Remembering Deir Yassin Massacre Which precipitated Palestinians Exodus

NEWS
5 minute read



It was 9 April 1948 .Only weeks before the British Mandatory Authority ended in Palestine which was later turned into Israel.  Jewish terror gangs   Irgun, Hagana and Stern went on   killing spree to drive out Palestinians and grab their lands.
Located in the outskirts of Jerusalem, Deir Yassin was a peaceful Palestinian village where    Irgun, led by Menachem Begin who later became Prime Minister of Israel, massacred the entire population of 254 men, women, children and the aged between 9 and 11 April 1948.
Palestinians and peace loving people worldwide observed 70 years of Deir Yassin Massacre   this month described as one of the most barbarous crimes ever committed against humanity and could be coupled with the “My Lai massacre in Vietnam”.
By noon 9 April 1948 over 100 people, half of them women and children, were murdered. 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. The mutilated bodies of the victims were thrown into a well in the village.
Of the victims were 22 pregnant mothers, a woman teacher by the name of Hayat Balabse who wore a Red Cross badge and was tending the wounded when she was butchered, a blind man, Mohammed Khalil Mustafa, and his wife, Latifa Mustafa, who was trying to lead him to safety when the attackers slaughtered both. The women, girls and the children who survived the holocaust were rounded up at dawn and loaded into Lorries to Jerusalem where they were paraded through the Jewish streets, jeered and spat upon.
That evening Menachem Begin called a press conference to announce the massacre as a “victory” in the war of conquests of Palestine and Trans-Jordan. The irony is that Begin,   not even a Palestinian, fled his native Poland to the Soviet Union where he was sentenced in 1940 to a Siberian labour camp for his Zionist activities.Deir Yassin2
Overwhelmed with panic the Palestinian who began to flee in terror. Haganah carried out attacks on other fronts. All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a hot knife through butter. The Arabs, unarmed and unorganised, began to flee in panic shouting “Deir Yassin”.
This horrific act served the future State of Israel well. According to Begin:”Arabs, 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   bulldozed and 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 remains crucial turning point in 20th-century Palestinian and Israeli history. 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  Jews from the rest of the world.
Commenting on this massacre, renowned historian Arnold Toynbee had this to say in his book “A Study of History”: “The evil deeds committed by the Zionist Jews against the Palestinian Arabs that were comparable to crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis, were the massacre of men, women and children at Deir Yassin which precipitated a flight of the Arab population in large numbers from districts within range of the Jewish armed forces, and the subsequent expulsion of the Arab population from districts conquered by the 
Jewish forces between 15 May 1948 and end of the year...The blood at Deir Yassin was on the head of the Irgun; the expulsion of Palestinians after 15 May 1948 were on the head of all Israelis.”
This was not the end of the story. In the same cold blooded vein Irgun, Stern and Haganah gangs massacred people in a number of other villages. This included   Nassiruddin, on April 14 1948, where all except forty, who managed to escape, were butchered. On May 5 1948, Haganah committed massacre in  Mazraat El Khoury, overlooking Tiberias. The bodies of many slain women and children were mutilated and a number of old people were beheaded and their limbs cut off. Young people were roasted alive when the Haganah locked them inside a house and set it on fire before the few surviving old people were finally set free and sarcastically asked the Arab states to come to their rescue.
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A mosque was blown up on 6 May 1948, over the heads of villagers who were locked in   at Al Zeitoon, Safad. The entire population of Beit Drass in Gaza was wiped out on 13 May 1948 similar to  Deir Yassin massacre. There pregnant women were bayoneted in the womb, bodies of others atrociously mutilated and all the houses in the villages were finally dynamited.
 The Zionist Jews also   asked Palestinians, through loudspeakers installed in armoured cars, to leave, saying the road to Amman was opened. Another method used was the mass destruction of their homes and villages. 
Since then the Palestinians, driven out of their homes and lands, are still suffering in the refugee camps. Tired mothers and hungry and sick children still hope in vain the United Nations would settle their problems, and let them return to their homes again. They still have the keys to their houses and the deeds to their lands now occupied by migrant Jews. About a quarter million Palestinian Arabs took refuge in neighbouring countries. 
This is how Israel was established in Palestinian lands with the complete backing of United States, Britain, France and Soviet Union. Western media never speaks about these war crimes.
The world, especially the Middle East, ruled by scoundrels, remains indifferent to Palestinian sufferings which continue unabated while US and remain all out to defend and protect Israel while Arab dictators have abandoned Palestinians to serve their Western and Zionist masters for their own political survival. Ends.

by Latheef Farook
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