Wilson Doesn't Understand What Deir Yassin Was About

Jonathan Wilson published a review of Hillel Halkin's book on the NILI group and Zichron Yaakov. And he found the need, when referring to the matter of murder in mandated Palestine, to write "Jews were hacked to pieces in Hebron and Arabs massacred in Deir Yessin".

In the first instance, the Jews slaughtered in Hebron in 1929 were an innocent civilian population, many of them non-Zionists of the ultra-orthodox Hareidi community, who had made no menacing moves against their Arab neighbors for decades. The Arabs killed in Deir Yassin in 1948 recently had enjoined the aggressive war against the as-yet-not born state of Israel as they had done in riots of 1920, 1929 and 1938. They directed sniper fire at the Jewish neighborhood of Bet HaKerem but five days before the attack on their own village which had become a base for Arab irregulars from Iraq as well as local Arab bands.

There was no massacre at Deir Yassin.

There was house-to-house combat, which was not the most professional military operation ever conducted, which caused, something usually overlooked, the attacking Jewish force 5 dead and over 40 wounded. A loudspeaker had been brought in to warn the residents to leave and most did, via the Ein Kerem route. Have you ever heard of a massacre in which its victims were warned to flee by a loudspeaker?

Wild-eyed estimates of 250 dead were corrected by Arab sources by the early 1980s as no more than 110. Of these, the only claim of a "massacre" were supposedly less than 20 Arabs who were led off to a stone quarry, the story goes, and shot there.

The BBC documentary "The Fifty Years War, Israel and the Arabs", confirms that the rumors of a massacre were initiated by Arab propagandists who are named. One week later, over seventy Jews in a convoy of Hadassah Hospital medical staff were slaughterd. Now, that indeed was a massacre.

Wilson, whose earlier novel "A Palestine Affair", unsuccessfully mixed history and fiction, seems to continue a pattern of misinformation.