1. Deir Yassin As a Turning Point:

Deir Yassin came early in the 1948 wave of the Zionist invasion. The Zionist invasion of Palestine had actually started at least 50 years before Deir Yassin.

Before 1948 the Zionists resorted mainly to two methods of transferring Palestinians out of the country: purchase of land from absentee landlords and formulating transfer projects with the hope that others such as the Americans or the British would do the transfering for them.

In late 1947, Zionists decided to accept the newly proposed Partition Plan but, at the same time, to take over the whole country by the use of force.

The time period from that point up to the end of the war can be divided into two stages according to the main method used to drive the Palestinians out of their towns and villages. These two stages I would call the stage of terrorism and the stage of massacres.

The dividing point between the two stages is the massacre of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948.

The method used since the early 30’s and intensified in late 1947 was the hit-and-run type of terrorism, in which Zionist terrorists resorted to blowing up train or bus stations, market places, homes at the edges of villages, or to throwing bombs from moving vehicles into cafes, restaurants or stores. Such acts usually resulted in the death of between 5 to 20 people, with 10 to 30 injured. This method did not prove very successful in making the Palestinians leave their homes.

Deir Yassin was a new experiment, and was much more successful. In Deir Yassin, they captured the village first, then they massacred the unarmed civilians including children, women and old people, and caused the total people of the village, about 750 in all, to leave. Some of the women and children who were captured were loaded onto trucks and paraded through the streets of West Jerusalem and then dumped at the edge of East Jerusalem. Others were lined up at the edge of the village and shot. All the able bodied men who were captured, about 40 of them, were also paraded through the streets of West Jerusalem. They were then returned to the village, lined up and shot. Their bodies were dumped in a nearby stone quarry and burned.

Deir Yassin was not to be the only, the last, the biggest or the ugliest massacre to be committed by the Zionist and Israeli forces. However, the novelty of it, its effectiveness in emptying the village of its inhabitants, and the effect it had on other Palestinian communities made it, by far, the best known of all the massacres perpetrated on the Palestinian people by the Zionist forces during the war of 1948.

2 - The Israeli Lesson From Deir Yassin:

For the Israelis the success of the Deir Yassin method turned it into a prototype after which many a massacre has since been modeled. The lesson of Deir Yassin has been institutionalized in the form of a racist and Fascist piece of Israeli wisdom namely: force is the only language Palestinians are capable of understanding. Of course, this does not mean that Arabs resort to force in dealing with the Israelis. No, Arabs are supposed to be too cowardly to do that.

What is meant is that the Israelis cannot make the Arabs understand what they mean without the Israelis resorting to the use of force against the Arabs. And "using force" with the Arabs is actually a euphemistic term for "killing Arabs." Thus, in order to make Arab children stop throwing rocks, you simply kill Arab children; to stop starving Arab laborers in Gaza from crossing the fence to get to work in Israel, you kill any laborer who tries to cross the fence; to train Arabs to stop at Israeli road blocks even without being told to, you kill the occupants of any car that keeps moving when it gets to the road block; to stop an Arab shepherd from grazing his goats close to the electrified fences of a Jewish settlement, you kill the shepherd; and to prevent an old woman from picking wild, edible plants from the lands close to a Jewish settlement, you kill the old Arab woman. These are not hypothetical cases; these are, all of them, cases which have actually happened. There are occasionally, of course, some Israeli sensitive souls who express emotions and feelings concerning such killings. The hearts of such sensitive Israelis, however, go out not to the Arabs killed in such cases, but to the nice Jewish boys, who are forced by the Arabs to do things they hate to do, but have to do, because the bad Arabs understand no other language but force.

In 1948 Israeli troops commanded by Alon and Rabin, for example, massacred over 250 civilians in the town of Lod after the town had surrendered, expelled the over 50 thousand inhabitants of the two towns Lod and Ramle, and sent them walking toward the town of Ramallah over 30 kilometers away. Another 300, or so, infants, children, old and sick people died on the road before the rest made it to Ramallah. When Rabin wrote his memoirs in 1979, among the things he wrote about the expulsion of these people was the following statement:

"Great suffering was inflicted upon the men taking part in the eviction action. Soldiers of the Yiftach Brigade included youth movement graduates, who had been inculcated with values such as international fraternity and humaneness." (quoted in Shipler 1986: 33).

3 - Revival of The Deir Yassin Controversy:

Recently, especially since the beginning of 1998, because of the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel and of the Palestinian Nakba arguments have been raging between Arabs and Jews over what happened at Deir Yassin in 1948.

Among Zionists, it is possible to identify three different types of arguments:

A. The most avid Zionists such as ZOA (Zionists of America) argue that since the number of Palestinians killed in Deir Yassin has been reduced to around one hundred, and since Deir Yassin was a strategic and hostile village which posed great threat to the surrounding settlements and to the Jewish convoys on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, then the case of Deir Yassin does not qualify as a massacre but was a legitimate military target where a battle was fought and around a hundred Palestinians were killed. Thus, the Israelis need not admit, regret, or apologize about any thing. Actually, if anyone needs to apologize, it is the Arabs.

As for the effect of Deir Yassin on other Palestinian communities, they say that it was the Arabs who exaggerated the figures, and over- publicized the whole affair to the point where they scared other Palestinians and caused them to leave the country.

B. A more moderate group accepts the definition of Deir Yassin as a massacre but blames the Etzel and Lehi gangs for it, thus absolving the Haganah, the Jewish Agency, and the official Zionist establishment from any guilt.

C. The third position is taken by the Zionist Left and the Peace Now and such groups which call for peace with the Palestinians and the rest of Arab World. These groups also accept the definition of Deir Yassin as a massacre, and call upon other Israelis to accept it as such, and admit the Israeli guilt and shame for inflicting such an atrocity upon the Palestinians. These groups call also upon the Palestinians to admit their crimes against the Israelis, and they often remind the Palestinians that the Jews know what it means to suffer more than any other people in the world and by far, more than the Palestinians, because of their experience in the Holocaust. In short, they say: now is the time for both parties to confess, forgive, forget, and proceed to establish the peace needed and desired by both parties.

4 - Points to be addressed about Deir Yassin:

For the rest of this presentation I will be dealing with three of the points mentioned above. First, I will deal with the numbers of those killed at Deir Yassin and explain how and why the confusion around the numbers arose. Then, I will try to answer the question of whether Deir Yassin actually formed an immediate threat to the Israeli settlements. Third, I will discuss the issue of whether there was a massacre committed at Deir Yassin.

4.1 The Issue of the numbers in the Deir Yassin Massacre:

Until very recently all those who dealt with Deir Yassin, including the most careful researchers quoted the number of those killed at Deir Yassin as ranging between 240 and 254. Many aspects of the Deir Yassin massacre were considered controversial, but the figures were supposed to be solidly established.

In 1984 I took over the Research Center at Birzeit University and brought with me to the center a project which I called "The Palestinian Destroyed Villages Project". My idea was to write an ethnographic monograph about each of the Palestinian villages which were evacuated and later destroyed by the Israelis. Being an anthropologist by training, I had in mind to reconstruct and portray what life in these villages was like during the 30’s and 40’s of this century. The number of such villages proved to be too large, around 420 of them, and the project proved to be too ambitious to be completed. We did, however, manage to produce about 15 monographs. What concerns us here is that one of the villages we worked on was Deir Yassin. Naturally, during the interviews we collected information about the massacre, and we could not help but notice that the figures we came across were quite different from those used in the literature. The people of Deir Yassin themselves talked about figures of about one hundred. We decided to investigate this matter, and the way we went about it was by checking four different lists of the martyrs (shuhada) of Deir Yassin against each other. One of the lists came from the April 12, 1948, issue of the Palestinian newspaper, Ad-Difa’. The second list came from a book by the Palestinian historian Aref el-Aref. The third list was collected for us by a son of Deir Yassin who was then teaching high school in Amman, and who collected the list from the Deir Yassin people living in Jordan. And the fourth list we collected our selves from the Deir Yassin people living in the West Bank. We also drew genealogical charts of all the clans of Deir Yassin in order to check the names against the charts. To our surprise none of the four lists went beyond 85 names, and we were able to identity and confirm a total of 107 separate names. We published our figures in the monograph on Deir Yassin which came out in 1986.

Up to the time the recent controversy flared up early 1998 no one paid any attention to the figures in our monograph. No one bothered to question, deny, or confirm these figures.

Recently I received a pamphlet published in 1994 by the Organization of Deir Yassin People in Jordan. The author, Mahfuth Sammur, who had participated in the fighting in Deir Yassin in 1948, gives the names and ages of 99 people who, he strongly insists, were the only ones killed in the Deir Yassin Massacre. A few weeks back Walid el-Khalidy published a series of articles on Deir Yassin Massacre in the Arabic newspaper "Al-Hayat" which comes out in London. The articles appeared few days later in "Al-Ayyam" newspaper in Ramallah. Al-Khalidy gives the round figure of one hundred. It is quite possible that the difference between the figure we gave in 1986 and the last two figures is explainable by the fact that we included in our list the names of those who died shortly after the massacre as a result of injuries sustained during the massacre.

If the actual number was around one hundred, which I believe all the available evidence supports, then the figures of 240-254 were lies invented and perpetrated by someone for some purpose. Where did these figures originate? Who invented them ? And what was the purpose?

Many Zionists would probably say, and they actually do, that it was the Arabs who exaggerated the figures in order to make the Jews look bad and to induce the Arab countries to come to their assistance. But the truth of the matter is that the Arabs had nothing at all to do with those figures. Actually, the figure 240 was heard for the first time from the BBC in a broadcast on the evening of Friday the 9th of April, that is, the same evening of the massacre. Also, it appeared in writing in the New York Times on the 10th and in the Hebrew newspapers in Palestine, the morning of Sunday the 11th. The figure 254 appeared first in the New York Times of April 13. The BBC, The New York Times, and the Hebrew newspapers got their figures from Mordechai Ra’nan the Commander of the Etzel in Jerusalem at a news conference which he held in Givat Shauul at 7 o’clock in the evening of the 9th of April shortly after the massacre had ended. As for the figure 250 which appeared in the Hebrew newspapers two days after the figure 240, and the figure 254 which appeared in the New York Times, my guess is that it came from adding figures which appeared in a news item in the Jewish paper, The Palestine Post, of April 11 which mentioned that there were 15 critically injured people from Deir Yassin, 10 of whom were brought to the Government Hospital in Jerusalem. This may turn out to have a sensational story behind it, but it is premature to talk about it yet; it needs further investigation.

The Palestinian and Arab news media have used the figure 250 almost exclusively, starting Monday, April 12 ,1948. They had taken that figure the day before when Hussain Fakhry el-Khalidy, the Secretary General of the Higher Arab Council held a news conference and made an announcement to that effect. Khalidi, in turn, had gotten the figure that afternoon from Jack de Reynier, the representative of the Red Cross in Jerusalem who had just returned from his first visit to Deir Yassin after the massacre. De Reynier told Khalidy that he (Reynier) was informed by the Etzel that they had killed about 250 people from Deir Yassin, including many women and children.

The Arabs accepted the figure given by the Etzel without any questioning and repeated it many times in their news media, as did the Jews and most other countries all over the world, and as any people would have done. Clearly, the figures 240, 250, and 254 originated with the "Lehi" and the "Etzel" gangs, who were the only people in position to know the facts. They were the ones who inflated the figures. But, what interest did these two gangs have in inflating the number of their victims?

It seems that the massacre itself was intended to carry two messages, one for the Arabs and the other for the Jewish public. The inflation of the figures was simply to maximize these messages. The massacre and the exaggeration in the horrors of the massacre were a message to the Arabs to induce them to leave the country.

Killing and terrorizing Arabs to induce them to leave had been intensified since late ‘47. Now, in April there was a greater sense of urgency to empty the Arab villages around Jerusalem for two reasons; first, in order to open up the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and second, to liberate Jerusalem before the middle of May, the date set for the departure of the Mandate Authorities and the beginning of the implementation of the Partition Plan, according to which Jerusalem was intended to be an international city. Creating a state of panic among the Arabs around Jerusalem was a main purpose behind the massacre itself and behind the exaggeration in both the figures and the atrocities committed in the massacre.

In a sense, the message to the Arabs was intended to impress on them the Jewish definition of the nature of the coming war: To all Arabs in Palestine, men, women, old people, children, and infants, even those still in their mothers bellies, leave the country before we get to you, if you are caught you will be slaughtered, without mercy.

The message sent to the Jewish public, especially those in the Jerusalem area, was concerned with the struggle between the three Zionist gangs, the Haganah on one side, and the Etzel and Lehi on the other, over political influence and popularity with the Jewish public.

The Haganah was gradually emerging as the official arm of the Jewish Agency, dominated by the Labor party, who hoped to keep the rightest groups out of the coming Israeli government. The Haganah had started the Nachshon operation intended to eliminate all Arab villages in the area between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and had reached Qastal, the closest Arab village to the west of Deir Yassin and had loomed as the savior of the Jewish people in Jerusalem.

Popularity and political influence with the Jewish population was then, as is still the case to day, won by showing who can kill more Arabs or drive more out of the country, and that was the idea behind the massacre itself and behind the exaggeration of the massacre.

4.2 The issue of whether Deir Yassin formed a threat. The two gangs which carried out the main part of the massacre, later tried to justify, or at least explain these deeds by portraying Deir Yassin as a heavily armed and fortified fortress which occasionally attacked, and continuously threatened, the neighboring settlements and the Jewish convoys on the nearby highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

To Zionist settlers then, as it is now, the Arabs of what they called "Eretz Yisrael" were not considered human; they were looked upon as an environmental nuisance which delayed the process of settling the country and cultivating the land. Values and ethics respected among human beings were not extended to the Arabs of Mandate Palestine. One single principle applied to them, namely, that Zionist settlers wanted to acquire land without Arabs on it. That was the goal they pursued; that is the goal they pursue today. That is what the expression now in use, "autonomy for the people but not for the land" actually means. That end " land without Arabs" justified then, and still justifies today, every possible means. No ethical or moral constraints are relevant when it comes to that end. What those gangs said about Deir Yassin, should not, then, be taken into account when looking for the truth. There are, and there always were, highly ethical and professional, Israeli and non-Israeli, historians and social scientists who documented the plight of the Palestinians during the British Mandate days, and since. To these we should turn in order to know the facts, not to the Zionists or Israeli political propaganda machines.

Going back to our topic: Deir Yassin was indeed located on top of a high hill, which overlooked neighboring Jewish settlements, and which was less than 2 kilometers from the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway. Potentially, therefore, Deir Yassin could have been a dangerous threat to the surrounding settlements and Jewish West Jerusalem. That is without entering into the question of why and how the settlements came to be there.

However, on the opposite side of the argument, we have the following points, which I cannot elaborate on very much in this paper:

1. In terms of its location, Deir Yassin was surrounded by six different Jewish settlements, which isolated it completely from the rest of the world. And the only road connecting it with Jerusalem passed right in the middle of the neighboring Givat Shaul settlement. Another settlement "Motza" extended between Deir Yassin and the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Highway.
2. The people of Deir Yassin realized how tenuous their situation was and tried to maintain good relations with the neighboring settlements. Different Israeli historians described the people of Deir Yassin as "passive", "peaceful", and "non-belligerent". There is no record whatsoever of the people of Deir Yassin ever having attacked a Jewish settlement or a Jewish convoy. The village never had any of the Arab irregular militia men stationed in it. Simha Flapan says that Deir Yassin had had a non-aggression agreement with the Jewish settlements since 1942, and we do know for sure that Deir Yassin held two non-aggression agreements during the first two months of 1948, one between the elders of Deir Yassin and those of Givat Shaul and the other between the village mukhtar and the Haganah commander in Jerusalem.
3. Benny Morris says that the massacre was not planned and was carried out in hot blood because the attackers found the going together than they expected. Members of the gangs themselves claimed that the village put up strong resistance and that those who got killed were either fighters or women and children who happened to get in the line of their fire.

   It is true that after the first push they were stalled at the edge of the village. The reasons were that they simply did not expect any resistance at all and therefore they brought with them very little ammunitions which ran out very early. Also the members of the two gangs were not used nor trained for that kind of fighting. As Collins and Lapierre put it, in their 1972 book "O! Jerusalem": "No one seemed to have imagined it might be considerably more difficult to conquer a resisting village than it was to toss a bomb into an unarmed crowd waiting for a bus". Actually the members of the two gangs thought seriously of withdrawing after they ran out of ammunition, but then three Haganah armored cars arrived, they brought more ammunitions quieted down the few points of resistance, took the injured and withdrew. From then on the going was easy.

4. If Deir Yassin was not fortified, was not belligerent, posed no threat to its neighboring settlements, and never attacked Jewish convoys, why then was it selected for the massacre? The Haganah had mounted its Nachshon campaign a few days before, and the campaign was doing very well and going strong. The Haganah had conquered most of the villages along Bab el-Wad, the road to Jerusalem, and were well on their way to becoming the liberators of Jewish Jerusalem. The competition was clearly going in favor of the Haganah and against the Etzel and Lehi. The Etzel and Lehi did not have the money, the arms or the manpower to mount a campaign similar to Nachshon. To stay in the competition they needed and easy an dramatic victory in or around Jerusalem. Such a victory was guaranteed in Deir Yassin because of its small size (about 750 people), its proximity to Jerusalem, its accessibility through the Jewish settlement of Givat Shaul, its reputation as peaceful and non-belligerent, and its weakness as manifested by holding two non-aggression agreements with its Jewish neighbors. To all that an economic factor was added; the fighters of the two gangs were badly in need of food supplies, and Deir Yassin was a prosperous village.

4.3 The 3rd Issue: Was there a massacre committed at Deir Yassin?

The first thing needed here is a definition or criterion of what a massacre is. For our purpose a massacre can be defined as the deliberate killing of captive civilians and the deliberate killing of soldiers or fighters after having surrendered, having been disarmed, and having ceased to form a threat to the capturing forces.

Does such a definition allow us to call Deir Yassin a massacre? What would be the evidence and the justification for that ?

We do have some evidence coming from statements made by the commanders and the leaders of the Etzel and Lehi themselves in which they hinted about committing atrocities against the people of Deir Yassin in addition to statements about planing ahead of time to teach the Arabs a lesson and to scare them in order to leave the country. But it would not be fair to use this as evidence because we considered them totally unethical or at least a-ethical, and because their statements about Deir Yassin were guided by the end they wanted to achieve rather than by the facts.

We have also the condemnations coming from mainstream Zionist authorities, including the Haganah, the Jewish Agency and from Ben -Gurion himself. But these statements are not acceptable evidence either for several reasons, one of which is that the Haganah, the Jewish Agency, and Ben-Gurion in particular were not, when it came to issues connected with the Arabs, anymore ethical than the leaders of the Etzel and the Lehi. Politically they were motivated to condemn their rivals and to distance themselves from the act in order not to harm their image in world opinion, especially that they were considered then as the official government of the Jews in Palestine. I

n addition, their strong condemnations of the massacre, and their elaboration of the atrocities committed by the Etzel and the Lehi reek of the same intentions as the ones they were condemning namely, the desire to horrify the Arabs to make them leave and in fact to strengthen the ugly and criminal image of the Etzel and Lehi in order to be able to use them in scaring the Arabs. In a sense the condemnations were telling the Arabs: "You know what these guys are capable of doing if we let them loose."

Still there are at least three types of admissible evidence: testimonies of individual observers, testimonies of surviving victims, and circumstantial evidence.

First, in terms of eye witness observers we have the testimony of Colonel Me’ir Pa’il who was then in the Haganah Intelligence service and was sent as an observer and evaluator of the performance of the Etzel and Lehi in order to determine their suitability for inclusion within the Israeli army when the state comes.

Although Pa’il was with the Haganah, his testimony, I believe is quite objective because it did not come within the context of a propaganda campaign, but as a written report to his superiors about his mission, or in the form of journal articles which came when there were no more reasons to lie about Deir Yassin. The other eyewitness observer was the representative of the Red Cross who was allowed on the scene only on the morning of Sunday, the 11th of April, that is, two days after the massacre.

I cannot go into this in detail but from the two testimonies together we can conclude that:

1. The massacre was premeditated, there was a pre-plan to kill the men of the village and any individual who comes in their way whether woman, child or old person.
2. The killing was mostly in cold blood and from a short distance, but there was also killing, in hot blood, of any thing that moved.
3. Whole families were taken out of their homes and then shot.
4. Men, women and children were lined up by a wall and shot.
5. Men, women and children were loaded into trucks and paraded through the streets of Jerusalem, that men were returned to the village, shot, their bodies dumped in a stone quarry and burned, and that some of the women and children were shot and others were sent by trucks to East Jerusalem.
6. Several school girls were raped and then killed, and other atrocities were committed.
7. After the main massacre, a process of "cleaning up" was carried out. this meant two things: finding any individuals still hiding in the houses and killing them, and finding those who were wounded but still alive and killing them, and in this case the killing was done with knifes and daggers.

Here we should only mention that the Etzel & Lehi did pass the exam and were shortly after incorporated in the mainstream Israeli Army, and later produced at least two prime ministers: Begin and Shamir .As for the testimonies of Deir Yassin people who survived the massacre, we have interviewed a large number of witnesses from Deir Yassin and their testimonies generally confirm the points mentioned above. We should, however, remember that those who witnessed more of what happened, by definition, did not survive to tell about it.

I should only mention that two points were especially noticeable in these testimonies. The invaders seemed especially fond of taking children and infants from their mothers’ arms, killing them, and sending the mothers away. The other point is that they were also fond of shooting pregnant women in the stomach from a short distance.

On the side of circumstantial evidence there are several hints about each of which there is no disagreement and which when brought together make up solid evidence to the effect that the killing took place mostly among unarmed civilians after having been captured. Some of those points were previously mentioned in this paper. Here is a summary of some of these hints and indications:

1. The majority of those killed were women, children, and old men. Many of the young able bodied men must have fled the village. The percentage of women, children, old men and handicapped, in the list we identified is about 70%.
2. A very small number of arms were found in the village after it was captured.
3. None of those killed were found with arms in their hands.
4. The number of Jewish casualties was very small; only 4 were killed and about 40 were wounded.
5. It is rather surprising that the ratio of the injured to those killed among the Jews was about ten to one, but no wounded people were found alive among the very large number of Arab casualties. There was one single ten year old child. Jack de Reynier, saw a little foot twitching in a pile of dead bodies. The child was still alive and was taken back to Arab Jerusalem.

Here I leave it up to each one of the readers to decide whether Deir Yassin was a massacre or not.

5. Conclusion:

To end this paper I would like to mention that the individual details or events, vicious and inhumane as they may have been, none of them, neither Deir Yassin, which many would want us to believe was the one unique mistake of the Zionist regime, nor any of the several scores of similar massacres, not even all of these together, make up the major crime against the Palestinian people. The major crime lies, rather, in the original sin in which Israel was conceived and which was committed by the founding fathers of the Zionist Movement who formulated an agenda requiring the colonization of a densely populated country and the elimination of its population. That agenda declared Palestine "A land without people" desperately waiting for " a people without land". In order to justify the first part of that lie, they had to adopt the view that Palestinians were simply an environmental nuisance which had to be eliminated. They destroyed a whole people, killed some and dispersed others, confiscated their lands, destroyed their villages and towns, occupied their homes, used their animals, utilized their cooking utensils, and many times even ate the meals they had prepared for their children. To justify the second part of the slogan, i.e. " people without land" they had to adopt the racist nationalism which had emerged only shortly before, in Europe, the Organic Nationalism of the nation-state which created an organic and inherent unity between the superior racial blood and the sacred earth of the fatherland; the nationalism which was not unique to Germany, but which reached its ultimate heights in Nazi Germany under Hitler. In the case of Zionism the two religious myths, the myth of the Chosen People and the myth of the Promised Land were added to further cement the blood-land combination, to create one of the most racist and exclusivist entities in the history of man.

As a result the Palestinians were, all of a sudden, faced with a situation, which, had it not been so serious and so tragic, could have been easily seen as humorous. A group of European colonialists appearing all of a sudden at the doorsteps of Palestinian homes and demanding that the inhabitants should leave everything in its place and move out of the country because these colonialists have come back to claim the homes and lands their ancestors had left behind a short time before - no more than 3000 years. And when the Palestinians expressed the opinion that they did not find the Zionist joke very funny and that they were willing to fight to defend their homes and their lives, they were called "enemies" and "terrorists" and consequently attacked, massacred, or driven out of the country. A hint as to why European Jews needed, toward the end of the last century, to turn to such chauvinist and racist ideology as Zionism turned out to be, may be found in a short quote recorded by Tom Segev in his 1986 book titled "The First Israelis". (P.90). The quote was taken from a speech in the Knesset by Dr. Zerah Warhaftig, in the course of a debate about the Palestinian Absentees’ property, and in particular about the uses to be made of the lands and homes of Deir Yassin. Dr. Warhaftig said

"....Who better than us, a people without land, who for so many generations could not call even a few feet of land its own, can know and must know how t appreciate land. The word for man in Hebrew (Adam) is derived from the Hebrew word for land (Adamah). Our sages said, "A man without land is not a man. "Only now that we have a state and a land of our own, can we be called both a nation and men.".

To the Zionist mind it does not seem to matter that the Palestinians, as a result, were turned into less than men according to this logic. Nor does it seem to matter to the Zionists that the land which was supposed to return them into men was stolen land and therefor may not do the job.

It is quite possible that all the toughness, aggressiveness, and ruggedness which the Israeli male tries to show is a facade, which he tries to put on, as a result of not being so sure that obtaining the land by defeating unarmed Palestinian peasants is enough to make up for all the dehumanization and the emasculation inflected upon him, over the years, in the ghettos and concentration camps of Europe. I believe that the Israeli male would feel a lot more manly and more convincing to himself and to others, had he been able to commit a massacre in Berlin or in Moscow, rather than in a small unarmed village like Deir Yassin. It is rather sad that the Zionists saw fit to take financial and military compensations from those who inflected the emasculation and the dehumanization on them in Europe, and to displace their anger and hostility to the only people in the world among whom Jews had been able to live and experience themselves as full men and full human beings, namely, the Moslem-Arab people.