Today the Palestnian people mark the 70th year of Dier Yassin .An Arab village cleared out in 1948 by Jewish forces in a heatbreaking massacre just weeks before Israel was formed.The village lay outside of the area assigned by the United Nations to the 'Jewish State'. It had a peaceful reputation, the Deir Yassin villagers had signed a non aggression pact with the leaders of the adjacent Jewish Quarter, Giv'at Shaul and had even refused military personnel from the Arab Liberation Army from using the village as a base.
But it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Deir Yassin was slated for ocupation under Plan Dalet and the mainstream Jewish defense force, the Haganah, authorized the irregular terrorist frces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang to perfrm the takeover.
Early in the morning Commanders of the Irgun (headed by Menachim Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. By the time the villagers realized the intensity of the terrorist attack, hundreds were already dead, the Zionist militia murdered over 250 Palestinian villagers, men, women, children and the elderly, in cold blood wounding many others. 53 orphaned children were literally dumped along the wall of the Old City, where they were found by Miss Hind Husseini and brought behind the American Colony Hotel to her home, which was to become the Dar El-Tifi El- Arabi orphanage.
The Deir Yassin massacre outraged many Jews at the time. The day after the massacre, Albert Einstein wrote a letter of protest to Ben Gurion. Six months later, Einstein and Hannah Arendt and many others were signatories to a letter to the New York Times, denouncing Menachem Begin, and warning Americans not to support him. “It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism through out the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents”, they said in the letter.
A year later the settlement Kafar Shaul was founded on this site. In the 1980's the remains of Dier Yassin were bulldozed to make room for new settlements. The streets of these new neighbourhoods were shamefully named after members of the Irgun family.Also today, a psychiatric hospital occupies the center of what was Deir Yassin village, restricting access to its fortified stone homes standing defiantly against the grid of generic Israeli settlement buildings constructed on stolen land.
For Palestinians and their supporters, the massacre is a symbol. It is remembered as the pivotal onset of the 1948 Nabka; Deir Yassin is the "other shoe that fell," sparking over 750,000 to flee from their homes out of a fear that they too would be massacred. What happened in Deir Yassin prepared the ground for the ethnic cleansing of 70% of the Palestinian people. The same ethnic cleansing that occurred then is still going on today. In 1948 they used direct massacres, but today they use airstrikes and shoot innocent young Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.This stain in history marks more thany anywhere else the Palestinian sense of dispossession.
Seventy years later the Deir Yassin massacre still remains an important reminder of Israel’s systematic measures of displacement, destruction, dispossession, and dehumanization.In keeping with Simon Wiesenthal's observation that "Hope lives when people remember," the suffering of the Jews has been rightly acknowledged and memorialised. But there are few memorials for Palestinians who died in 1948 and since. Their history, in which the massacre at Deir Yassin is a very significant event, but has been largely buried and forgotten. And yet, like the descendants of the victims in Armenia (1915-17), in the Soviet Union (1929-53), in Nazi Germany (1933-45), in China (1949-52, 1957-60, and 1966-76), and in Cambodia (1975-79), the descendants of Palestinians want the world to remember what they suffered, what they lost and why they died. The calculated efforts by Israel to completely erase the history, narrative and physical presence of the Palestinian people will not be simply ignored or forgotten. It also serves to ask ourselves the question what turns a victim into an abuser,a bully that keeps blaming its victims? And over the years we've been taught many things, that invasion was not invasion, occupation was not occupation, apartheid was not apartheid,ethnic cleansing was not ethnic cleansing,and that land theft was not land theft and Palestine was not Palestine.
And Seven decades later , Palestinians continue to be killed with apparent impunity, as ongoing events in the Gaza Strip demonstrate, and modern day Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank continue to face widespread illegal settlement expansion and home demolitions, but the Palestinian peoples collective voice can still be heard from the refugee camps of Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, to the towns of the West Bank and Gaza, to the ghettos inside the Israeli green line. This determination and resilience has earned them respect and support of an increasing number of people around the world. Despite the humiliation and pain of their occupation, you can't kill their indomitable spirit and struggle.
Phil Monsour , featuring Rafeef Ziadh - The Ghosts of Dier Yassin
