Reply #22: Deir Yassin = massacre.

[Englander]

Again, I hope all these links & info are informative, like the previous info on Irgun, &tc.

Deir Yassin massacre, 55 years on
By Yair Ettinger

Dozens of Jews and Arabs yesterday marched around the fence surrounding Jerusalem's Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital, the site of the Deir Yassin massacre, to commemorate its 55th anniversary.

On April 9, 1948, the Lehi and Etzel attacked the village of Deir Yassin as part of the Nahshon Operation, killing an unknown number of residents, including women and children. Yesterday's ceremony included the reading of 93 names of victims.

Residents of the nearby Jerusalem religious neighborhood of Har Nof watched the ceremony, cursing at participants.

Among those attending the ceremony was Abdel Aziz Barakat, 81, who lost 17 members of his family in the massacre and told participants about Arab and Israeli coexistence in Jerusalem until 1939.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=282499&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

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Survival of the fittest
By Ari Shavit

>snip

According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

"Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima , in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram : at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=380986

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Remember the pain, heal the wounds

Anne Karpf
Guardian

Tuesday March 26, 2002

Given the current carnage in the Middle East, it may seem arbitrary - perverse, even - to alight on one bloody episode from 54 years ago. But the events that took place in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in April 1948 are so symbolic that they might almost serve as the DNA of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And the decision to memorialise them in England, Scotland, and elsewhere around the world on April 7 is highly charged and, to some, downright inflammatory.

The bare facts are beyond dispute. Early in the morning of April 9 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and Lehi guerrilla groups, with the help of a small elite unit from the main Jewish defence organisation, the Haganah, led an attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem. Some 100 Palestinians (mainly old men, women and children) were killed.

Defenders of the massacre say that it was an attempt to break the siege of west Jerusalem, and that Deir Yassin was no sleepy hamlet but a heavily armed Arab military post. Others point out that, at the time, Deir Yassin was designated a peaceful village, had contracted a non-aggression pact with the neighbouring Jewish settlement of Givat Shaul, and that its awesome arsenal amounted to some old Turkish rifles and two machine-guns.

Jewish leaders rushed to condemn the attack. The prime minister, David Ben Gurion, sent an apology to King Abdullah of Jordan, while the Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber called it "a black stain on the honour of the Jewish nation" and "a warning to our people that no practical military needs may ever justify such acts of murder".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4381818,00.html