Published in the Socialist Worker

11 April 2002

By Michael Rosen

One of the tricks played by the news media is to present events as if they can be explained by pictures of gun battles and two-minute interviews with spokespeople. Nine times out of ten this suits the oppressor not the oppressed as it shows the resistance of the oppressed as terrorism and the actions of the oppressor as peace-keeping. Perhaps newsreaders should wear badges on their foreheads saying: You are now entering a History-free Zone. Israel's greatest propaganda victory of the last fifty years has been to present itself as a peace-loving democracy fighting to secure a haven for the persecuted Jews of the world.

This overlooks two very awkward facts: 1) the best place to have been a Jew for the last fifty years is as far away from Israel as you can get. 2) the origins, the history and the present-day story of Israel is a terrible narrative of persecution, exploitation, transfer and mass murder of the Palestinian people. The first point is self-evident. To uncover all the details of the second involves meticulous research, hours of hard work and brilliant campaigning skills. I am hugely proud to have a role in the event known as Deir Yassin Remembered.

This last weekend, for the second year, a group of people came together to remember the massacre, enforced evacuation and demolition of the Palestinian village, Deir Yassin. These are the events we commemorate: in the morning of Friday, April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun, (headed by Menachem Begin, later to be Prime Minister of Israel), and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, with its 750 residents. By noon over 100 people, half of them women and children, had been systematically murdered. Twenty-five male villagers were loaded into trucks, paraded through Jerusalem, and then taken to a quarry and shot dead. The remaining residents were driven to Arab East Jerusalem. A final body count of 254 was reported by The New York Times on April 13, one day after they were finally buried.

Begin knew what it was for:

Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of "Irgun butchery," were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede. The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.

Deir Yassin was then wiped off the map. By September, Jewish immigrants were settled there. The centre of the village was renamed and as Jerusalem expanded, the land of Deir Yassin became part of the city. The massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin is one of the most significant events in 20th-century Palestinian and Israeli history. This is not because of its size or its brutality, but because it stands as an early warning of a calculated depopulation of over 400 Arab villages and cities and the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian inhabitants.

We should have forgotten Deir Yassin. That was the plan. But we haven't.

The atmosphere on Sunday night, I sensed, was of course grieving but it was also passionate and angry. I saw there many of the people who have struggled for years to make the history of the Palestinians heard in this country - people who are yelled at and insulted on the Today programme and Newsnight, while deferential questions are put to the thugs who run Israel. But even more heartening was to see there many people discovering for the first time the truth about the founding of the Zionist state. Alongside the slogan They shall not pass, we always have to add: We shall not forget.