As the end of the mandate approached, the British army started withdrawing from Palestine, allowing the Jews to execute Plan Dalet - the culmination of a carefully designed purge of Arabs that had been in development for decades. Beginning in December 1947 the Jewish army started to attack Arab settlements, surrounding them on three flanks and leaving the fourth open for evacuation; massacres ensued whenever this tactic didnt work, and evidence suggests that some of the slaughters were intentional. Israel concealed these crimes for decades, but evidence slowly started leaking out of the state archives, fleshing out the testimonials of countless Palestinians. However, Israeli scholars who exposed the truth about the ethnic cleansing were largely ignored by Western media. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe described the massacre that took place in the village of Deir Yassin: As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed. One of the survivors - twelve years old at the time - recalled the slaughter of his family: They took us out one after another; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him - carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her - they shot her too. The results of the campaign were devastating for the Palestinians: 500 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods were burned to the ground; thousands of Arabs were massacred and 700,000 expelled from their homeland.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 21:03:35 +0000