Deir Yassin Remembered
Early in the morning of April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. The village lay outside of the area to be assigned by the United Nations to the Jewish State; it had a peaceful reputation. But it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Deir Yassin was slated for occupation under Plan Dalet and the mainstream Jewish defense force, the Haganah, authorized the irregular terrorist forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang to perform the takeover.
In all over 100 men, women, and children were systematically murdered. Fifty-three orphaned children were literally dumped along the wall of the Old City, where they were found by Miss Hind Husseini and brought behind the American Colony Hotel to her home, which was to become the Dar El-Tifl El-Arabi orphanage.
Watch the full documentary now
July 5th, 2009 at 07:01
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.
September 6th, 2009 at 20:28
LOL!!
January 31st, 2010 at 19:29
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.