Remembering Deir Yassin: The Future of Israel and Palestine

Reviewed by Raja M. Abu-Jabr

Edited by Daniel A. McGowan and Marc H. Ellis
Olive Branch Press, 1998, 150 pp. List: $15 hardcover; AET: $9.

Edited by Professor Daniel A. McGowan, of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and Marc H. Ellis, a Jewish thinker and educator, Remembering Deir Yassin, The Future of Israel and Palestine is part of a larger project to create a monument at the site of Deir Yassin, a former village of Palestinian stone-cutters, in remembrance of the residents massacred there on April 9, 1948. The book was published on the 50th anniversary of that massacre as part of a commemoration project, organized by McGowan, that he calls “Deir Yassin Remembered.” When it is completed, the Jews and non-Jews he has organized to carry it out hope to build the memorial on the West side of Jerusalem within sight of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to victims of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II.

Deir Yassin was a tiny Palestinian village, which had sought to stay neutral in the fighting around it, when it was stormed early in the morning by 130 Jewish militiamen of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, headed by Menachem Begin, and Lehi (the Stern Gang), one of whose three commanders was Yitzhak Shamir. The assault by the two “Jewish Underground” militias received artillery support from Haganah, the future Israeli army. The resulting massacre, in which more that 200 Palestinian men, women, and children were killed, is considered a turning point in Palestinian history.

When the story of how virtually the entire population of a Palestinian village was wiped out echoed across the towns and villages and olive groves of Palestine, thousands of families took flight at the approach of Jewish forces to escape a similar fate. In fact, Deir Yassin was only the first of several massacres that led to the dispossession in 1948 of some 750,000 Palestinians who were barred by Israeli forces from returning to their homes after the fighting ended.

Nowadays, “Islamic terrorism” has become a cliché in a world that, unconsciously or deliberately, refuses to acknowledge the many acts of “Jewish terrorism” and their victims. Among those who in this book challenge the worldwide conspiracy of silence concerning such terrorism is Jewish thinker and MIT Professor Noam Chomsky. He states that “the Deir Yassin massacre is a bitter symbol of a long history of terror and repression, to which—to our shame—we have contributed in many substantial ways, and still do. We should not only remember, but also rethink and understand, and more important, act to bring some measure of justice to people who have suffered gravely.”

Other Jewish leaders who have publicly denounced the massacre include Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, Werner Senator and Cecil Roth. A year after the massacre they wrote to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, charging that Deir Yassin had become “infamous throughout the Jewish world, the Arab world and the whole world. In Deir Yassin, hundreds of innocent men, women, and children were massacred. The Deir Yassin affair is a black stain on the honor of the Jewish nation.”

Remembering Deir Yassin is divided into two parts. The first includes eight essays by Palestinian, American and Israeli authors who vividly describe the indelible horror of the massacre. They agree that “the creation of Israel was dependent on the cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Palestine.”

The book provides a transcript of an interview with Israeli Col. Meir Pa’il, who actually witnessed the massacre: “I found myself watching this story and until this day I can’t overcome my remorse,” he recalls. “When I was walking from house to house I could see people dead in the corners—an old man, a wife and two children, here and there a male; it was terrible—I am still suffering; I don’t like it.”

In her essay “Assault and Massacre,” Sheila Cassidy describes the horror of the massacre and quotes survivor Jamil Ahmad who watched his cousin and brother being killed: “They took them as prisoners, raised their hands, and took them to the edge of the village near my house and sprayed them with gunfire. A blind man was also shot like that. A child, seven years old, was also killed that way. Other women were taken prisoner and put into trucks.” In 1967, after Ahmad took his son to visit his uncle’s grave at Deir Yassin, he said, “It was like my whole heart and all my life were all lost in that moment when I went and saw.”

In another essay, “The Surviving Children of Deir Yassin,” Pat McDonnell Twair describes some of the massacre’s aftermath, focusing on Hind al-Husseini’s experience in raising 55 orphans of Deir Yassin. Both Fuad Bassim Nijim’s and Rami Khouri’s essays conclude the first part of the book with a proposed design for the memorialization of Deir Yassin. To Nijim, building a memorial would make the Palestinians feel the agony of their past and bring Deir Yassin and its forgotten history back to life. Khouri believes that the memorial “would help to heal the still open and festering Palestinian wound that comes from hearing that Palestinians do not exist and seeing that their villages can be erased from the face of the earth by the hundreds and that they can be paraded in trucks and slaughtered in quarries.”

The second part of the book focuses on the future outcomes of building the memorial that should allow Jews and Palestinians to recognize the necessity for peaceful coexistence. Though this part of Remembering Deir Yassin presents a variety of perspectives by different authors, it incorporates them into the theme of using memory as a path to the future. In a long and sophisticated essay, “On the New Diaspora: A Jewish Meditation on the Future of Israel/Palestine,” Marc H. Ellis underlines several aspects of the history of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, recognizing the widening gap that has arisen between Jews and Palestinians since their mutual celebrations of the signing of the Oslo accords at the White House in September 1993 and September 1995. “What is it that went wrong?” Ellis asks. “How did those who struggled find themselves in the place of celebrating events which, when scrutinized closely and objectively, can be seen as disasters and defeats?”

Ellis examines the complexities and diversities of the conflict that mitigate against a just peace between Israel and Palestine. “It is almost as if the Palestinians were, at least for this century, on the other side of history, with external and internal forces either too weak or arrayed against them. In this case, the Palestinians take on a place in history not dissimilar to the place of the Jews in Europe during the 1930s.”

Ellis concludes his challenging essay with a spiritual discussion of God and diaspora: “Perhaps the diaspora, like God, is a witness to a future which could be and is already when those who choose exile and those who are in exile without choice face one another in pain and hope. In this sense, God and the future are now, before us, here.”

Muhammad Hallaj, former director of the Palestine Research and Educational Center in Washington, DC, argues that the uncertainty of the Palestinian future shown in Oslo made the entire political process controversial. To him, “the Palestinian future being fashioned by the Palestinian-Israeli agreements under the Oslo formula would fall far short of the desired outcome of self-determination and independent statehood.”

Rosemary Radford Ruether, discussing “Christianity and the Future of Israeli/ Palestinian Relations,” argues that “only by truthful critique of all ideologies that justify oppression can there be a hope for a just sharing of the land and hence true peace.”

Remembering Deir Yassin concludes with a “A Vision for the Palestinian Future” written by Souad Dajani, an American of Palestinian origin. Hers is an essay about “truth and power, and the power of truth.” To Dajani, as it should be to everyone else in this world, the truth is that “Palestinians do exist, that their expulsion from their homeland was real, and that their national claims are just and legitimate, and have not been achieved.”

Being a Palestinian made the experience of reading Remembering Deir Yassin painful rather than refreshing. Living all my life under the Israeli occupation, feeling the pain of my people’s history, and watching the injustice of this world did not help lessen the pain of reading Remembering Deir Yassin. The book, however, is not only about pain. It is also about power. The power of being able to remember and write a true and accurate history of the Palestinian catastrophe. The effort of editing the book is outstanding. But the effort it will take to complete the memorial will be phenomenal.

Raja M. Abu-Jabr is a Fulbright scholar from Gaza completing her master’s degree in political science at Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania.