Half a century ago, kadima was the order given by Ariel Sharon, the young Israeli officer, to blow up the West Bank Arab hamlet of Qibya, in which 69 villagers were killed, many of them women and children. Today it is the inspiring political battle cry of his new centrist party, formed to move Israel and the Palestinians into an era of peace.

Qibya is one of the most notorious military operations of the Israeli general-turned-politician’s life, ranking just behind the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Phalangist allies in Beirut. It was the most infamous of the night-time reprisal raids carried out by his elite Unit 101 in the then Jordanian-occupied West Bank during the 1950s, in retaliation for fedayeen attacks on Israeli homes just inside the Green Line.

Sitting amid the threadbare blankets and peeling paint of his home near the monument to the villagers shuhada (martyrs) Sulaiman al Abed Ali, now 86, remembers hearing the first signs of the Israeli raiding party shortly after evening prayers when the muezzin then, as now, blared‘Allahu Akbar’ into the night-time valleys.

"They had ambushed two of the village’s guards but one of them managed to escape and rushed toward the village shouting‘the Jews, the Jews’," he recalled. "The force that was attacking the village came from a different side, they threw a grenade and I heard the commander shouting ‘Kadima, kadima, urging his men forward." Working regularly for Israelis as a farm labourer he spoke a little Hebrew, even as a youth."We knew what it meant because they used to say it to us."

Writing years later in his 1989 autobiography Warrior, Mr Sharon gives a detailed account of the about the Qibya attack. He described leading 100 paratroopers and 25 commandoes who carried 600 kilograms of explosives to destroy the village’s buildings in retaliation for a ‘particularly horrendous’ murder by Palestinian gunmen of a young Israeli mother and her two children aged one and three while they slept in nearby Yehud.

Arield Sharon insists that when they entered the village"Qibya seemed completely deserted". After sending soldiers to look through each house "to make sure no one was inside", the charges were placed and set off’, an operation that lasted several hours and destroyed 42 buildings

This is not how the villagers recall it today. "They attacked fiercely, wherever they heard a noise they demolished the building," Mr Ali recalls, conceding that local fedayeen guerrillas mounted regular attacks into Jewish areas. "I ran after I heard the shooting, who would stay? We were so afraid that we fled. Everyone fled, except the poor ones who remained to hide."

A few streets away Husni Mustafa Hussein, 74, was a guard tasked to defend the village, but with few bullets to do so. He too heard someone shouting "Kadima," followed by Arabic curses to scare village defenders away. Unaware of Mr Sharon’s new party’s name, he like the rest of the village has followed the medical reports from Jerusalem, with little sympathy for the man who killed his friends and relatives. "They shot a woman and her daughter in the street. Nothing has changed of his attitude. Even though he did withdraw from Gaza his instincts remained."

In his autobiography Mr Sharon acknowledges that Qibya was a "tragedy" but insists that its real importance was as ‘lesson’ that the new Jewish state would no longer suffer silently attacks across the Green Line.

"The orders were clear. Qibya was to be a lesson," he wrote."I was to inflict as many casualties as I could on the Arab home guard and whatever Jordanian army reinforcement showed up. I was also to blow up every major building in the town."

He "couldn’t believe" his ears when he learnt the extent of the casualties from the radio the next day, he wrote, surmising that "some Arab families must have stayed in their houses rather than running away."

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