Forward from
The Ansar Code
The Palestinian Book of "Exodus"By Ray Hanania
ForwardIn the early morning hours of Friday, April 9, 1948, two units of the Irgun Zvei Leumi (Etzel) and one unit of Stern Gang (LEHI, pronounced "Le-Chi") consisting of about 150 heavily armed men and women fighters surrounded the Arab village of Deir Yassin, located on the southwestern outskirts of Jerusalem.
The advance was staged from a nearby Jewish settlement, Kfar Shaul (sometimes also called Giv'at Shaul.) The two villages lived together in close proximity, sharing some grazing land for their herds, and leaders of both had even met during the growing turmoil between their peoples to initial an agreement by which both sides would notify the other of "strangers" or "suspicious looking" individuals who might wander into the area. Although Kfar Shaul was being used as a military transport center by the Haganah, the official Jewish military organization during the British Mandate for Palestine, Deir Yassin was non-military.
After claiming to have given the sleeping residents at Deir Yassin a 15 minute warning to evacuate, small squads of fighters from Menachem Begin's Etzel and Yitzhak Shamir's LEHI forces raked through the village of 700 to 750 people, killing 254 (reported at the time) mostly old men, women and children, and wounding 300 others. What was to have only lasted an hour, turned into a bloody carnage that lasted more than 10 hours, mainly because of the inept military training of Etzel and LEHI fighters. The battle did not end until the Palmach, the special trained unit of the Haganah, came in to help finish the battle. They provided support, initially, from the sidelines. Many of the bodies of the victims had been tossed into the village well during a clean-up operation that lasted two days.
Some of the Arab survivors who had been captured by the Irgun and LEHI forces were paraded through the Jewish sectors of Jerusalem. Afterwards, these survivors were taken to an outlying quarry where they were murdered by gunfire. (Reports of those paraded through the city range in number from 25 to 150 captives held at gunpoint by Etzel and LEHI assault teams.)
Other sources report that some 50 orphaned children whose parents were massacred during the attack were taken to Jerusalem and abandoned behind the Wailing Wall near the Dome of the Rock. These children were adopted by a loving, young Palestinian woman, Hind Husseini, who converted her home into an orphanage that later became renown as the famous Dar el-Tifl.)
The three Etzel and LEHI platoons had been supported by an "observer" squadron of the crack Palmach unit of the Haganah, which waited at the bottom of the hill until the fighting seemed to come to an end.
The Haganah and the Jewish Agency, which officially denounced the atrocity but only after details had become public several days later, did all they could to delay representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross from investigating the aftermath of the massacre. It wasn't until Sunday morning, on April 11, that Jacques de Reynier, chief representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross with offices in Jerusalem, was allowed to inspect the village to investigate what were then strong rumors that a massacre of civilians had taken place. An English translation of de Reynier's De Reynier's report is included in the Appendix, published originally in French in de Reynier's book `A Jerusalem Un Drapeau Flottait Sur La Ligne de Feu' 1950, Geneva.
Although Irgun and LEHI officials worked hard to disguise evidence of the massacre, what remained had turned de Reynier's stomach.
The Arab survivors of the assault were never permitted to return and the village was eventually converted into a Jewish military enclave, used mainly to coordinate Haganah military operations in the Jerusalem area.
Menachem Begin, at first, denied direct knowledge of the planning of the attack, although he awaited word on its results at his headquarters in Tel Aviv when the attack was completed.
Ironically, the attack also had come as a complete surprise to the Deir Yassin villagers, whose village elders had signed a non-aggression pact with the leaders of the adjacent Jewish village of Kfar Shaul. Deir Yassin officials had even prevented military personnel from the Arab Liberation Army from using the village as a base.
Despite that, Begin and his lieutenants alleged that Arab army irregulars had been using the village as a staging point to support the Arab effort to block the Jewish military effort to resupply the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem. Most observers, however, believed that false charge was the excuse Begin needed to seize the Arab village, which was situated on highlands overlooking passage into Jerusalem. Both the Irgun and the Haganah, rivals in the early days of the birth of Israel, planned to build an air strip at the village that would be used to supply Jewish residents of Jerusalem, besieged by Arab forces during the war.
Deir Yassin is described as one of Begin's "finest moments." Also included in the Appendix are statements made by Haganah witnesses to the devastation, Col. Meir Pa'el (retired) and by Zvi Ankori, Haganah commanders who occupied Deir Yassin after the Irgun's evacuation, and by survivors of Deir Yassin.
These testimonials are offered in the Appendix to counter assertions from Begin revisionists who have tried to erase the memory of Deir Yassin from the historical annals of the Birth of Israel and the destruction of Arab Palestine in 1948.
The Deir Yassin massacre had a lasting and profound impact on the future of the Palestinian People. It also played a significant role in the events that unfolded in Palestine in 1948 and 1949.
The Etzel and LEHI killers never realized that the massacre they meticulously planned would bring the results they had so desperately sought. Striking fear in the hearts and minds of Palestinians throughout Palestine would prompt the Arabs to flee their homes and villages in fear, evacuating lands sought by their Jewish antagonists.
Had this not occurred, the Jewish State would have faced a major dilemma.
The Zionist movement had carefully planned the creation of their state, from the declaration of a Jewish State by Theodore Herzl in 1897 at Basle, Switzerland, to the endorsement of the Balfour Declaration by the British in 1917. It was supplanted by a steady although erratic policy that fostered the immigration of Jews from their European ghettos to newly created and heavily financed settlements in Palestine's countryside. Although there were moments when the drive to establish a Jewish State in Palestine stumbled, the Zionist architects were dedicated to that one important cause. They followed one basic plan to manipulate World politics in their favor in order to populate Palestine with Jews from the Diaspora, at whatever pace. Although the pace increased after 1945, with the effort to save Jews from the still smoldering ashes of the Holocaust.
Despite this single-minded dedication, the Jewish pioneers of Israel confronted a perplexing challenge: the United Nations had divided Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish. Notwithstanding all their efforts and a massive movement of Jews from other countries into Palestine, and as meticulously as the United Nations attempted to draw the boundaries of the "Jewish State" to encompass the bulk of Jewish settlements and cities in Mandated Palestine, the proposed "Jewish State" still had almost as many non-Jewish Arabs as there were Jewish residents.
To create a truly "Jewish State," the Zionist planners found themselves obligated to do all they could to forcibly evict as many of the Arabs as possible from their proposed state. Although not acknowledged immediately, it is documented repeatedly in the later memoirs of many of Israel's pioneering leaders.
In 1944, Yigal Yadin, later to become a renown Israeli archeologist, had formulated the basis for the planned expulsion of Arabs from areas of Palestine they hoped to conquer for their state. His plan was called "Plan Dalet."
According to Yadin, who was partly motivated by the news of atrocities occurring under the Nazis, the target of this wholesale removal of Arabs by military force was Palestine's "main Arab villages." Former Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok (who changed his name in 1948 to Sharrett) wrote, "The most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine -- more spectacular in a sense than the creation of a Jewish State -- is the wholesale evacuation of its Arab population."
In their minds, they needed "living space" for their people in Palestine.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, had written to his son as early as 1937, forewarning, "We will expel the Arabs and take their places." In 1947, he expounded on that promise, ordering, "In each attack, a decisive blow should be struck, resulting in the destruction of homes and the expulsion of the population."
Obviously, this was their private posture. Publicly, during these trying years, Jewish leaders stuck to their script, that Arab refugee flight from Palestine was instigated by overconfident Arab braggadocio which, according to them, urged the Arab peasants to "leave temporarily" while their Arab Armies "mopped up Palestine" and "drove the Jews into the sea."
With the complicity of a sympathetic and very biased Western news media, this false perception was sold easily.
The goal of the Jewish leadership, in fact, was to use fear as a means of achieving an immediate goal. The massacre at Deir Yassin was a part of this plan. The short term objective of capturing a strategic Arab highland to use as an airport, shrouded in the horror of a mass killing that morning, resulted in an impetus of Arab fear that lasted far beyond their anticipated goal.
Deir Yassin was among the Arab villages targeted in Plan Dalet. Its population had to be removed to create an airstrip, but also to assist in the depopulation of Arabs from areas targeted by the drive to create a Jewish State. The Deir Yassin massacre became a catalyst that fueled Arab fear. It motivated the flight of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from other villages also targeted by the Jewish forces in Plan Dalet during a war effort that began in early 1947 for the Jewish military, and ended in deadlock for the Arabs in 1949.
Not only had the massacre at Deir Yassin created a mass exodus of more than 700,000 Palestinians, who fled to the deserts of neighboring Arab countries, it also added strength to the Jewish effort to takeover Palestine and to create the Jewish State of Israel.
While many Arab and Palestinian scholars have examined, written and re-written the history of Palestine and the Palestinian Al Nakba, (translated from Arabic as either "The Catastrophe" or "the Dispossession"), few have focused on the essence of the human tragedy of Palestine. That human tragedy is embodied in the history of Deir Yassin, a tiny village that had no broad strategic importance, no real diplomatic significance, and no world view. Its past and its future was that of pure simplicity of culture.
But the tale of Deir Yassin is not simply the story of a village. What happened at Deir Yassin symbolized what happened to the entire country of Arab Palestine. And, it is also the story of a tragedy that has confronted the Jewish People.
This novel is fiction based on fact, an effort to dramatize, as best as possible, the events surrounding the Deir Yassin Massacre and to explore its impact on the destruction of the Palestinian lands. It is also an effort to place the massacre in the context of the bigger picture, to help the world understand the motivations, goals and the objectives of all the players that existed at the time.
In researching this book, I recognized immediately that while the Israelis had meticulously documented their history, the Arabs had failed terribly in documenting their own history. In fact, Arab history is mired in the polemical rhetoric of politics. Events in the Arab history of Palestine, are not recorded as events, per se, but are analyzed for their political weight for application in today's dialectics. The Arab history of Palestine has been written and re-written repeatedly as an effort to justify an argument, rather than as a clinical record of events.
Ironically, while Israelis strive to restrain the context of the Arab experience into a tabulation of faceless statistics -- constantly trying to force a debate on how many were killed (100 or 254) rather than on why they were killed -- the Arab political documentation of their own history has inadvertently contributed toward that same result.
Arab history is filled with rhetoric prompted by the politics of the moment. There was no long range plan to preserve information or record events. It is unfair to place all the blame on the Arabs by themselves, or even on the Israelis.
History, in the hands of a very biased and prejudiced Western News Media, has a way of distorting and burying the facts.
While Israel has since micro-researched and maintained documentation to strengthen their politically historical preservation -- after all, they controlled most of the land and administrative buildings that existed in Palestine and had stronger ties to the western news media reporters who covered the events -- the Arabs and the Palestinians have been forced to struggle to reconstruct the actual events of a shameful massacre the Israelis have done much to bury.
In what has been written by both Arab and Jewish sources, dates events and statistics are intermingled and confused. For example, the death of Abdel Qader al-Husseini, which is written about in this novel, has been recorded by scores of sources as having occurred on three different dates, April 7, April 8 and April 9. I have chosen to recognize the death as having occurred on April 8, based on the volume of sources and despite date otherwise. The debate over how many Palestinians were murdered continues until this day, with numbers varying from 254, as generally accepted by Palestinians, to 120 (recently argued in an article in Ha'aretz Newspaper by writer Danny Rubenstein).
Regardless of the number, though, the massacre occurred and the events were horrific. Although it cannot be compared to the Holocaust, to the victims of Deir Yassin, the massacre was their Holocaust, and Jews who suffered in the Holocaust were responsible.
It is the most perplexing aspect of not only the massacre, but the brutal events that have marked the history of modern-day Palestine.
With no real unbiased, professional media, no real effort to archive complete historical records, and only the shaken memories of a handful of Palestinian survivors and Arab leaders involved in the 1948 catastrophe collected years later, the Palestinian story of Deir Yassin has never been told, at least not told in a human context.
It has always been referred to as "the massacre of 254 Arab civilians residents of Deir Yassin." What a terrible and clinical way to address an event whose magnitude shook the very foundations of Palestinian resistance in 1948.
I hope this novel will not only help people better understand Deir Yassin and the significant place it marks in the history of the Palestinian People. I hope it also helps objective people evaluate an event that had an impact on both Arabs and Jews, and allow Arabs and Jews, together, to consider each other's pain.
As we mark the 50th anniversary of this tragedy, a new look back might inspire both Arabs and Jews to show compassion toward one another.
The tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust in Nazi Germany will forever stand as a reminder of the depths of human evil. The Holocaust can show us both the enormity of the pain and suffering that one people can inflict, while explicitly demonstrating the pain and suffering that another people can endure. The Palestinian Arabs are as deserving of this same kind of consideration.
The Holocaust and the Tragedy of Palestine are subjects that exist in different worlds. But they have the same end results: The intended destruction of a people; the cruelty of mankind; the suffering of one people in the context of the global community.
Deir Yassin is a tragedy that continues on a much larger scale today, stoking the flames of conflict and acrimony that continues among Jews and Arabs.
This story is one filled with emotion for both Jews and Palestinians. I have tried to fairly represent the events not only surrounding Deir Yassin but those that impacted on Jewish involvement in the massacre.
I tried hard to understand and share an understanding of why a survivor of the Holocaust, (Shoah in Hebrew) would participate in the massacre of other human beings so soon after their own suffering.
This is not an effort to assess guilt, or to convey innocence. It is simply an effort to present in a broader context, the story of one small, little Arab village that once existed in Palestine, and that, through events beyond its own control, came to play such a pivotal role in deciding the first of many Arab-Israeli conflicts.
This is the first of three parts dedicated to recording to tragedy of Palestine and the commemoration of 50 years since Al Nakba.
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