http://www.deiryassin.org/mas.html
Deir Yassin Massacre
Following are the events that took place on the day of the
massacre. They are listed in sequential order by the time at
which they occured. Use the arrow icons to return to the Sequence
of Events just below.
Sequence of Events
Early
in the morning of Friday, April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun,
headed by Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang attacked Deir
Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. It was
several weeks before the end of the British Mandate. The village
lay outside of the area that the United Nations recommended be
included in a future Jewish State. Deir Yassin had a peaceful
reputation and was even
said by a Jewish newspaper to have driven out some Arab
militants. But it was located on high ground in the corridor
between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and one plan, kept secret until
years afterwards, called for it to be destroyed and the residents
evacuated to make way for a small airfield that would supply the
beleaguered Jewish residents of Jerusalem.
By noon over 100 people, half of them women and
children, had been systematically murdered. Four commandos died at
the hands of resisting Palestinians using old Mausers and
muskets. Twenty-five male villagers were loaded into trucks, paraded
through the Zakhron Yosef quarter in Jerusalem, and then taken to
a stone quarry along the road between Givat Shaul and Deir Yassin
and shot to death. The remaining residents were driven to Arab
East Jerusalem.
That
evening the Irgunists and the Sternists escorted a party of
foreign correspondents to a house at Givat Shaul, a nearby Jewish
settlement founded in 1906. Over tea and cookies they amplified
the details of the operation and justified it, saying Deir Yassin
had become a concentration point for Arabs, including Syrians and
Iraqis, planning to attack the western suburbs of Jerusalem. They
said that 25 members of the Haganah militia had reinforced the
attack and claimed that an Arabic-speaking Jew had warned the
villagers over a loudspeaker from an armored car. This was duly
reported in The New York Times on April 10.
A final body count of 254 was reported by The New York Times on April
13, a day after they were finally buried. By then the leaders of the Haganah
had distanced themselves from having participated in the attack and issued
a statement denouncing the dissidents of Irgun and the Stern Gang, just
as they had after the attack on the King David Hotel in July, 1946. A
1987 study undertaken by Birzeit University's Center
for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society found "the numbers
of those killed does not exceed 120".
The Haganah leaders admitted that the massacre
"disgraced the cause of Jewish fighters and dishonored
Jewish arms and the Jewish flag." They played down the fact
that their militia had reinforced the terrorists' attack, even
though they did not participate in the barbarism and looting
during the subsequent "mopping up" operations.
They also played down the fact that, in Begin's
words, "Deir Yassin was captured with the knowledge of the
Haganah and with the approval of its commander" as a part of
its "plan for establishing an airfield."
Ben Gurion even sent an apology to King
Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But this horrific act served the future
State of Israel well. According to Begin:
Arabs throughout the
country, induced to believe wild tales of "Irgun
butchery," were seized with limitless panic and
started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon
developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede. The
political and economic significance of this development
can hardly be overestimated.
Of
about 144 houses, 10 were dynamited. The cemetery was later
bulldozed and, like hundreds of other Palestinian villages to
follow, Deir Yassin was wiped off the map. By September, Orthodox
Jewish immigrants from Poland, Rumania, and Slovakia were settled
there over the objections of Martin Buber, Cecil Roth and other
Jewish leaders, who believed that the site of the massacre should
be left uninhabited. The center of the village was renamed Givat
Shaul Bet. As Jerusalem expanded, the land of Deir Yassin became
part of the city and is now known simply as the area between
Givat Shaul and the settlement of Har Nof on the western slopes
of the mountain.
The massacre of Palestinians at Deir
Yassin is one of the most significant events in 20th-century
Palestinian and Israeli history. This is not because of its size
or its brutality, but because it stands as the starkest early
warning of a calculated depopulation of over 400 Arab villages
and cities and the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian
inhabitants to make room for survivors of the Holocaust and other
Jews from the rest of the world.
