[THS] A Massacre of Arabs Masked by a State of National Amnesia

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25411.htm

A Massacre of Arabs Masked by a State of National Amnesia

Sixty years on, the true story of the slaughter of Palestinians at Deir Yassin may finally
come out

By Catrina Stewart in Jerusalem

May 10, 2010 "The Independent" -- More than one unwitting visitor to Jerusalem has
fallen prey to the bizarre delusion that they are the Messiah. Usually, they are
whisked off to the serene surroundings of Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital on the
outskirts of the city, where they are gently nursed back to health.

It is an interesting irony that the patients at Kfar Shaul recuperate from such
variations on amnesia on the very spot that Israel has sought to erase from its
collective memory.

The place is Deir Yassin. An Arab village cleared out in 1948 by Jewish forces in a
brutal battle just weeks before Israel was formed, Deir Yassin has come to symbolise
perhaps more than anywhere else the Palestinian sense of dispossession.

Sixty-two years on, what really happened at Deir Yassin on 9 April remains obscured
by lies, exaggerations and contradictions. Now Ha'aretz, a liberal Israeli newspaper, is
seeking to crack open the mystery by petitioning Israel's High Court of Justice to
release written and photographic evidence buried deep in military archives.
Palestinian survivors of Deir Yassin, a village of around 400 inhabitants, claim the
Jews committed a wholesale massacre there, spurring Palestinians to flee in the
thousands, and undermining the long-held Israeli narrative that they left of their own
accord.

Israel's opposing version contends that Deir Yassin was the site of a pitched battle
after Jewish forces faced unexpectedly strong resistance from the villagers. All of the
casualties, it is argued, died in combat.

In 2006, an Israeli arts student, Neta Shoshani, applied for access to the Deir Yassin
archives for a university project, believing a 50-year embargo on the secret
documents had expired eight years previously. She was granted limited access to the
material, but was informed that there was an extended ban on the more sensitive
documents. When a lawyer demanded an explanation, it emerged that a ministerial
committee only extended the ban more than a year after Ms Shoshani's first request,
exposing the state to a legal challenge. The current embargo runs until 2012.

Defending its right to keep the documents under wraps, the Israeli state has argued
that their publication would tarnish the country's image abroad and inflame Arab-
Israeli tensions. Ha'aretz and Ms Shoshani have countered that the public have a
right to know and confront their past.

Judges, who have viewed all the archived evidence held by the Israeli state on Deir
Yassin, have yet to make a decision on what, if anything, to release. Among the
documents believed to be in the state's possession is a damning report written by
Meir Pa'il, a Jewish officer who condemned his compatriots for bloodthirsty and
shameful conduct on that day. Equally incriminating are the many photographs that
survive.

"The photos clearly show there was a massacre," says Daniel McGowan, a US retired
professor who works with Deir Yassin Remembered. "Those photos show [villagers]
lined up against a quarry wall and shot."

In 1947, the United Nations proposed a partition plan that would divide Palestine into
a Jewish and Arab state, with Jerusalem an international city. The Arabs fiercely
opposed the plan and clashes broke out as both sides scrambled for territory before
the British mandate expired. In April 1948, the Hagana, the predecessor of the Israeli
army, launched a military operation to secure safe passage between Jewish areas by
taking Arab villages on high ground above the road to Jerusalem.

Irgun and the Stern Gang, breakaway paramilitary groups, drew up separate plans
to take the strategic Deir Yassin in a pre-dawn raid on 9 April 1948, even though the
villagers had signed a non-aggression pact with the Jews and had stuck to it. What
happened next is still under debate. In his book The Revolt, Menachim Begin, a
future Israeli prime minister, recounts how the Jewish forces used a loudspeaker to
warn all the villagers to leave the village. Those that remained fought.

"Our men were compelled to fight for every house; to overcome the enemy they
used large numbers of hand grenades," wrote Mr Begin, who was not present at the
battle. "And the civilians who had disregarded our warnings suffered inevitable
casualties. I am convinced that our officers and men wished to avoid a single
unnecessary casualty."

Mr Begin's account, however, is challenged by the recollections of survivors and
eyewitnesses. Abdul-Kader Zidain was 22 years old in 1948, and immediately joined a
band of 30 fighters from the village to fend off the surprise Jewish offensive, even
though they were clearly outnumbered.

"They went into the houses and they shot the people inside. They killed everybody
they saw, women and children," said Mr Zidain, who lost four of his immediate
family, including his father and two brothers, in the attack. Now a frail 84-year-old
living in a West Bank village, he says he remembers everything as if it were
yesterday. Survivor testimonies are supported by Mr Pa'il, whose detailed eyewitness
account was published in 1998. Awaiting reassignment, he went to observe the
attack as part of his remit to keep the Irgun and the Stern Gang in check.

After the fighting had wound down, Mr Pa'il described how he heard sporadic firing
from the houses, and went to investigate. There he saw that the soldiers had stood
the villagers in the corners of their homes and shot them dead. A short while later,
he saw a group of around 25 prisoners being led to a quarry between Deir Yassin
and neighbouring Givat Shaul. From a higher vantage point, he and a companion
were able to see everything and take photographs. "There was a natural wall there,
formed by diggingy. They stood the prisoners against that wall and shot the lot of
them," he said. Mr Pa'il described how Jews from neighbouring Givat Shaul finally
stepped in to stop the slaughter.

In the ensuing confusion and anger over the killings in Deir Yassin, both sides
released an inflated Palestinian death toll for very different reasons: the Palestinians
wanted to bolster resistance and attract the attention of the Arab nations they hoped
would help them; the Jews wanted to scare the Palestinians into flight.

After the dust had settled, Mr Zidain and the other survivors counted the missing
among them, and concluded that 105 Palestinians had died in Deir Yassin, not the
250 often reported. Four Jews were killed. But the damage was already done. The
reports from Deir Yassin led to a total collapse of morale, and many historians regard
the incident as the single biggest catalyst for the Palestinians' flight. By UN estimates,
750,000 Palestinians had fled their homes by the end of the 1948 War of
Independence, roughly 60 per cent of Palestine's pre-war Arab population.

Mention Deir Yassin these days to most young Israelis and it will fail to register. Not
far from the Kfar Shaul hospital, two teenage boys shake their heads at a question on
Deir Yassin. Never heard of it, they say.

"Most Israelis treat the subject with total silence," says Professor McGowan. "They no
longer deny it, they just don't talk about it."

The decision on whether that silence will now be broken remains in the hands of
Israel's courts. "This was a big and important event in our history here. It was the
first village we took and has a lot of meaning in the war that came after," says Ms
Shoshani. "We have to deal with our past for our own sake."

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