It was a 90-minute drive from Jerusalem to the town of Kufr Qassem in the Palestinian triangle inside Israel proper. I had arranged a number of interviews with survivors of a massacre the Zionist army committed a bit over four decades ago. The road leading into the town was full of olive trees on both sides. Only a few people were collecting their olives. The harvest was close to its end. And so were the days forty one years ago.

On 29 October 1956, just hours after the tripartite attack of Israel, France and Britain started on Egypt in what was known as the Sinai Campaign, 49 villagers from Kufr Qassem were slaughtered in cold blood as they made their way back from their fields to their homes.

In the town centre stood a monument commemorating those who were killed. The list of names carved on the big square stone contained 49 names and one blank space. I later was told it was left for the 50th victim whose name nobody could find out. One of the murdered women was pregnant in her eighth month and the baby died in her womb. No one could ever come up with a suitable name for that unborn victim.

I went through the list and matched it with names of people who were slated for interviews later in the day. Many names sounded familiar. Many of them were relatives of those I was going to see. The view of those picking their olives whom I saw on my way into the town crossed my mind to intercut later with images of those who returned to their homes on the day of the massacre. I was moved by the scene and was on the verge of crying. At that moment, light rain drops sporadically fell above our heads. The sky, I wondered, was crying in Kufr Qassem!

A month and a half later, details on the massacre started to flow in through the media. A number of left-wing and Arab Knesset members played a leading role and contributed to the exposure. Tewfiq Toubi and Meir Wilner of the Israeli Communist Party sent hundreds of letters about the events on that day to public figures in the country . Latif Dori, an active member of left-wing Zionist Mapam Party infiltrated into the village three days after the massacre and collected first hand testimonies from survivors. Uri Avneri, also a leading leftist who was the first to visit PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat in Beirut during the Israeli siege of the Lebanese capital in 1982, played an effective role through his weekly magazine, Ha'Olam Hazeh (This World).

Yet all that was published in those days could not give an exact account of the motives behind the massacre. The only explanation was given by the villagers themselves who insisted the slaughtering of innocent villagers was meant to force them out of their country into Jordan. Kufr Qassem was no more than six miles away from the 1967 borders between Jordan and Israel.

Only in 1991, part of the truth started to come out. Rupik Rozenthal, an Israeli journalist, wrote in "Hadashot" on 25 November saying the massacre was part of an overall plan by the Israeli army to deport as many Palestinians as possible out of the country. Rozenthal was allowed to go through the army archives and read the minutes of the military trial of the 11 soldiers and officers who were involved in the massacre. He found out that the plan was to try and move the Palestinians out of the Arab villages in the Triangle and send them into Jordan should the latter intervene in support of Egypt. Jordan did not enter the 1956 war. The plan was not carried out in full. Only the first phase was done. The dire price was the lives of 49 villagers from Kufr Qassem.

When it realized that the crime was too heinous to hide, Israel decided to put those involved on military trial, which according to the villagers was no more than a joke. Colonel Yishishkar Shedmi, who changed the timing for the curfew and reportedly gave his soldiers the green light to go ahead with the massacre, was only found guilty of exceeding his authority when he moved the curfew hour. The court fined him only one piaster. The verdict, at least as far as the villagers were concerned, meant that one piaster was the price Israel was ready to give for the 49 victims. The rest of those on trial were sentenced to between seven and 17 years imprisonment, but all were released before the end of the third year of their penalty.

Major Avraham Melinki, who commanded the Border Police force in the village and was the one who gave the orders to shoot, was promoted shortly after his release from prison. Then Prime Minister and Defense Minister David Ben Gurion placed him in charge of security arrangements in Israel's maximum security nuclear reactor in Dimona. Colonel Shedmi continued his service in the army. In 1967, he was a mechanized brigade commander and in 1973 he served as advisor to the commander of the northern district and was wounded when their helicopter crashed over Mount of Hermon on the Golan Heights.