The Massacre at Deir Yasin

By Richard H. Curtiss

Whether or not it's a media conspiracy, when there's good news about Israel or bad news about an Arab state, it's on Page 1. Conversely, bad new about Israelis or good news about Arabs is on Page 65. Editors who break the rule lose advertisers and, eventually, their jobs. Here's some information you may have missed if your local newspaper doesn't have a Page 65.

"The Irgun massacred the Arab inhabitants of the village of Deir Yassin in its efforts to induce the flight of Arabs from territories wanted for the future state of Israel. It worked. For this and other reasons a million Arabs fled—and have been homeless ever since." —Joseph C. Harsch, Christian Science Monitor, June 20, 1985

The November 29, 1947 United Nations vote to partition Palestine between its Jewish and Arab inhabitants had set the Holy Land afire. Arabs were incensed at a gerrymandered plan which, by placing 497,000 Arabs into the Jewish area and fewer than 10,000 Jews into the Arab area, had succeeded in giving 56 percent of the Palestine Mandate to the 33 percent of its population who were Jews. While the 1,300,000 Palestinian Arabs talked, however, the 650,000 Jews in Palestine were acting, particularly against the portion of the plan which called for keeping Jerusalem and Bethlehem, an area sacred to Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, separate from the future Jewish and Palestinian states. In and around Jerusalem, Arabs and Jews skirmished for neighborhood strong points for use when the British finally withdrew. In the countryside, soldiers of the Haganah, the future Israeli Army, began occupying Arab villages, sometimes by trickery or intimidation and sometimes after heavy fighting. The Arab villagers pleaded for arms and training. Gradually volunteers, many of them regular army officers, began to arrive from other Arab countries.

President Harry Truman, a novice in international affairs but an old pro at domestic politics, had disregarded the opposition to partition by his experienced Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall, and his Ambassadors in the Middle East. Instead he had used the bait of American economic assistance to elicit positive votes from newly-created states and from European nations devastated by World War II. Now Truman seemed shocked that his victory in the UN, which had helped his party win a closely-contested by-election in a heavily-Jewish congressional constituency of New York, had triggered such bloodshed overseas.

While Clark Clifford, David Niles and other White House domestic strategists talked of Jewish votes in the United States, and Marshall, Dean Acheson and other foreign affairs experts warned of Arab counter-measures overseas, the fighting escalated. Jewish militiamen seized Arab villages overlooking the road linking Tel Aviv with Jerusalem, and incoming Arab officers and hastily-armed Palestinians began defending the strong points and sniping at Jewish convoys passing below.

Four loosely-related clans of Arab stone-cutters, who together comprised the inhabitants of the village of Deir Yasin, were determined to stay out of the skirmishing. With Jewish settlements to the north and east, where some of their women worked as housekeepers, and Arab settlements on the south and west, Deir Yasin was in a highly exposed position. Its leaders had agreed with their Jewish neighbors that neither side would initiate hostilities. When Arab irregulars offered to help defend Deir Yasin against likely Jewish incursions, the villagers had fed them but insisted that they move on. Even before the neighboring Arab village of Kastel was captured by Jews, retaken by Arabs and then reoccupied by Jews, the villagers in Deir Yasin had dug ditches blocking the one dirt road into the village and mounted a round-the-clock guard against intruders.

On the Jewish side, Haganah commanders securing the Arab villages overlooking the road to Jerusalem had received a secret offer of support in return for arms from two formerly-outlawed Jewish terrorist organizations, both offshoots of the extremist Revisionist movement which had split with mainstream Zionists before World War II. One group was known as Lehi to Jews and as the Stern Gang to the British soldiers it had continued fighting, even when the British Eighth Army was all that stood between the Jews in Palestine and Hitler's Afrika Korps sweeping across North Africa. Throughout World War II, Stern Gang members had continued to murder British soldiers for their rifles, and had assassinated the British Governor General in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in his Egyptian headquarters. The other group, Irgun Zvai Leumi, had suspended fighting against the British at the outbreak of World War II but resumed it in 1942, three years before the war's end. The Irgun had blown up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which the British were using as their Palestine headquarters, with the loss of 91 Arab, British, and Jewish lives.

Members of both Lehi and the Irgun, like their leaders, had mostly come from the ghettos of Eastern Europe. They were specialists in urban terrorism who had been planting bombs in Arab market places and throwing grenades into Arab crowds at bus stops for years. While the Haganah had been involved in some of the same urban guerrilla warfare, it had also trained, first under the British and then under its own officers, for conventional warfare. The Haganah commander in Jerusalem, David Shaltiel, listed a number of fortified Arab villages his forces planned to seize. When the Lehi and Irgun leaders insisted, instead, on attacking neutral Deir Yasin, Shaltiel agreed reluctantly to support the attack only on one condition that once the terrorists had seized the village, they would hold it since the inhabitants would no longer be neutral.

Just before dawn on the Muslim Sabbath, Friday, April 9, 1948, a combined force of 140 Irgun and Lehi irregulars opened fire on the sleeping village from three sides. Although they lost only four dead in the entire operation, they later claimed that they faced such stubborn opposition throughout a long day of fighting that they were finally forced to destroy the village, house by house, by dropping grenades through the windows or placing satchel charges of dynamite outside the doors. For this reason, they said, hundreds of villagers who had not fled had died in their houses.

Their account of the battle differed considerably, however, from accounts by Haganah regulars who were present for much of it. In fact, when the irregulars were not able to capture the village, a Haganah unit had been summoned. It seized the unconquered half of the village without suffering casualties or serious resistance, turned the secured houses over to the irregulars, and withdrew. What happened next can best be described in the words of eye witnesses.

A 12-year-old Deir Yasin Arab boy, Fahmi Zeidan, pulled from his house at gunpoint,reported: "The Jews ordered all our family to line up against the wall and they started shooting us. I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. The bullets hit my four-year-old sister Kadri in the head, my eight-year-old sister Sameh in the cheek, my seven-year-old brother Mohammed in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed: my father, my mother, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts, and some of the children."

Jacques de Reynier, Swiss representative of the International Red Cross, was permitted to enter the village by a German-born Irgun member who told Reynier the Red Cross had once saved his life. Reynier reported: "The first thing I saw were people running everywhere, rushing in and out of houses, carrying sten guns, rifles, pistols and long, ornate Arab knives. They seemed half mad...'We're still mopping up,' my German friend explained. All I could think of was the SS troops I'd seen in Athens."

Reynier was permitted to carry a wounded 10-year-old Arab girl he found under the bodies of her parents, an elderly woman, and a fatally wounded old man into a Red Cross ambulance before Irgun and Lehi officers ordered him to return with the ambulance to Jerusalem. They later threatened to kill him if he ever revealed what he had seen.

When Shaltiel's adjutant, Yeshurun Schiff, who had provided the weapons for the assault, reached the scene he found the terrorists trying "to kill anybody they found alive." His men surrounded the Irgun and Lehi personnel and ordered them to carry the bodies of their victims to a quarry, pour gasoline over them and set them afire.

"It was a lovely spring day." Schiff reported. "The almond trees were in bloom, the flowers were out and everywhere there was a stench of the dead, the thick smell of blood, and the terrible odor of the corpses burning in the quarry."

When the odor became unbearable, the Irgun and Lehi terrorists abandoned the village. Later, Jewish school boys from the Gadna youth organization were sent to dispose of the bodies. The Gadna commander, Eliyahu Arieli, a veteran of British Army service, counted 250 dead of whom he reported:

"All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women or children...The dead we found were all unjust victims and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands."

Some participants in the massacre admitted the men and boys who had surrendered had been lined up and shot. Despite the eyewitness accounts to the contrary, the Irgun and Lehi terrorists maintained the women and children had died in their dynamited homes. A rough count showed that of some 750 villagers present when the attack began, 250 had fled to safety. Another 250 had been taken alive, loaded on trucks and paraded through Jewish sections of Jerusalem before being released near an Arab neighborhood. The remaining 250 were buried at the quarry.

Five weeks later the British withdrew and the Jewish state of Israel was proclaimed. Its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, expressed shame at the massacre. But word of what had happened to the people of Deir Yasin spread to every Palestinian Arab village under attack by Jewish soldiers. The latter usually left one quarter open for escape and, by the time they occupied a village, its houses and streets were often deserted. Where the villages they captured were still occupied, the Israeli soldiers sometimes ordered the inhabitants out of their houses by loudspeaker, and then, at gunpoint, marched or drove them to Arab lines. The memory, and pointed reminders, of Deir Yasin made the job much easier.

In succeeding years, leaders of the two revisionist groups publicly took credit for the terror that had miraculously "cleared the land" of Israel of the majority of its Palestinian Arab occupants, who were never allowed by the Israeli Government to return. Thirty-nine years later, Ben-Gurion's shame at the Deir Yasin massacre apparently has been forgotten by at least half of Israel's voters. The leader of the larger of the two terrorist groups that carried it out, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, was Menachem Begin, who became Prime Minister of Israel in 1977 and who served until his resignation in 1983. His successor as Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, was one of the three principal leaders of the Lehi—the Stern Gang—at the time of the massacre. In November, 1986, Shamir began his second term as Prime Minister of Israel.

(This summary of the Deir Yasin massacre is based upon generally consistent accounts in three histories of the 1947-1948 fighting: Genesis 1948—The First Arab-Israeli War, by Dan Kurzman, New York, World Publishing Company, 1970; Torn Country—An Oral History of the Israeli War of Independence, by Linne Reid Banks, New York, Franklin Watts, 1982; and O Jerusalem, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, London, Pan Books, 1973. The four quotations are from O Jerusalem, pp. 269-275.)