good, slaughter is better, and in great enough numbers combined with atrocities best of all, a lesson taught Israeli youths preparing them to be soldiers.
Like all imperial states, Israel specializes in historical revisionism, legitimizing massacres in school texts, transforming the outrageous into liberating heroism, "align(ed) with the goals of Zionism and with Jewish creed." They become acceptable acts in times of conflicts. Utility is all that matters, justifying the unjustifiable for a greater good, manipulating young minds to believe it and Jewish exceptionalism, including the mythology about Israel's "war of independence."
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