Deir Yassin a casualty of guns and propaganda
Paul Holmes JERUSALEM
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On a rise on the western edge of Jerusalem stands a collection of Arab stone houses that serve today as a mental health center.
To the Orthodox Jews, who populate the suburb of Kefar Shaul, the site is just that.
To Arabs it is the heart of what was Deir Yassin, a village whose fate 50 years ago did more to precipitate the flight of Palestinians from their homes than any other event leading up to the birth of the state of Israel.
Scores of men, women and children were killed on 9 April 1948, when fighters from the Irgun and Lehi Jewish nationalist underground movements attacked and captured Deir Yassin.
For five decades, it has stood as a defining tragedy in what Palestinians call "Al Nakba" the "Catastrophe" that was the exodus of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages with the loss of their land.
Now evidence is gaining ground that truth was as much a casualty of Deir Yassin as the people who died there.
Fighters from both sides, as well as Palestinian and Israeli academics, say accounts of the carnage were sensationalized by Jews and Arabs alike for different propaganda purposes but with the same result.
"The Arabs, I am sorry to say, were stupid enough to take it and publicize it," said Sharif Kana'ana, a professor of anthropology at the Palestinian university of Bir Zeit, who has researched the killings of Deir Yassin in detail.
"They publicized it so much... that they scared the hell out of themselves."
Whether or not what happened at Deir Yassin was a massacre remains in deep dispute, though there is no doubt that unarmed men, women and children were killed. Up to 28 from one extended family perished in one house alone.
Contradictory accounts persist to this day about whether some villagers were led to a quarry and shot in cold blood after the fighting had ended, or were paraded in captivity through Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem and then killed.
But there is growing acceptance that fatalities numbered no more than 120, a figure established by Kana'ana that is half the reported toll, and that some of the claimed atrocities never happened.
Mordechai Ra'anan, the Irgun commander in Jerusalem, was the first to inflate the figure. He announced that 240 villagers had been killed soon after the battle in a calculated attempt to sow fear and panic among the Arab population of Palestine.
"He knew the number was exaggerated but he told me he did it because he wanted to use it as psychological warfare," said Yehuda Lapidot, second-in-command of the Irgun at Deir Yassin.
A Palestinian leader in Jerusalem, Hussein Fakhri Al Khalidi, seized on the Jewish report, upped the number to 254 and added lurid accounts of rape and savagery, in a statement read out in radio broadcasts to Arabs throughout Palestine.
The intention was to stiffen Arab resolve. The effect was to empty villages, at times without a shot being fired, in sheer terror at the approach of Jewish forces.
"One of the ironies about it all is that there were greater massacres than Deir Yassin but they were forgotten by everybody," said Benny Morris, one of Israel's "new historians."
Deir Yassin was home to about 750 people from five clans in early 1948, as war between Jews and Arabs intensified in the approach to the end of the ruling British mandate on 15 May, under the terms of a United Nations plan to partition Palestine.
Its importance lay in its strategic position, on a height at the western approach to Jerusalem overlooking the main road linking the city to Jewish Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean coast.
Gunmen from Arab towns along the road had blocked lifeline convoys of food and other supplies from Tel Aviv, putting the Jews of Jerusalem under siege.
Deir Yassin was different.
Former residents say it had a truce deal with nearby Jewish settlements and had kept out Syrian and Iraqi irregulars who had come to fight alongside Palestinian Arabs.
Still, with war clouds gathering, the villagers sent three men to Egypt in late 1947 to buy arms. They returned with two machine-guns and 40 assorted rifles.
"I tell you we were living in our village, minding our own business, not thinking about fighting," said Mohammed Radwan, now 70, who has raised a large family in two rented rooms in Jerusalem's Old City since losing the fight for Deir Yassin.
"Did we go and attack Beit Hakerem and Givat Shaul or did they come and attack us?" asked Radwan, who fought for several hours to repel the assault before running out of bullets.
All Radwan and his wife Zuhdia, 67, have to remind them of the home they lost is a single, decorated floor tile. It was salvaged from the house, now a joiner's workshop, when an Israeli journalist took Radwan back a few months ago.
"We sit sometimes and cry over the tile," said Zuhdia.
The Radwans, however, seem as bitter over distortions in the history of Deir Yassin as they are over killings by the Lehi and Irgun fighters that cost the lives of relatives and neighbors.
"I know when I speak that God is up there and God knows the truth and God will not forgive the liars," said Radwan, who puts the number of villagers killed at 93, listed in his own handwriting.
"There were no rapes. It's all lies. There were no pregnant women who were slit open. It was propaganda that... Arabs put out so Arab armies would invade," he said. "They ended up expelling people from all of Palestine on the rumor of Deir Yassin."
Lapidot, also 70, helped lead some 120 Jewish fighters into Deir Yassin at 4:30 a.m. on the day of the attack, a Friday.
The assault was a critical test for the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and for the Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, and whose leaders included Yitzhak Shamir.
Neither man was present at Deir Yassin. Both were later to become prime ministers of Israel, though not before their right-wing camp spent two decades in the political wilderness, in part because of the ignominy of Deir Yassin.
Until the assault, the Irgun and Lehi had engaged only in hit-and-run raids on British mandate forces and Arab villages.
"This was the first time where the decision was not retaliation or punishment but taking over, conquering the area and holding it," Lapidot recalled.
"It was a crucial change in the war of 1948. As it was a change in strategy, the decision was to avoid casualties."
As a result, he said, the force decided to sacrifice the element of surprise and sent a vehicle ahead with loudspeakers to call on villagers to leave.
The vehicle got stuck in a ditch at the edge of Deir Yassin, a village guard fired a warning shot and all hell broke loose.
"They were in their buildings, stone buildings and we were outside," Lapidot said.
"We changed our tactics and before going into buildings we threw in hand grenades and in some cases we blew up the buildings. This is the reason for the many casualties, men, women and children," he said.
"Once there was shooting from the buildings, it was the enemy for us. Once there was no shooting, there was no killing."
In the first half hour of the battle, the assault force lost 30 percent of its men, according to Lapidot, who put the Jewish toll at five dead and 35 wounded.
"We underestimated the power in Deir Yassin. We thought it would be very easy for us," said Lapidot. "But they were very strong and they fought, for a change they fought."
So precarious was the attackers' position that they had to call in supporting fire from two units of the Haganah, the much larger, socialist-leaning fighting force of the Jewish community of Palestine led by David Ben-Gurion.
Ben-Gurion, who was to found Israel five weeks after Deir Yassin, had his own political reasons for portraying what took place in the village as a brutal massacre unworthy of Jews.
Records have since shown the Haganah knew of the attack in advance and approved it. But reports of atrocities at the time, including those from Red Cross and British sources, provided an opportunity to paint their Irgun and Lehi rivals black.
"I spent virtually my entire life believing Deir Yassin was one ugly episode in Jewish history," said Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America.
As Israel turns 50, Klein is campaigning to show Deir Yassin was no more than a legitimate military operation.
Palestinians, as they remember their plight, will see Deir Yassin as anything but legitimate.
Ultimately, many Palestinian academics say, how many villagers were killed is less important than why.
"I believe that the Israelis, the Jewish forces, were not motivated in killing Palestinians... ," Kana'ana said.
"I don't think they really had anything against the Palestinians except that they existed. They wanted them out."
Deir Yassin, he said, "defined the situation for the rest of the war you had to leave or die."
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