On April 9, 1948, two different Zionist militias, the Irgun and the Lehi, descended on the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, a small village located about five kilometers west of Al-Quds (known now in Occupied Palestine as “Jerusalem”). The militias systematically went house-to ]-house, dispossessing the entire village and killing an estimated minimum of 107 Palestinian people in the process.
Deir Yassin was a village composed of civilians. Not only did the village have a signed non-aggression pact with Zionist forces, but they had even fought off Arab forces that intended to use the village as a base camp for operations.
Zionist forces destroyed the village, bombing civilian homes. A commander involved in the massacre, Yehoshua Zettler, recounted, “House after house … we’re putting in explosives and they are running away. An explosion and move on, an explosion and move on and within a few hours, half the village isn’t there any more.”
Dina Elmuti, a granddaughter of a survivor of the Deir Yassin massacre recounts her surviving family’s testimony:
In a letter from the UK Delegation addressed to the UN outlined what independent observers witnessed:
The deaths of some 250 Arabs, men, women and children, which occurred during this attack, took place in circumstances of great savagery. Woman and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities. Those who were taken prisoner were treated with degrading brutality.
On the 13th April, it became apparent that the Haganah had taken over the village from the terrorists, and the operation was, therefore, suspended. The Government of Palestine reported on the 14th April that it had not yet been possible to enter Deir Yassin and that a Jewish Police Officer sent to investigate was not allowed by the Haganah to proceed beyond Givat Shaul. A representative of the International Red Cross who visited Deir Yassin on the 11th April is said to have stated that in one cave he saw heaped bodies of some 150 Arab men, women and children, whilst in a stronghold a further 50 bodies were found.
Mordechai Gichon, a Haganah intelligence officer sent to Deir Yassin after the massacre, recounted years later, “To me it looked a bit like a pogrom”. He would add, “There was a feeling of considerable slaughter and it was hard for me to explain it to myself as having been done in self-defense. My impression was more of a massacre than anything else”.
Another member of the Haganah in the information service, Shraga Peled, recounted, “When I got to Deir Yassin, the first thing I saw was a big tree to which a young Arab fellow was tied. And this tree was burnt in a fire. They had tied him to it and burned him.”
Zionist Paramilitary Forces
During the Nakba, the Zionist dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians and the murder of thousands more to establish the state of Israel, there were three main Zionist paramilitary forces: the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang). After Israel established statehood following the Nakba, these three forces would merge to join the Israeli army.
Though the Haganah committed many crimes and many war crimes too—including not not limited to biological warfare, collective punishment, and ethnic cleansing—the Irgun and Lehi were bonafide terrorist groups, even being designated as such by the US and British governments as well as the UN. The Lehi took this a step further and proudly referred to themselves as terrorists. The leader of the Lehi during the Nakba, Yitzhak Shamir, wrote in 1943, “Terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play.”
Though the Haganah was not strictly speaking involved, they did provide aid to the Irgun and Lehi and took over control of Deir Yassin from the Irgun and Lehi following the massacre.
The aftermath
The Palestinian villagers of Deir Yassin were either killed or dispossessed from their land and never allowed to return. Records are spotty and incomplete so it is unclear where many of the dispossessed Palestinians wound up.
The leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, would go on to become Israel’s sixth prime minister from 1977-1983. The leader of the Lehi, Yitzhak Shamir, would go on to become Israel’s seventh prime minister from 1986-1992. The Zionist forces that slaughtered, dispossessed, and ethnically cleansed the village of Deir Yassin never saw any consequences for their crimes. In fact, one of the militants, Ezra Yachin, would go on to become the Israeli army’s oldest reserve soldier. He has given over 9,000 speeches to Israeli soldiers and came to give another speech to Israeli soldiers on October 14, 2023 at the age of ninety-five, saying, “Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live. Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbor don’t wait. Go to his home and shoot him.”
The Deir Yassin massacre was also a catalyzing moment for neighbouring Arab forces to commit to defending the Palestinian people and state. Despite the fact that Zionists refer to the Nakba as the 1948 War of Independence, over 300,000 Palestinian people were already dispossessed, systematically ethnically cleansed from Palestine before ‘war’ broke out. It was cases like Deir Yassin that pushed neighbouring Arab forces to take up arms to oppose the Zionist massacres of Palestinians.
Applying Deir Yassin to today
The Deir Yassin massacre is an important historical event because it single handedly debunks many Israeli propaganda talking points. Deir Yassin was a civilian population who went to great lengths to oppose being involved in fighting and were still murdered and dispossessed merely for existing. The Deir Yassin massacre also motivated Arab forces to commit to fighting, dispelling the myth that the Nakba was a war of independence for Zionists. Further, a common argument Zionists use to argue in favour of the Nakba was the 1947 UN Resolution 181, known as the “Partition Plan for Palestine.” But even forgoing the fact that the Resolution was merely a plan that had no legal standing, was never taken up in the Security Council, and that the UN has never had a mandate to create states—even forgoing all of this, Deir Yassin is in the part of Palestine that was partitioned by the UN in the Resolution as an “Arab state.”
It is crucial to remember that Deir Yassin was not unique, nor is it an academic matter to pick apart and analyze as a sanitized lesson. It was a bloody, unjust crime against humanity whose trauma is still felt by survivors and their ancestors today.
Deir Yassin didn’t end on April 9, 1948. It didn’t end when the Nakba officially ended in May 1948. It didn’t end in 1967 when a further 300,000 Palestinians were dispossessed in the Naksa (Arabic for “setback”). It hasn’t ended in the decades of Zionist settlement expansion since. It hasn’t happened since the start of the Gaza Holocaust either. Deir Yassin was not an aberration. It is a logical consequence of a racist Zionist ideology that places the “right” to colonize above Palestinians’ right to exist. That same supremacist logic has led to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine for decades, and now an outright extermination campaign against the people of Gaza.
Just as the Nakba only (officially) ended when Arab state’s armies made the cost of Zionist aggression too high, the current Israeli genocide in Gaza will only end with resistance, by making the cost too high for Israel. Appealing to the morality of an oppressor is a largely fruitless matter—if an oppressor had a conscience, they wouldn’t be an oppressor. The goal should be to make the cost to Israel as high as possible through divestment, sanctions, isolation, and most importantly arms embargoes. All are important to create a path to Palestinian liberation, and they will only happen through building mass movements to push for these goals.
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