Deir Yasin massacre

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Deir Yasin
Letter to the editor to the New York Times , signed by Albert Einstein , Hannah Arendt, and others.

Deir Yasin (also Deir Jassin , Arabic دير ياسين Dair Yāsīn or in the Palestinian dialect Dēr Yāsīn ) was a Palestinian village, today part of the orthodox settlement Giv'at Sha'ul in the north-west of Jerusalem . The village with around 600 inhabitants was attacked and captured on April 9, 1948 during the civil war in Palestine by paramilitary groups of the underground organizations Irgun Tzwai Le'umi (IZL) and Lechi .

background

The event is in the context of the civil war that raged shortly before the founding of Israel and the end of the British mandate between the warring Jewish and Arab national movements and the British police forces in the British mandate of Palestine . On April 5, Jewish combat groups started Operation Nakhon , which was supposed to end the Arab blockade of Jerusalem in order to be able to transport food to the Jews trapped in the city. Deir Yasin was a strategic location due to its proximity to Jerusalem and its elevated position, but its capture was not a high priority during the operation.

The attack was not carried out by the Hagana , which was already functioning like a regular army at that time , but by around 100 to 130 militarily untrained and poorly equipped fighters from the underground organizations Irgun and Lechi , who had no experience with the planned capture of a village. The commanding Hagana officer in Jerusalem, David Shaltiel , had agreed to the operation on the condition that the village must be occupied afterwards in order not to turn it into a retreat for Arab combat units. It was hoped that the civilians would flee if warnings were given over the loudspeaker beforehand. Whether these even reached the people in Deir Yasin is controversial. Shaltiel wrote to the commanders of the Lechi on April 7th:

“I learned that you wanted to attack Deir Yassin. Don't forget that the conquest and occupation of Deir Yassin is only one stage in our overall plan. I don't mind if you do the operation, provided you are able to hold the village afterwards. If you cannot do that, I hereby warn you against destroying the village, because that would mean that the inhabitants flee and the ruins and abandoned houses fall into the hands of the enemy. "

course

Map section by Deir Yasin

In any case, many residents stayed in their homes and the escape corridor, which was left open, was only used by around 200 of the 600 villagers. However, at 9:30 a.m., five hours after the fighting began, the Lechi evacuated 40 old men, women and children in trucks and drove them to a base in Sheikh Bader .

Arab fighters and armed residents holed themselves up in houses and fired at the attackers from there. They then went from house to house and threw hand grenades through the windows, as they avoided close combat in the winding houses. This approach in particular led to the extremely high number of civilians killed. The conquest of Deir Yasin took several hours.

The killing of some of the deceased women is due to the fact that Arab men sometimes disguised themselves as women. Some Jewish soldiers shot both Arab soldiers and civilians. The Irgun commander reported:

"[The attackers encountered] men disguised as women [and therefore started] to shoot women who did not take the quickest route to the place designated for the collection of the prisoners."

The number of victims could not be precisely determined. Israeli and Palestinian historians now assume 100 to 120 dead Arabs, of whom around ten can safely be described as armed fighters. Four of the attackers died and over 30 were injured. Whether there were executions of prisoners after the fighting ended is a matter of dispute among historians. The number of victims was a political issue immediately after the attack and was probably deliberately inflated to spread fear and terror in the Palestinian population and to induce them to flee and give up their settlement areas. Later the numbers were also exaggerated by the Arab side in order to use the incident for themselves. The Arab side has also claimed that the action involved rape of Arab women by Jewish soldiers. However, many years later this turned out to be fictitious: Hazam Nusseibeh, who was employed by the Palestinian Radio at the time of the massacre, reported about it 50 years later in the BBC documentary "Israel and the Arabs: The 50 Year Conflict". Accordingly, the Palestinian leader Hussein Khalidi had instructed him to disseminate such information in order to persuade Arab armies to intervene in the Jewish-Arab conflict.

The massacre was officially condemned by all sides, including the Hagana and the Jewish Agency . As a result of the massacre and for other reasons, between 250,000 and 300,000 Arab Palestinians had fled or were expelled by the actual start of the Palestine War on May 14, 1948 - i.e. within 35 days .

consequences

The action was commanded by the future Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Menachem Begin . Begin also later defended the massacre: "The Deir Yassin massacre was not only justified - without Deir Yassin's 'victory' there would never have been a state of Israel." The act was later in the domestic political debate against Begin's Cherut party and Likud used. The Hagana's share remained unclear.

Four days later, on April 13, 1948, in a retaliatory attack, Arab militants massacred a medical convoy on Mount Scopus, killing 77 Jews and injuring 23, most of them doctors and nurses.

According to Ilan Pappe , the massacre was part of a planned ethnic cleansing with which leading Jewish politicians and commanders expelled the Arab population from the parts of the Mandate territory that they intended for the coming State of Israel. The book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine , in which Pappe put forward this controversial thesis, was sharply criticized by his fellow historian Benny Morris , among others . Smaller and larger distortions would be found on almost every side. Paper's book A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples , which also deals with the time before Israel was founded, was criticized by Ephraim Karsh with similarly sharp words. He accused him of "countless errors and inaccuracies"; including that Pappe placed Deir Yasin in Haifa, even though it is near Jerusalem.

Kfar Scha'ul Hospital with old buildings from Deir Yasin's time

From the summer of 1948, the village was repopulated as planned and connected to the Jerusalem infrastructure. The new residents of the settlement now called Giv'at Scha'ul were mainly immigrants from Poland, Romania and Slovakia, who were associated with the ultra-Orthodox party Poalei Agudat Jisra'el .

The scholars Martin Buber , Ernst Simon , Werner Senator and Cecil Roth objected to this rapid resettlement in a letter to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion . They asked him not to allow resettlement, at least for the time being, and wrote:

“The name of this village is notorious in the whole Jewish world, in the whole Arab world and in the whole world in general. Hundreds of men, women and children were killed in Deir Yassin. The event is a black mark on the honor of the Jewish nation. […] Resettlement of Deir Yassin within a year of the crime and as part of normal settlement activities would amount to supporting or at least tolancing the massacre. Leave the village of Deir Yassin temporarily uninhabited and let its abandonment serve as a terrible and tragic symbol of war and a reminder to our people that no practical or military necessity can ever justify such murder and that the nation does not want to benefit from it. "

Ben-Gurion left the letter unanswered. After the scholars sent him a copy, his secretariat said he was too busy reading it. The inauguration ceremony of Giv'at Scha'ul took place in the presence of the ministers Kaplan and Shapira , as well as the chief rabbi and the mayor of Jerusalem.

After the end of the Irgun, the massacre was also accused of its successor organization Tnu'at haCherut ("Freedom Party"). When Menachem Begin visited the United States in late 1948 to promote the goals of the party he founded, prominent American Jews - including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt - wrote a letter to the New York Times against him and the party he founded with express reference to the massacre. The relevant position is:

“A shocking example was their actions in the Arab village of Deir Yasin. This village, located on no main road and in the middle of Jewish lands, had not taken part in the war and had even driven out Arab gangs who wanted to use the village as a base. On April 9, terrorist gangs attacked this peaceful, non-military target village, killing most of the residents (240 men, women and children) and leaving a few alive to be driven as prisoners through the streets of Jerusalem. […] Far from ashamed of their actions, the terrorists were proud of the massacre, made it widely known and invited all foreign correspondents in the country to inspect the piles of corpses and the general destruction in Deir Yasin. Deir Yasin is an example of the nature and procedures of the Freedom Party. "

Einstein had previously refused to support Begin's party financially or in any other way. His letter of rejection probably coincidentally dated April 10, the day after the massacre. Einstein writes:

"Should a real and definitive catastrophe in Palestine overtake us, the British would be primarily responsible and the terrorist organizations formed from our own ranks second would be responsible for it."

A considerable part of the area of ​​the former village lies within the facilities of the Kfar Scha'ul Hospital, founded in 1951, a psychiatric clinic that is known nationwide for the treatment of the Jerusalem syndrome , which occurs again and again in foreign visitors to Jerusalem .

To this day, large parts of the material that the Army Archives hold about the massacre, including photos and witness reports, are under lock and key. Filmmaker Neta Shoshani went to the Supreme Court demanding publication and was dismissed in 2010 because it would damage Israel's international reputation. For her documentary "Born in Deir Yassin" (2017), she was therefore forced to do research herself and find contemporary witnesses.

literature

  • Daniel A. McGowan (ed.): Remembering Deir Yassin: the future of Israel and Palestine. Olive Branch Press, New York 1998, ISBN 1-56656-291-0 .
  • Sharif Kananah, Nihad Zaytuni: Deir Yassin القرى الفلسطينية المدمرة, Birzeit University Press, 1988.
  • Uri Milstein: Blood Libel at Deir Yassin: The Black Book. (Hebrew: עלילת דם בדיר יאסין - הספר השחור), National Midrasha Publishers and Survival Institute Publishers, 2007.
  • Benny Morris : The Historiography of Deir Yassin. In: Journal of Israeli History Vol. 24 No. 1 (2007), pp. 79-107.
  • Benny Morris: The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004, ISBN 0-521-81120-1 .
  • Ilan Pappe : The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine . Oneworld, Oxford 2006, ISBN 978-1-85168-467-0 . English: The ethnic cleansing of Palestine . Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-86150-791-8 .
  • Tom Segev : Once upon a time there was a Palestine . Jews and Arabs before the founding of the state of Israel. Pantheon, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-570-55009-5 .
  • Tom Segev: The first Israelis. The beginnings of the Jewish state (original title: 1949, the First Israelis , translated by Helmut Dierlamm and Hans Freundl), Siedler, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-570-55113-4 , pp. 125–129.

Documentaries

  • Born in Deir Yassin (2017), by the Israeli filmmaker Neta Shoshani

Web links

Commons : Deir Yasin  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. quoted from Jörg Rensmann: Founding of the state and the war of independence ; in Jörg Rensmann (ed.): The Nakba Myth - Facts on the Israeli founding history , published by the working groups of the German-Israeli Society, August 2013, p. 20.
  2. Jörg Rensmann: State foundation and war of independence ; in Jörg Rensmann (ed.): The Nakba Myth - Facts on the Israeli founding history , published by the working groups of the German-Israeli Society , August 2013, p. 20.
  3. quoted from Jörg Rensmann: Founding of the state and the war of independence ; in Jörg Rensmann (ed.): The Nakba Myth - Facts on the Israeli founding history , published by the working groups of the German-Israeli Society, August 2013, p. 20.
  4. Kan'ana & Zaytuni: Deir Yasin , 1988, pp. 5 and 57.
  5. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/German/Die_Fl%FCchtlinge.html#F
  6. a b Milstein 1999, p.388 (" the leaders of ETZEL, LEHI, Hagana and MAPAM leaders had a vested interest in spreading the highly inflated version of the true facts ") and pp.397-399.
  7. ^ Benny Morris, The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited , Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.294, 566
  8. Morris 2004, p.239: “ IZL leaders may have had an interest, then and later, in exaggerating the panic-generating effects of Deir Yassin, but they were certainly not far off the mark. In the Jerusalem Corridor area, the effect was certainly immediate and profound. "
  9. Jörg Rensmann: State foundation and war of independence ; in Jörg Rensmann (Ed.): The Nakba Myth - Facts on the Israeli founding history , published by the working groups of the German-Israeli Society, August 2013, p. 21.
  10. Sachar, p.333: "The most savage of these reprisal actions took place on April 9, 1948 ... the deed was immediately repudiated by the Haganah command, then by the Jewish Agency "
    Morris 2001, p.208: " the Jewish Agency and the Haganah leadership immediately condemned the massacre ".
  11. ^ Markus A. Weingardt: German Israel and Middle East Policy . Campus Verlag 2002, ISBN 3-593-37109-X , p. 33.
  12. ^ Benny Morris: Righteous Victims. A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 , p. 209.
  13. ^ The Liar as Hero , Benny Morris in The New Republic, March 17, 2011
  14. ^ A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, reviewed by Ephraim Karsh , Middle East Quarterly 2006
  15. Israel State Archives, Prime Minister's Office, Immigrant Admission in Agriculture, 7133 5559 / C. Quoted in: Segev: The first Israelis . 2008, p. 127 f.
  16. Segev: The first Israelis . 2008, p. 128.
  17. ^ "A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. [...] But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party. " New Palestine Party. Visit of Menachen Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed. Letter to the New York Times, December 4, 1948, online
  18. facsimile
  19. Testimonies From the Censored Deir Yassin Massacre , Ha-Aretz on July 16, 2017
  20. Born in Deir Yassin , Jerusalem Film Festival July 2017
  21. ^ Massacre of Deir Yasin in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Coordinates: 31 ° 47 ′ 11 "  N , 35 ° 10 ′ 41"  E