Tikvah Tablet Deir Yassin IRGUN-LEHI Revisionist Revisionism: The New HASBARAH Propaganda in Comparative Perspective
David Shasha
Remember Deir Yassin!
By: Gil Troy
Deir Yassin. For decades it was the main count in the Palestinian indictment against Zionism and Israel. In the 1970s, when Palestinian terrorists butchered schoolkids and Olympic athletes, they and their supporters cried “remember Deir Yassin!” In the 2000s, when Palestinian leaders blew up the Oslo Peace Process by dispatching suicide bombers to Israeli buses and cafes, they and their supporters cried “remember Deir Yassin!” Even today, the massacre of 254 Arabs, including 25 pregnant women, 50 breastfeeding mothers, and 60 other women—followed by mass rapes and other atrocities in this pastoral village just outside Jerusalem—remains one of the prime movers of anti-Zionism, an often-invoked justification for the rejectionism and crimes of Palestinian extremists. In their still-defining book on 1948, O Jerusalem, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre describe Jews cutting open a pregnant woman’s stomach “with a butcher’s knife,” and slashing at least two people “from head to toe,” as they “killed” and “looted,” then, “finally they raped.”
But what if, as professor Eliezer Tauber argues in his new book, Deir Yassin is The Massacre That Never Was?
Tauber’s book, subtitled The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, may have been 2021’s most snubbed yet significant scholarly work. Originally published in Hebrew in 2017 as Deir Yassin: Sof Hamitos (Deir Yassin: The End of the Myth), it was ignored then, as it is being ignored now.
Tauber, who founded Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies, is a tenacious researcher, offering nearly 100 pages of Arab, Israeli, and British sourcing to back 208 pages of text. He painstakingly recreates the battle of Deir Yassin, noting who fought where, who had how many guns, and who died. Sixty of the Arabs who died were men, and 41 were women—some dressed as men and armed to fight. Tauber concludes that 61 of the 84 Arabs whose circumstances of death were ascertained “were killed under battle conditions.”
The battle began early on Friday, April 9, 1948, five weeks before David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. Since the United Nations had voted a Jewish state into existence on Nov. 29, 1947, Arab extremists in Palestine had launched a guerilla war against their Jewish neighbors. The British, who controlled Palestine under the 1920 Mandate, were counting down to their U.N.-mandated departure on May 14. Jews and Arabs were scrambling for strategic advantage—and starting to clash over land. Arab irregulars were besieging Jerusalem, and three different fighting forces were defending the Jews while competing aggressively with one another, too.
The most established, disciplined fighting force in the Jewish-state-to-be was the Haganah. In 1931, militant Zionists renounced the Haganah to found the Irgun Tzvai Leumi: the national military organization, also known by its acronym “Etzel.” Nine years later, Yair Stern and other militants splintered from the Irgun. Detractors called these “Lehi” rebels—a Hebrew acronym for the Freedom Fighters of Israel—the Stern Gang.
The Irgun and Lehi united for this operation. Attempting to transition from guerilla fighters to proper soldiers, they hoped that seizing Deir Yassin, a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, would break the siege. Beyond the usual battlefield fog, therefore, rival hit-and-run-type fighters were cooperating awkwardly, using unfamiliar military tactics with an objective they had never achieved—actual conquest of territory—and which the Arab defenders also did not expect.
Predictably, chaos followed.
The Irgun and Lehi forces arranged for an armored car with a loudspeaker—secured with a deposit of 57 Palestine pounds, Tauber discovered—to warn villagers to leave. The Irgun insisted on forgoing a surprise attack to minimize civilian casualties. But the car tumbled into a defensive trench the villagers dug. The defenders’ fusillade that followed, and the trench’s distance from the village’s center, muffled the message. Nevertheless, “within minutes of the start of the battle, a stream of villagers could be seen running over the hills.” Eventually, three-quarters of the villagers, some 730 people, escaped.
The Jewish fighters encountered more resistance than they had expected. The intensity of combat, the warning they gave (no matter how futile), and the flights they witnessed, all fed their impression that the civilians were gone and only fierce fighters remained.
House-to-house fighting erupted. Too many noncombatants were killed by the panicked, inexperienced fighters. But there is no credible evidence of systematic slaughter, of any rapes, of any torture of any kind. There simply is no physical evidence. There are no photographs. And Tauber’s thorough, witness-by-witness scrutiny uncovers a revealing pattern. “The testimonies of both Etzel’s and Lehi’s combatants and the Arab survivors were surprisingly similar, sometimes almost identical,” he reports, “as both were there when it happened.” Clearly, there “is a substantial difference between people killed during fighting and a massacre,” Tauber explains. These “narratives,” however, “could not prevail” over the propagandists’ subsequent spin.
When the fighting ended, the 120 Jewish soldiers deployed had secured the village, despite suffering a high casualty rate of about 30%, with 30 to 40 injuries, and five deaths. Tauber carefully and credibly lists the names of the 101 dead villagers, estimating that another 100 were injured, with 150 to 200 imprisoned, then released. Ayish Zeidan, who was a teenager living in Deir Yassin in 1948, told a reporter 50 years later: “I believe that most of those who were killed were among the fighters and the women and children who helped the fighters.” As for the rape accusation, Zeidan insisted: “This is not true.”
Careful not to fight propaganda with more propaganda, Tauber acknowledges that the Lehi and Irgun victors looted the village. They justified their actions by distributing much of their plunder to Jerusalem’s besieged residents. The morality of those actions is worth debating but without exaggerating, as Collins and Lapierre did, by claiming that, “Women had bracelets torn from their arms and rings from their fingers and parts of some of the women’s ears were severed in order to remove earrings.”
How, then, did this rather typical example of the intense fighting that characterized Israel’s 1948 War of Independence turn into an apparently mythical massacre?
Here’s where Tauber’s meticulous, trilingual research abilities add value to the historical record. He quotes the Arab Higher Committee’s Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi instructing Arab newspaper editors to give the battle “the utmost propaganda possible,” explaining: “We are forced to give a picture—not what is actually happening—but we had to exaggerate a little bit so that maybe the Arab countries would become enthusiastic to come and join us.” In that spirit, when the Arab Higher Committee published photos of mutilated bodies, Tauber reports, a “Haganah intelligence man identified the bodies as actually being Jewish victims of mutilation by Arabs.”
Al-Khalidi coached Deir Yassin’s refugees, saying: “We want you to say that the Jews slaughtered people, committed atrocities, raped and stole gold.” Some refugees obliged, while others resented the attempt to humiliate Deir Yassin’s women.
The rape libel quickly backfired.
“We did not understand the mentality of our own Palestinian people,” the Arabic editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, Hazim Nusayba, admitted. The rape allegations touched “a raw nerve in the Palestinian psyche.” Refusing to sacrifice their women’s honor for land, most Arab men fled. “This turned out to be the highest, most expensive mistake that we made,” Nusayba realized.
“We are not afraid of death,” one mukhtar (a village leader) exclaimed, “but we will not accept that our women be raped.” “The other villages started to leave one after the other, without resistance, out of fear and apprehension of another similar massacre,” Yunus Radwan, another Deir Yassin refugee, wrote five years later. It happened “because of a mistake committed by our leaders and those responsible for the spreading of rumors who overstated the crimes of the Jews.” An estimated 60,000 Arabs in Palestine fled their homes before April 9. More than 350,000 would flee in the ensuing five weeks. Adil Yahya, a Palestinian researcher who interviewed many refugees in the late 1990s, concluded: “The Deir Yassin affair was the main cause for the 1948 exodus.”
Appalled by the civilian casualties, some Haganah leaders exploited Deir Yassin to delegitimize the Irgun and Lehi. Haganah’s regional intelligence officer Mordechai Gicherman, declared: “There is an urgent need to exploit this for a widespread propaganda campaign to undermine confidence in the dissidents, both with regard to their military ability and moral stature.”
Meanwhile, leading British officials, fed up with the Jews, interwove this massacre myth with deeper antisemitic tropes, ones that still resonate today. Romanticizing the villagers as Christ-like innocents, they overlooked the Arab stockpile of 60 rifles, at least 20 pistols, and numerous explosives, including hand grenades. This distortion helped sketch the now-ubiquitous caricature of evil Zionists bullying pure, passive Palestinians. And, instinctively, these Mandatory leaders Nazified the Jews, denouncing this “beastly Holocaust” while insisting that Hitler’s concentration camp at “[Bergen] Belsen pales” beside Deir Yassin.
No wonder Tauber’s book is too threatening to be taken seriously. It details how the anti-Israel propaganda armada was first launched, revealing just how rooted modern anti-Zionism is in traditional antisemitism. It exposes how the Palestinian national movement hasn’t come to terms with some legitimate grievances about its history of exaggeration and demonization. And, most significantly, it refutes the foundational myth of that movement, which continues to convince millions of people that it is the only one in the world that should never be criticized.
The perverse marriage of official Palestinian lies and Western antisemitism continues to distort the discourse about Israel to this day, while chaining the Palestinian leadership to an ultimately self-destructive addiction to anti-Zionism and Jew-hatred. If Deir Yassin is less central to the Palestinian narrative today than it was several years ago, it is only because decades of delegitimization have paid off. But the Palestinian national movement continues to wallow in totalitarian paralysis, often seeking “justice” for similarly counterfeit crimes.
In this historic, underappreciated boomerang that scarred Palestine’s Arabs more than it scarred the Jews, lies a cautionary tale for all political movements. Demonization and fear-mongering are the crack cocaine of politics, the fleeting highs often leaving lasting damage. Tauber’s epitaph for Deir Yassin sums up this enduring lesson, and the past 74 years of Palestinian history: Seeking “to prevent a catastrophe,” Arab hyperbole “instead created one.”
From Tablet magazine, January 21, 2022
Deir Yassin Massacre: What really happened?
By: Yisrael Medad
This coming Friday, the Zochrot NGO will be marking Deir Yassin Memorial Day. They have called on the public to join them in remembrance of an event that occurred 73 years earlier on Friday, April 9, 1948.
On that day, according to their narrative, “Zionist forces took control of the village of Deyr Yasin, west of Jerusalem [and] what followed was one of the worst massacres during the Nakba.”
Zochrot’s vision, as it appears on its website is “to promote acknowledgment and accountability for the ongoing injustices of the Nakba... and the reconceptualization of the Return as the imperative redress” of that Nakba. It additionally seeks the “Return of the Palestinian refugees to their country... coupled with a joint Jewish-Palestinian process of restitution.”
The term nakba, interestingly enough, was first used by the Syrian Constantine Zurayk in an August 1948 pamphlet not as much to describe an “expulsion of Palestinians,” but rather why the Arabs failed to prevent the results of the war of aggression they themselves launched. He was critical of Arab society in general, seeing Arab civilization in a weakened state of crisis and sought to transform it into a practical, rational, and scientific society.
Deir Yassin has been elevated to the level of the “poster boy” operation of a satanic Zionist plot to commit planned massacres during the 1948 war. But was it? A second question is of all the instances of loss of life, on both sides, why is Deir Yassin such a high profile symbol?
As to the first question, from a high of 254 victims, even the Wikipedia entry now reads that “around 107 of its residents” were killed, although “massacre” is employed. In 1987, the Research and Documentation Center of Bir Zeit University published a comprehensive study of the history of Deir Yassin and arrived at a figure of 111, later reduced to 107. In other words, it is indeed acceptable to correct the original claims regarding what exactly happened at that village just west of Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul neighborhood.
Facts, however, cannot be debated if they are simply ignored. The entry’s bibliography does not include the book of Uri Milstein, The Birth of a Palestinian Nation: The Myth of the Deir Yassin Massacre, published by Gefen Publishing House in 2012, nor that of Eliezer Tauber, Deir Yassin: Sof Hamitos [Deir Yassin: The End of the Myth] by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir in 2017. Milstein details the participation of a Palmah mortar unit in the battle.
Both volumes are based on original documents, interviews and years of research. Prof. Yoav Gelber’s review of Tauber asserts he “deserves every kudo for his meticulous work, which is exemplary for this genre of historiography. He left no stone unturned and used all the available sources, written and oral, Arab, Jewish (Haganah, IZl, LHI, and political), British, and Red Cross... His expertise in Arabic and on Palestinian society equipped him with vital tools for conducting such a study... After reviewing all the existing lists and comparing them, Tauber compiled his own list that includes 101 names and is probably the closest to the real number.”
Both historians come to the same conclusion: that in Deir Yassin there was no pre-planned, deliberate massacre as the Arab narrative would have us believe – and has been quite successful in having us believe that. This has been due to the support Israeli and Diaspora Jewish anti-Zionists. Unfortunately, Tauber’s book has been submitted to various academic presses abroad but they declined to publish it.
Another element that worked to the advantage of the Arab narrative was the rivalry between the Jewish Agency’s Hagana forces and the Mapam-sponsored Palmah and the dissident Irgun and Lechi undergrounds. It was convenient for David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Shertok (Sharett) to blame the “right-wing” and “fascist” militias even though, for example, outrages were committed by the Hagana and Palmach during 1948 no less disturbing such as at Sassa (in February 14), Ein al-Zeitun (May 2) and Lydda (July 11-12). Benny Morris described some two dozen such actions.
Of course, mostly overlooked are Arab atrocities as the Ben-Yehudah Street blast (February 22), Hadassah Convoy (April 13) and the Kfar Etzion battle (May 13), which alone resulted in 157 deaths.
Propaganda was the vehicle that drove the Deir Yassin myth of a “massacre.” As long ago as 1998, the BBC broadcast filmed testimony from residents of Deir Yassin and of those who promoted the massacre myth discounting their own claims. In their series, The Arab Israeli Conflict, readily available on YouTube for viewing, Hazem Nuseibeh, in 1948 the news editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, is heard on-screen relating his conversation with Hussayn Khalidi, the deputy chairman of the Higher Arab Executive in Jerusalem, right after the incident. Khalidi instructed him to “make the most of this” and so the press release included made up stories of children pregnant women raped and “all sorts of atrocities.”
The Friday tour is not an exercise in the memorialization of a tragedy, but the attempt to pervert the historical record.
The writer is a research fellow at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center.
From The Jerusalem Post, January 21, 2022
UN Palestine Commission - Attack on Deir Yassin (9 April 1948) - Letter from United Kingdom
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-211346/
UNITED NATIONS PALESTINE COMMISSION
Communication Received from United Kingdom Delegation Concerning Jewish Attack on Arab Village of Deir Yassin
The following communication, giving details of the Jewish attack on the Arab Village at Deir Yassin on 9 April, has been received from Mr. Fletcher-Cooke of the United Kingdom Delegation.
UNITED KINGDOM DELEGATION TO THE UNITED NATIONS
Expire State Building
New York 1, N.Y.
20th April, 1948.
My dear Bunche,
May I refer you to paragraph 2 of the Incident Report for the 9th April, in which reference was made to the attack by Jews on the Arab village at Deir Yassin.
2. The following supplementary information is now available as regards this incident:-
(1) The operation is believed to have been a joint National Military Organisation – Stern Group enterprise undertaken with the knowledge of the Haganah.
(2) The deaths of some 250 Arabs, men, women and children, which occurred during this attack, took place in circumstances of great savagery.
(3) Woman and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities.
(4) Those who were taken prisoner were treated with degrading brutality.
(5) Although the Haganah is unable to deny that it gave covering fire to the terrorists responsible for this outrage, the action as a whole has been condemned by the Jewish press and denounced by the Chief Rabbinate.
(6) Owing to other pre-occupations, the Security Forces were not in a position to act before the 14th April, for which day an air strike at Deir Yassin was arranged.
(7) On the 13th April, it became apparent that the Haganah had taken over the village from the terrorists, and the operation was, therefore, suspended.
(8) The Government of Palestine reported on the 14th April that it had not yet been possible to enter Deir Yassin and that a Jewish Police Officer sent to investigate was not allowed by the Haganah to proceed beyond Givat Shaul.
(9) A representative of the International Red Cross who visited Deir Yassin on the 11th April is said to have stated that in one cave he saw heaped bodies of some 150 Arab men, women and children, whilst in a stronghold a further 50 bodies were found.
Yours sincerely,
(signed) J. FLETCHER-COOKE
Dr. Ralph J. Bunche,
Principal Secretary to the United Nations
Nations Commission on Palestine
United Nations, Lake Success.
Testimonies from the censored Deir Yassin massacre: 'They piled bodies and burned them'
By: Ofer Aderet
For two years now a document that makes for difficult reading has been lying in the archives of the association to commemorate the heritage of Lehi – the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel pre-state underground militia. It was written by a member of the underground about 70 years ago. Reading it could reopen a bleeding wound from the days of the War of Independence that to this day stirs a great deal of emotion in Israeli society.
“Last Friday together with Etzel” – the acronym for the National Military Organization, also known as the Irgun, another pre-state underground militia, led by Menachem Begin – “our movement carried out a tremendous operation to occupy the Arab village on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road – Deir Yassin. I participated in this operation in the most active way,” wrote Yehuda Feder, whose nom de guerre in Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang) was “Giora.”
Further along in the letter, he describes in detail his part in the massacre that took place there. “This was the first time in my life that at my hands and before my eyes Arabs fell. In the village I killed an armed Arab man and two Arab girls of 16 or 17 who were helping the Arab who was shooting. I stood them against a wall and blasted them with two rounds from the Tommy gun,” he wrote, describing how he carried out the execution of the girls with a submachine gun.
Along with that, he tells about looting in the village with his buddies after it was occupied. “We confiscated a lot of money and silver and gold jewelry fell into our hands,” he wrote. He concludes the letter with the words: “This was a really tremendous operation and it is with reason that the left is vilifying us again.”
This letter is one of the historical documents revealed in a new documentary film entitled “Born in Deir Yassin” by director Neta Shoshani, who devoted the past several years to comprehensive historical research on the Deir Yassin massacre, one of the constitutive incidents of the War of Independence, which has remained a blot on Israel to this day.
In advance of the premiere screening of the film at the Jerusalem Film Festival, Shoshani showed Haaretz the testimonies she has gathered about the incident, the result of extensive digging in archives along with in-depth interviews with the last living participants in the action. Some of them broke a silence of decades when they spoke to her, often for the first time in front of a camera.
The assault on the village of Deir Yassin began on the morning of April 9, 1948, as part of Operation Nachshon to break through the blockaded road to Jerusalem, with the participation of about 130 Lehi and Irgun fighters who received aid from the Haganah – the pre-independence army. The fighters encountered stiff resistance and sniper fire and advanced slowly through the village lanes while throwing grenades and blowing up houses.
Four of the fighters were killed and dozens were wounded. The number of Arab inhabitants who were killed there and the circumstances of their deaths has been disputed for many years, but most researchers state that 110 inhabitants of the village, among them women, children and elderly people, were killed there.
“They ran like cats,” related the commander of the operation, Yehoshua Zettler, the Jerusalem commander of Lehi, as he described the Arabs fleeing from their homes. Shoshani interviewed him in 2009, a few weeks before his death. Zettler denied that his people carried out a massacre in the village but he spared no words to describe the way its inhabitants were killed. “I won’t tell you that we were there with kid gloves on. House after house ... we’re putting in explosives and they are running away. An explosion and move on, an explosion and move on and within a few hours, half the village isn’t there any more,” he said.
Zettler also provided a harsh account of the burning of the bodies of those who were killed, after the village was occupied. “Our guys made a number of mistakes there that made me angry. Why did they do that?” he said. “They took dead people, piled them up and burned them. There began to be a stink. This is not so simple.”
Another harsh account was provided by Prof. Mordechai Gichon, a lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces reserves, who was a Haganah intelligence officer sent to Deir Yassin when the battle ended. “To me it looked a bit like a pogrom,” said Gichon, who died about a year ago. “If you’re occupying an army position – it’s not a pogrom, even if a hundred people are killed. But if you are coming into a civilian locale and dead people are scattered around in it – then it looks like a pogrom. When the Cossacks burst into Jewish neighborhoods, then that should have looked something like this.”
According to Gichon, “There was a feeling of considerable slaughter and it was hard for me to explain it to myself as having been done in self-defense. My impression was more of a massacre than anything else. If it is a matter of killing innocent civilians, then it can be called a massacre.”
Yair Tsaban, a former Meretz MK and government minister, related in his interview with Shoshani that after the massacre, in which he did not participate, he was sent with fellow members of the Youth Brigades to bury the corpses of the dead. “The rationale was that the Red Cross was liable to show up at any moment and it was necessary to blur the traces [of the killings] because publication of pictures and testimonies about what had happened in the village would be very damaging to the image of our War of Independence,” he said.
“I saw a fair number of corpses,” he added. “I don’t remember encountering the corpse of a fighting man. Not at all. I remember mostly women and old men.” Tsaban testified that he saw inhabitants shot in the back and dismissed the claims of some of participants in the action that the locals had been hit in exchanges of fire. “An old man and a woman, sitting in the corner of a room with their faces to the wall, and they are shot in the back,” he recalled. “That cannot have been in the heat of battle. No way.”
The massacre at Deir Yassin had many repercussions. The Jewish Agency, the chief rabbis and the heads of the Haganah condemned it. The left used it to denounce the right. Abroad, it was compared to the crimes of the Nazis. Additionally, as historian Benny Morris notes in his book “Righteous Victims,” “Deir Yassin had a profound demographic and political effect: It was followed by mass flight of Arabs from their locales.”
Shoshani first became interested in the Deir Yassin story about a decade ago, while working on her final project at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, which focused on visual documentation of the Kfar Shaul state psychiatric hospital, which in turn was built on the lands of Deir Yassin after the war. Following her documentation of the place as it is today, with its buildings that had served the village’s inhabitants in the past and today are part of the hospital, she also wanted to find historical pictures of the massacre that took place there 70 years ago.
To her surprise, she found that the task was not at all simple. “On the internet are pictures of corpses that are captioned as having been photographed at Deir Yassin, but they are from Sabra and Chatila,” she says, referring to the 1982 massacre by Christian militiamen of hundreds of residents of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. “In the IDF Archive they released to me for publication pictures of the fighters from Deir Yassin themselves,” she continued and displayed a series of photos showing armed Irgun and Lehi members, but no trace of the Arabs who were killed.
At the Haganah Archive, where Shoshani continued her search – “like an naive child,” as she said – another surprise awaited her. “An older man came up to me, very hush-hush, took me to a side room and told me that he had taken pictures immediately after the massacre,” she said.
The man was Shraga Peled, 91, who at the time of the massacre was in the Haganah Information Service. He told Shoshani that after the battle he was sent to the village with a camera to document what he saw there. “When I got to Deir Yassin, the first thing I saw was a big tree to which a young Arab fellow was tied. And this tree was burnt in a fire. They had tied him to it and burned him. I photographed that,” he related. He also claims he photographed from afar what looked like a few dozen other corpses collected in a quarry adjacent to the village. He handed the film over to his superiors, he says, and since then he has not seen the photos.
Possibly this is because the photos are part of the visual material that is hidden to this day in the Archive of the IDF and the Defense Ministry, of which the state is prohibiting publication even 70 years after the fact. Shoshani petitioned the High Court of Justice about this a decade ago as part of her final project at Bezalel. Haaretz joined her in the petition.
The state explained that publication of the pictures was liable to damage the state’s foreign relations and the “respect for the dead.” In 2010, after viewing the pictures, the Supreme Court justices rejected the petition, leaving the material far from the public eye. In the meantime Shoshani managed to get hold of some other photos connected to the massacre, among them a series of pictures documenting orphaned children whose parents had been killed at Deir Yassin.
The Deir Yassin massacre continues to upset everyone who deals with it, even at a distance of 70 years. Not everyone agrees with the characterization “massacre.” Historian Dr. Uri Milstein, who studies Israel’s wars, does a lot to propagate the thesis that there wasn’t any massacre in the village. In many articles he has written, he claims that this is “a mendacious myth” and “a blood libel” and that the Arab dead were killed in “a battle in a built-up area.”
“I don’t think that anyone there had the intention of coming there and killing children,” says Shoshani in summing up the materials she has gathered about the incident. However, she says, “This was not a battle against fighters but rather the sudden occupation of a village, in confrontation with inhabitants who defended their homes with meager means. There were also cases, apparently isolated, of mowing down inhabitants, ‘executions,’ after the fighting was over, for the purpose of deterrence and out of fear.”
The Deir Yassin massacre was the first of a number of incidents in which Jewish fighters were involved in killing civilians in the War of Independence and after it was over. Another infamous incident was the one at Kafr Qasem in 1956, on the day the fighting in the Sinai Campaign began. Forty-eight Israeli Arab citizens were killed by Border Police gunfire. As in the case of Deir Yassin, the state is still censoring the archival materials from Kafr Qasem.
From Haaretz, July 16, 2017
Remembering the massacre at Deir Yassin
By: Hana Hussain
On this day 70 years ago, some 120 members of underground Jewish militia groups invaded the Palestinian Arab village of Deir Yassin, killing between 100 and 250 people including men, women, children and the elderly. With reports of mutilations, rapes and survivors being paraded through Jewish neighbourhoods before being summarily executed, the massacre remains one of the most brutal in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Seven decades later, Palestinians continue to be killed with apparent impunity, as ongoing events in the Gaza Strip demonstrate.
What: The massacre at Deir Yassin
When: 9 April 1948
Where: The village of Deir Yassin on the outskirts of West Jerusalem
What happened?
The massacre took place against the backdrop of the bitter conflict that preceded the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. Just months before, in November 1947, the UN had proposed the division of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem administrated independently of either side by an international body. The Arabs rejected the UN proposal and the conflict became even more intense.
Deir Yassin was a peaceful village of around 400 people that had signed a non-aggression pact and was excluded from clashes elsewhere. Due to its proximity to West Jerusalem, it came under the UN Partition Plan as part of the independent Jerusalem area.
The Jewish forces that invaded Deir Yassin belonged mainly to two extremist, underground, paramilitary groups, the Irgun (National Military Organisation) and the Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, also known as the Stern Gang), both of which were aligned with the right-wing Zionist movement; they have been described as "Jewish terrorist" groups. The two groups attacked the village in order to clear the road to Jerusalem of its Arab inhabitants, as well as send a message to the other Palestinians in the region. The Palmach, a unit of the Haganah (the forerunner of the Israel Defence Forces) whose leadership was aligned with the political left, also took part in the massacre to a lesser degree.
The attack force consisted of some 120 fighters, who met for a briefing on the morning before the massacre. Those present later described the atmosphere among the militants as festive, as they prepared to massacre Palestinians in their homes. They arrived at the edge of the village at 4:30am, where they took up positions and started firing at residents. Whilst the Jewish groups had expected the Palestinians to flee, the residents did not foresee the attack to be an attempt to kill them or drive them all away; they thought that it was just a raid, and refused to run.
The militias entered the village, shooting at those in the street and throwing hand grenades into houses, destroying buildings and killing the residents who were hiding inside. Eyewitnesses, including fighters from the Haganah, testified to seeing Irgun and Lehi troops pillaging houses and corpses, stealing money and jewellery from the survivors, and burning corpses. There were also multiple reports of rape and mutilation, as well as an account that villagers were killed after being taken on a victory parade through Jewish neighbourhoods in West Jerusalem.
What happened next?
The Arab emergency committee in Jerusalem learned of the attack at around 9am on the same day. Despite appealing for the British Army to intervene to protect civilians, the British Mandate authorities were not keen to face the Jewish militias; General Sir Gordon MacMillan, the commander of British forces in Palestine, stated infamously that he would risk British lives only for British interests.
Two days after the massacre, Jacques de Reynier, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Palestine, visited Deir Yassin. In his personal memoirs, published in 1950, he recalled seeing the bodies of over 200 dead men, women and children: "[One body was] a woman who must have been eight months pregnant, hit in the stomach, with powder burns on her dress indicating she'd been shot point-blank."
On 14 April, Assistant Inspector-General Richard Catling of the British Palestine Police, conducted interviews with female survivors of the massacre taking refuge in the nearby Palestinian town of Silwan. In a subsequent report he concluded that there was "no doubt" that the Jewish groups had committed numerous sexual atrocities against the villagers.
"Many young schoolgirls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested. One story is current concerning a case in which a young girl was literally torn in two. Many infants were also butchered and killed. I also saw one old woman who gave her age as one hundred and four who had been severely beaten about the head with rifle butts."
News of the indiscriminate killings sparked terror among Palestinians, causing many to flee from their towns and villages in the face of Jewish advances. With the news of other atrocities in Haifa and Yaffa, public anger in the Arab world rose to new heights over the following month as they demanded that their governments should take action. Consequently, on 15 May 1948, one day after the British Mandate ended and Israel declared its independence, several Arab armies invaded and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war began.
The aftermath
After the war ended in 1949, the Jewish neighbourhood of Giyat Shaul Bet was built on what used to be Deir Yassin, despite protests and requests that it be left uninhabited. Today, it is part of Har Nof, an Orthodox Jewish area.
Although the two main groups responsible for the massacre were considered underground, extremist militias, both of their leaders, Menachem Begin of the Irgun and Yitzhak Shamir of the Stern Gang, later became Prime Minister of the state of Israel.
Today, Israel continues to kill Palestinians with apparent impunity; outrage from the international community is generally limited to condemnations on global platforms. As the Palestinians mark 70 years since the Nakba ("Catastrophe", the creation of Israel in Palestine) next month, the lives and rights of those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip continue to be trampled upon, with millions across the world denied their legitimate right to return to their homes. The massacre at Deir Yassin is a reminder of the inhumanity and brutality at the heart of the ongoing occupation and refugee crisis.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
From Middle East Monitor, April 9, 2018
Israel’s concealing of Nakba documents is totalitarian
By: Benny Morris
Who gave the order and is the operation legal? These are the questions that remain after Hagar Shezaf’s excellent investigative report in Haaretz a week ago: “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs.”
Shezaf outlines how, since the mid-2000s or early 2010s, Malmab, the Defense Ministry’s secretive security department, has systematically culled from Israeli archives documents that paint the state’s conduct toward Palestine’s Arabs, particularly during the 1948 war, in bleak colors. In vaults, it hides away documents describing expulsions and massacres by various pre-state militias and then Israeli soldiers during that war and in subsequent years.
Malmab is supposed to protect the defense establishment from infiltration by hostile elements – spies, traitors and cyberattackers – and from leaks of documents on sensitive matters like intelligence and nuclear information. But instead it’s trying to prettify the state’s actions 70 years ago, essentially seeking to rewrite and whitewash the history of the Jewish state. No law defines Malmab’s roles, but doing PR for the state and whitewashing its past surely aren’t legitimate areas of activity for it.
About a decade ago, I began to hear rumors about the sealing of documents that I had already seen, that previously were open to the public. One of these was a document on the “emigration movement of Land of Israel Arabs between December 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948.” It was dated June 30, 1948, and authored by Moshe Sasson of the Arab section of the Haganah Intelligence Service. (This service of the pre-independence army, the Haganah, was known by the Hebrew acronym Shai.)
A copy of this document was open to the public at the archive of the Hashomer Hatza’ir youth movement at the Yad Yaari Research & Documentation Center at Givat Haviva. I didn’t check the matter and presumed that it was a random, isolated case. Maybe I should have checked.
But two years ago, as I was preparing a collection of articles for my latest book in Hebrew (“From Deir Yassin to Camp David,” 2018), I requested permission from the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archives to take another look at the documents on the massacre by two militias/terrorist organizations – the Irgun and the Lehi – in the Arab village of Deir Yassin on Jerusalem’s western outskirts on April 9, 1948. On that day, 100 to 120 villagers were killed, a majority of them women, children and elderly.
These documents were open to researchers and the general public at the start of this century, and I quoted extensively from them in my article “The Historiography of Deir Yassin” in the 2005 edition of Tel Aviv University’s Journal of Israeli History. Now I was asking to see the documents again, but the director of the archive turned down my request. The only mumbled explanation was that “the documents are now closed.”
The documents that I wished to see were of two types: 1971 correspondence between former Haganah/IDF officials and Foreign Ministry officials about what happened at Deir Yassin in 1948, and documents from April 1948, mainly from the Haganah Intelligence Service, about the massacre that had just occurred.
Dubious booklet
The (secret) correspondence was sparked by the Foreign Ministry’s publication of a booklet that was distributed in English to Israeli missions around the world in 1969 and later also distributed in Israel by the Herut party, today’s Likud. (Disclosure: The booklet was written by my father, Ya’akov Morris, who worked at the ministry’s information department.) The booklet claimed that no massacre took place at Deir Yassin; the story was an Arab invention, “part of a collection of fairy tales.” The foreign minister at the time was Abba Eban.
People from the left-wing Mapai party and the Labor movement who were top defense officials in 1948 complained about the booklet. On January 31, 1971, Shaul Avigur, a founder of the Israeli intelligence community, protested to Gideon Rafael, the director general of the Foreign Ministry. Avigur attached to his letter a statement by Yehuda Slutsky, chief editor of the Hebrew-language book “History of the Haganah,” who confirmed that there had been a massacre at Deir Yassin.
Meanwhile, Yitzhak Levy, the head of Haganah intelligence in Jerusalem in 1948 who went on to become the IDF Jerusalem district commander and the deputy director of the Prime Minister’s Office, complained in a letter to Menachem Begin on April 12, 1971. Begin, the future prime minister who had led the Irgun in 1948 and led Herut at the time of the letter, denied that a massacre had taken place.
But Levy wrote that he had looked into the story and found that Deir Yassin was a quiet village that did not take part in the 1948 war and that a massacre by the Irgun and Lehi had indeed taken place there. Israel Galili, a Haganah leader in 1948 and a senior minister in 1971, also complained to Eban. Eventually, Eban responded that his ministry had shelved the booklet.
The relevant letters from 1971, which were open in 2003 and 2004, were closed to researchers and the Israeli public at Malmab’s order, and so in 2018 I was unable to see them.
Similarly, most of the “incriminating” material from April 1948, written by Haganah intelligence officers and open for viewing in 2003 and 2004, was closed by Malmab. (Incidentally, even before that, from the time I began working on the events of 1948 starting in the early 1980s, the IDF consistently refused to release photographs of the massacre victims in Deir Yassin, pictures that were apparently taken by Haganah intelligence before the victims’ burial.)
Three days after the massacre, on April 12, 1948, Levy reported to Haganah intelligence’s Arab section: “The takeover of the village was done with great brutality. Whole families, women, old people and children were killed …. Some of the captives who were taken and transferred to detention locations, including women and children, were cruelly murdered by their guards.” And in a supplementary report the next day, based on what Lehi members had said, Levy wrote: “[Irgun fighters] raped a number of girls and killed them afterward. (We [Haganah intelligence] don’t know if this is true.)”
These reports also contain much more detail on what the Irgun and Lehi did in Deir Yassin on April 9 (for example, looting), but Malmab has classified them in recent years. (Of course, other reports, by foreigners, about what happened in the village are open for viewing; in Britain’s National Archives, for instance. The British high commissioner, Gen. Alan Cunningham, reported to London on April 17, 1948, that the takeover of the village “was accompanied by every possible expression of barbarity” – as if he had seen Levy’s reports.)
Mind-boggling effort
The foolishness of Malmab’s actions in concealing the incriminating material about the expulsions and massacres by members of the Haganah, Irgun, Lehi and IDF in 1948 is mind-boggling. The entire story has already been told since 1988 in numerous books and articles in Hebrew and English, by myself and others, in part based on those documents that were once open for scholars and the general public. Malmab’s attempt to hide this material is akin to closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
No reasonable person still believes that there were no acts of expulsion and massacre by the Jewish side in the 1948 war, which was launched by the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states and which in my view was a justified war in defense of the Jewish community. It was a war in which the Arabs also committed massacres (at the Haifa refineries and in Kfar Etzion) and expulsions (from the Jewish Quarter in the Jerusalem’s Old City, for example), though to a lesser degree.
But, as Shezaf’s article indicates, Malmab’s chiefs hoped or are hoping that their actions of blocking accessibility to the Israeli material will raise doubts about the work, conclusions and credibility of various scholars, myself included, for readers of their books and articles.
In general, Malmab’s actions regarding the documents on 1948 and the following years (such as material on the expulsion of Bedouin from the Negev in the ‘50s) is a foolish and malicious act typical of totalitarian regimes. The question remains: Who gave Malmab the authority? Who ordered it to filter material from 1948 and about 1948 to prettify the history of Israel? Was it prime ministers Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert, or more likely, Benjamin Netanyahu? Or someone acting on his behalf?
There is also the question of just when Malmab began screening material on the treatment of the Palestinian Arabs, besides doing its legitimate job of screening material on the nuclear program or intelligence matters. And another question: Is this ongoing operation legal?
Israel’s archives law says that diplomatic documents are to be opened after 30 years and military documents after 50 years, unless declassification could harm national security or the country’s foreign relations. And if classification is to be extended, it’s not up to a shadowy body like Malmab to decide, but rather to a special ministerial committee headed by the justice minister, in agreement with the state archivist.
And such a decision is supposed to be considered regarding each document separately, not a wholesale effort. It’s highly probable that none of these things were done. Perhaps attorneys for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (or any other relevant organization) should raise the question of Malmab’s actions and authority before the High Court of Justice.
The damage to Israel’s image caused by Malmab’s actions and their inevitable revelation is much greater than any damage that could have been caused by revelation of the actions from 1948 (most of which were already public knowledge before Malmab’s purging operation began). What happened in 1948 happened 70 years ago in a difficult war that was forced upon the Jews. Malmab’s actions, meanwhile, only attest to Israel’s increasingly benighted character today.
Prof. Benny Morris, a historian, is the author of a number of books including “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949.”
From Haaretz, July 15, 2019