Deir Yassin, and the Emptied Cities

A note for parents and teachers. This chapter describes a massacre, including what was done to women, children and old people. It is written plainly and without exaggeration, but it is not gentle, because what happened was not gentle. If you are reading this with a younger child, read it first yourself.

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Deir Yassin was a stone-cutters’ village on a hill west of Jerusalem. About 600 people. They quarried limestone and sold it in the city, so they were a bit better off than most villages, and there was a school.

They had done something careful. Deir Yassin’s elders had made an agreement with the neighbouring Jewish settlement of Givat Shaul: we won’t attack you, you don’t attack us. The village had turned away outside Arab fighters who wanted to use it as a base, because the elders knew that would break the deal. The Haganah had the village listed as peaceful.

They had done everything right, by the rules of a war they were trying to stay out of.

9 April 1948

Around 120 fighters from the Irgun and Lehi attacked before dawn. The Haganah’s local command knew about the operation and let it proceed, and Palmach units later provided mortar support.

The plan was to take the village. The fighting at the edge was harder than expected and several attackers were hit. Then they went house to house.

What they did in those houses is documented, and it is documented largely by Jewish witnesses, which is why it cannot be argued away.

They threw grenades into houses and then went in and shot the people inside. Families were killed together in single rooms. Old men were killed. Women were killed. Children were killed, including babies. Some people were taken out, lined up against walls, and shot. Bodies were thrown into the village quarry and some were burned.

Meir Pa’il was a Haganah intelligence officer who was there and who reported what he saw to his commanders. He described fighters moving through the village killing people who were not fighting, and he said the men doing it had a look on their faces he could only describe as an appetite for it.

Jacques de Reynier was the head of the International Red Cross delegation, and he forced his way into the village on 11 April against the wishes of the men holding it. He went through the houses. He found bodies everywhere, and among the dead he found one child, a girl of about ten, still alive.

Before that, a group of surviving villagers, mostly women and children, were loaded into trucks and driven through West Jerusalem in a kind of parade, with crowds watching and jeering. Some of the men taken that day were then driven back and shot.

The number killed is between about 93 and 140. For decades the figure of 254 was used, and that figure came from the Irgun themselves, who inflated it deliberately, and it was then repeated by Arab radio to show the world how terrible the enemy was.

Read that again, because it is one of the cruellest things in this whole history. The killers exaggerated their own body count on purpose, because terror was the product they were selling. And Arab broadcasters helped them advertise it.

What the terror did

It worked exactly as intended.

Word of Deir Yassin went through Palestine within days, and it went village to village, mother to mother, and it grew as it travelled. And the question in every village became the same question: if we stay, will they do that to our children?

Benny Morris, who mapped the flight of the Palestinians more carefully than anyone, concluded that no single event did more to cause the exodus than Deir Yassin.

Villages emptied at the rumour of an approaching column. Nobody had to attack them. In the weeks that followed, Haganah units drove through the countryside with loudspeakers on trucks, broadcasting in Arabic, telling people to leave before what happened at Deir Yassin happened to them. Some broadcasts imitated Arab voices warning of typhus and cholera. This was a deliberate programme, and its name in Hebrew was the whispering campaign.

Fear is a weapon, and in 1948 it moved more people than bullets did.

Four days later, on 13 April, Arab fighters ambushed a convoy going to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus and killed around 78 people, most of them Jewish doctors and nurses, and burned them in their buses while British troops nearby did not intervene. It was revenge for Deir Yassin, and it was a massacre too, and it belongs in the record next to the other one.

Then the cities fell, one after another

Tiberias, 18 April. The British pulled out. The Haganah took the town. The entire Arab population, around 5,000 people, was put on British trucks and taken away. The old Arab quarter was demolished soon after.

Haifa, 21 to 23 April. Haifa was Palestine’s great mixed port city, about 70,000 Arabs and 75,000 Jews living in the same streets. The British commander suddenly pulled his troops back to the port area and told each side, essentially, that they were on their own. Haganah forces attacked from the high ground of Mount Carmel down into the Arab neighbourhoods below, and used mortars, and rolled barrels of explosive down the steep streets, and drove loudspeaker vans through the districts telling Arabs to get out while they still could.

Tens of thousands of people ran for the harbour. There are photographs of the docks that day, of families jammed against the water, of boats overloaded, of possessions abandoned on the stones. People drowned in the crush to get onto boats.

About 65,000 to 70,000 Palestinians left Haifa. Around 3,000 to 4,000 stayed.

This is the one the old story leans on hardest, because Jewish leaders in Haifa did publicly ask Arabs to stay, and Arab leaders did tell people to go. Both of those things are true. And they sit inside a week of mortar fire, explosive barrels rolling downhill, and loudspeakers announcing what was coming. A British officer who watched the exodus said afterwards that they could have stopped it and did not.

Jaffa, late April to 13 May.

There is a reel of British newsreel from the years just before this, shot in the groves outside Jaffa. Palestinian farmers picking oranges. Crate after crate, stacked and carried and loaded for the boats to England. The narrator is cheerful about it, the way those newsreels always were. He tells the British audience sitting in the dark that they are due for a share of these. Real Jaffas, he says, gathered in the groves of Palestine and on their way to Britain.

Due for a share. Of another country’s oranges, off another people’s trees, in a place Britain happened to be running at the time.

It is a calm, ordinary, slightly dull little film about fruit.

Watch it knowing what is a few years away from those men, and it is one of the hardest things in the whole archive.

Jaffa was the biggest Arab city in Palestine, around 70,000 to 80,000 people, and the UN partition plan had given it to the Arab state. But look at how it was given. Jaffa was left as an island, an Arab enclave with the Jewish state drawn the whole way around it. The same plan cut the Gaza area off from the farmland that fed it.

Sit with that for a second, because it was done on a map, in a committee, by people who believed they were being fair. A city surrounded on every side. A coastal strip cut off from its fields. Neither one could be defended, and neither one could really live.

And that was the pattern of the whole map. Partition did not draw two countries. It drew a set of fragments interlocking like fingers, each state in three pieces joined at narrow pinch points, with Jaffa stranded inside the other one.

A country shaped like that cannot hold a border, because it is almost all border. It cannot run an economy either.

The Arab state, as drawn, was not really a country. It was a handful of leftovers with a name written across them.

The Irgun then shelled Jaffa with mortars for days, firing into the packed old town rather than at anything military, and the shelling did exactly what it was designed to do.

By the time the city surrendered on 13 May, roughly 4,000 people were left out of eighty thousand. Some went by sea, some by road to the east. Many of the men who stayed were put into detention camps.

The city that had sent oranges around the world had almost nobody left in it.

Safed, 10 to 11 May. Palmach forces took the town using mortars, including the heavy Davidka mortar, whose main effect was an enormous noise. Around 12,000 Arab residents fled into Lebanon. Safed’s Arab population went to essentially zero.

Acre, 17 May. The old sea fortress that Napoleon could not take fell in a day. The population had already swollen with refugees from Haifa. During the siege a typhoid epidemic broke out in the town, traced to the aqueduct that supplied its water. Israeli documents released decades later confirm that Zionist forces ran an operation involving typhoid bacteria in this period. Acre’s Arab population dropped from tens of thousands to a few thousand.

West Jerusalem. The wealthy Arab districts, Katamon, Talbiya, Baqa, the German Colony, streets of stone villas with gardens and libraries, were taken through late April and early May. The families walked out with a suitcase. Their houses are still standing today, lived in, some of them very expensive. In many cases the descendants know the address.

Count it before May

Now stop and add it up, because this is the fact that changes how you see everything after.

By 14 May 1948, before Israel had declared itself, before any Arab state had sent a soldier across any border, roughly 300,000 to 350,000 Palestinians had already been driven from their homes. Around 200 villages were already empty. Every major mixed city except Nazareth had already fallen.

The story many people were taught goes: the Arabs attacked, the Jews defended, and the Palestinians ran away because their leaders told them to.

Half the Nakba was finished before the part of that sentence that mentions Arab armies had happened at all.

And on the question of orders to leave, the British and American intelligence services and the BBC were all monitoring Arab radio broadcasts throughout 1948. Researchers have gone through those monitoring records. They did not find the broadcasts telling Palestinians to evacuate. What they found were Arab stations pleading with people to stay put.

The empty house

There is a detail from Haifa and Jaffa that historians keep coming back to, because it explains the keys.

People locked their doors.

They took the key, and they locked the house, because they were going away for two weeks until the trouble passed, and you lock your house when you go away. They left the pots. They left the beds made. In some houses they left bread on the table.

Then the door was opened by someone else, and the family never came back through it.

Two weeks turned out to be seventy-eight years and counting.