Deir Yassin: There was no massacre
A founding myth of the Palestinian narrative was a
fabrication that drove thousands of Arabs to panic and
flee
In this 1948 photo from the UNRWA archive, Palestinian
refugees stand outside their tent in Khan Younis, Gaza
Strip. (photo credit: AP/UNRWA Photo Archives)
In this 1948 photo from the UNRWA archive, Palestinian
refugees stand outside their tent in Khan Younis, Gaza
Strip. (photo credit: AP/UNRWA Photo Archives)
Deir Yassin is one of the founding myths of the
Palestinian narrative, according to which Israelis
murdered 254 people, committed rapes, and other gender-
oriented atrocities in a peaceful 1948 Palestinian
village. For the past five years, I have carried out an
in-depth research into the affair, learned to know the
village, who lived there and where, their names, and
above all, the exact circumstances of death of each of
the people killed there. The results were astounding,
but clear. There was no massacre in Deir Yassin. No
rapes. Lots of unfounded Palestinian propaganda.
On 9 April 1948, combined forces of the Jewish Etzel
and Lehi underground organizations attacked Deir
Yassin, an Arab village west of Jerusalem. It was four
months after the eruption of hostilities between Jews
and Arabs in Palestine, and about a month before the
termination of the British mandate and the
establishment of the State of Israel. The nature of
this attack became one of the most controversial issues
in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, serving
the Palestinians as a proof for Israeli inhumanity. For
almost seven decades, an anti-Israeli biased literature
described it as an intentional and deliberate massacre
of defenseless Arab villagers, accompanied by rapes and
other atrocities.
What really happened in Deir Yassin? Contrary to what
one could expect, I found that the testimonies of the
Jewish attackers on the one hand, and the Arab
survivors on the other hand, were surprisingly similar,
at times almost identical. My methodology, therefore,
was to integrate the testimonies of both parties
involved, Jews and Arabs, into one story. I relied on a
vast number of testimonies and records from 21 archives
(including Israeli, Palestinian, British, American, UN
and Red Cross), many of them yet unreleased to the
public, and hundreds of other sources. My findings were
basically two: no massacre took place in Deir Yassin,
but on the other hand, the false rumors spread by the
Palestinian leadership about a massacre, rapes and
other atrocities, drove the Palestinian population to
leave their homes and run away, becoming a major
incentive for the creation of the Palestinian refugee
problem.
No Massacre
Deir Yassin was not the peaceful village many later
claimed it to be, but a fortified village with scores
of armed combatants. Its relations with the adjacent
Jewish neighborhoods were troubled for decades and the
Jews believed it to endanger the only road from
Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, thus constituting part of the
Arab siege of Jewish Jerusalem. Therefore, although
later denying it for political reasons, the Jewish main
militia in 1948, the Haganah, sanctioned the attack and
later took part in it by means of its striking force,
the Palmach.
A ten-hour fierce battle, in the presence of a civilian
population, ended in the victory of Etzel and Lehi. No
massacre took place. When the battle ended, the killing
stopped. “I believe that most of those who were killed
were among the fighters and the women and children who
helped the fighters,” one of the Arab survivors was
later to testify. Furthermore, the Arab villagers got
an advance warning to evacuate the village, which 700
of them followed. The attackers took an additional 200
villagers prisoner and safely released them in Arab
Jerusalem. Only 101 Arabs were killed, a quarter of
them active combatants and most of the rest in combat
conditions. The Jewish assailants also suffered
casualties.
The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
For psychological warfare considerations, Etzel
reported 200 Arabs killed, twice more than the actual
number, enthusiastically adopted by the Palestinian
leadership in Jerusalem, which increased it to 254 and
added rapes and other gender-oriented atrocities.
Hussein Khalidi, the senior Arab authority in 1948
Jerusalem, was of the opinion that, “We must make the
most of this.” As his assistant Hazim Nusayba reported
in a 1998 interview, Khalidi said “we should give this
the utmost propaganda possible because the Arab
countries apparently are not interested in assisting us
and we are facing a catastrophe….So we are forced to
give a picture – not what is actually happening – but
we had to exaggerate.” Khalidi’s distortion of the
facts failed to prevent catastrophe. Instead, it helped
created one.
“Dr. Khalidi was the one who caused the catastrophe,”
one of the Arab survivors ruled. “Instead of working in
our favor, the propaganda worked in favor of the Jews.
Whole villages and towns fled because of what they
heard had happened in Deir Yassin.” The Palestinian
leadership intended to exploit the affair to lay
pressure on the Arab states to send their armies to
Palestine to fight the Jews. The plan boomeranged.
Following the rule that women’s honor comes before
land, the moment the Palestinians heard about rapes
they started to leave.
Israelis and Palestinians believe in two myths about
the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The
Israelis claim that the Palestinians followed their
leaders’ exhortations to evacuate their homes
temporarily and then return with the victorious Arab
armies, but that is not what spurred Palestinians to
leave. The Palestinians claim that the Israelis
expelled them in 1948, but this was not what drove the
departure. The true story of the 1948 Palestinian
exodus was a flight mainly motivated by panic over a
massacre that never happened.
Horror Propaganda
The horror propaganda about the affair has continued
apace from 1948 to the present. The following is just a
typical story, repeatedly cited, lately by the exiled
Egyptian Muslim preacher, Yusuf Qaradawi: “As a climax
of cruelty certain Jewish terrorists laid wagers on the
sex of the unborn babies of expectant mothers. The
wretched women were cruelly disemboweled alive, their
wombs drawn out and searched for the evidence which
would determine the winner.”
However, Palestinians and Muslim preachers are not the
only ones who promote the massacre narrative,
Westerners do as well. “Deir Yassin Remembered” is an
organization founded in the United States, interested
in building a memorial to commemorate the affair in a
location overlooking the Yad Vashem Holocaust
Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, apparently in order to
draw an analogy between the two. The equation recurs in
their writings, which argue that describing the
massacre as “false, exaggerated, or in dispute” is
tantamount to Holocaust revisionism. My research of the
affair puts to rest any serious questioning of whether
there was or was not a massacre at Deir Yassin. There
was not.
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