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The Myth of the Deir Yassin Massacre

(Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Dr. Arnon Groiss - In the recently published Hebrew-language Deir Yassin: The End of the Myth, Prof. Eliezer Tauber of Bar-Ilan University gathered all the available testimonies related to the Deir Yassin battle from all involved parties, both surviving villagers and attackers, and provides a minute-by-minute analysis of the battle and the death circumstances of each victim. According to Tauber, Deir Yassin was the first case of house-to-house fighting in the 1948 war, as the defenders did not run away. The attackers broke into the houses by blowing up their doors, hurling hand grenades inside, and storming in while shooting. This resulted in many casualties, including non-combatants. Yet except for one case in which an attacker shot dead non-combatants who had surrendered, all the rest were killed during house-to-house fighting. The false accusations of civilian massacres appeared after the battle had ended, when forces of the mainstream Hagana entered the village, saw the many corpses, including women and children, and concluded that they must have been murdered by Etzel and Lehi fighters. Due to the bitter enmity between the Hagana and the two groups, the atrocity charges became widespread and hugely inflated. The Palestinian Arab leadership also inflated these charges to stir up public opinion in the neighboring Arab states to join the war against the Jews after the end of the British Mandate. The Deir Yassin episode was unique because its pattern of house-to-house fighting did not recur on a similar scale. According to Arab claims, verified by most scholars, the mere mention of Deir Yassin brought about mass flight or hasty surrender of villagers elsewhere, which made house-to-house fighting largely unnecessary. Those who speak of the Nakba inflicted by the Jews rarely mention that it was the Palestinian Arabs who waged a war of annihilation against their Jewish neighbors in the first place, in an attempt to prevent the creation of a Jewish state in accordance with the UN Partition Resolution of November 1947. Had this assault not taken place, there would have been no Nakba. Also ignored is the fate of the 17 Jewish localities occupied by the Arabs in 1948. The surviving inhabitants of Kfar Etzion were massacred after their surrender. A total deportation of the Jewish population took place in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. The Jews let tens of thousands of Arabs stay in their homes under Israeli rule. The Arabs, by contrast, did no such thing, destroying entire localities and expelling their populations to the last person. Dr. Arnon Groiss, a scholar of Middle Eastern studies, has 42 years' experience as a journalist at Israel's Arabic radio station.
2017-11-24 00:00:00
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