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 lived there. The men cut white limestone out of the hillside and sold it in the city, so the village was a little better off than most. It had a school. It had a mosque.

And its old men had done something careful.

They had gone to the Jewish village next door and made an agreement with them. We will not attack you. You will not attack us. When Arab fighters turned up wanting to use Deir Yassin as a base, the old men sent them away, because letting them stay would have broken the promise. The Haganah’s own lists had Deir Yassin written down as a peaceful village.

They had done everything right, in a war they were doing their best to stay out of.

9 April 1948

Before dawn, about 120 fighters from the Irgun and Lehi attacked the village.

Why this village? One that had a peace agreement, that had sent fighters away, that the Haganah’s own lists called peaceful?

There were two reasons, and neither one had anything to do with Deir Yassin.

The first was the hill. The village stood on high ground, looking down on the road up to Jerusalem, and every side in this war wanted that road.

The second was pride. The Irgun and Lehi wanted an attack of their own, something big, to prove they mattered as much as the Haganah did.

And this was not two small groups acting on their own. The Haganah commander for that area knew they were going, and let them go. Later in the day, Palmach fighters joined in with mortars, short metal tubes that lob a bomb high over the rooftops so that it comes down on whatever is behind them.

The plan was simply to capture the village. But the fighting at the edge of it was harder than the attackers had expected, and several of them were shot.

Then they went from house to house.

What happened inside those houses was written down at the time, mostly by Jewish witnesses. That is exactly why nobody has ever been able to argue it away.

They threw grenades into houses and then walked in and shot whoever was still alive. Families died together in one room. Old men were killed. Women were killed. Children were killed, and so were babies. Some people were marched outside, lined up against a wall, and shot. Bodies were thrown down into the stone pit where the village had cut its limestone, and some were burned.

Meir Pa’il was a Haganah officer who was in the village that day, and afterwards he reported what he had seen to his commanders. He described men walking through Deir Yassin shooting people who were not fighting anybody. On their faces, he said, was a look he could only call enjoyment.

That same day, some of the villagers who had survived, mostly women and children, were loaded onto lorries and driven slowly through the Jewish half of Jerusalem, while crowds stood on the pavements and watched them go by and shouted at them. Some of the men taken away that day were driven back to the village afterwards and shot.

Now, some Israelis have argued ever since that Pa’il was never really in the village at all. So leave him out of it for a moment, because two days later another man arrived, and nobody has ever argued about him.

Jacques de Reynier was in charge of the Red Cross in Palestine. The Red Cross is an organisation that goes into wars to help the wounded, and it takes nobody’s side.

On 11 April he forced his way into the village, past the armed men holding it, and walked through the houses himself.

He found bodies everywhere he looked. And among all those dead people, he found one child still alive. A girl of about ten.

Between about 93 and 140 people were killed at Deir Yassin.

For years, the number people used was 254. It was wrong, and here is where it came from.

The Irgun made it up. They made their own killing sound worse than it really was, on purpose, because frightening Palestinians was the whole point of doing it.

And Arab radio stations then repeated that bigger number all over the Arab world, to show everybody how cruel the enemy was.

Stop on that, because it is one of the cruellest things in this entire history. The killers advertised their own massacre. And the other side helped them advertise it.

What the terror did

The terror worked exactly the way it was meant to.

News of Deir Yassin crossed Palestine in days. It travelled village to village, mother to mother, and it grew bigger every time it was told.

And in every village, the question became the same one.

If we stay here, will they do that to our children?

Of everything that happened in 1948, nothing sent more people running than Deir Yassin.

Villages emptied on nothing more than a rumour that soldiers were coming. Nobody had to attack them at all.

And in the weeks that followed, the Haganah made sure the rumours kept coming.

Lorries with loudspeakers on the roof drove through the countryside, speaking in Arabic, telling villagers to get out before what happened at Deir Yassin happened to them. Some of those voices pretended to be Arabs, warning their own people that deadly diseases were spreading.

None of this was an accident. It had a name in Hebrew. They called it the whispering campaign.

Fear is a weapon. In 1948 it moved more people out of their homes than bullets did.

Four days later, on 13 April, Arab fighters attacked a line of buses and lorries going up to a hospital in Jerusalem. Around 78 people were killed, most of them Jewish doctors and nurses, and their bodies were burned inside the buses. British soldiers were close enough to help, and did not.

It was revenge for Deir Yassin. It was also a massacre, and it belongs in this book right beside the other one.

The shape of the map

Before you read how the cities fell, look for a moment at the map the UN had drawn. It explains why so many of them could not be held.

Jaffa had been given to the Arab state. But look at how it was given.

Jaffa was left like an island. An Arab city with the Jewish state drawn all the way around it, on every single side.

The same map cut the Gaza area off from the farmland that grew its food.

Think about that for a moment, because it was done at a table, on paper, by men who believed they were being fair. A city with somebody else’s country wrapped right around it. A strip of coast cut off from the fields that fed it.

Neither one could be defended. Neither one could really live.

And that was the shape of the whole map. It did not draw two countries. It drew two sets of broken pieces, pushed in and out of each other like the fingers of two hands laced together. Each state came in three separate lumps, touching only at one narrow point.

Now think about what that does to a country.

A border is the edge of your country, the line you have to guard. If your country is nothing but edges, you can never guard all of it. And if your farms are on one piece of it and your port is on another, you cannot even sell what you grow.

So the Arab state on that map was not really a country at all. It was a few leftover pieces with a name written across them.

Then the cities fell, one after another

Tiberias, 18 April. The British marched out of the town. The Haganah took it. Every single Arab in Tiberias, around 5,000 people, was loaded onto British lorries and driven away. The old Arab part of the town was knocked down soon afterwards.

Haifa, 21 to 23 April. Haifa was Palestine’s great mixed port city, about 70,000 Arabs and 75,000 Jews living along the same streets.

Then the British commander suddenly pulled all his soldiers back to the docks and left the two sides to fight it out.

The Haganah attacked from the high ground of Mount Carmel, straight down into the Arab neighbourhoods below. They fired mortars into them. They rolled barrels packed with explosives down the steep streets into the houses. And they drove vans with loudspeakers through the district, telling Arabs to get out while they still could.

Tens of thousands of people ran for the harbour. Photographs were taken at the docks that day, and you can still see them. Families crushed up against the water. Boats loaded until they sat low. Suitcases and bundles left lying on the stones because there was no room for them. People drowned in the crush trying to get onto the boats.

Between 65,000 and 70,000 Palestinians left Haifa. Around 3,000 or 4,000 managed to stay.

Haifa is the city people point to when they want to say the Palestinians left because their own leaders told them to. You should know why, because part of it is true. Jewish leaders in Haifa did stand up in public and ask the Arabs to stay. Arab leaders did tell people to go.

Both of those things really happened. Now put them back where they belong.

They happened in a week when mortar bombs were falling on your street, when barrels of explosive were rolling down the hill into your house, and when a loudspeaker outside was telling you what was coming next.

A British officer who stood and watched all those families run for the boats said afterwards that his army could have stopped it, and chose not to.

Jaffa, late April to 13 May. Jaffa was the biggest Arab city in Palestine, with 70,000 to 80,000 people in it, and the world knew its name because of its oranges.

A few years before all this, a British film crew came out to the orange groves outside the city and filmed the Palestinian farmers picking. Crate after crate, stacked and carried and loaded onto boats for England. The man speaking over the pictures is cheerful about it. He tells the British families watching that they are due for a share of these. Real Jaffas, he says. Grown in the groves of Palestine, and on their way to you.

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

It is a calm, ordinary, rather boring little film about fruit. And it is one of the hardest things in this whole story to watch, because you know what is coming for the men holding those crates.

The Irgun shelled Jaffa with mortars for days on end, dropping the bombs into the crowded old town rather than onto anything the soldiers were using.

The shelling did what it was built to do. People ran.

By the time the city gave up on 13 May, about 4,000 people were left out of eighty thousand. Some got away by sea. Some went east along the roads. Many of the men who stayed behind were locked up in camps.

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

Safed, 10 to 11 May. Palmach fighters took the town with mortars, including one enormous home-made mortar whose real weapon was the noise it made. Around 12,000 Arabs fled north into Lebanon. Afterwards there were almost no Arabs left in Safed at all.

Acre, 17 May. Remember Acre from the first chapter, the walled sea fortress that had beaten off armies for hundreds of years. Napoleon himself once sat outside those walls for two months and could not get in.

Acre fell in a single day.

The town was already packed with families who had run there from Haifa. And while it was surrounded, people in Acre began falling sick with typhoid, a disease you catch from dirty water, which spreads fast and kills. It was traced to the channel that carried the town’s drinking water in.

For a long time that was only a suspicion. Then, many years later, Israel released some of its own papers from 1948, and historians going through them found that Zionist forces had indeed been working with typhoid germs at exactly that time. Acre’s Arab population fell from tens of thousands to a few thousand.

West Jerusalem. Through late April and early May, the richer Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem were taken one by one. These were streets of beautiful stone houses with gardens and libraries inside them.

The families walked out carrying a suitcase.

Those houses are all still standing. Other people live in them now, and some of them are worth a great deal of money. And in many cases the grandchildren of the families who left still know the exact address of the house that was theirs.

Count it before May

Now add it all up, because this one fact changes everything that comes after.

By 14 May 1948, Israel had still not declared itself a country. No Arab state had sent a single soldier across a single border.

And already, by that date, roughly 300,000 to 350,000 Palestinians had been driven out of their homes. Around 200 villages stood empty. Every big Arab or mixed city in Palestine had fallen, except Nazareth.

Now here is the story most people in the world were taught.

The Arabs attacked. The Jews defended themselves. And the Palestinians ran away because their own leaders told them to.

Look at the dates again. Half of the Nakba had already happened before those Arab armies arrived at all.

And what about the part where their own leaders told them to go?

All through 1948, the British government, the Americans, and the BBC, which was Britain’s own radio service, sat listening to Arab radio stations and writing down everything they heard.

Those written records still exist. Researchers have gone through them line by line, hunting for the broadcasts that told Palestinians to leave their homes.

They are not there.

What the researchers found instead were Arab radio stations begging people to stay where they were.

The empty house

In the very first chapter of this book you read about the keys. The front door keys that families carried away with them, and that their grandchildren still keep in drawers today.

Here is where those keys come from.

In Haifa and in Jaffa, on the worst days of their lives, people locked their doors.

They turned the key, and they pulled the door shut, and they put the key in a pocket. Because they were going away for two weeks until the trouble passed, and you lock your house when you go away for two weeks. They left the pots in the kitchen. They left the beds made. In some houses they left the bread sitting on the table.

Then somebody else opened that door.

And the family never walked back through it.

The two weeks are not over yet.