Did they get resettled, or did they get to go home?
Generally speaking, resettled. The big refugee populations in the late forties/early fifties that I know of were the fourteen million refugees from the partition of India, who got resettled in the new countries, the three million germans from Poland, East Prussia and the Sudatenland, who got resettled (Poland essentially moved 200 miles west), and the inhabitants of the DP camps. Of those, I think the gentiles went home, but the Jews resettled in Israel or the US. There are also the 600,000 Jewish refugees from the Arab countries who got resettled in Israel. There were a ton of internal Russian refugees, but under Stalin everybody went where the government said to go.
As for Deir Yassin, two things are not disputed. 1) there was a massacre by the Irgun, though how exactly many people died and whether there were any rapes is still disputed, 2) The Arabs themselves publicized it widely, and unintentionally helped foment the panic.
As for the purpose, perhaps there was an intention of creating general panic, but the short-term mission was to create local panic, clear out the villages by the road, and thus deprive Abdul Khader Husseini of the bases that his men were using to ambush the convoys into Jerusalem. There was a war on. |
