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## Nachricht <6ri1hKOTg2B@forum.nadeshda.gun.de> vom 12.04.98 17:24 weitergeleitet
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## Ersteller: i.musa@NADESHDA.gun.de (Izzeddin Musa)


An important article from The Guardian on the 50th anniversary of the
massacre. Please let me know if you see any commemoration of this defining
event in the US media. I doubt we will see much.

Ghost village where sanity is locked out

Israel at 50: Julian Borger in Givat Shaul, formerly Deir Yassin

Thursday April 9, 1998

In the zero-sum struggle of Middle East politics, 50 years of Israeli
survival and achievement have been 50 years of Palestinian disaster. So
this month, as Israel celebrates, the Palestinians will be mourning the
nakba, or catastrophe.

Their grief has many focal points - more than 400 villages literally
erased from the map after the 1948 war - but none so emotive as Deir
Yassin. Fifty years ago today, the small hilltop village on the western
edge of Jerusalem was the scene of a massacre by Jewish paramilitaries
which shocked not only Arabs but also Jews who had thought their own
persecuted, brutalised race incapable of such atrocities.

For all the sound and fury associated with its name, the old village of
Deir Yassin is eerily quiet today. Most of the original Arab stone houses
are still standing, but shaded now by 50-year-old pines and surrounded by
wire fencing. The entrance is barred by a heavy metal gate, security
guards and a signpost reading: Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre.

Nowhere in modern Israel is there an old Arab village so perfectly
preserved, and so lifeless. This is where the psychologically unbalanced
are brought to recover, away from the tensions of modern Israel in the
tranquillity of a dead village. Pilgrims suffering from "Jerusalem
syndrome" (believing they are Jesus or another central biblical character)
come here for the slow descent to normality.

Outside is the burgeoning Jerusalem suburb of Givat Shaul. Inside the
security fence, a few inmates wander erratically among the old cottages
along paths which - 50 years and a day ago - bustled with anxious Arab
villagers.

On that day, a 20-year-old called Mahmoud Assad Yassini was standing guard
at the highest point of Deir Yassin, from where he could see the battle of
Kastel across the valley. On that day the Arab commander, Abdel Kadr
Husseini, would be killed and the hopes of home-grown resistance begin to
crumble.

Tension in Deir Yassin rose. Abu Mahmoud (as Mr Yassini is now known)
stood guard all night with about 80 other village men. Shortly before dawn
the attack came.

"I heard a bren-gun and then flares went up. It was like day," he
recalled. He is within a few yards of his family house but it is out of
reach on the wrong side of the wire fence.

"The fight went on all day. In the afternoon we ran out of ammunition and
the fighters were forced to flee."

That is when, by most accounts, the real killing began, carried out by
Jewish irregulars from the Irgun organisation and another hardline group,
Lehi, known to the British as the Stern Gang.

At the moment Abu Mahmoud fled, his cousin Zeinab Akkel was being rounded
up with the other women of the village. She had just seen her 14-year-old
brother shot.

"My husband had given me 250," she said. "I offered it to a Jewish soldier
and said, 'Please leave my brother alone, he is so young'. He took the
money, but then he just knocked my brother over and shot him in the head
with five bullets."

Mrs Akkel, now aged 70, said she saw Arab villagers being driven off in a
truck to one of Deir Yassin's quarries. She said the truck returned empty.

Members of Irgun and the Stern Gang have always denied killing villagers
in cold blood. Yehuda Lapidot, Irgun's deputy-commander that day, said:
"We were outside, open to fire. To stop the shooting from the buildings,
we had to fire into the buildings, but inside there were also women and
children. That's how so many Arabs got killed."

That account differs dramatically not only from the reports of Arab
survivors but also from the story told by Meir Pail, who took part in the
attack as an observer for the mainstream Jewish forces, the Haganah.

After the battle was won by Haganah's intervention, Mr Pail says, "the
people from Stern and Irgun went rushing from house to house shooting,
slaughtering, killing and looting, with quite a lot of disorder.

"Arab men were taken to an old quarry between Givat Shaul and Deir Yassin.
They lined them up with their backs to the wall of the quarry and shot
them all. I had a soldier with me who took pictures of it."

Those pictures and Mr Pail's report were delivered the next day to the
Haganah command, but they have never been published.

With the truth suppressed, Deir Yassin became a propaganda weapon almost
immediately. Abu Mahmoud, who lost 38 people from his extended family at
Deir Yassin, says he was approached the next day by Arab officials who
told him to claim that there had been rapes and butchery with knives.
"They said I should change my story, but I refused," he said.

Meanwhile, Irgun and the Stern Gang reportedly circulated exaggerated
rumours to spread terror in other Arab villages. Arab broadcasters,
embroidering the story in an attempt to stir sympathy for the plight of
Palestine, unwittingly encouraged the Arab exodus.

The original reports said 250 died in Deir Yassin; Mr Pail thinks the
figure nearer 200. Recent research suggests a toll of about 120. Abu
Mahmoud swears only 93 villagers died.

It was followed by an Arab reprisal ambush on a convoy of Jews in which 78
were killed.

Half a century of wars and civil strife later, the name Deir Yassin still
has a resonance which seems to echo from the heart of the endless
Arab-Israeli feud.

For Mr Pail, as for many liberal Israelis, it has remained a weevil
gnawing at the moral foundations of the Jewish state, even now on its 50th
birthday.

"Look at it like this," he said. "You have a barrel of honey, and a barrel
of shit. If you take a teaspoon of honey and put it in the shit, it won't
change it. But if you take a spoonful of shit and put it in the honey, the
whole barrel is spoilt... We have suffered for this until now."

Copyright Guardian Media Group plc 1998