Deir Yassin massacre

The Deir Yassin incident took place on April 9, 1948, during the Jewish attempts to break the siege of Jerusalem (imposed by raids of Arab irregular forces upon the sole Tel-Aviv-Jerusalem road). The Jewish forces participating in the operation belonged in effect to two Jewish undergrounds - the Irgun led by Menachem Begin (he was a political, rather than military leader, and did not command the forces at Deir Yassin) and the Stern gang. Iraqi soldiers were reportedly among the Palestinian villagers. Iraq took part on the Arab side in the civil war between Jews and Arabs in the British Mandate of Palestine.

Deir Yassin was village a quiet village located a few kilometers west of Jerusalem and two kilometers south of the highway. The villagers reportedly wanted to remain neutral in the war and they had repeatedly resisted help and alliances with the Palestinian irregulars. Instead they had made a pact with Haganah to not help the irregulars as long as they were not the target of military operations. (Levi, Yitzhak, op. cit. pp 340-341)

In the meeting with Haganah commander David Shaitel, which was Irgun's and the Stern Gang's link to the Haganah, they opted for an attack against the village. Shaitel didn't like that idea since Deir Yassin was of no strategic importance and they had held their agreement with the Haganah. The reasons why the underground commanders choose to attack Deir Yassin are unclear. Among the different reasons given, are that the groups saw themselves as to inexperienced to carry out a difficult mission and they expected Deir Yassin to provide them with an easy one, and that the underground groups needed loot to support their organisations.

Yehuda Lapidot, Irgun Commander, testified as recorded in the Jabotinsky Archives:

"The original idea to attack Deir Yassin, was Gal's , according to what I heard at the time. The reason was mainly economical. That is, to get booty in order to maintain the bases that we had set up at that time with very poor resources. The main idea was nonetheless the military and security conquest of the point..." (Lapidot, Yehudah, testimony at Jabotinsky Archives)

The Arab side would rather characterize at reast some of these reasons as a trumped-up excuse.

The attack was launched at the morning of Friday April 9, 1948. In the northeast sector of the village, Lehi advanced while in the southwestern part the Etzel people wasn't making any progress because of sniper rifle fire from the western heights. This was fquickly neutralized by Haganah units using mortar fire sometime between 10:00 or 12:00 A.M, after which Haganah units left. (Levi, Yitzhak, op. cit. p343-344; Pail and Isseroff, op. cit.)

At this point there was no longer any resistance in the village, but it did not surrender. Etzel and Lehi soldiers began going from house to house shooting the inhabitants. Groups of prisoners were taken out of Deir Yassin and paraded in Jerusalem. One group of about 15 to 25 men was returned to the village and shot. (Kfir, Ilan, Yediot Ahronot 4.4.72)

The most detailed study of the incident to this date was made in 1987 by independent Palestinian college researches at Bir Zeit University. They found that although there was indeed a massacre "the like of which has seldom been seen", fewer civilians than had been earlier claimed were actually killed. The study put the number of victims at below 120. This study was part of a larger project to map out the hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

The Israeli historiography generally accepts the the massacre had taken place; the Israeli accounts may however at occasions disagree with the statements of the Arab side in the description of its various details, such as the number of dead, which they claim to be significantly lower (which would fit in with the results of the Palestinian study presented above).

Sid Zion wrote in a March 23, 1998 column in the New York Daily News that what happened in Deir Yassin was a pitched battle, not a massacre, and that the Irgun actually warned the Arab residents prior to the battle. He further concludes that the charge of "massacre" was a "libel". See the web site [1].

Historical perspective

Some accounts also state that the purpose of this massacre was strictly an exercise in propaganda. By parading the victims who survived in their bloody nightgowns, through the neighbouring towns, they were able to further frighten and panic the remaining inhabitants of these areas. Also the, Palestinians claim that sounds of the attack were recorded, and used again and again to frighten other villages, and areas, containing the native Palestinian population, this also encouraged them to flee. See, for example, [2].

Several articles (including one by Sid Zion above) were written, that display the incident as a pitched-up battle. While their findings contradict the more serious research on both the Israeli and the Arab sides, they do raise the important question of whether the battle's description had been exaggerated in Arab media for propagandist purposes. Arabs claim that pro-Zionist organizations, such as the American Zionist Organization, are now at the forefront to tone down the size of the massacre.

Many people, both Zionist and non-Zionist argue that to deny that a massacre took place is to rewrite history and to participate in what they regard as analogous to holocaust denial. For an example of a liberal Jewish web site that memoralizes the victims at Deir Yassin, see [3]. This web site disagrees with the ZOA assertion, arguing that "Examination of the known history, including testimony by Irgun and Lehi combatants, indicates that this claim is absurd". The web site also includes an eyewitness account of the events at Deir Yassin.

Sources

• Sharif Kanaana and Nihad Zitawi, "Deir Yassin," Monograph No. 4, Destroyed Palestinian Villages Documentation Project (Bir Zeit: Documentation Center of Bir Zeit University, 1987), p. 55.