The real issue is not the claim that the Israelis are pure as the driven snow
That may or may not be "the real issue", but I was addressing a quite different issue raised by David Warren. I don't know what Mr. Warren was thinking when he wrote what he wrote, but I think it safe enough to assume that he meant to say exactly what he said.
There were 10s of millions of refugees in the 40's; no other group is still in camps. Most got resettled instead.
Did they get resettled, or did they get to go home?
Arabs themselves publicized Deir Yassin (suitably exaggerated) in the mistaken belief that it would stiffen resistance. Instead it fomented a panic.
Now we come into interesting territory, rendered more interesting by a subsequent post claiming that the facts in the Deir Yassin incident are "disputable". The facts in this case have been rendered disputable simply by constant dispute. Menachem Begin's account of the incident starts with the words "Arab headquarters at Ramallah broadcast a crude atrocity story....". Many other accounts attribute the story entirely to "Arab propagandists".
Fortunately for those who care to look, there are reliable accounts available. The first is the police report on the incident, particularly the interviews with survivors conducted by Inspector General Richard Catling. The second is the published account of Jacques de Reynier, head of the International Red Cross delegation in Palestine, who arrived in Deir Yassin shortly after the incident. The third is a report written by Meir Pa'el, a Palmach soldier who participated in the operation, which was unearthed and published, on April 4, 1972, by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot. Pa'el's report describes the military encounter preceding the incident, which according to the report was fought entirely by Palmach forces, and how "The Irgun and Stern irregulars left the places in which they had been hiding and started carrying out cleaning up operations in the houses". The cleaning up operations are also described, in considerable detail.
None of these accounts are the work of "Arab Propagandists". There are no significant discrepancies among the accounts. I don't think that anyone reading them could come away with any question that an atrocity of proportions uncommon even in that sad region happened in that place.
I will not quote details. They are not pretty.
One of the more interesting parts of the story is de Reynier's observation that "this gang was admirably disciplined and only acted under orders". This is particularly interesting in light of your comment that Deir Yassin "formented a panic". Begin puts it this way:
Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of "Irgun butchery", were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon turned into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede. Of the about 800,000 Arabs who lived on the present territory of the State of Israel, only some 165,000 are still there. The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated."
The question: was Deir Yassin an unplanned incident that just happened by accident to cleanse the land of several hundred thousand people that the Zionists very much wanted to leave? Or was it planned with the intention of achieving precisely the goal that it apparently achieved? We don't know. Certainly if Begin thought such a device would achieve a desired goal, he would not refrain out of squeamishness: a man willing to blow up 88 people - including 15 Jews - in the King David Hotel to achieve one goal would hardly hesitate to kill 240 Arabs to achieve another.
Again, we don't know and we never will. But lopsided though the balance of transgression has been in recent years, I would hesitate to say that any one side in this conflict has a monopoly on duplicity and barbarity.
Now I've used up my SI time allocation for the day on one post. If I manage to be productive (it's morning in my time zone), I may look in to see what sort of reaction all this verbiage provokes.... |
