Massacre as imperialist tactic
50th anniversary of Deir Yassin
By Richard Becker
April 9 was the 50th anniversary of the
massacre of 254 Palestinian women, men and children-virtually
the entire population of Deir Yassin, just outside
Jerusalem.
The Irgun, a heavily armed paramilitary force made up of
Israeli Zionist settlers, gave the unarmed residents of the
quiet village 15 minutes to evacuate their homes. Then the
slaughter began.
Over protests of the Jewish Agency-forerunner to the
government of Israel, which was to be proclaimed five weeks
later on May 15, 1948-Jacques de Reynier of the International
Red Cross visited Deir Yassin a few days later.
De Reynier reported: "Here the 'cleaning up' had been done
with machine guns, then hand grenades. It had been finished off
with knives. Anyone could see that.
"I gave orders that the bodies in this house be loaded on
the truck and went on to the next house. Everywhere it was the
same horrible sight. I found only two more people alive."
Despite De Reynier's account and many others, most Israeli
and U.S. histories of the state of Israel ignore or deny Deir
Yassin and similar atrocities against Palestinian Arabs during
this period.
Now, for the first time, an Israeli television series is
admitting some of this truth-and arousing furious protest from
the right-wing Zionist leadership. They are afraid that the
truth will discredit the official version of Israel's 1948
creation and call into question the legitimacy of the Israeli
state.
U.S. wanted dependent
state in Middle East
The Nazi genocide in World War II killed 6 million Jews.
After the war, there was great worldwide sympathy for the
Jewish people.
The U.S. government had looked the other way while the Nazis
carried out the mass murder of Jews. During the war Washington
refused entry to Jews trying to flee the Nazi Holocaust. And
after the war, the United States turned away Jewish death-camp
survivors who wanted to emigrate to the United States.
According to a New York Times report at the time, 90 percent
of the surviving Jews in Europe who wished to emigrate wanted
to go to the United States. But Washington wanted a client
state in the oil-rich Middle East, a state dependent on U.S.
support that would carry out U.S. imperialist policies.
So Zionist leaders and their U.S. imperialist backers worked
to channel sympathy for the victims of the Nazi Holocaust into
support for creating an Israeli state in Palestine.
The founders of Israel and their backers promoted an
international public-relations campaign around the theme "A
land without people, for a people without a land."
This was a thoroughly racist slogan. Palestine was not empty
territory. More than a million Palestinian Arabs were living
there.
The very existence of the Palestinians, whose ancestors had
been on the land for many centuries, was a major problem for
the Zionists. This was true even after the United Nations voted
to partition the British colony of Palestine into two states on
Nov. 29, 1947. Then, as now, the UN was under the domination of
the United States.
Under the plan, the new Israeli state would receive 55
percent of Palestine's territory, although just 30 percent of
the population was Jewish and only 6 percent of the land was
Jewish-owned. With a two-thirds majority required, the vote was
33 for, 13 against and 10 abstentions. This margin was obtained
only through the most intense U.S. pressure.
War between Zionist settlers and the outraged Palestinians
broke out immediately. The Zionists had military
superiority.
Since 1946, vast amounts of money, arms-including tanks,
planes and artillery-and the material to build their own arms
industry had been flowing into the Zionist-controlled areas.
The British had prohibited the Palestinians from owning
weapons-under penalty of death-ever since a 1936 anti-colonial
uprising.
By February 1948, a hastily formed and poorly armed
Palestinian militia of 25,000 faced a well-supplied and highly
organized Zionist army of 50,000. The armies of the neighboring
Arab countries, all of which were feudal regimes under the
thumb of the Western imperialists, did not balance out the
relationship of forces.
Despite their military superiority, the settlers could not
achieve a decisive victory for Israel as an exclusively Jewish
state as long as the Palestinians remained a majority. Far from
being a "land without people," all the arable parts of the
country were inhabited by Palestinians.
In January 1948 the Haganah-the official Zionist army-and
the Irgun began to carry out "Plan Dalet." Under this "plan,"
they staged night-time attacks on "quiet" Palestinian villages,
those not involved in fighting.
Haganah and Irgun units would typically plant explosives
around houses, drench them with gasoline and open fire. The
point was to drive out the population.
Villagers left their homes, but went only as far as the next
village or city. They remained in Palestine.
Massacre as political policy
The April 9 massacre at Deir Yassin raised "Plan Dalet" to a
new level of brutality. It was meant to be a warning to all
Palestinians.
While the Jewish Agency "condemned" the Deir Yassin
massacre, on the same day it brought the Irgun into the
military Joint Command.
Twelve days after Deir Yassin, joint Irgun-Haganah forces
launched a lethal attack on the Palestinian areas of Haifa.
They rolled barrel bombs filled with gasoline and dynamite down
narrow alleys in the heavily populated city, while mortar
shells pounded the Arab neighborhoods from overhead.
Haganah army loudspeakers and sound cars broadcast "horror
recordings" of shrieks and screams of Arab women, mixed with
calls of: "Flee for your lives. The Jews are using poison gas
and nuclear weapons."
The Irgun commander reported that many Palestinians cried
"Deir Yassin, Deir Yassin," as they fled.
Within a week, similar tactics led 77,000 of 80,000
Palestinians to flee the port city of Jaffa. These tactics
included Israeli sound cars driving through Arab neighborhoods
announcing, "Flee or the fate of Deir Yassin will be
yours."
Jaffa was in what was supposed to be the Palestinian
partition zone.
These operations were repeated again and again. By May 15,
1948, when Israel's independence was proclaimed, 300,000
Palestinians were living and dying in abominable conditions of
exile in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and the Jordan Valley.
By the end of the same year, the number of dispossessed
Palestinians had grown to 750,000 people. Their farms,
livestock, work places and homes were stolen-and formed an
indispensable part of the foundation of the new Israeli economy
and state.
Israel conquered 80 percent of Palestine in 1948. In 1967,
it seized the remaining 20 percent-the West Bank and Gaza-along
with the Golan Heights of Syria.
The real story of Israel's creation is far different than
the one to be seen in the media in the coming weeks, as its
50th anniversary approaches. The Palestinians call it
"Al-Nakba"-the catastrophe.
And this catastrophe has not ended.
Today, millions of descendants of the dispossessed
Palestinians of 1948 still live in refugee camps and exile,
forbidden to return to their country by the Israeli
authorities.
The massacre of 254 innocent people at Deir Yassin played a
key role in the creation of Israel and the dispossession of the
Palestinian people.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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