"Menahem Begin, the Leader of the Irgun, tells how 'in Jerusalem, as elsewhere, we were the first to pass from the defensive to the offensive... Arabs began to flee in terror... Hagana was carrying out successful attacks on other fronts, while all the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter'... The Israelis now allege that the Palestine war began with the entry of the Arab armies into Palestine after 15 May 1948. But that was the second phase of the war; they overlook the massacres, expulsions and dispossessions which took place prior to that date and which necessitated Arab states' intervention."  Sami Hadawi  "Bitter Harvest"

"Israel must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no - it must - invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge... And above all - let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space."  Quoted in Livia Rokach, "Israel's Sacred Terrorism"

"For the entire day of April 9, 1948, Irgun and LEHI soldiers carried out the slaughter in a cold and premeditated fashion... The attackers 'lined men, women and children up against the walls and shot them,'... The ruthlessness of the attack on Deir Yassin shocked Jewish and world opinion alike, drove fear and panic into the Arab population, and led to the flight of unarmed civilians from their homes all over the country."  Israeli author, Simha Flapan  "The Birth of Israel"

"It is simply extraordinary and without precedent that Israel's history, its record - from the fact that it is a state built on conquest, that it has invaded surrounding countries, bombed and destroyed at will, to the fact that it currently occupies Lebanese(*), Syrian, and Palestinian territory against international law - is simply never cited, never subjected to scrutiny in the U.S. media or in official discourse...never addressed as playing any role at all in provoking 'Islamic terror'."  Edward Said in "The Progressive. May 30, 1996"

Between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

Early in the morning of Friday, April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun, headed by Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. It was several weeks before the end of the British Mandate. The village lay outside of the area that the United Nations recommended be included in a future Jewish State. Deir Yassin had a peaceful reputation and was even said by a Jewish newspaper to have driven out some Arab militants. But it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and one plan, kept secret until years afterwards, called for it to be destroyed and the residents evacuated to make way for a small airfield that would supply the beleaguered Jewish residents of Jerusalem.

By noon over 100 people, half of them women and children, had been systematically murdered. Four commandos died at the hands of resisting Palestinians using old Mausers and muskets. Twenty-five male villagers were loaded into trucks, paraded through the Zakhron Yosef quarter in Jerusalem, and then taken to a stone quarry along the road between Givat Shaul and Deir Yassin and shot to death. The remaining residents were driven to Arab East Jerusalem.

That evening the Irgunists and the Sternists escorted a party of foreign correspondents to a house at Givat Shaul, a nearby Jewish settlement founded in 1906. Over tea and cookies they amplified the details of the operation and justified it, saying Deir Yassin had become a concentration point for Arabs, including Syrians and Iraqis, planning to attack the western suburbs of Jerusalem. They said that 25 members of the Haganah militia had reinforced the attack and claimed that an Arabic-speaking Jew had warned the villagers over a loudspeaker from an armored car. This was duly reported in The New York Times on April 10.

A final body count of 254 was reported by The New York Times on April 13, a day after they were finally buried. By then the leaders of the Haganah had distanced themselves from having participated in the attack and issued a statement denouncing the dissidents of Irgun and the Stern Gang, just as they had after the attack on the King David Hotel in July, 1946. They admitted that the massacre "disgraced the cause of Jewish fighters and dishonored Jewish armies and the Jewish flag." They played down the fact that their militia had reinforced the terrorists' attack, even though they did not participate in the barbarism and looting during the subsequent "mopping up" operations. They also played down the fact that, in Begin's words, "Deir Yassin was captured with the knowledge of the Haganah and with the approval of its commander" as a part of its "plan for establishing an airfield."

Ben Gurion even sent an apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But this horrific act served the future State of Israel well. According to Begin: "Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of "Irgun butchery," were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede. The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated. Of about 144 houses, 10 were dynamited. The cemetery was later bulldozed and, like hundreds of other Palestinian villages to follow, Deir Yassin was wiped off the map. By September, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland, Rumania, and Slovakia were settled there over the objections of Martin Buber, Cecil Roth and other Jewish leaders, who believed that the site of the massacre should be left uninhabited. The center of the village was renamed Givat Shaul Bet. As Jerusalem expanded, the land of Deir Yassin became part of the city and is now known simply as the area between Givat Shaul and the settlement of Har Nof on the western slopes of the mountain.

The massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin is one of the most significant events in 20th-century Palestinian and Israeli history. This is not because of its size or its brutality, but because it stands as the starkest early warning of a calculated depopulation of over 400 Arab villages and cities and the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian inhabitants to make room for survivors of the Holocaust and other Jews from the rest of the world.

There are no markers, no plaques, and no memorials at Deir Yassin; parking is a problem and access to the mental hospital grounds is, understandably, restricted. But tourists today can help keep its memory alive and reinforce our efforts to memorialize Deir Yassin by asking about and visiting the site.

Was Deir Yassin the only act of its kind?

"By 1948, the Jew was not only able to 'defend himself' but to commit massive atrocities as well. Indeed, according to the former director of the Israeli army archives, `in almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes'... Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that `every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs'."  Norman Finkelstein  "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict"

"However much one laments and even wishes somehow to atone for the loss of life and suffering visited upon innocents because of Palestinian violence, there is still the need, I think, also to say that no national movement has been so unfairly penalized, defamed, and subjected to disproportionate retaliation for its sins as has the Palestinian...

...The Israeli policy of punitive counterattacks (or state terrorism) seems to be to try to kill anywhere from 50 to 100 Arabs for every Jewish fatality. The devastation of Lebanese refugee camps, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, and orphanages; the summary arrests, deportations, house destructions, maimings, and torture of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. These, and the number of Palestinian fatalities, the scale of material loss, the physical, political and psychological deprivations, have tremendously exceeded the damage done by Palestinians to Israelis."  Edward Said  "The Question of Palestine"

"The record of Israeli terrorism goes back to the origins of the state - indeed, long before - including the massacre of 250 civilians and brutal expulsion of seventy thousand others from Lydda and Ramle in July 1948; the massacre of hundreds of others at the undefended village of Doueimah near Hebron in October 1948;...the slaughters in Quibya, Kafr Kassem, and a string of other assassinated villages; the expulsion of thousands of Bedouins from the demilitarized zones shortly after the 1948 war and thousands more from northeastern Sinai in the early 1970's, their villages destroyed, to open the region for Jewish settlement; and on, and on."  Noam Chomsky  "Blaming The Victims"

"In June 1982 Israel again invaded Lebanon, and it used aerial bombardment to destroy entire camps of Palestinian Arab refugees, By these means Israel killed 20,000 persons, mostly civilians. Israel claimed self-defense for its invasion, but the lack of PLO attacks into Israel during the previous year made that claim dubious. The UN Security Council demanded `that Israel withdraw all its military forces forthwith and unconditionally to the internationally recognized boundaries of Lebanon'."  John Quigley  "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice"

Amnesty International Report

Amnesty International is calling for an investigation into incidents in which Lebanese civilians were killed in south Lebanon during the withdrawal of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) from south Lebanon.

Information gathered by Amnesty International, including during a fact-finding visit to south Lebanon, suggests that in at least four incidents on 22 and 23 May 2000, Israeli forces directed tank fire from the Israeli side of the border at Lebanese civilians, killing four people and injuring several others. These attacks were indeed willfully directed at civilians, the Israeli army has committed war crimes and those responsible should be brought to justice, Amnesty International said.

On 22 May a man and a 16-year-old boy were killed on a road facing the Israeli village of Manara. Hundreds of civilians, including many children, and some armed people had been driving or walking along the road celebrating Israel's withdrawal and the return of villagers to south Lebanon when the attacks took place. According to witnesses, 22-year-old Abd al Karim Assaf from Mays al-Jabal, was killed when a shell fired without warning from an Israeli tank slammed into the Mercedes car he was driving in. Five other people in the car were injured. Shortly after another shell exploded near a pick-up truck which was approaching the burning Mercedes, killing Ibrahim Maruni, aged 16, from Shaqrah.

Later on 22 May Salman Rammal was killed in the Lebanese village of Adaysah by tank fire apparently coming from the Israeli border near the Israeli village of Misgav Am. According to witnesses, he was operating a bulldozer to remove an SLA roadblock after the SLA had left. Here too there were dozens of people celebrating around him when he was killed.

On 23 May Abd-al-Rahman Abed Taqqush, was killed on the same stretch of road facing Manara where the two other fatal attacks had taken place the day before. According to witnesses who were near the car when it was hit, and others watching from Manara, an Israeli tank fired at the stationary car in which Abed Taqqush was making a phone call. This attack was followed by bursts of machine-gun fire apparently aimed at civilians, including foreign journalists who were sheltering in a nearby building.

Not enough Megabytes

There wouldn't be enough Megabytes to cite all the atrocities Israel and the Israeli Army have committed (and are still committing) inside the Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and inside every refugee camps scattered around the world....

On September 30th, 2000, a Palestinian, caught in the crossfire, tries to protect his 12-year-old son in Netzarim (Gaza), he tries to signal to the Israeli Army their presence. After a long time and to the amazement of the people across the street and under the eyes of the world community, they were shot. The boy was fatally hit in the abdomen and the father critically wounded. Israeli military later admitted that the boy and father were shot by Israeli forces. The Israeli government never apologized but blamed the boy for being there.

Seconds after this tragic shooting, emergency medical technician  Bassam Balbeisi was also shot and killed as he tried to rescue the boy. Mr Bassam attempted to get his ambulance to the boy and father, but was hit by a live bullet in the chest while driving.  He was from Gaza city and leaves behind a wife and 9 children.

Jenin

On April 3, 2002, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched a major military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, home to some fourteen thousand Palestinians. The Israelis' expressed aim was to capture or kill Palestinian militants responsible for suicide bombings and other attacks that have killed more than seventy Israeli and other civilians since March 2002. The IDF military incursion into the Jenin refugee camp was carried out on an unprecedented scale compared to other military operations mounted by the IDF since the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict began in September 2000.

The presence of armed Palestinian militants inside Jenin refugee camp, and the preparations made by those armed Palestinian militants in anticipation of the IDF incursion, does not detract from the IDF's obligation under international humanitarian law to take all feasible precautions to avoid harm to civilians. Israel also has a legal duty to ensure that its attacks on legitimate military targets did not cause disproportionate harm to civilians. Unfortunately, these obligations were not met. Human Rights Watch's research demonstrates that, during their incursion into the Jenin refugee camp, Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes.