Commemorating the 53rd Anniversary of the Massacre at Deir Yassin

By Allan C. Brownfeld

On April 1, Christians, Jews and Muslims gathered together in London to commemorate the 53rd anniversary of the massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin.

While Deir Yassin was neither the only nor the worst massacre in the conflict, more than any other single event it signaled the flight of the Palestinian people, which led to eventual dispossession.

To the question, “Why Commemorate Deir Yassin?” the London organizing group, which consisted of Jews, Christians and Muslims from many parts of the world, argued that for Jews, in particular, such remembrance is of particular importance:

“Despite the fact that Jews are now part of the fabric of society not only in Israel but also in America and Europe, many feel endangered spiritually and morally. Some remain spiritually broken by the tragedy of their holocaust and morally uneasy about the injustice done by them, or in their name, to the Palestinian people. Jews today lament the decline in adherence to their faith and community…Perhaps by acknowledgment of their own responsibility toward the Palestinians, they might find a way to resolve their moral uncertainty and reverse this decline. So, for Jews too, joining with Palestinians in the commemoration of Deir Yassin could signal a way forward…Deir Yassin is the story of two peoples inextricably bound together—a victim and the victim of a victim. This is made poignant by the fact that Deir Yassin stands in clear sight of Vad Yashem. The widely known symbol of the one people’s tragedy facing the virtually unknown symbol of the other’s. Such a configuration speaks eloquently of all atrocity and victimhood…”

Although organizations such as Deir Yassin Remembered refuse to let the village’s tragedy be forgotten, the story of what occurred on April 9, 1948 is little known today, particularly in the U.S.

On that day, the Irgun and Lehi Jewish militias launched an attack on the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Situated in the hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Deir Yassin constituted no immediate threat to the Zionist forces. Its residents were considered passive, and its leaders had agreed with those of an adjacent Jewish neighborhood, Givat Shaul, that each side would prevent its own people from attacking the other. It was the Muslim Sabbath when the Irgun and Lehi attacked, with the reluctant acquiescence of the mainstream Jewish defense organization, the Haganah.

“For Jews too, commemoration of Deir Yassin could signal a way forward.”

All the inhabitants of the village were ordered out into a square, where they were lined up against the wall and shot. More than 100 civilians were killed. News of the massacre spread widely and helped prompt a panic flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

Most of the victims of the Deir Yassin massacre were women, children and older people. The men of the village were absent because they worked in Jerusalem. Irgun leader and future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin issued this euphoric message to his troops after the attack: “Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest…As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou hast chosen us for conquest.”

David Shipler, Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times from 1979 to 1984, provides this assessment:

“The Jewish fighters who planned the attack on Deir Yassin also had a larger purpose, apparently. A Jerusalem woman and her son, who gave some of the men coffee in the pre-dawn hours before their mission, recall the guerrillas talking excitedly of the prospect of terrifying Arabs far beyond the village of Deir Yassin so that they would run away. Perhaps this explains why the Jewish guerrillas did not bury the Arabs they had killed, but left their bodies to be seen, and why they paraded surviving prisoners, blindfolded and with hands bound, in the backs of trucks through the streets of Jerusalem, a scene remembered with a shudder by Jews who saw it.”

One of those involved in organizing the London commemoration of Deir Yassin is Marc Ellis, a professor of American-Jewish Studies at Baylor University. Professor Ellis asks: “What are Jews to do with this event that signaled then and represents now the catastrophe within Palestinian history? What are we to do with Deir Yassin, the shadow-side of the formation of Israel?”

Dr. Ellis expresses the view that, “For most Jews this event is forgotten or repressed, folded into the larger Jewish drama of suffering in the Holocaust and survival in the state of Israel. For some Jews, the tragedy of the Holocaust is so huge that to spend time on this smaller, perhaps unfortunate, event in the midst of war where terrorism was perpetrated by both sides is misplaced. Perhaps the burial of this tragedy in Jewish consciousness has a more significant reason. In Israel and Palestine today, there is a fear of raising the issue. The fear is that the Jewish history of dispossession, known and mourned by all Jews, and the dispossession of Palestinians, if analyzed and affirmed, is all too familiar. Could the recognition that the Palestinians have experienced a tragedy not unlike the tragedies in Jewish history—this time at our hands—call our commitment to Israel into question?”

A Tragic Symbol of War

In a letter to David Ben-Gurion protesting the plans to settle Deir Yassin after the war with Jewish citizens, Martin Buber, one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals and religious figures of his time, along with Ernst Simon, Werner Senator and Cecil Roth, wrote that the massacre at Deir Yassin had become “infamous throughout the…whole world. In Deir Yassin hundreds of innocent men, women and children were massacred. Let the village of Deir Yassin remain uninhabited for the time being, and let its desolation be a terrible and tragic symbol of war, and a warning to our people that no practical military needs may ever justify such acts of murder…”

Martin Buber concluded his reflection on Deir Yassin with these words: “The time will come when it will be possible to conceive of some act in Deir Yassin which will symbolize our people’s desire for justice and brotherhood with the Arab people.”

Professor Ellis declares: “On the anniversary of Deir Yassin, can we Jews recognize that the only act that can symbolize that desire is a full recognition of the equality of Palestinians as a people and a nation? Buber’s vision is a challenge. If not now, when? For Jews to remember Deir Yassin is a tribute to our martyrs and the martyrs of all peoples: that their lives will not be lost to history and that the reconciliation of histories, broken by atrocity and war, will one day be healed. It is time now for Buber’s vision to be sought and implemented, on this, the anniversary of the division of two peoples who may one day live together in peace and justice.”

Two distinguished British rabbis, Jeffrey Newman and John D. Rayner, explained their participation in the first ever British observance of Deir Yassin Day:

“Deir Yassin was evacuated, its cemetery bulldozed, and its site appropriated to provide a Jewish mental home and an Orthodox Jewish settlement,” the two rabbis noted. “No marker was ever erected to indicate that Deir Yassin had once existed, its name does not appear on Israeli maps, its memory has been effectively erased. The exhortation never to forget man’s inhumanity to man was apparently deemed inapplicable…It is clearly right and proper that the Palestinians should commemorate their national tragedy as we Jews commemorate ours. But why should we associate ourselves with theirs? For three reasons which we find compelling.

“First, by way of human solidarity,” they continued, “Edmond Fleg’s ‘I am a Jew because in every place where suffering weeps, the Jew weeps’ says it all. The yiddishe neshome [Jewish soul] demands it. Secondly, because we, the Jewish people, are implicated. To say that is not to prejudge the issue of the distribution of responsibility, which is complex and admits of a variety of views. But it cannot be denied that the Palestinian tragedy has been a by-product of the Zionist enterprise, carried out by and for the Jewish people. Nor can it any longer be maintained that it was a wholly unintended by-product, for Israeli historians have proved that the depletion of the Arab population in what was to become the Jewish State was, to some extent, deliberate Haganah policy. Besides, there have been many ugly actions, from the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 to the Hebron massacre of 1993 and since, for which we cannot altogether disclaim responsibility without denying the talmudic principle kol yisrael arevin zeh ba-zeh, that all Jews are responsible for one another…

“Thirdly,” they concluded, “for the sake of the future. Whatever our views may be about the shape of the political settlement ultimately to be desired, Jews and Palestinians are destined to live together and side by side in the same region. If they are to do so harmoniously, they need to face the truth about themselves as well as learn to understand and respect each other, and to feel each other’s pain.”

A Deir Yassin Memorial

The organizers of the London meeting have as one of their goals a memorial to mark the events at Deir Yassin. Daniel McGowan, professor of economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and founder of Deir Yassin Remembered, points out that, “In keeping with Simon Wiesenthal’s observation that ‘Hope lives when people remember,’ the suffering of the Jews has been rightly acknowledged and memorialized. But there are few memorials for Palestinians who died in 1948. Their history, in which the massacre at Deir Yassin is a very significant event, 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…In the spirit of reconciliation essential for the success of any peace process, the organizers of Deir Yassin Remembered believe it is appropriate for the suffering of the Palestinians to be acknowledged and memorialized.”

Many Jewish voices have been raised on behalf of human rights throughout the world. It is only proper that the plight of the Palestinians receive the same attention and concern as has been expressed for the people of Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan and other places where human rights have been violated and men and women have become the victims of ethnic and religious persecution.

Within Israel itself, voices have been raised on behalf of the Palestinian people, although these have not received a proper hearing within the organized American Jewish community.

One of these voices belongs to Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who for many years was head of the biological chemistry department at Hebrew University and professor of neurophysiology at the Hebrew University Medical School.

In an essay written in 1988 (reprinted in the volume, Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State, Harvard University Press, 1992), he discusses the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israeli occupation:

“That a subjugated people would fight for its freedom against the conquering ruler, with all the means at its disposal, without being squeamish about their legitimacy, was only to be expected. This has been true of the wars of liberation of all peoples. We call the acts of the Palestinians ‘terrorism’ and their fighters ‘terrorists.’ But we are able to maintain our rule over the rebellious people only by actions regarded the world over as criminal. We refer to this as ‘policy’ rather than ‘terror’ because it is conducted by a duly constituted government and its regular army. The ‘aberrant causes’ of necessity became the rule, since they are not incidental to a conquering regime but essential to it. We are creating—and have already created—a political atmosphere…in which a former chief justice of the [Israeli] Supreme Court legitimates the use of torture in the interrogation of Palestinian prisoners…”

Dr. Leibowitz argues that, “Only by putting an end to our rule over the other people can we be saved from the dire consequences of persisting in the present policy. If the present situation continues…the growing savagery of Israeli society will be as inevitable as the severance of the state from the Jews of the world…Already today, the state of Israel, to which most of the world’s nations were once sympathetic, has earned contempt and hatred throughout the world.…Above all, the state, which was to have been the pride and glory of the Jewish people, is rapidly becoming an embarrassment to it.”

At the London commemoration of Deir Yassin, a concluding prayer was given by Rabbi John D. Rayner, president of the Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues: “Tonight we have remembered the innocent victims of the massacre that occurred at Deir Yassin in 1948, the terror it caused, the flight it precipitated, the tragedy of dispossession and exile that resulted from it; and those of us who are Jews confess our people’s share of responsibility for that tragedy….We wish to look forward to a brighter future, and resolve to do what we can to bring it about. We know what that requires of us. So many teachers of religion and morality have said it, ‘Justice, justice shall you follow’ (Deuteronomy 16:20). ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18). ‘Depart from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.’ (Psalm 34:15). Let us dedicate ourselves to that task. May our meeting here…bring nearer the time of reconciliation, when Abraham’s children will live together in mutual understanding and respect…and the ancient vision will be fulfilled: ‘Behold how good it is, and how pleasant, when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity.’ (Psalm 133:1).”

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.