Countering An Arab Propaganda Claim

It is difficult at times to counter Arab falsification of history.  Other times, a bit of research will solve the difficulty.

For example, here, where it is claimed:

The Deir Yassin massacre followed in 1948. A join contingent, containing the Tsel, Irgun, and Haganah, assaulted the 600-person village near Jerusalem. A cistern alone was found to contain 150 mutilating bodies and the full death toll remains unknown. Irgun leader Menachem Begin falsified the Red Cross’s reports, ironically labelling it the fabrication by anti-Semites. [3]

We'll ignore the misspelling of Etzel. Or whether actually 150 bodies, mutilated (all?), were found (Bir Zeit University claims maybe 110 were killed*). Well, I went to the source quoted.

There, on page 297, I found this:

How could he falsify the reports of the Red Cross? Did the writer mean he misrepresented them? Or that he quoted from them what they did not contain?

So I went to Begin's memoir as Commander of the Irgun, The Revolt, and on page 164 I found this footnote:

and as I presumed, Begin insisted not that the battle did not took place but that there was no "massacre". The charge of a "massacre" is a lie. That claim is correct as Eliezer Tauber's new Hebrew-language book details (see here). He also used "Jew-haters", not "anti-Semites" if we are to be exact in quoting someone.

And he certainly did not "falsify" the Red Cross reports. In fact, "Red Cross reports" are not mentioned at all by Begin.

Were those reports false? That is another issue.

They claimed that there was "great savagery"; that "Woman and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing"; that "survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities"; and that those "who were taken prisoner were treated with degrading brutality".

Those claims are false.

______________

*
Here:

In 1987, the Research and Documentation Center of Bir Zeit University, a prominent Arab university in the territory now controlled by the Palestinian Authority, published a comprehensive study of the history of Deir Yassin, as part of its "Destroyed Palestinian Villages Documentation Project." The Center's findings concerning Deir Yassin were published, in Arabic only, as the fourth booklet in its "Destroyed Arab Villages Series." The purpose of the project, according to its directors, is "to gather information from persons who lived in these villages and were directly familiar with them, and then to compare these reports and publish them in order to preserve for future generations the special identity and particular characteristics of each village."88 The Bir Zeit study's description of the 1948 battle of Deir Yassin began with the hyperbole typical of many accounts of the event, calling it "a massacre the likes of which history has rarely known."89 But unlike the authors of any other previous study of Deir Yassin, the Bir Zeit researchers tracked down the surviving Arab eyewitness to the attack and personally interviewed each of them. "For the most part, we have gathered the information in this monograph during the months of February-May 1985 from Deir Yassin natives living in the Ramallah region, who were extremely cooperative," the Bir Zeit authors explained, listing by name twelve former Deir Yassin residents whom they had interviewed concerning the battle. The study continued: "The [historical] sources which discuss the Deir Yassin massacre unanimously agree that number of victims ranges between 250-254; however, when we examined the names which appear in the various sources, we became absolutely convinced that the number of those killed does not exceed 120, and that the groups which carried out the massacre exaggerated the numbers in order to frighten Palestinian residents into leaving their villages and cities without resistance."90 The authors concluded: "Below is a list of the names and ages of those killed at Deir Yassin in the massacre which took place on April 9, 1948, which was compiled by us on the basis of the testimony of Deir Yassin natives. We have invested great effort in checking it and in making certain of each name on it, such that we can say, with no hesitation, that it is the most accurate list of its type until today." A list of 107 people killed and twelve wounded followed.91 

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