Is it older than Israel?

On 29 October 1956, the first day of the Suez war, the Israel Border Police imposed a curfew on villages along the Jordanian border from five in the evening. The villagers of Kafr Qasim, at work in the fields and in nearby towns, had not been told. As they came home the police stopped them at the entrance to the village and shot them in groups. Forty-nine people were killed, among them 23 children; a further Palestinian was killed in the neighbouring village.

The affair was censored for weeks. Eleven policemen were tried and eight convicted; the sentences were reduced and all were out within three years. The commanding officer was fined one piastre. The ruling in the case, that a soldier must refuse a "manifestly illegal" order over which "a black flag flies", is the one part of it Israel remembers.