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Washington Report, July 2005, pages 22-23
Special Report
Returning to Deir Yassin to Commemorate The 57th Anniversary of
a Terrible Event
By Hanna Marmelstein
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| Mordechai Vanunu (l) joined
Palestinians and Israelis in commemorating the 57th
anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre (Courtesy Deir Yassin
Remembered). |
ABOUT 150 JEWS and non-Jews attended an April 7 commemorative
event at Deir Yassin, on the west side of Jerusalem, within sight of
Yad Vashem, the most famous Holocaust memorial. If there’s any
positive story to be told about the ceremony, it’s a bittersweet
one. It is positive in its current implications, but a commemoration
of a tragedy. On April 9, 1948, members of two different Jewish
Zionist terrorist groups broke into Palestinians’ homes and killed
between 110 and 140 people. This was not the only massacre of the
time, and probably not the biggest, but it was the one people heard
about, the one that caused so many thousands of Palestinians to flee
their homes in fear, not realizing that, 57 years later, they still
would not be allowed to return. Today, most of the village’s land
has been taken by the modern Jewish religious neighborhood called
Har Nof. The buildings in the center of Deir Yassin have become
part of a mental hospital known as Kfar Shaul.
Zochrot, an Israeli organization committed to remembering the
Nakba, or Palestinian “catastrophe,” planned the
commemoration along with the international group Deir Yassin
Remembered. We walked the land with survivors, organizers from
the sponsoring groups, and Mordecai Vanunu, the Israeli
whistleblower who spent 18 years in prison for disclosing Israel’s
nuclear weapons program and who still is forbidden from leaving
Israel. We carried white flowers, one to represent each of the 93
victims’ names that are known. The names were written in Arabic and
Hebrew on placards. At first I thought there were only a few
Palestinians in the crowd, but as I started hearing Arabic spoken
all around me, I realized I had only been counting headscarves. The
crowd was a mix of Israeli citizens and internationals, and the
Israeli citizens were a mix of Jews and Palestinians.
Young Orthodox Jewish children watched us from their playground
as we approached the area set aside for us. Speeches began, and
singing—mostly songs whose lyrics were Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry.
Translation was constant, Arabic to Hebrew and vice versa on stage,
and then Hebrew to English in the audience for a small group of us
sitting in the back.
Zaiyneb Akel, an 80-year-old survivor of the massacre, was there,
and she began to tell stories, personal stories about many of the
killings. She talked about the good relations the Palestinians and
Jews had previously enjoyed, how they had been friends, how she
doesn’t know what the Palestinians could have done to the Jews to
make them do this to her family.
She talked about pregnant women being sliced through the stomach
and killed; old men thrown off the roofs of houses; seven young boys
sleeping in bed who were rounded up, taken outside, lined up, and
shot; a few members of her family (herself included) who were given
the choice of whether they wanted to be shot or stabbed to death,
only to be saved at the last minute by one soldier who said, “Don’t
kill them, let them go.” This is how she escaped, along with the
other survivors of the village who were put on a truck and shipped
out, away from their village where their ancestors had lived for
many centuries. Still they cannot go back.
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Each of the names of the known dead at Deir
Yassin was remembered with a single white rose (Courtesy Deir
Yassin Remembered). |
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Then Zaiynab Akel sang a song, and the lyrics went something like
this: “They put a mountain between us… I wish it could become sand
and disappear…”
Between whom? I wondered. Jews and
Palestinians? Palestinians and their family members? Both?
“We need everyone in the world to know what happened in Deir
Yassin,” she closed by saying, adding that she still had the
newspaper articles from about the time her family members who were
killed. She said this with such urgency, trying to convince a world
that has deliberately remembered certain massacres and forgotten
others, that we can forget none. That the way to peace is not to
forget the past and move on, but to acknowledge the past and move
on.
As if to spite her, the group of Israeli kids from Har Nof,
instructed by an adult, had begun to tear up the booklets titled
“Remember Deir Yassin.” I tried to take a picture and one said, “Are
you going to put this in the paper?” He then covered his face with a
torn booklet, put his middle finger up in front of it, and said,
“Put this in the paper.”
I was sad to see the boys’ reaction, to see them laughing at
others’ pain. At the same time, I think it is good that they were
exposed to this, good that they saw Palestinians who were from the
place where they now lived, who not so long ago were kicked off
their land by some of these kids’ grandparents.
As disappointing and disgusting as the boys’ reaction was, the
fact that so many Jewish Israelis were there to remember and
acknowledge the sordid history of Zionism was just as incredible.
First the tragedy needs to be exposed, then acknowledged, and then
hopefully, someday, dealt with justly. If any people should know the
importance of this, it is certainly we Jews.
Hannah Marmelstein is a member of Zochrot and of Deir Yassin
Remembered.
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SIDEBAR
An American Jew’s Short Trek Through Israel
I took a taxi to the 1948 massacre site of the disappeared
village once called Deir Yassin, and was dropped off at the
Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center, whose buildings comprise the
center of the old village of Deir Yassin. A two-mile walk
around the block in search of the cemetery brought me back to
the original point, without having located the graveyard. A
discouraging conversation followed with the gate guard: “I
cannot give you any information as to the question you are
asking. It is very sensitive, your question.” I had explained
that I was on the board of directors of Deir Yassin
Remembered.
“Could you let me speak to the hospital director, and let
me ask him?”
“No, I will not let you speak with him, or anybody. And I
will not let you enter the property.”
Pause…
“Sorry.”
Like hell.
Across the street the market vendor was equally
tight-lipped, suggesting the possibility that the cemetery was
in the gated compound of the mental hospital.
Ironically, gazing across a huge valley exposed the north
side of Yad Vashem, Israel’s premier Holocaust museum. A very
long walk brought me there, and the synapses began
shortcircuiting. How could the Holocaust happen, and how CAN
the occupation be happening? Why does the public allow itself
to be used in this manner, to support another ethnic cleansing
to atone for a previous one?
A slight note: As many Jewish families were burning trash,
traif, and homitz in preparation for Passover, two out of
three parents would not let me give a tennis ball to their
young kids. Where is that coming from? No eye contact, very
few hellos. In the occupied West Bank, these yellow balls go
like hotcakes. It’s tough, being the oppressor
At the rear of Yad Vashem, next to a huge yard sculpture
sticking out of the hillside, one can look back across the
valley and see the village of Deir Yassin, which puts a lie to
the Zionist claim that “As soon as Israel declared Statehood
(May 15, 1948) it was attacked by five Arab countries.”
The massacre of Deir Yassin occurred on April 9, 1948—six
weeks before statehood.—Henry
Herskovitz | |
