"Godhet utan vishet och utan
gränser är bara en annan
form av ondska."
(John Paterson)

"Det är synd att 99% av
journalisterna skall fördärva
förtroendet för en hel yrkeskår"
(Okänd)

"Ormar äro älskliga varelser,
om man råkar tillhöra samma
giftgrupp"
(Artur Lundkvist)

"När försiktigheten finns överallt,
finns modet ingenstans."
(den belgiske kardinalen Mercier)

"Den som gifter sig med
tidsandan blir snabbt änka."
(Goethe)

"Civiliserade är de kulturer
och individer som respekterar
andra."
(Hört på Axesskanalen)

"Det tragiska med vanligt
sunt förnuft är att det
inte är så vanligt."
(Albert Einstein)

"Halv kristendom tolereras
men föraktas.
Hel kristendom respekteras
men förföljs."
(Okänd)

Deir Yassin

Den 9 april 1948 angrep motståndsgrupperna Irgun Zva'i Leumi och Lehi (Stern-ligan) den fridfulla och fredsälskande arabiska byn Deir (Dir) Yassin, varvid ett stort antal av dess 750 invånare dödades. Antalet offer brukar uppges till 250 eller mer. Ofta påstås dessutom att de judiska soldaterna slaktade barn och våldtog gravida arabiska kvinnor. Denna version har i stort sett köpts fullt ut av Godhetskören och det intellektuella etablissemanget i Sverige och de flesta europeiska länder. Att den arabiska sidan ständigt hänvisar till Deir Yassin, och våldsamt överdriver det som skedde där, är så självklart att det knappast behöver påpekas.

Ovanstående, som ofta används som argument mot Israel och dess rätt att existera, har inte speciellt mycket med sanningen att göra. Det handlar till största delen om ren propaganda. Låt oss därför titta lite på vad några alternativa källor har att säga i ämnet. Jag beklagar att texten är på engelska (fast förmodligen förstår minst 90 procent av mina läsare engelska tillräckligt bra för att kunna tillgodogöra sig det mesta nedan).

Jag vill rikta ett stort tack till Leo Kramár, som sänt mig nedanstående text. Tack!

 

THE JERUSALEM REPORT, April 2 1998

Arab witnesses admit exaggerating Deir Yassin massacre

Fifty years after the Deir Yassin massacre of Arab villagers by the Irgun Zwa'i Leumi and the pre-state Lehi underground on April 9, 1948, Palestinian witnesses have admitted more explicitly than ever before that they deliberately exaggerated reports of the slaughter. Hysterical reactions to the reports prompted thousands of Arabs to flee the country.

In a BBC television series, "Israel and the Arabs: the 50-Year Conflict," Hazem Nusseibeh, an editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948, describes an encounter at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem's Old city with Deir Yassin survivors and Palestinian leaders including Hussein Khalidi, the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee (the representative body of the Arabs of British Palestine).

"I asked Dr. Khalidi how we should cover the story," recalled Nusseibeh, now living in Amman. "He said, 'We must make the most of this'. So we wrote a press release stating that at Deir Yassin children were murdered, pregnant women were raped. All sorts of atrocities."

A Deir Yassin survivor, identified as Abu Mahmud, said the villagers protested at the time. "We said, 'There was no rape.' [Khalid] said, 'We have to say this, so the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews.'"

Nusseibeh, a member of one of Jerusalem's leading Arab families, admitted that the propaganda boomeranged. "This was our biggest mistake," he said. "We did not realize how our people would react. As soon as they heard that women had been raped at Deir Yassin, Palestinians fled in terror."

Like Hazem Nusseibeh, Palestinian scholars have begun to put the massacre in a more sober perspective.

Standard accounts, fostered for different reasons by Jews and Arabs, put the Arab death toll at 240-250 (the victims were buried in haste by the mainstream Haganah Jewish force without keeping count). The true figure, it is now acknowledged, was half that.

Sherif Kanaaneh and Nihad Zitawi, two anthropologists at Bir Zeit University, interviewed dozens of Deir Yassin survivors and compiled a list of family members killed. Deir Yassin was a village of 750 people, all of whom knew each other. In their report, published by the university's Center of Documentation and Research, Kanaaneh and Zitawi concluded: When we checked the names that appeared in different sources, we were clearly convinced, that the number of dead did not exceed 120.

The TV series will be broadcast [as the article was written in 1998 the series was sent long ago — Krister's comment] this spring in Britain (BBC 2) and Israel (Channel 2).

Eric Silver

(Eric Silver, who died in 2008, was one of Israel's leading English-language journalists, who reported from Israel for some of the world's leading newspapers and periodicals, including The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent and Time.)

 

FrontPageMagazine.com | 4/11/2005

By Steven Plaut

(Two of the articles, which are linked to below, cannot be found. Maybe the addresses have just changed and the articles are still there on the site. However, I have not been able to find them. I have changed the links so they now point to the opening pages of these sites, which contain many other interesting articles about the Middle East conflict. Maybe one of my readers will be able to find the specific articles about Deir Yassin. If so, please inform me!)

This week is the anniversary of the events that took place in the Arab village of Deir Yassin in 1948. In recent years, Deir Yassin has been converted into a bludgeon by the Far Left, the Neonazi Right, and Israel-bashers in general.

Deir Yassin is the ultimate "Man Bites Dog" news story supposedly based on the inversion of players. It is recited endlessly by the very same people who have nothing to say against a century of countless massacres of Jewish civilians by Arabs. The church in St. John's Wood in London is just one of many examples of outfits "commemorating" the "victims" of Deir Yassin this week.

Deir Yassin was a not-at-all innocent Arab village sitting near the only road into Jerusalem in 1948. In the previous December, the UN had voted to partition what was left of Mandatory Palestine into two states, one a Jewish state and the other an Arab state to be named Palestine, of approximately equal sizes. The Jews of Israel accepted the plan, while the Arab states and the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected it. Had they accepted it, a Palestinian state would have arisen peacefully in 1948.

In response to the UN resolution, Arabs launched attacks against Jews everywhere in the country and in particular placed the city of Jerusalem under siege. The Jewish population of Jerusalem was quite literally starving. The only road into the city passed through the area of Deir Yassin, and the Arab militiamen in the town were stopping all convoys from passing through. Since Israel had yet to be formally proclaimed, the only Jews doing the fighting were members of three poorly-armed militias. The main one was the Hagana, commanded by David Ben Gurion and the socialist Zionist party. There were two smaller ones operating independently under the command of the dissident "revisionist Zionist" movement, the Etsel and the Lehi.

Poorly-trained irregulars of the two latter militias were ordered to attack Deir Yassin to relieve the siege. They did so in ferocious hand-to-hand fighting, in which some Deir Yassin villagers were killed. The Bash-Israel lobby has always maintained that the villagers were "massacred" in cold blood, despite a distinct lack of evidence.

Those who participated in the battle claim the villagers were killed when the Jewish militiamen fired into homes from which fire was directed at them. The village was successfully taken and the siege of Jerusalem was lifted. Large numbers of Jewish militiamen had been killed in the house-to-house battle for the village. Approximately 100 Arabs in the village died, a number that was later greatly inflated by anti-Jewish propagandists to 250.

Part of the problem was that the mainstream socialist Zionist parties themselves magnified the supposed misbehavior of the two opposition militias in order to discredit them in the coming political contest for control of the emerging Jewish state. This trend has been echoed in recent years, and Deir Yassin has become the "massacre of choice" for anti-Semites trying to prove the Jews are bloodthirsty barbarians. In part these have based their claims on a document by a Hagana officer, one Meir Peil, who was not actually present at the battle but surveyed the village AFTER the fighting was finished. Peil claimed he thought there had been looting and intentional killing of some villagers. The problem is that Peil is also a leftwing radical and not exactly a neutral source. Other less politicized sources tell a different tale. Even some Arab sources confirm that no massacre took place in Deir Yassin.

Meanwhile, a few years back the ZOA issued a new study Deir Yassin History of a Lie, a 32-page analysis (with 156 footnotes) by ZOA National President Morton A. Klein. (For a free copy, please call (212) 481-1500.)

Among other things, the ZOA study shows that the original claim of 254 dead was not based on any actual body count. The number was invented by Mordechai Ra'anan, leader of the Jewish soldiers who fought in Deir Yassin. He later admitted that the figure was a deliberate exaggeration in order to undermine the morale of the Arab forces, which had launched a war against the Jews in Mandatory Palestine to prevent the establishment of Israel. Other eyewitnesses to the battle estimated that about 100 Arabs had died. Despite Ra'anan's admission, the figure 254 was circulated by Palestinian Arab leader Hussein Khalidi. His claims about Deir Yassin were the basis for an article in the New York Times claiming a massacre took place--an article that has been widely reprinted and cited as "proof" of the massacre throughout the past 57 years.

Meanwhile, there have been numerous exposes of the lies that have been invented surrounding the battle for Deir Yassin and these have largely discredited the Peil "eyewitness" report.

A massacre did indeed take place, following the events in Deir Yassin, which had occurred on Friday morning April 9, 1948. On Monday morning, April 13, 1948, an Arab mob, chanting "Deir Yassin", massacred a bus convoy of Jewish doctors and nurses who were headed to Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Seventy-eight members of Hadassah's medical staff were murdered in cold blood. Only recently was it revealed that some of the Hadassah nurses had found refuge in the nearby compound of the British consul, only to be turned over to Arabs by the Brits, and the Arabs proceeded to slaughter them in "revenge" for what they thought had occurred at Deir Yassin.

Both sides used the symbol of "Remember Deir Yassin" in 1948 during the war. There were Jews who intimidated Arabs with the slogan and there were Arab commanders who rallied their populace with the same adage. Meanwhile, what has fanned the flames of Deir Yassin has been the United Nations decision to confine more than three million Palestinian Arabs to refugee camps, promising them the "right of return" to Arab villages that no longer exist.

In recent years a group of pro-Arab propagandists in the US have started holding annual "memorials" for the "victims" of the "massacre" in Deir Yassin. The late Edward Said (läs gärna denna artikel, som bl a diskuterar Edward Said — en av historiens mest överreklamerade personer enligt min mening) had been a member and the group includes such people as anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein, Saudi-financed ex-congressman Paul Findlay, and PLO propagandist Hanan Ashwari.

These are people who have never denounced Arab massacres of Jewish children, which were committed not by poorly trained irregulars in the heat of a crucial battle, but by Islamofascist terrorists awash in money and under the direct personal command of the PLO.

(Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his blog.)

 

Further reading (in Swedish):

Sune Persson, Palestinakonflikten (Studentlitteratur, 1994) sid. 53.

Sören Wibeck, Ett land två folk (Historiska Media, 2009) sid. 24.