Deir Yassin came to be fought over in 1948 because of the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhek Shamir and the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin. Two Jewish terrorist and extremist groups who where involved in attacks on Palestinian villages such as Deir Yassin, best known for blowing up the British Military Headquarters at the King David Hotel. These groups where not part of the Haganah, the official Israeli army, they where two small extremist groups who could make their own decisions. However this is not to say that the Haganah was not also aggressive, they attacked lots of Palestinian villages that where on the road into Jerusalem, they could attack this road with no problems because it was open to the Jews as their only way of supplies into Jerusalem. The Haganah wanted to protect themselves and stop villages on the outskirts of this road from being used as shelters for Arab soldiers, who’s aims where to attack supplies into Jerusalem. The Haganah however, chose not to attack Deir Yassin, unlike The Stern Gang and The Irgun because it was not on their list of hostile villages and it had stayed out of disputes and didn’t deem to be any risk to the Jewish.
Although it was the Stern Gang and the Irgun who attacked Deir Yassin, it has been said that the Haganah had granted these two groups permission to do so.
Deir Yassin was a major atrocity, which involved the Irgun slaughtering the Arab civilians and causing them to flee in fear of their lives. This caused a Palestinian refugee problem, with Arabs fleeing to surrounding areas such as Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. This Refugee problem still exists today, sixty years later and the effects of the attack caused great devastation in Palestine.
Sources A and B are written by the Jewish Foreign Minister and the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), both of these sources are blaming each other for the attack on Deir Yassin and for the flight of Arabs from their villages.
Source A, which is written by the PLO uses very harsh vocabulary such as ‘in cold blood murdered’ and ‘mutilated bodies’ this suggests how the PLO are trying to gain sympathy from the public about how they where driven out of their homes, all because of the Jewish armies. The PLO describes the village of Deir Yassin as peaceful, this is their opinion of the village, and is used to emphasize how the Jewish destroyed the peace and harmony within the Arab villages. This source was written in 1984, for a pamphlet in which the public could read, the Palestinians are blaming the Jewish for everything, trying to make the public aware of the refugee situation.
Source B which is written by Mrs Golda Meir, Israel’s foreign minister suggests that the large numbers of Arabs fleeing from their homes was because of the Arab leaders telling them to get out of their homes so that the Arab armies could get in. When the British left the country in 1948, the Arab armies invaded the newly created state of Israel and already by that time, there had been hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who had left their homes as a result of fighting which had taken place in the country. When the regular Arab armies joined there fighting, the source says that this is when a full-scale war broke out and the numbers of refugees increased. Source B says that the responsibility for all of the refugees must lie in the hands of the people who started the aggression against Israel, the Arabs. This statement was written in 1961 in a speech made to the United Nations, the Israeli people are blaming all of the effects of Deir Yassin, much like in Source A where the Palestinians where blaming it all on the Israeli’s.
According to two Palestinian eye witnesses the Palestinians didn’t have a chance, within minutes the village was ablaze with attacks from machine guns and grenades which where thrown into Palestinian houses and killed in one scenario twenty-eight people in one house, it was inevitable that the Jewish would come out of this civil war victorious, the Arabs didn’t stand a chance.
