This weeks history lesson: When hostilities erupted in 1948, the villagers of Deir Yassin and those of the nearby Jewish village of Givat Shaul signed a pact, later approved at Haganah headquarters, to maintain their good relations, exchange information on movement of outsiders through village territory, and ensure the safety of vehicles from the village. The inhabitants of Deir Yassin upheld the agreement scrupulously, resisting infiltrations by Arab irregulars. Though this was known to the Irgun and Lehi forces, they attacked the village on April 9, 1948. The assault was beaten off initially, with the attackers suffering 40 wounded. Only the intervention of a Palmach unit, using mortars,[6] allowed them to conquer the village. Houses were blown up with people inside and people shot: 107 villagers, including women and children, were killed. The survivors were loaded on trucks that were driven through Jerusalem in a victory parade.[5][7] Four Irgun or Lehi men were killed.[8] The incident became known as the Deir Yassin massacre. The killings at Deir Yassin are regarded as one of two pivotal events that led to the exodus of around 700,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages in 1948, along with the defeat of the Palestinians in Haifa. News of the killings, amplified by Arab media broadcasts of atrocity, triggered fear and panic among Palestinians, who in turn increasingly evacuated their homes A year after the massacre, the settlement Givat Shaul Beth was founded by religious Jews on the place of former Deir Yassin. It was later incorporated as a neighborhood into the city of Jerusalem. In 1980, the remaining ruins of the village were bulldozed to clear the ground for new Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. The streets in the new neighborhoods were named after units of the Irgun, which perpetrated the massacre, and units of the Hagannah. In the early 1980s, most of the Deir Yassin cemetery was bulldozed and a new highway to Givat Shaul Bet was built in its place.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 02:51:44 +0000
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