Mick Hartley: Deir Yassin revisited

Deir Yassin is a name that reverberates through the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Deir Yassin massacre happened, as everybody knows, when Zionist paramilitaries from the Irgun shot up a peaceful Palestinian village in 1948, killing over 100 innocents. It has become a key event - perhaps the key event - in the Palestinian narrative of displacement and exile.

But did it happen like that? Israeli historian Eliezer Tauber has researched the subject, and concluded that it did not. But you won't be able to read about it:

What really happened in Deir Yassin? Tauber is not the first scholar to argue that the large-scale massacre story is a myth. Professor Yoav Gelber, in “Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” makes a similar claim. Still, Tauber was more thorough than all of his predecessors in looking into this specific day of carnage. The result is a gripping narrative.

Deir Yassin in Tauber’s account doesn’t depict a day of poorly organized battle, with confusion playing a role in making a bad day even worse. He counts one clear case of unjustified shooting. An Arab family evacuated a house in surrender. An Irgun fighter opened fire while his commander was shouting at him, “What are you doing? Stop it!” This incident, Tauber believes, gave credence to later overblown stories of larger-scale massacre, rape, mutilation and barbarity.

But the myth was perpetrated not because of confusion. It was a deliberate attempt by the Palestinian leadership to force the Arab militaries of surrounding countries to intervene in the battle over Palestine. The leaders of the Palestinians sowed a wind and reaped a whirlwind. More than convincing the Arab states to intervene (they eventually did), they convinced their fellow Palestinians to flee.

Why am I telling you this story? Because there is no other way for you — Americans — to know about it. Professor Tauber believed that his story would be of great interest to American publishers. He contacted university presses in the United States, and their response left him stunned. A representative of an elite university wrote back: “While everyone agreed on the book’s many strengths, in the end the consensus was that the book would only inflame a debate where positions have hardened.” Another one wrote: “We could sell well to the right-wing community here but we would end up with a terrible reputation.” Apparently, a book questioning the Palestinian narrative is not a book that American universities feel comfortable publishing.

One American media outlet found Tauber’s account worthy of a review: the online Mosaic magazine. The review rightly included the sober conclusion: “It’s hard to believe that Tauber’s book will put an end to the use of Deir Yassin for propaganda and political purposes. Myths take on a life of their own and historical facts are but background sets for them.” If you need any proof of that, just look at what an American publisher had to say about that review: “Of course Mosaic loved it, they tend to be to the right of Attila …”

The nearest you can get to reading Tauber is reading Miriam Elman at Legal Insurrection:

Academic publishing is a tough business, and even first-rate manuscripts can be passed over if the scholarship isn’t a perfect fit for a publisher’s list or on account of a bottleneck in the pipeline—which isn’t uncommon for elite presses.

But something else, very damaging to academia, is going on here.

That’s because the U.S. university presses which Tauber approached reportedly rejected his book on the say-so of anti-Israel faculty reviewers and members of their editorial boards. Apparently, these faculty are worried that Deir Yassin: The End of a Myth could upend the way a lot of American and English-language readers assess the Palestinian narrative of 1948, so they’re advising acquisition editors not to adopt it.

If that’s true, then it’s a scandal of mega proportions.

Basically, it would be another indication that the virulently anti-Israel perspective which currently dominates in many disciplines in the Humanities and soft Social Sciences, especially Middle Eastern Studies, is truly having a corrosive impact on American higher education by undermining viewpoint diversity and hindering the growth of knowledge....

The massacre myth was basically, according to Tauber, a Palestinian narrative that backfired. Rather than strengthening the resolve of the Arabs, it caused a panic:

Tauber disproves that there was a large-scale massacre at Deir Yassin—there were “blunders” but “aside from isolated cases” the majority of those who died were killed in battle.

Tauber’s new study also corroborates prior claims that false reports concocted by Hussein al-Khalidi, the Supreme Secretary of the Palestine Arab High Committee in Jerusalem and a senior political figure in the city, “backfired” because they “precipitated the flight of the Arabs.”

Here, Tauber does shed new light on how the story of the massacre “continued to blossom”. Specifically, he argues that al-Khalidi’s assistant, Hassan Nusseibeh, disseminated the exaggerated story of rapes and atrocities at Deir Yassin from an Arab radio station in Jerusalem. Using that station, the “false story” could be “immediately broadcast within minutes” without having to worry about British censorship.

Tauber also highlights how “the problem of rape” is what really scared the Palestinians—more so than the killings:

"The Palestinian leadership intended to exploit the affair to lay pressure on the Arab states to send their armies to Palestine to fight the Israelis. It turned out to be a boomerang. Following the rule that women’s honor comes before land, the moment the Palestinians heard about rapes they started to leave.”

Tauber’s point makes sense given that, certainly at the time and arguably today as well, the society located the family’s dignity to a large degree in the virginity of its unmarried daughters. In Arab Palestinian society of the 1940s, rape carried a lifelong stigma and could have meant serious financial costs to the woman and her family given that husbands may not have been found.

So is it any wonder that, once al-Khalidi announced that hundreds of people had been killed and women raped, the story spread like wildfire, causing the mass flight of Arabs who were horrified that they too would experience a fate similar to that of the inhabitants of Deir Yassin?

Thanks to US publishers, though, it's a story that the world will be spared from hearing.

Comments

Wow! What a stunning story! And how frustrating to read. Let's hope the book finds an independent publisher. Its impact would be muted, but at least it would be out there. Thank you for writing about it. You've done your readers a tremendous service.

Posted by: Joanne | March 19, 2018 at 05:38 PM

About 90 innocent civilians were killed in the King David Hotel attack. So I wouldn't go out of my way to cast the Irgun in a favourable light even if this new explanation is correct.

BTW, I fully support the right of Israel to exist.

Posted by: LibertyPhile | March 19, 2018 at 07:41 PM