http://www.mediamonitors.net/shamir12.html
April is the cruelest month
By Israel Shamir, 04/2001
On a beautiful spring day, when the skies of the Holy Land are tender
blue and the grass is a verdant green, air-conditioned buses ferry
tourists from the City of the Plain to the City in the Mountains. A
small distance past the halfway point, just beyond the reconstructed
Ottoman inn of Bab al-Wad, the Gate of the Valley, the bus drives by
the red-painted skeletons of armored vehicles. This is where the tour
guides make their routine pitch. "These vehicles are in memory of the
heroic break-through of Jews relieving the blockade of Jerusalem
imposed by the aggression of nine Arab states". The number of Arab
states varies with the mood of the guide and how they size up their
audience.
The battle for the road to Jerusalem was a high point of the 1948
Civil war in Palestine, and it ended with the Zionist Jews of the
Plain capturing the prosperous West End of Jerusalem with its white
stone mansions of Arab nobles and German, Greek and Armenian
merchants. In the course of these battles they also subdued the
neutral, non-Zionist Jewish neighborhoods. Zionists expelled the
Gentiles in a massive sweep of ethnic cleansing and contained the
local Jews in the ghetto. In order to achieve this feat, they razed to
the ground the Palestinian villages on their path to the city.
The rusted junk is barely an adequate backdrop for the standard
Israeli narration, and they would not qualify for a realistic film
production. It is a staged scene that lacks the authentic look needed
by movie directors. The story of the blockade and aggression is a
theater play, not a cinema script. It is an encore performance for the
tourist receiving indoctrination on the non-stop trip to the Wailing
Wall and the Holocaust Museum.
The war for this road was over in April 1948, weeks before Israel
declared independence on 15th of May, before the hapless rag-tag units
of Arab neighbors entered Palestine and saved what remained of the
native population. As T.S. Elliot observed, April is the cruellest
month. And so it was on that fateful April when the Palestinians were
doomed to start a journey to five decades of exile. Its apotheosis was
reached near the entrance to Jerusalem, where the Sacharov gardens
lead to a cemetery, to a lunatic asylum and to Deir Yassin.
Death has many names. The Czechs call it Lidice, the French word is
Oradur, in Vietnamese they use My Lai, for every Palestinian, it is
Deir Yassin. On the night of the ninth of April 1948, the Jewish
terrorist groups Etzel and Lehi attacked the peaceful village and
massacred its men, women and children. I do not want to repeat the
gory tale of sliced off ears, gutted bellies, raped women, torched
men, bodies dumped in stone quarries or the triumphal parade of the
murderers. Existentially, all massacres are similar, from Babi Yar to
Chain Gang to Deir Yassin.
Yet, the Deir Yassin massacre is special for three reasons. One, it is
well documented and witnessed. Other Jewish fighters from the Hagana
and Palmach, Jewish scouts, Red Cross representatives and the British
police of Jerusalem left complete records of the event. It was just
one of many massacres of Palestinians by the Jews during the war of
1948, but none received as much attention. This is probably due to the
fact that Jerusalem, the seat of the British Mandate in Palestine, was
just around the corner.
Second, Deir Yassin had dire consequences, beyond its own tragic fate.
The horror of the massacre facilitated the mass flight from nearby
Palestinian villages and gave the Jews full control over the western
approaches to Jerusalem. The flight was a prudent and rational choice
for the civilian population. As I write this, my TV glares with the
image of Macedonian peasants fleeing a war zone. My mother's family
escaped from a burning Minsk on June 22, 1941, and survived. My
father's family remained and perished. After the war my parents could
return like other war refugees. The Palestinians, however, have not
been allowed to come back, until this very day.
Three, the careers of the murderers. The commanders of the Etzel and
Lehi gangs, Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir eventually became Israeli
prime ministers. None of them expressed any remorse, and Menahem Begin
lived the last days of his life with a panoramic view of Deir Yassin
from his house. No Nuremberg judges, no vengeance, no penitence, just
a path of roses all the way to a Nobel Peace prize. Menahem Begin was
proud of the operation, and in his letter to killers he congratulated
them for fulfilling their national duty. "You are creators of Israel's
history", he wrote. Yitzhak Shamir was also pleased that is helped to
achieve his dream: to expel the nochrim (non-Jews) from the Jewish
state.
The field commander of the operation, Judah Lapidot, also had quite a
career. His superior, Menahem Begin, appointed him to run the campaign
for the right of Russian Jews to immigrate to Israel. He called for
compassion and family reunion; he orchestrated the demonstrations in
New York and London, with that memorable slogan "Let My People Go". If
you supported the right of Russian Jews to immigrate to Israel, maybe
you came across this man. By then the blood stains of Deir Yassin had
presumably washed off. For the political indoctrination of Russian
immigrants, he even published a Russian-language "version" of "Oh
Jerusalem", a best seller by Lapierre and Collins, expurgating the
story of Deir Yassin.
But there is yet another reason why this event was historically
significant. Deir Yassin demonstrated the full scope of Zionist
tactics. After the mass murder became known, the Jewish leadership
blamed - the Arabs. David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of
Israel, announced that the Arab rogue gangs perpetrated it. When this
version collapsed, the Jewish leaders began the damage control
procedures. They sent an apology to Emir Abdallah. Ben Gurion publicly
distanced himself and his government from the bloody massacre, saying
it stained the name of every honest Jew and that it was the work of
dissident terrorists. His public relations techniques remain a source
of pride for the good-hearted pro-Zionist "liberals" abroad.
"What a horrible, dreadful story", a humanist Jew told me when I drove
him by the remaining houses of Deir Yassin, then he added "But Ben
Gurion condemned the terrorists, and they were duly punished".
"Yes", I responded, "they were duly punished and promoted to the
highest government posts".
Just three days after the murder, the gangs were incorporated into the
emerging Israeli army, the commanders received high positions, and a
general amnesty forgave their crimes. The same pattern, an initial
denial, followed by apologies, and a final act of clemency and
promotion, was applied after the first historically verifiable
atrocity committed by Prime Minister Sharon. It was at the
Palestinian village of Qibya, where Sharon's unit dynamited houses
with their inhabitants and massacred some 60 men, women and children.
After the murders became public, Prime Minister Ben Gurion, at first,
blamed rogue Arab gangs. When that did not wash, he blamed Arab Jews,
who, he said, being Arabs by their mentality, committed the
unauthorized wild raid of vengeance and killed the peasants. For
Sharon, it was the usual path of roses all the way to the post of
Prime Minister. It sometimes appears that to become the Prime Minister
of Israel, it helps to have a massacre to your name.
The same pattern was repeated after the massacre of Kafr Kasem, where
the Israeli troops lined up the local peasants and machine-gunned them
down. When the denial failed, and a Communist MPs disclosed the gory
details, the perpetrators were court-martialed and sentenced to long
prison terms. They were out before the end of the year, while the
commander of the murderers became the head of Israel Bonds. If you
ever purchased Israeli Bonds, maybe you met him. I am certain he
washed the blood off his hands by the time he shook yours.
Now, with the passing of 50 years, the Jewish establishment had
decided to, once again, take a stab at "Deir Yassin" revisionism. The
Zionist Organization of America pioneered the art of denying history
and published, at the expense of American taxpayer, a booklet called
"Deir Yassin: History of a Lie". The ZOA revisionists have utilized
all the methods of their adversaries, the "Holocaust deniers": they
discount the eye-witness accounts of the survivors, the Red Cross, the
British police, Jewish scouts and other Jewish observers, who were
present at the scene of massacre. They discount even Ben Gurion's
apology, since after all, the commanders of these gangs became in turn
prime ministers of the Jewish state. For ZOA, only the testimony of
the murderers has any validity. That is, if the murderers are Jews.
Still, there are just people, and probably because of them the
Almighty does not wipe us off the face of the earth. There is an
organization called Deir Yassin Remembered, which fights all attempts
to erase the memory. They publish books, organize meetings, and they
are working on a project to build a memorial at the scene of the
massacre, so the innocent victims will have this last comfort, their
name and the memory saved forever (Isa 56:5). It will have to do,
until the surviving sons of Deir Yassin and neighboring villages
return from their refugee camps to the land of their fathers.
