A necessary corrective to teh thoughtless pro-Israeli media norm. At the same time, though, we have to acknowledge that this situation is 'way more complicated than a "white hat/black hat" scenario. Palestine is a historical tragedy with no simple solution in 1948, and much more so now. Both sides were pawns in Great Power politics back then, with teh interests of local warlords/dictators/kings making thngs even murkier. I would like people to remember, too, that there were non-imperialist Zionists (meaning, those who wanted to negotiate a two-state or unitary/secular state solution--Albert Einstein, in refusing teh first Presidency of Israel, represented himself and an older generation of SOCIALIST Zionists--spoke for these.
It should be noted, too, under teh "Hopeful Signs" category, that the Israeli public is FAR more willing to negotiate and conciliate with "the Enemy" that its leaders (sound familiar?). I llok forward to a stmulatng dialogue stirred by this article...

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

You present a nice story and make it very personal. However, you don't give your name. So, there isn't much substance to it.
By the way,
Your story tells enough to validate the Arab story when you talk about 'inexperienced' soldiers going door to door tossing in grenades and spraying with rifle fire [in a civilian residential community]. Your speaker pointed out that Deir Yassin was located strategically. This is a military assessment. The occupation of the town was a military objective, as was the terrorizing of the Arab populace.
Could it be that you were ashamed when you were present at the event because you saw it directly. But, later, the grand talk in Oxford gave you a way to be free of that shame, and so you took it. This is how all of us remain complicit in the Iraq occupation, and, I know you hate to hear it, but it is how the German people were brought in by the Nazis. When governments do evil, they tell you it is in your best interest, in fact, it is necessary for your survival, and, well the victims were bad people anyway.
But the question is, have 60 years of war really been in the best interest of the people of Israel?
Is unending conflict with their Arab neighbors and the destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank really their only hope of 'survival'?
Could there have been, and could there be now, a better diplomatic policy for Israel than military supremacy?

The information that this article is based on is from Jewish Voices For Peace. One of the officers of this organization has parents living in Israel. She, like all other Jewish people of conscious want a strong and safe Israel and the only way to achieve this is for the Jewish people to acknowledge the past and present crimes of the Jewish state. I am Jewish and I am the one who wrote this article. I have relatives in Israel and unfortunately they care more about military dominations and hoarding the resources for Jewish people than they do about peace.

Jewish Voice for Peace and the New Blood Libel
Author

* Anonymous Poster

Date Created

* 26 May 2008

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* 26 May 2008 10:54:10 AM

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www.bluetruth.net

Jewish Voice for Peace and the New Blood Libel

Jewish Voice for Peace needs a new motto, something like “We’re not really anti-Zionist, but we always act that way.” Their latest screed about the Palestinian Nakba reads like a textbook produced by the Palestinian Authority, full of allegations designed to incite hatred and prevent peace. It levels charges of atrocities allegedly committed against Arab civilians by the Jews of 1948 Palestine, who had the temerity to try to defend themselves not only against 5 invading Arab armies, but also against local villages that had long been launching attacks against Jewish civilians and besieging Jewish Jerusalem.

Their “fact sheet” accuses Israel of war crimes, in blood-curdling detail that brings to mind accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust. This of course is not by accident. There are three themes that anti-Zionists use to try to relate the Palestinian narrative to the Holocaust. First, they attempt to present the Arabs as nothing more than peaceful innocent bystanders who became secondary victims of the Holocaust (ignoring the fact that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al Husseini spent the war years in Berlin where he encouraged the Nazis to commit full scale genocide against the Jews, recruited Muslims for the Nazis, and toured Auschwitz with Eichmann, probably to help plan a similar facility should the Germans have overrun Palestine). Secondly, they insist on the false equation of the mass industrial-scale extermination of European Jewry based on a horrific racist ideology, and the dislocation of Palestinian Arabs caused by another war of extermination against the Jews—this one started by their fellow Arabs. Finally, and most outrageously, they claim that current Israeli self-defense actions against the terrorist organizations Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad are morally or legally on a plane with Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews.

The descriptions used by JVP are almost all credited to one source: Ilan Pappe’s book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappe, for those unfamiliar with him, is a former Israeli lecturer at the University of Haifa who has since relocated to the University of Exeter in the UK. A doctrinaire Marxist who once ran for Knesset with the Communist-led Hadash party, he opposes the existence of Israel as a Jewish state but nonetheless supports "resistance" by Hamas, a radical Islamist movement that seeks to impose sharia law and at least tolerates, if not incites, violence against Christian "infidels" . Most tellingly, he also frankly admits that he is not really interested in facts: “‘We do [historiography] because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth seekers... ‘there is no such thing as truth, only a collection of narratives’.” This philosophy was exposed when one of Pappe’s graduate students, Teddy Katz, was shown to have falsified evidence about an alleged massacre at Tantura in 1948 by claiming that his interview subjects said one thing while the tapes of the interviews proved otherwise.

There are historians such as Benny Morris who have indeed documented incidents of expulsion and even murder of Arabs during Israel’s War of Independence, when the Jews were fighting for their lives and the Arabs were fighting to kill Jews. Israel, no more and no less than other countries, was not born without violence, without wrongs being committed, without people being displaced. All Americans who are not part of the original Native American population live on their land by virtue of military conquest, much of it involving acts worse than anything Israel is accused of by its worst enemies-- and Americans are not returning to a homeland for which we have pined and prayed for centuries. The same holds true for Canadians and Australians. So by what moral right do those who point the finger at Israel and bellow “J’accuse!” continue to reside in their own comfortable homes?

The blood libel is an old staple of anti-Semitism. Jews through the centuries have been slaughtered because of the now-rejected Catholic teaching that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus, then for the myth that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood for matzah. Now we have the new blood libels against Israel. The most prominent has been the al-Dura affair, used as a bloody shirt to create a jihadist frenzy during the Arafat’s terror war—and now that the entirety of the filmed evidence has been aired in a French courtroom, the questions about what might have been a fully staged hoax are larger than ever. Other examples of media gullibility to Arab manipulation abound—the “Jenin massacre” in 2002 during which world media eagerly swallowed Palestinian claims of hundreds of deaths during Operation Defensive Shield, the doctored pictures from Lebanon , blame placed on Israel for the deaths of civilians killed by Hamas mines on a Gaza beach. Of course, while the sensationalist false reporting of these incidents makes headlines, the “corrections” are always buried in small type at the bottom of page 10.

JVP has chosen to perpetuate the tradition of the blood libel, hiding behind anti-Zionism as a politically correct shield. As self-described experts on anti-Semitism, their leadership can’t claim to be ignorant of what they are doing. So one can only conclude that they agree with Pappe: facts aren’t important, advancing the ideology is. And the ideology, sadly, is not one of peace, but of fanning the flames of anti-Israel hatred.

winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?15077S

arkansas.indymedia.org/newswire/display/22311/index.php

"She, like all other Jewish people of conscious want a strong and safe Israel"

Actually, Jewish Voice for peace is an anti-Israel group and regularly stands with the most vehement of anti-Semites. Jewish Voice is not what they pretend to be.