Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (43 page)

The reason why the two terrorist organisations needed a soft and easy target had to do with their own limitations. Irgun and Stern Gang cadres, women as well as men, were not experienced in conventional military activities. They were bombers (place and run) and assassins (hit and run). They had little knowledge of how to engage for attack or defence in conventional terms. It followed that if they were confronted by serious opposition, they might not acquit themselves well. And that in turn was why they wanted to be in possession of overwhelming firepower for their first venture in conventional fighting.

Deir Yassin was known as the “stone-cutters” village, this because most of its male inhabitants of working age made their living by cutting Jerusalem’s beautiful stone. It was the main ingredient in the construction or the facing of many of the Holy City’s buildings of all kinds.

Deir Yassin had done nothing to provoke an attack and, actually, had lived peaceably in a sort of agreement with the Jewish suburbs surrounding it. Shaltiel would later confirm that the village had been “quiet since the beginning of the disturbances”, and had not once been mentioned in reports of attacks on Jews. More to the point is that this particular Arab village had collaborated in the past with the Jewish Agency. On at least one occasion its lightly armed watchmen, seven in all, had driven incoming Arab militants out at the cost of the life of the
mukhtar’s
(headman’s) son.

On the morning of the attack Deir Yassin, innocent and unsuspecting, was at its most vulnerable because many of the men of the village were absent, away at their work in Jerusalem. Most of their wives and children were sleeping soundly, watched over by the seven guards. Their ancient rifles were mainly used for shooting rabbits and providing a noisy backdrop to village feasts.

At 4.30 a.m. on Friday 9 April the seven guards, unconcerned, were awaiting the arrival of the dawn and, why not, another peaceful day. It might be that war was coming if the United Nations failed to stop the Zionist takeover of Palestine, but in the absence of war the peace of Deir Yassin, nearly perfect in the night, would not be disturbed. “
Insha’ Allah
”. God willing.

Under the cover of night the attack force, 130 representatives of the “new specimen of human beings”, was moving into position for the assault. The Irgun was approaching by way of the nearby Jewish suburb of Bet Hakerem to the south. The Stern Gang was coming from the north. To the east, along the only road leading to the village, a home-made armoured car equipped with a loudspeaker was creeping forward. To symbolise their collaboration the two terrorist organisations had chosen
Achdut
(Unity) as the codename and password for the operation.

On the slopes below his post one of the guards could just about make out the forms of men moving up the wadi. After a double-take, probably, to make sure his eyes were not deceiving him, he screamed, “Ahmed, Yehud ala inou!” (“The Jews are coming!”)

All seven of the Arab guards fired in the direction of the advancing Jews, as they would have done if the Jews had been rabbits; and then they raced from door to door giving the alert. Some of the villagers fled to the West with only robes thrown around them.

The Jews took cover just beyond the first row of houses waiting for the arrival of the loudspeaker. They had intended to warn the villagers to flee their homes. Why risk spilling one drop of Jewish blood if Deir Yassin could be emptied of its Arab inhabitants by other means. As it happened the warning could not be given. The armoured car with the loudspeaker had tumbled into a ditch and was out of action, blocking the road. News of that plus the shots from the village caused a heated debate. Deir Yassin was, perhaps, better defended than the Jews had anticipated.

Eventually a burst of machinegun fire tore into the village. That was the signal for the attackers to move forward.

After a first rush, the attack stalled. Quite a few of the old men of the village who were not guards, and who had not fled, possessed ancient weapons of their own. They put up a surprisingly tenacious defence of their homes and their loved ones. Without experience of conventional military tactics Zionism’s terrorists were out of their depth. It took them nearly two hours to breach the first row of houses and to reach the center of the village. There the two groups met and celebrated. But their joy, as Collins and Lapierre put it, was of short duration.

Their ammunition supply was almost gone and the Irgun’s homemade Sten guns were jamming one after another. Although in reality their casualties were light—the attack would cost the two groups only four killed—in the heat of the battle that seemed high to untrained terrorists. [It would have been more accurate to describe them as trained terrorists untrained for conventional military action.] Two key leaders were wounded. There was even talk of withdrawing. No one seemed to have imagined it might be considerably more difficult to conquer a resisting village than it was to toss a bomb into an unarmed crowd waiting for a bus. Giora, the leader of the Irgun Command, rallied his men for another push forward. Then he, too, was wounded. A kind of collective hysteria overtook the attackers. As the opposition to their assault finally waned, they fell with increasing fury on the inhabitants of Deir Yassin.
¹⁸

With the resistance over, the remaining villagers were ordered into the square. Those who came out of their homes were lined up against the wall and shot. They were the lucky ones. Those who remained in their houses were butchered. Many of the Arab women were raped before they were killed.

O Jerusalem!
contains a detailed account of what happened as Deir Yassin was submerged, bit-by-bit, “in a hell of screams, exploding grenades, the stench of blood, gunpowder and smoke.” The eye-witness testimony of one survivor, the daughter of one of the principal families of Deir Yassin, included this: “I saw a man shoot a bullet into the neck of my sister Salhiyeh, who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher’s knife.”
¹⁹
According to a corroborating account, another woman was killed when she tried to extricate the unborn infant from the dead mother’s womb. A 16-year-old survivor, Naaneh Khalil, told how she saw a man “take a kind of sword and slash my neighbour Jamil Hish from head to toe and then do the same thing on the steps of my own house to my cousin Fathi.”
²⁰

The first investigator to arrive was Jacques de Reynier, the Swiss representative of the International Red Cross. He and his German escort found 150 bodies thrown into a cistern. In all they counted 254 dead, including 145 women of whom 35 were pregnant. In his diary that night Reynier noted that when he arrived the terrorists had not completed their work. One of the Irgun attackers told his German escort that they were still “cleaning up”.
²¹
Reynier wrote: “The first thing I saw were people running everywhere, rushing in and out of houses, carrying Sten guns, rifles, pistols and long ornate knives... They seemed half mad.” He also noted his horror at witnessing, “a young woman stab an elderly man and woman cowering on the doorstep of their hut.” He also recorded what he had seen when he pushed his way into the first house he reached. “Everything had been ripped apart and torn upside down. There were bodies strewn about...They had done their cleaning up with guns and grenades and finished their work with knives, anyone could see that.” The only thing Reynier could think of at the time, he said, “was the S.S. troops I’d seen in Athens.”

On the spot Reynier had seen something moving in the shadows. He bent down and discovered “a little foot, still warm”. It belonged to a 10 year-old girl still alive despite her wounds. Reynier picked her up and ordered his German escort to take her to their waiting ambulance. Then, furious, he demanded that he be allowed to continue his search for others who might still be alive. But his presence was too much of an embarrassment for the terrorists. They ordered him back to Jerusalem with the wounded he had managed to pull out of the ruins; and who would have been finished off if he had not been there.

The British High Commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, was having a routine daily meeting with his Security Committee when the first report of what had happened at Deir Yassin came through. He knew the Haganah well enough to believe it was incapable of such action. He was certain it had to be the work of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. His own fury was apparent in what he said to General Sir Gordon Macmillan, the commander of British land forces in Palestine. “
At last you’ve got those bastards. For God’s sake, go up there and get them!”
²²
But General Macmillan refused to make a move. He insisted that he did not have enough troops available. That was not the whole truth. By this time Macmillan was committed to a policy of deploying his troops only in pursuit of strictly British interests—protecting British installations and British manpower. Protecting the Arab interest was no longer on the British Army’s agenda.

Cunningham believed that the situation was grave enough to require him to take exceptional action. Angrily he turned to his R.A.F. chief and asked him to perform with an air strike. In principle the R.A.F. chief was willing, he said, to give the High Commissioner what he wanted; but there was a problem. The day before—Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine was well underway despite the turmoil at the UN and in Truman’s administration —the R.A.F. had sent all of its light bombers to Egypt and its rockets to Habbaniya in Iraq (Britain’s most subservient client state). It would take 24 hours to get them back.

The evidence suggests that Cunningham would have insisted on an air strike, and quite possibly risked a showdown with London, if a new twist in the fast developing atrocity story had not made the use of air power unthinkable. The Haganah had moved into Deir Yassin to take over the village. And the stage was being set for a possible confrontation between it and Zionism’s terrorists.

The first Haganah unit to reach Deir Yassin was led by Eliyaha Arieli. He was the scholarly commander of the Gadna, the Haganah’s youth organisation. On account of his six years of service with the British Army, he was also something of a war veteran. He had participated in Britain’s retreat from Greece. But nothing in his military experience had prepared him for what he would see when he entered Dier Yassin. It was, he would later say, “Absolutely barbaric... All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women and children... The dead we found were all unjust victims and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands.”
²³
Arieli was, in fact, so appalled by the scene that he refused to allow his youngsters into the village to witness it.

The next and larger Haganah unit to arrive was led by Schiff, Shaltiel’s adjutant and the man who had done the deal with the Irgun and the Stern Gang. He later noted that instead of using the weapons he had given them to assist the Haganah, the terrorists “had preferred to kill anybody they found alive as though every living thing in the village was the enemy and they could think only of ‘Kill them all.’”
²⁴

Before reporting to Shaltiel by wireless, Schiff ordered his men to surround the killers. Their organisations had deceived him and he was not intending to take any more chances. The atmosphere as the two Zionist forces eyeballed each other in the village square was one of menace. When he was certain he had the situation under control, Schiff faced the commander of the Stern Gang’s contingent and said, “You are swine.”

Then he reported to Shaltiel who had already told the Irgun that the Haganah was not going to take the responsibility for “your murders.” Shaltiel had said so directly by wireless to the Irgun’s commander at Deir Yassin when he asked for a Haganah unit to be sent to take control of the village.

Shaltiel told Schiff to disarm the terrorists. He added: “If they don’t lay down their arms, open fire!”

Schiff knew the butchers of Deir Yassin would not give up their weapons without a fight.

In the long silence that followed Schiff had a debate with himself. He was a soul in torment and it is not difficult to imagine that he had never known such agony. He loathed the men and women of the Irgun and the Stern Gang for what they had done, but could he fire on them? Jewish history, Schiff reminded himself, was full of stories of fratricidal strife in the face of an enemy. If Jew started to kill Jew now they would be lost forever. He was not going to be in the instigator of a Jewish civil war.

Eventually Schiff said to Shaltiel, “I can’t do it.”

Over the wireless Shaltiel snapped: “Don’t tell me what you can or can’t do, those are your orders!”

“David”, Schiff begged, “you’ll bloody your name for life. The Jewish people will never forgive you.”

Eventually Shaltiel relented and the terrorists were ordered to clean up the village.

As Schiff watched, the killers carried the bodies of their victims to Deir Yassin’s rock quarry and laid them on the stones. When they had finished they poured gasoline over the corpses, most of them mutilated, and set them ablaze.

Compared to the horror of what the Nazis had done to Europe’s Jews, six million of them, what happened at Deir Yassin was nothing; but in its own tiny way it was another holocaust. And it, too, was to change the course of history.

Unlike the extermination of the Jews of Europe, the slaughter of Arabs by Jews at Deir Yassin was not pre-meditated. It just happened. But it was born of a Zionist intention to dispossess the Arabs of Palestine of their homes, their land and their rights.

From that perspective operation
Achdut
was a far greater success than even Begin in his wildest dreams could have imagined. As Arthur Koestler was to write: the “bloodbath” at Deir Yassin was “the psychologically decisive factor in the spectacular exodus of the Arabs from the Holy Land and the creation of Palestinian refugee problem
”.
²⁵
Jacques de Reynier agreed. He wrote that after the massacre, and because of the publicity it received, “the exodus (of Palestinians) began and became nearly general.”
²⁶