Zionists and Rape: the Deir Yassin Massacre and its Deniers

Deir Yassin deniers insist the massacre at the village of Deir Yassin was only a military action where almost everyone killed was an enemy soldier and no rapes occurred. But after the Zionist militias, the Irgun (IZL) and Lehi (LHI, aka the Stern Gang), fought side-by-side against the village’s defenders, the Jerusalem head of Shai, the Zionist intelligence agency, wrote,

LHI members tell of the barbaric behavior of the IZL toward the prisoners and the dead. They also relate that the IZL men raped a number of Arab girls and murdered them afterward (we don’t know if this is true)

No one lightly accuses their comrades-in-arms of rape. Deniers insist Palestinian stories about rape were propaganda, but they cannot explain why Lehi members would lie about the Irgun. If the Lehi members were lying, the most plausible reason is they also raped and wanted to put the blame on their allies. If no rapes occurred, why would Lehi members invent a charge that hurt the Zionist cause?

The evidence may lie in Israeli military archives that are still classified after seventy-five years. Until those records are made public, we can only assume they stay hidden because they would hurt Israel’s image in the world.

This is what most historians believe:

On April 9, 1948, the primary Zionist militia, Haganah, gave its approval to Irgun and Lehi for an attack on Deir Yassin, a village of about 600 people near Jerusalem. A letter to the New York Times signed by famous American Jews including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein shows what everyone originally thought about that day:

A shocking example was [Irgun’s] behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9, terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants — 240 men, women and children — and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.

Historians now say the numbers were exaggerated — current estimates are 107 to 117 villagers were killed and 12 to 50 villagers were wounded. Four members of the Zionist militias were killed by the village’s defenders, a fifth was killed by friendly fire, and a dozen were wounded.

The kill ratio alone should silence deniers. In battle, the number killed on one side is rarely 25 times greater than the number killed on the other, and the number of killed is always less than the number wounded. That pattern is reversed in massacres.

Haganah intelligence officer Mordechai Gichon arrived shortly after the killing and concluded there had been no ordinary battle. He said,

…it looked a bit like a pogrom. If you’re occupying an army position — it’s not a pogrom, even if a hundred people are killed. But if you are coming into a civilian locale and dead people are scattered around in it — then it looks like a pogrom. When the Cossacks burst into Jewish neighborhoods, then that should have looked something like this. There was a feeling of considerable slaughter and it was hard for me to explain it to myself as having been done in self-defense. My impression was more of a massacre than anything else. If it is a matter of killing innocent civilians, then it can be called a massacre.

Yehoshua Gorodenchik, the Irgun physician, testified that they had committed the war crime of killing prisoners:

We had prisoners, and before the retreat we decided to liquidate them. We also liquidated the wounded, as anyway we could not give them first aid. In one place, about eighty Arab prisoners were killed after some of them had opened fire and killed one of the people who came to give them first aid. Arabs who dressed up as Arab women were also found, and so they started to shoot the women also who did not hurry to the area where the prisoners were concentrated.

Yehuda Feder, a Lehi fighter, wrote a letter confessing to looting and killing prisoners:

In the village I killed an armed Arab man and two Arab girls of 16 or 17 who were helping the Arab who was shooting. I stood them against a wall and blasted them with two rounds from the Tommy gun. … We confiscated a lot of money and silver and gold jewelry fell into our hands. … This was a really tremendous operation and it is with reason that the left is vilifying us again.

Yair Tsaban, a member of the Youth Brigades sent to bury corpses at Deir Yassin, said,

The rationale was that the Red Cross was liable to show up at any moment and it was necessary to blur the traces [of the killings] because publication of pictures and testimonies about what had happened in the village would be very damaging to the image of our War of Independence. I saw a fair number of corpses. I don’t remember encountering the corpse of a fighting man. Not at all. I remember mostly women and old men. An old man and a woman, sitting in the corner of a room with their faces to the wall, and they are shot in the back. That cannot have been in the heat of battle. No way.

Shai reported:

Some of the women and children were taken prisoner by the Lehi and transferred to Sheik Bader [Lehi’s headquarter in Jerusalem]. Among the prisoners were a young woman and a baby. The camp guards killed the baby before the mother’s eyes. After she fainted they killed her too.

After interviewing Deir Yassin survivors who had been taken to the village of Silwan, Richard Catling of the British Palestine Police Force wrote:

On 14th April at 10 a.m. I visited Silwan village accompanied by a doctor and a nurse from the Government Hospital in Jerusalem and a member of the Arab Women’s Union. We visited many houses in this village in which approximately some two to three hundred people from Deir Yassin village are housed. I interviewed many of the women folk in order to glean some information on any atrocities committed in Deir Yassin but the majority of those women are very shy and reluctant to relate their experiences especially in matters concerning sexual assault and they need great coaxing before they will divulge any information. The recording of statements is hampered also by the hysterical state of the women who often break down many times whilst the statement is being recorded. There is, however, no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young schoolgirls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested. One story is current concerning a case in which a young girl was literally torn in two. Many infants were also butchered and killed. I also saw one old woman who gave her age as one hundred and four who had been severely beaten about the head with rifle butts. Women had bracelets torn from their arms and rings from their fingers and parts of some of the women’s ears were severed in order to remove earrings.

Though the charges against Lehi and Irgun are damning, not all are necessarily true. In The Massacre That Never Was?, Eliezer Tauber insists the reports of rape were Arab propaganda that misfired:

Ayish Zeidan, who was a teenager living in Deir Yassin in 1948, told a reporter 50 years later: “I believe that most of those who were killed were among the fighters and the women and children who helped the fighters.” As for the rape accusation, Zeidan insisted: “This is not true.”

Careful not to fight propaganda with more propaganda, Tauber acknowledges that the Lehi and Irgun victors looted the village.

…Al-Khalidi coached Deir Yassin’s refugees, saying: “We want you to say that the Jews slaughtered people, committed atrocities, raped and stole gold.” Some refugees obliged, while others resented the attempt to humiliate Deir Yassin’s women.

The rape libel quickly backfired.

“We did not understand the mentality of our own Palestinian people,” the Arabic editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, Hazim Nusayba, admitted. The rape allegations touched “a raw nerve in the Palestinian psyche.” Refusing to sacrifice their women’s honor for land, most Arab men fled. “This turned out to be the highest, most expensive mistake that we made,” Nusayba realized.

“We are not afraid of death,” one mukhtar (a village leader) exclaimed, “but we will not accept that our women be raped.” “The other villages started to leave one after the other, without resistance, out of fear and apprehension of another similar massacre,” Yunus Radwan, another Deir Yassin refugee, wrote five years later. It happened “because of a mistake committed by our leaders and those responsible for the spreading of rumors who overstated the crimes of the Jews.” An estimated 60,000 Arabs in Palestine fled their homes before April 9. More than 350,000 would flee in the ensuing five weeks. Adil Yahya, a Palestinian researcher who interviewed many refugees in the late 1990s, concluded: “The Deir Yassin affair was the main cause for the 1948 exodus.”

Deniers are right that fear of rape caused many Muslims to flee, but they fail to question the testimony of those who say there were no rapes at Deir Yassin. Some villagers may have believed there were no rapes because they did not see any, or they may be lying to protect the reputation of women who were raped.

Deniers admit that rape created an intolerable stigma for Muslim victims. Did the women of Deir Yassin hate Jews so much after the slaughter at their village that they were willing to lie and carry that stigma for the rest of their lives? Catling’s comment argues that the women were telling the truth: “the majority of those women are very shy and reluctant to relate their experiences especially in matters concerning sexual assault and they need great coaxing before they will divulge any information.”

There’s yet another reason to believe the atrocities at Deir Yassin included rape. It fits a common pattern in war. Consider the massacre at the Vietnamese village of My Lai:

American forces killed hundreds of old men, women and children. They raped and tortured. They razed the village. When Haeberle’s shocking photographs of their atrocities were published — more than a year later — the pictures laid bare an appalling truth: American “boys” were as capable of unbridled savagery as any soldiers, anywhere.

When fighters believe civilians are the enemy, murder and rape often follow. If you oppose rape in war, there is one solution: make a just peace.

Postscript: Because partisans read maliciously, I will say what should not need to be said: rape is one of the worst things that humans do. Explaining it is not excusing it; explaining it is the first step to ending it. Zionists do not rape more than any other fighters do. Some argue Zionists rape less, a claim that I will examine in my next post.

Recommended: THE 1948 MASSACRE AT DEIR YASSIN REVISITED