Israel has long played on its heroic beginnings to stir up support for its  less than heroic exploits today.  The problem is that those heroic  beginnings have always been a fiction. Israel’s bloody birth and subsequent  actions were crimes against humanity which continue to this day. The veneer  of Israel’s manufactured “legitimacy” cannot hide the rot eating away at the  core of its existence – its original sin of violent dispossession and its  current colonialist and apartheid policies.  And, without acknowledgement  of, and reparations for, the atrocities committed against the Palestinians,  the ghosts of Deir Yassin and elsewhere in Palestine will continue to loom  large in any peace talks.

It was 9 April 1948, that a Jewish terrorist gang entered the quiet rural  village of Deir Yassin on the outskirts of Jerusalem with the express  purpose of destroying it.  There were 750 people living in the village at  the time, mostly stonecutters. Their houses had been built from limestone  with arched doors and windows and these homes had stood that way for  centuries.  The villagers knew that massacres had been carried out earlier  in the year in other villages and had, therefore, entered into a  non-aggression pact with the Jewish Hagana, another terrorist group.  But  this pact was worthless: Deir Yassin had already been marked for extinction  and to avoid being held accountable the Hagana called on two terrorist  groups, the Irgun and Stern Gang, to execute the plan.

 

Zionist leaders had in March of that year, devised a military strategy they  called Plan Dalet or Plan D, the express purpose of which was to clear all  of the Palestinians from the cities, towns and villages and allow for a  Jewish state to come into being. Their first operation known as Nachshon was  designed to empty the rural villages along the route between Jerusalem and  Tel Aviv by occupying, expelling and/or killing their inhabitants – and Deir  Yassin lay within their plan.   Although not the largest of the massacres  committed in that year, Deir Yassin became a turning point because the  publicity given to it was designed to spread an atmosphere of terror  throughout the land, hastening the ethnic cleansing that followed. Before  that plan, some 30 villages had already been destroyed, but once it was  finalised, Operation Nachshon served as a blueprint for future Zionist  campaigns which ended up destroying 531 villages and 11 urban  neighbourhoods.  And, in that year alone, the Zionist groups (which  collectively became known as the Israeli Defence Force) committed 33  documented massacres with some historians putting the figure as high as one  hundred. Those Palestinians not killed, either fled or were forcibly  expelled.

 

And who would not flee given the chance on seeing or hearing of the  atrocities being committed?  Women were raped, men tortured, children made  to watch and no age or gender was spared from being killed, their mutilated  bodies then stuffed down wells or left heaped in mounds of mangled flesh and  blood.  At least a hundred villagers of Deir Yassin suffered that fate,  although the original number was much higher – 254 deaths – the number  supposedly inflated by the Zionists themselves to terrorise Palestinians  everywhere. Regardless of how many died, killings of unarmed men, women and  children were commonplace, so it was no wonder that Palestinians fled once  they heard that bands of Zionist terrorists were in the vicinity of their  towns and villages.  Food was left still warm and uneaten on tables, clothes  left hanging in cupboards, and toys, photos and papers were all left behind  in the rush to escape. But the 750,000 Palestinian refugees, who barely  locked the doors to their homes behind them, all thought that they were  coming back.

 

Today, in the most tasteless, despicable irony, the Israeli museum  commemorating the Jewish holocaust, Yad Vashem sits on top of a hill  overlooking the graveyard of Deir Yassin, while the limestone buildings of  the former Palestinian village are used as an Israeli mental institution.   Is it any wonder that the ghosts of Deir Yassin still haunt the collective  memory of Palestinians and all those who know that Deir Yassin was the  catalyst in the plan to create a Jewish-only state of Israel?  In the  meantime, the millions of dispossessed in the camps of Gaza, the West Bank,  Jordan and Lebanon are waiting to return and/or receive compensation for  their immeasurable losses and nobody has the authority to trade away their  human rights in order to submit to a racist state born out of Palestinian  dispossession and misery. To agree to anything less without their consensus  would betray the 60-year Palestinian struggle for recognition and  self-determination in defiance of Apartheid Israel.   

 

 Reference:  Pappe, Ilan – “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, Oneworld Publications, England, 2006

 

 

Sonja Karkar is the founder and President of Women for Palestine in Melbourne,  Australia. See www.womenforpalestine.com

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