The 1948 Deir Yassin massacre as a prequel to today’s war in Gaza

“The compulsory transfer of Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own feet during the days of the First and Second Temple. … We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places,­ then we have force at our disposal.”

Those were the words of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, written in his diary.

Understanding this reality is necessary to understand the threat of what is happening in the occupied West Bank and Gaza today.

For Palestinians, April 9, 1948, launched a decades-long diaspora and calamity known as the Naqba (“catastrophe”). Like Israel’s Oct. 7, 2023, catastrophe, the 1948 Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin sent cataclysmic shock waves throughout Palestine, tremors whose reverberations extend to this day in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

However, unlike Israel’s recent trauma, the events of 1948 were Israel’s launching pad for an ongoing 76 years of brutal massacres and expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and another 350,000 in 1967. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is a continuation of this dastardly policy of expelling Palestinians from their ancestral lands.

That’s the Palestinian perspective and history most Americans don’t know.

The United States and European countries never have expressed serious objections or concern about Palestinian lives or their dispossession. They are, instead, complicit in the longest colonial crime in modern history.

How it began

Seventy-six years ago, organized Jewish terrorist groups, including the Irgun and Stern Jewish terrorist gangs, attacked the Village of Deir Yassin, a Christian village whose population numbered about 600 people. There, 112 women, children and old men were brutally butchered in a massacre that has been likened to the Babi Yar Nazi massacre of Jews in Kiev, Ukraine.

Adding insult to injury, some of the survivors were stripped, loaded on flatbed trucks and paraded in a demeaning triumphal drive through Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods where they were taunted by Holocaust survivors, driven out of town, and shot to death. Altogether, more than 250 villagers were massacred.

Under the cover of darkness, 55 surviving children were loaded on trucks and dumped in a Jerusalem alleyway. To her credit, Hind Husseini, the daughter of one of Jerusalem’s oldest Palestinian families, took the children in and opened an orphanage to house these youngsters whose parents were killed in a heinous crime.

In 1948 and 1949, some 550 Palestinian villages were bulldozed and permanently wiped off the map.

Some ironies: Israelis would change the name of one village to Kfar Shaul, move Holocaust survivors into homes that were not destroyed, build a mental institution on the site, and the site itself is within full view of the Holocaust Memorial. Instead of being punished for this heinous crime, the leaders of these terrorist gangs would eventually become prime ministers and politicians.

The persecuted became the persecutors.

Documented carnage

Reporters have documented the carnage: “corpses dotted the village’s square, several civilians were disemboweled, others were dumped into a well, and several women disfigured as a result of the malevolent theft of their jewelry — from their ears and arms.”

For those interested in pursuing the truth see Ofer Aderet’s thorough July 16, 2017, report: Testimonies from the Censored Deir Yassin Massacre: “They Piled Bodies and Burned Them.” There you will read of a young fellow tied to a tree and set on fire. A woman and an old man shot in the back. Girls lined up against a wall and shot with a submachine gun.

Israeli historian Benny Morris remarked: “Whole families were riddled with bullets. … Men, women and children were mowed down as they emerged from houses; individuals were taken aside and shot. … Some of the prisoners moved to places of incarceration, including women and children, were murdered viciously by their captors.”

Professor William James Martin wrote in 2004 an article titled “The Deir Yassin Massacre,” where he explained that on April 9, 1948, “members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells.”

“The massacre at Deir Yassin was widely publicized by the terrorists and the numerous heaped corpses displayed to the media. In Jaffe (sic), which was at the time 98% Arab, as well as in other Arab communities, speaker trucks drove through the streets warning the population to flee and threatening another Deir Yassin. Begin said at the time, ‘We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation.’”

Whitewashed history

The 1948 massacre in Deir Yassin has been whitewashed by Israel, the U.N., the media and the so-called law-abiding civilized Western world — a world that lectures Palestinians on morality, the rule of law and democracy and that has sown the pestilence of genocidal wars, misery, and chaos.

“The 1948 massacre in Deir Yassin has been whitewashed.”

Professor Martin further states: “From about 1938 on to the founding of Israel, Begin was the leader of the Irgun. That group regularly assassinated English soldiers in Palestine and frequently hung their booby-trapped bodies in public places. Under Begin, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 97 British civil servants (most of whom were Palestinian, including a relative). The Stern Gang, under Shamir, also assassinated the U.N. representative to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, in 1948.

“But Deir Yassin was not the only massacre by the Israeli Defense Force. That army, under Moshe Dayan, took the unarmed and undefended village of al-Dawazyma, located in the Hebron hills, massacred 80 to 100 of its residents, and threw their bodies into pits. ‘The children were killed by breaking their heads with sticks. … The remaining Arabs were then sealed in houses, as the village was systematically razed.’”

According to Yitzhak Rabin’s own biography: “We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Alon repeated his question: ‘What is to be done with the population?’ BG waved his hand in a gesture, which said: Drive them out! … I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.”

There were many other such villages with Arabic names that almost have been expunged from memory — but not quite. These facts always have been known to some historians, but they have been consistently denied by the official Israeli histories. Israel never has taken any responsibility for the exodus of Palestinians from the land of the present state of Israel.

Where to find facts

To those interested in facts, I would suggest Ilan Pappe’s must-read book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappe is an Israeli citizen and chair in history at University of Exeter; he is dubbed a self-hating Jew by the ardent defenders of the faith, Christian Zionists and Israel’s apologists.

Based on extensive research extracted from the Israeli national archives, including personal interviews, witness accounts, a plethora of documentary materials, diaries and tape recordings, Pappe’s book chronicles Jewish terror in pre-Israel Palestine. The second half of the book chronicles the post-April 9, 1948, implementation of the U.N. partition plan, a plan that robbed Palestinians of their lives, birthright, country, identity, properties, personal possessions and dignity.

The Balfour Declaration

Emboldened by the Balfour Declaration, in the 1930s Zionists formulated a plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine of her indigenous population. Demonizing the Palestinians as cockroaches, jackals, subhuman, primitive and dirty, and with the help of European Zionists, pressure was exerted on England to implement the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

That declaration called for the establishment in Palestine of a homeland for the Jews. The British stood by as one defenseless Palestinian village after another was wiped off the face of the earth. British Mandate forces in Palestine provided logistical support to Jewish terrorist organizations, including military training and arms. One British Sergeant trained Jewish terrorists in using bayonets, advising that “killing dirty Arabs” with bayonets would save ammo for other purposes.

Under the cover of darkness, Jewish terrorists would enter villages from the three weakest flanks; bombs would be thrown through windows of alternating homes and, as the terrorized villagers emerged from their homes, they were machine-gunned in cold blood. The same tactics were used either in the early or late hours of the day. With the help of masked informants, males were targeted for executions either in the center of the village square or on the outskirts of villages. Frequently one group of males was ordered to dig graves into which corpses were deposited and, Nazi-style, these unsuspecting villagers were in turn gunned down and deposited into mass graves.

The coup de grȃce for rural Palestine was the summary expulsion of the entire population — this, after looting, the stealing of jewelry and ISIS-style assaults on women and girls, including the raping of young girls.

As soon as a village was ethnically cleansed, the rich farmlands were appropriated for the collective Kibbutzim. The fate of most of the structures was a systematic bombing and razing of homes, mosques, schools and churches.

“In the span of three years, more than 530 Palestinian villages were pulverized to rubble and permanently wiped off the face of historic Palestine.”

In the span of three years, more than 530 Palestinian villages were pulverized to rubble and permanently wiped off the face of historic Palestine, a land desecrated, blemished and made unholy.

Planting trees

I shall never forget what a Jewish friend told me: “In the synagogue pews (across America) were Jewish-Federation marked Tu Bishvat envelopes soliciting funds to plant trees in Israel.”  To cover their dastardly deeds, Israeli leaders, with the help of Jews in diaspora, planted pine forests in each of the 530-plus locations of what used to be Palestinian villages.

Yet to this day, the visible remains of homes, mosques and churches, albeit in rubble reminiscent of ancient archeological sites, bear witness to the Jewish attempt to erase Palestine from the annals of history.

Little did these donors know that the trees were planted on razed Palestinian villages where a peaceful agrarian population thrived for centuries.

In addition to this cynical coverup, on July 3, 2000, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported on the “The Great Tree Fraud Arboreal Scandal in Israel: Not All of the Trees Planted There Stay” in which the Israeli government was exposed for hauling busloads of tourists/donors to sites where they were led to believe their tree fund donations were put to good use. At dusk, the saplings planted earlier in the day with generous donations were “cynically” uprooted “to make way for the next day’s busloads.”

The Maariv “printed three photographs taken from the same vantage point on two consecutive days in late June.”

‘Memoricide’

How could the survivors of the Holocaust, those who want to keep reminding us of Nazi atrocities, undertake Gestapo tactics to affect what has been called “memoricide”?

Pappe’s meticulous recording of the genocidal carnage highlights the following: So successful were these Jewish terroristic crimes in ethnically cleansing some 300-plus villages leading up to early 1948, the terrorists became emboldened as they began attacking urban centers. Ben Gurion and his henchmen moved on to urban Palestine in Jaffa, Haifa, Acre and Safad. In Acre, the Jewish terrorists deposited typhoid viruses into the drinking water, thus killing scores of civilians. A similar attempt in Gaza was preempted when the two Jewish chemists were caught. In Haifa, barrel bombs (loaded with oil and explosives) were rolled down into Palestinian neighborhoods, thus killing and terrorizing civilians, and Jeeps mounted with loudspeakers drove through Arab neighborhoods in Jaffa, Haifa and other urban centers advising Palestinians to flee lest they suffer the same fate as this or that village.

On to Jerusalem

Jerusalem was the coveted prize of the murderous interlopers.

To frighten Jerusalem’s Palestinian population, the Posh Semiramis Hotel in a West Jerusalem suburb was bombed — as was Jerusalem’s King David Hotel — where 94 people were killed when an entire wing of the hotel collapsed.

Years later, Menachem Begin would become Israel’s prime minister, and he would brag about his role in various Irgun terrorist murderous crimes. And he would be awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace. That’s akin to giving Goebbels or Mussolini the Humanitarian Man of the Year Award.

Which brings me to this: The leadership of the Jewish terrorists realized if Jerusalem’s Palestinian population could be terrorized and ethnically cleansed as the rural and other urban areas had been cleansed, then the prize was within their reach.

Thus, having perfected their killing tactics and having terrorized Palestinian villages with their successive successful ethnic cleansing tactics, and as previously stated, the Jewish terrorists set their eyes on Deir Yassin. Thousands Palestinians fled for their lives, with only the clothes on their backs.

And thus began the Naqba in which 750,000 Palestinians were cleansed from their ancestral lands. And the world stood by, as it still does today, as the 76-year tragedy plays out in repeated fashion.

 

Raouf J. Halaby is a professor emeritus of English and art. Formerly stateless, he is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, beekeeper, avid gardener and peace activist.