The Haifa Oil Refinery massacre took place on 30 December 1947. After members of the Zionist paramilitary organisation, the Irgun, threw a number of grenades at a crowd of 100 Arab day-labourers who had gathered outside the main gate of the then British-owned Haifa Oil Refinery looking for work, six people were killed and 42 wounded. Minutes after this attack, Arab refinery workers and others began attacking the Jewish refinery workers, resulting in 39 deaths and 49 injuries, before British army and Palestine Police units arrived to put an end to the violence. Haganah later retaliated by attacking two nearby Arab villages in what became known as the Balad al-Shaykh Massacre, where between 21 and 70 Arabs were killed, while skirmishes followed in Haifa.
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Famous quotes containing the words oil and/or massacre:
“Eat what you can get.
Where’s the salt
in this dump of a village?
And, Lucky Man,
what’s the use
of a salty thing
if there’s no oil in it?”
—Hla Stavhana (c. 50 A.D.)
“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)