Thank you for posting that; it is a classic example of the use of incomplete information.
This is the line that stands out, to me:
Surprisingly, after the “massacre,” the Irgun escorted a representative of the Red Cross through the town
Very upright of them, no? How could anything be amiss with a representative of the Red Cross on the spot? Almost any reader would accept that as solid evidence that no wrongdoing was intended. It struck me as odd only because I know who that Red Cross representative was, and I've read his description of the incident. His name was Jacques de Reynier, and he was head of the International Red Cross delegation in Palestine. His account is quite long and painfully detailed, but a short excerpt will suffice:
there had been 400 people in this village; about fifty of them had escaped and were still alive. All the rest had been massacred in cold blood for, as I observed for myself, this gang was admirably disciplined and acted only under orders.
De Reynier writes that the Irgun tried to prevent his entry into the village, and threatened to kill him if he would not sign a document exonerating them.
I have already cited the accounts of Assistant Inspector General Richard Catling, who interviewed the survivors and concluded, among many other things, that "many sexual atrocities" were committed and that "young school girls were raped and later slaughtered".
And then there is the account of Meir Pa'el, a Palmach soldier who took part in the operation. He has this to say, among other things:
It was noon when the battle ended and the shooting stopped... The Irgun and Stern irregulars left the places in which they had been hiding and started carrying out cleaning up operations in the houses. They fired with all the arms they had, and threw explosives into the houses. They also shot everyone they saw in the houses, including women and children - indeed the commanders made no attempt to check the disgraceful acts of slaughter... some 25 men had been brought out of the houses: they were loaded onto a truck and led in a victory parade... at the end of the parade they were taken to a stone quarry between Giv'at Sha'ul and Deir Yassin and shot....
Here we have three accounts. One is an eyewitness account by a soldier who took part in the operation, one the eyewitness account of the same Red Cross official whose presence was invoked to make the operation seem less offensive, one the report of the policeman who interviewed the survivors. These are the sort of accounts most historians look for: the stories of the people who were there, or who dealt with the situation immediately afterwards. Oddly, the piece you pasted not only fails to cite any of these accounts, it does not even acknowledge that they exist. Was the writer deliberately omitting information that might detract from the point he was trying to make, or was he just a very sloppy researcher?
What do you think? |
