Deir Yassin massacre 50th Anniversay
Palestine-Israel, History, 4/8/1998

In remembrance of Deir Yassin, ArabicNews.com received the following information for release , we do so with minor editing. For more information:see http://www.deiryassin.org


On April 9 - 10, 1948 the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem was attacked by Jewish nationalist militias, Irgun and Lehi (also known as The Stern Gang). During this attack over 100 men, women and children were killed according to the New York Times on April 13, 1948. This massacre is often cited as sparking the panic that led to over 750,000 Palestinians being driven from their homes. Over one million Palestinians live in refugee camps today. During his visit to Israel in March of this year British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook laid a wreath in honor of those massacred at Deir Yassin.

In summary, the tragic massacre of the Palestinian Arab villagers of Deir Yassin in 1948 by pre-state Israeli paramilitary forces highlights several important matters for peacemakers and humanitarians. Most important of these is the great risk of acts of inhumanity to our fellow humans that war and ideology make possible. Of considerable importance as well is the massacre's specific and disproportionate significance in shaping the modern Middle East and its troubles.

Additionally, awareness of the massacre and its history is singularly helpful in bringing to light essential realities for any person interested in bringing peace to the Middle East. Finally, and with an almost poetic poignance, the site of massacre is within view of the Yad Vashem memorial to the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust. A special memorial for one infamous massacre nearby would powerfully emphasize the continuing urgency of remembering slain innocents and the evil consequences of dehumanization.

- The consequences of dehumanization of the enemy are found in the reflection of an eyewitness: Yeshurun Schiff was the commander of the mainstream Jewish forces which had originally aided the terrorist forces to capture the village. Later, when he came upon the scene, he saw the full extent of the subsequent atrocities. He would comment with horror that the forces that had committed the massacre had "kill[ed] everybody they had found alive as though every living thing in the village was the enemy and they could only think 'Kill them all.'"

Deir Yassin ["Yassin Abbey"[or Monastery]] was the name of an Arab village about 3 miles due west of the Old City of Jerusalem in the British Mandate of Palestine. (Today the village lies within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem in the area known as Givat Shaul and Kfar Shaul; the original village was not demolished but was resettled by Israel despite international protests from such luminaries as Albert Einstein and Martin Buber.)

In April 1948, warfare continued to intensify between its Arab and Jewish communities in anticipation of the British departure in the next month. On the 9th of April, the village was attacked and captured by Jewish nationalist forces. Subsequent to the capture, villagers were variously paraded, terrorized, abused, expelled and anywhere from 100 to 254 were ultimately massacred by two of the militia forces known as the Irgun Zvai Leumi (the Irgun) and the Lehi (the Stern Gang). Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others have labeled these ultra-nationalist groups "Fascist, terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organizations."

The main attacking forces, the independent Zionist (Jewish nationalist) militias, Irgun and the Lehi (also called the "The Stern Gang"), initially failed to effectively capture the village and so a more mainstream organization, the Palmach, came in and captured the village for them and turned over the village to them. Within the next two or so days anywhere from 100 to 254 innocent villagers were systematically slaughtered. The victims were mostly non-combatant civilians. Jacques de Reynier, head of the Red Cross, visited the site soon after and saw "a young woman stab an elderly man and woman cowering on the doorstop of their hut." He noted that "They [the Irgun] had done their 'cleaning up' with guns and grenades and finished their work with knives . . . . All I could think of was the S.S. troops I'd seen in Athens." In another place, he found "a woman who must have been eight months pregnant, hit in the stomach, with powder burns . . . indicating she had shot point blank." (Collins, LaPierre 292-93). Eliyahu Arieli, the head of Gadna, the main Jewish youth organization, whose members were brought in to bury the dead bodies of the villagers observed a sight at Deir Yassin that was "absolutely barbaric" where "all of the killed with very few exceptions were old, men, women, and children. . . . The dead we found were all unjust victims and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands." (Collins, Lapierre 294)

Some victims were paraded in public before being killed. Journalist Harry Levin reported that he saw three trucks of captive villagers of Deir Yassin "driving slowly up and down King George V Avenue, carrying men, women, and children, their hands held over their heads." One was "a young boy, a look of anguished horror written on his face, his arms frozen upright." (Collins, Lapierre 293).

Trained British criminal investigators concluded that sexual assault of some villagers of Deir Yassin occurred after its capture. "There is, however, no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the [attackers]." (Dossier No. 179/110/17/GS Report by Richard C. Gatling, Assistant Inspector General of the Criminal Investigation Division, to Chief Secretary of the Palestine Government, Sir Henry Gurney, April 15, 1948. Quoted in Collins & Lapierre 290).

The village was not a hostile target and there is evidence that some kind of harm was planned to befall the villagers in order to demonstrate a political purpose.

David Shaltiel, the commander of the main Jewish forces in Jerusalem at the time commented that Deir Yassin "had been quiet since the beginning of the disturbances . . . not mentioned in reports of attacks on Jews, and one of the few places which has not given a foothold to foreign bands [irregular outside Arab forces fighting alongside Palestinians]" (Quoted in Collins, Lapierre).

The commander of the attack, Benzion Cohen, later recalled that "The majority [of the attackers] was for liquidation of all the men in the village and any other force that opposed us, whether it be old people, women, and children." (Quoted in Shipler). David Shipler, New York Times reporter in Israel in 1986, reported that "the Jewish fighters who planned the attack on Deir Yassin also had a larger purpose, apparently. A Jerusalem woman and her son, who gave some of the men coffee in the predawn hours before their mission, still recall the guerrillas talking excitedly about the prospect of terrifying Arabs far beyond the village of Deir Yassin so that they would run away. Perhaps this helps explain why the Jewish guerrillas did not bury the Arabs they had killed, but left the bodies to be seen, why they paraded surviving prisoners, blindfolded and with hands bound, in the backs of trucks through the streets of Jerusalem." (Shipler 38)

Type of attack and killing of villagers was a regular part of the fighting and was actually a climax of the ongoing seizures by Jewish nationalist forces, both mainstream and extremist, of Arab villages and the terrorization of their populations into refugees.

Dana Adams Schmidt, New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem at the time, noted that "the most common type of [military] incident in those early months of 1948 were raids by Haganah or other Jewish paramilitary groups who would raid a village and blow up houses. The inhabitants of the village would then flee. Schmidt said this was the beginning of the flight of the Arabs from Palestine in 1948."

In more recent times, Israel's own archives reveal several villages in which massacres of Arabs took place in the 1948 war. (Shipler 36-37) Although the overall commander of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, who would become Prime Minister of Israel 30 years later, denied that atrocities had taken place at Deir Yassin, Schmidt of the New York Times went to visit "the Irgun spokesman" in Tel Aviv who told him that they were obliged to use "terror, bombs, and assassination." "It is the only way," the Irgun spokesman (possibly Begin himself) said, confirming the true methods used. "We have no other weapons that will move the British and frighten the Arabs."

It remains one of the single most significant causes of the Palestinian refugee situation which lay at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some conventional mythology still attributes the mass flight of the Palestinians to "evacuation orders" of the neighboring Arab states. According to the accounts of the battle for the Jerusalem area made by UPI journalist Larry Collins and writer Dominique Lapierre for their book, "O Jerusalem!" (Simon & Schuster 1972), which was based upon extensive original first-hand research of the time and its participants, it was "the gruesomely detailed news of [Deir Yassin] . . . [which] stirred a growing sense of panic among the Arabs of Palestine [and] helped set the stage for a problem soon to haunt the Middle East, the drama of thousands of Arab refugees." (Collins & Lapierre 296).

Menachem Begin, later a Prime Minister of Israel, who was overall commander of the Irgun, the main Jewish nationalist force which occupied Deir Yassin, later bragged in his memoir, "The Revolt," that after "Dir Yassin" as he called it, "out of evil, however, good came. The legend [as he calls reports of the actual massacre] was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel. Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz-Israel."

Shipler, the Times reporter, noted that "Deir Yassin quickly became a name of infamy and a source of terrible fear that served its goal of provoking flight by those who thought the Jews would do the same in every Arab village." The atrocity also reveals that the intervention by the Arab states against the newborn state of Israel in May had some other motives than a desire to stop the newly forming state of Israel from coming into being. It should be noted that part of the flight of the Arabs from terrorizing raids on their villages such as Deir Yassin occurred before the Arab states intervened in the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and before the British left. Further, it reminds us that even today Jerusalem is a difficult issue not only because of the holy sites in mostly Arab East Jerusalem but also because West Jerusalem had Arab residents who, as in Deir Yassin, were cleared out to make way for Jewish settlers.

Whatever may be the best form of memorial, one thing is clear. The massacre of April 9-10, 1948 at Deir Yassin should be memorialized as a message of hope and education. Deir Yassin Remembered is devoted to preserving that memory in the interests of peace for all parties, justice for the dispossessed Palestinians, and the honor of the victims of Deir Yassin as martyrs to the value of all humanity.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y :
- Collins, Larry & Lapierre, Dominique. O Jerusalem. (Simon & Schuster 1972).
- Schmidt, Dana Adams. Armageddon in the Middle East. (New York Times Books: 1972).
- Shipler, David. Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. (Penguin Books 1986).

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