Deir Yassin Remembered

A moving and thought provoking doco, but even here I see the hand of what I would describe as culpability minimisation: Irgun and the Stern Gang were not a “militia” they were TERRORISTS plain and simple Deir Yassin is only one of the many atrocities carried out by these terrorists,another-incredible but true- was the bombing at Haifa,in 1940, of the refugee ship Patria,with hundreds killed these were JEWISH refugees from Europe.As a link to today, Tzipi Livni’s parents were terrorists both active in Irgun, the terrorists “credited” with the Deir Yassin and many other massacres.This woman,the progeny of mass murderers,nearly became the PM of Israel.

The Irgun were freedom fighters, fighting to get the British colonialists out of the Jewish homeland, which the League of Nations had designated as the “Jewish National Home.” They met Arab terror with retalitions and reprisals which I would label counterterror rather than terror. The incident of Deir Yassin was unfortunate, but blown WAY out of all proportion at the time by (a) the left wingers led by Ben Gurion who wanted to discredit the Right Wing led by Begin at any cost, and (b) by wildly exaggerated Arab propaganda which instead of bolstering Palestinian fortitude to fight, only led instead to fright and their flight.

The resultant wild tales of rapes and mutilations have since finally been conceded to have been totally fabricated. It is true that in the battle of Deir Yassin bad luck caused a series of things to get out of control. The town was expected to simply surrender without any resistance but things got out of control. In fact, at most, perhaps 25 were indeed executed after the battle, but most of the 107 fatalities were due to the things that normally go on in battle when resistance is met, such as hand grenades being thrown into homes from wherein you are being fired upon from. In a 1997 BBC documentary, “The Fifty Years War,” some Arab survivors of Deir Yassin interviewed therein had a very different tale to tell than those in this documentary.

But terror in Palestine did NOT begin with the Zionist Jewish immigrants, but rather with radical clerical opponents of the Mandate, particularly the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin el Husseini, who really started the intercommunal violence in earnest back in 1920, also murdering scores of fellow Arabs who were prepared to at least try to compromise with the Jews. The Jewish terrorist groups, such as Irgun and the Lehi (“Stern Gang”) did not arise until very late in the 1930s after hundreds of Jews and others had already been massacred by the Mufti’s gangs, and when Britain, in its White Paper of 1939, reneged on its committment made to the terms of League of Nations Mandate.
This is stated not to condone excesses caused in the heat of battle, but to explain the context of this unfortunate event.

No, the 650,000 non-Jewish inhabitants who were living there for generations, indeed in some cases many centuries, would have full civil and religious rights. You can look up text of the Mandate by “googling” San Remo Text League of Nations 1922. It’s all there in black and white. The intent of the League of Nations was to restore the country to the many millions of Jews who had been displaced from their homeland by European Romans over 1800 years ago.
But one must understand that Jews had been dispersed to all corners of the world and in most cases were never granted citizenship rights in the vast majority of them, even though many had lived there for many centuries. The US was one of those early exceptional countries that did give Jews citizenship, and that certainly attracted many Jews to it.
The League of Nations had to deal with MANY peoples who strove for independence and nationhood. But the most unique were the Jews, because the Jews were the only nation that had almost COMPLETELY been displaced from their homeland. Other nations were occupied, and colonized, but rarely was an ENTIRE PEOPLE displaced from their land as completely as the Jews. So, there are many reasons why the League had to take into consideration and treat the plight of the Jews in a somewhat unique and unusual way, as their condition was unique and unusual. I hope this helps.

At some point, fire has to be fought with fire. Ask any wilderness fire fighter. The Jews DID NOT initiate hostilities, violence or terror! It came after many years of Arab violence beginning in 1920 (with the League of Nations’ ruling that Palestine was to be restored as the Jewish National Home) spurred primarily by the Mufti of Jerusalem began in earnest. The Hebron Massacre of 1929, where Jewish children were murdered along with 67 innocent inhabitants of Hebron, who had lived there for generations, were cut to pieces like meat really changed things. But the underground terrorist groups, like Irgun and the Stern gang, did not start up till 1939 when the British went back on the terms of the LoN’s Mandate and shut Palestine closed as WWII was approaching. Look, the US bombed to death hundreds of thousands of civilians from the air in Germany and Japan. When you are fighting an enemy that does not respect the rules of war and murders civilians, then all bets are off. It then becomes TOTAL war and the gloves come off.