Deir Yassin - now Har Nof - was an Arab village on the western
outskirts of Jerusalem. It was located across the valley from Beit
Hakerem where I was lodging. In the early spring of 1948, Deir Yassin
gunmen began taking potshots at Beit Hakerem and other nearby
neighborhoods, and at dawn on Friday, April 9, Menachem Begin's Irgun
Zvai Leumi, assisted by members of the Stern Group, attacked the
village.

I was 18 at the time, and this is what I scribbled in my
diary: "Practically knocked out of bed by big explosion at 5 a.m. and
then another at 7 a.m. They were explosions from Deir Yassin, a
village across the valley. Told that IZL and Lehi attacked the
village. Had always been very quiet and quite friendly. Told that
Arab gangs had pushed themselves in. Went at 10 a.m. to investigate.
Crawled down valley behind rock. Could see Jews maneuvering into
positions. Crashed Jewish lorry on hill.

"Hagana asked for reinforcements for wounded etc. Village captured by
2 p.m. Jewish flag raised over destroyed mukhtar's house.

"Prisoners taken around town by terrorists [sic] in lorry with their
hands up. Idea is to bolster morale. Rumored they were to be shot....
Walking home we saw the captured women and children in a truck. They
just stared. Many Jews around. I felt ashamed the way they cheered.
Told that Hagana were going to hand them over to the British."

AND NOW, more than four years later, there I sat crammed into the
spectators' gallery of the Oxford Union, looking down on a chamber
packed with students listening to Dr. Ali el-Husseini lashing out at
Dr. Gershon Levy over what he asserted was a deliberate Jewish
massacre at Deir Yassin.

"Menachem Begin," he raged, "stands indicted as a war criminal for
the deliberate brutal massacre of 254 innocent men, women and
children at Deir Yassin. He ordered his thugs to descend upon this
quiet village, savage its women, throw scores of mutilated bodies
down the village wells, and burn the rest. Those who survived the
massacre were, at Begin's command, loaded onto trucks and paraded
throughout Jewish Jerusalem, to be stoned and spat upon, before being
taken to a nearby quarry to be shot."

Then, thunderously, bitterly, in a tear-smothered voice:

"What happened at Deir Yassin was emblematic of the notorious and
horrific totality of Zionist massacres and imperialist crimes
committed against the Palestinian people. The Deir Yassin massacre
and the resultant terror that seized the Palestinian people marked
the beginning of the depopulation of Arab Palestine. For millions
upon millions of Arabs this tiny village has become a symbol of
Zionist imperialistic perfidy, brutality and aggression."

WITH THAT, he sat down and Gershon Levy jumped up. In an incensed
voice that lifted to a shout stopping all applause dead, he
fumed, "What this House has just heard is an elaborate exercise in
Arab myth-making. On trial here is not what happened at Deir Yassin
but what has been invented about Deir Yassin."

And now, tersely, vigorously, powerfully, as an attorney might
address a jury, he made his points - that Deir Yassin, high on a
ridge overlooking the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, was a place of
strategic importance in a life-and-death struggle for Jewish
survival; that on Menachem Begin's orders a loudspeaker mounted on a
truck had forewarned its inhabitants of the impending assault,
thereby surrendering the element of surprise; that the fighting was
house-to-house and, therefore, murderous, causing heavy civilian
casualties; and that the number of dead was less than half of what
Arab propaganda alleged.

Turning now to Ali el-Husseini he said to him in a voice as cold as
his eyes:

"I would advise you, sir, not to don the cloak of hypocrisy before an
audience as perceptive as this. You cannot pull wool over their eyes,
as the show of hands shall presently reveal. For they know it to be
true that we Jews, unlike you Arabs, are not a martial people. And
unlike the Arab nation" - he was talking to the students again - "the
legendary heroes of the Jewish nation are not warriors and
conquerors, but prophets and scribes. There never was, never could
be, a Begin policy of deliberately attacking civilians as there has
been a consistent Arab policy of doing just that. I speak of the
policy of massacre and mutilation of Jews in the riots of 1920, in
the riots of 1921, in the riots of 1929, in the riots of 1936 to
1939, and in the recent 1947-1948 war in which the Arabs set out to
massacre and mutilate the Jewish state at birth; a war, in the course
of which a convoy of 77 Jewish doctors and nurses, in clearly marked
ambulances en route to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, met with
massacre and mutilation. I speak of the massacre and mutilation of
the 35 ambushed in a convoy en route to the Etzion Bloc. I speak of
the massacre and mutilation of all but four survivors of Kibbutz Kfar
Etzion. I speak of the massacre and mutilation…"

Cries of revulsion and nausea suddenly cut him short as a foul stench
inexplicably suffused the hall. Outrageously, an unseen blackguard -
or a mere prankster, perhaps - had hurled a fistful of stink bombs in
the direction of the president's chair. They fell at his feet, and
the reek was so pungent people held their noses, their faces screwed
up as though biting into lemons. The Oxford Union president,
handkerchief over his nose, began yelling, "Order! Order!" but his
audience was fleeing in such droves he declared the debate null and
void.

THIS EXPERIENCE came to mind almost 30 years later, in 1980, when I
found myself working closely with the man who had actually assumed
command of the IZL attack on Deir Yassin. His name was Yehuda
Lapidot, a soft-spoken professor of biological chemistry at the
Hebrew University. He had taken a leave of absence to head up a unit
in the Prime Minister's Office called Lishkat Hakesher, a semi-covert
operation that maintained contact with Jews locked behind the Iron
Curtain during the Cold War.

One day, over coffee, I shared with him my diary notes of that bloody
Friday of April 9, 1948. He mulled over the pages trying to decipher
my boyish handwriting, and when he spoke there was a tinge of sadness
in his voice.

The battle had not gone as planned, he said. They had been repeatedly
hit, sustaining heavy casualties from the start. He had taken command
after the officer in charge, a fellow called Ben-Zion Cohen, went
down early in the fighting.

Menachem Begin had ordered that bloodshed be avoided as much as
possible, which was why he had insisted upon the use of a loudspeaker
to forewarn the villagers, giving them a chance to flee. Many did.
The intention had been to smash right into the center of the village
with the truck and blare the announcement: "You are being attacked by
superior forces. The west exit of Deir Yassin leading to Ein Karem is
open to you! Run immediately! Don't hesitate! Our forces are
advancing! Run to Ein Karem!"

But the loudspeaker vehicle plunged into a ditch at the village
outskirts. The overturned vehicle I had seen on the crest of the hill
mentioned in my diary was probably that loudspeaker truck, and its
breakdown marked the beginning of the calamity.

The Arabs chose to stand and fight. They were better armed. The 120
Jewish attackers had, between them, something like 20 rifles, three
Bren guns, 30 to 40 Sten guns - most of which proved defective - and
grenades.

None of them had house-to-house battle experience, and all they could
do was toss grenades and spray gunfire. A few buildings were
dynamited, and those were probably the explosions I had heard in Beit
Hakerem. Thus it was that instead of smashing right through to the
heart of the village as planned, it took them two hours of horrific
fighting to reach and capture the mukhtar's house and raise the flag.

"No! No! No!" insisted Prof. Yehuda Lapidot, with emphatic
conviction. "Absolutely no! There was absolutely no deliberate
massacre at Deir Yassin. It is a lie!"

"But what of those dazed and shaken Arabs I had seen being driven
through Jerusalem on trucks that Friday afternoon?" I asked. "Were
they not being taken away to be shot?"

"That is a pernicious lie, too," answered Lapidot, his face frowned
with fury. "It was part of a smear campaign spread by the Ben-Gurion
camp which would stop at nothing to slander Menachem Begin. Those
Arabs were being taken to the Arab side of town where they were
released among their own people."

And so it is that that the cant of Deir Yassin lives on. Like
Scheherazade narrating one of her never-ending tales of the Arabian
Nights, Arab storytellers continue to weave their gory fiction,
resurrecting the ghosts of Deir Yassin from generation to generation