Looking for Deir Yassin
by: Daniel A. McGowan
September - October
1996
The Link - Volume 29, Issue 4
Page 1
Palestinians, Israelis, and a few foreign visitors are beginning to take limited tours of some of the Arab villages depopulated in 1948 during the creation of Israel as a Jewish state. The Alternative Information Center (P.O. Box 31417, Jerusalem or aicmail©trendline.co.il) may be the only group that includes Deir Yassin in its Study Tours of Jerusalem.
There also are special tours led by surviving underground fighters or "battle participants" such as Ezra Yachin and Yehuda Lapidot. The latest of these, led by Lapidot, was sponsored by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and a group of Irgun veterans. This tour usually corresponds with the April 9th anniversary of the "battle" and celebrates it from the radical Zionist perspective. These special tours deny there was a massacre, and greatly inflate the number of Jewish casualties while lowering the number of Palestinians killed. No mention is made of the male prisoners who were put on display in Jerusalem before being taken to the stone quarry between Deir Yassin and Givat Shaul and shot to death.
When ordinary tourists ask about Deir Yassin, the guide will simply deny, often truthfully, ever having heard of it, or respond that there are many other more significant sites in Jerusalem and no time to look for Deir Yassin. In other instances, the question alone brands you as anti-Zionist and therefore the enemy in the guide's eyes. While other tour members remain oblivious, he or she will dismiss your inquiry with a wave and you will be largely shunned for the rest of the trip. The guide need not be Jewish; Christian Zionists are often worse when is comes to queries about Deir Yassin.
At Birzeit University, Dr. Saleh Abdel Jawad, a member of our Board of Advisers, heads a handful of academics who comprise the Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society. Although often referred to as "the Harvard of the West Bank," Birzeit University is very poor. Nevertheless, the Center is able to sponsor an occasional tour of some of the 400 villages which were either depopulated of Arabs or destroyed in 1948.
On one of these tours, I visited 45 villages which most Israelis have never heard about and most Palestinians have never seen. In some places the only remains were a pile of rocks and the prickly, small cacti the Israelis call "sabra." At some sites, beautiful Arab homes were partially destroyed, while at others Israeli Jews were occupying Arab homes. Where memorials existed, they were to Jews fallen in their War of Independence. There were no memorials to Palestinians who fell in the same war, known to them as The Catastrophe.
 Printer Friendly Version of this Article
|
![[Skip to Page Content]](graphics/skip_sliver.jpg){kind=small}
