Deir Yassin: The massacre that probably (very likely) was
In a recent book, The Massacre That Never War: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, by the Israeli historian, Eliezer Tauber, we learn that the Deir Yassin massacre, which took place on the 9th of April 1948, was not a massacre at all. Instead, it was a justifiable military assault, if ill-led and manned by poorly trained fighters of the Irgun and Lehi, which resulted in many unfortunate civilian casualties.
This kind of account is not new, it mirrors the general arguments that can be found in former Irgun leader and later Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin’s, The Revolt (1951)—Tauber makes much the same argument but with significantly more detail drawn from survivor and attacker accounts. There in lies the usefulness of the book, whether one agrees with its conclusion or not.
Tauber contends that the Jewish fighters attacked the villages with 120 men and faced stiff resistance from around 70 to 80 defenders. The attackers
lacked training in both urban and open area combat, and were definitely inexperienced in a [sic] house-to-house fighting. They had never participated in a full-scale battle, or even in a field operation. They had no experience in the conquest of populated areas and did not have the slightest idea how to conquer an Arab village efficiently.
As such, according to Tauber, the tactics used by the Irgun and Lehi, when faced with a house, would use breaching charges to gain ingress, throw explosives or grenades into the home, make entry and indiscriminately spray all the inhabitants with bullets (p. 96). This was the cause of the majority of villager casualties — an unfortunate but necessary tactic in a brutal, bloody battle which preserved Jewish lives. Civilians killed in this way were unfortunate collateral damage. There was one instance in which a soldier murdered a handful of civilians in the heat of the moment, but it was no massacre — certainly not the calamity that propaganda from all sides concerned (Jewish, Arab and British, each for their own purposes) has made Deir Yassin a keystone of Palestinian Nationalism.
Unsurprisingly, this assessment stands in contrast to much of the historiography. Benny Morris, in his study of the First Arab-Israeli War, 1948, for instance, describes it as ‘not much of a battle’ (Kindle Location: 1853). In summary of Morris wrote,
It quickly emerged that the fighting had been accompanied, and followed, by atrocities. In part, these were apparently triggered by the unexpectedly strong resistance and by the (relatively) high casualties suffered by the attacking force. Some militiamen and unarmed civilians were shot on the spot. A few villagers may have been trucked back to Jerusalem and then taken back to Deir Yassin and executed; a group of male prisoners were shot in a nearby quarry; several of those captured were shot in Sheikh Bader, a temporary LHI [Lehi] base in West Jerusalem. (Kindle: 1869)
It was, according to Yitzhak Levy, a senior intelligence officer in the Haganah, an example of vicious murder which included unconfirmed reports of rape and sexual violence. Yet, in Tauber’s account, very little of this occurred, as noted, in only one instance in his analysis did one of the attackers — unnamed by Tauber — gun-down 11 defenceless villagers in the custody of the attackers (p. 154). He goes on to describe the killing of at least seven, possibly nine, others — including a babe in arms. Thus, by Tauber’s own calculations at least 18 unarmed individuals were killed while in custody. Yet this was not a massacre? This kind of contradiction is never resolved. What we are left with, in the words of Morris, devolves into a ‘semantic problem of what exactly constitutes a “massacre.”’
The first problem Tauber has is the sheer disparity in fatalities. For two sets of fighters, relatively equally matched in numbers, with the attackers ill-prepared and trained and the defenders well drilled and dug in it, the ratio of deaths between attackers and defenders seems near inconceivable. Tauber’s own estimate is that 101 defenders (including civilians) died while the attackers received only four (possibly five) fatalities. Tauber makes much of the villagers training — necessary as it is to present the village as a legitimate military target. ‘During the preceding months,’ he writes, ‘the defenders had trained in field exercises, shooting and first aid, and more than a dozen firing positions had been prepared in the village.’ The resulting battle was a ‘stalemate between the two sides for several hours’. The defenders engaged the attackers ‘from house to house and from street to street’. Such was the ferocity of the defence, ‘About 30 percent of the attackers were hit, most injured but some killed [four].’ (p. 260)
Yet what of the defenders? According to Tauber of the101 villagers killed, some 42% males of fighting age. That however does not suggest that 58% were non-combatants — some teenagers, women and the elderly likely took up arms or assisted the fighters. Yet, according to Tauber’s figures, only 24 fighters were among the dead, meaning that around three quarters of the fatalities were civilians. Meanwhile many ‘heads of families remained alive … It was precisely because they were armed combatants that they had the ability and skills to succeed in escaping.’ (p. 256)
This leads us to an obvious conundrum: the Jewish attackers were ill-trained and inexperienced, but the defenders were trained, entrenched and skilled combatants. Yet for every Jewish fighter who died, six Arab combatants were killed as were 19 civilians. Tauber presents a heavy, pitched battle where Jewish fighters and Palestinian defenders made unfortunate miscalculations which led, thanks to confusion and a lack of training in urban warfare, led to disproportionate civilian casualties. Tauber makes much of the 30% casualty rate — as in wounded rather than fatalities — yet entirely fails to explain away the massive fatality rate among defending combatants. Meanwhile, some 50–70 villagers were also wounded as compared to over 100 fatalities.
There is an easy answer to this. And the whole point of Tauber’s book is to dismiss this easy answer. It is that rather than being trained combatants, the villagers, worried about marauding gangs threatening the village, had armed themselves. Once the attackers stormed the village they were met with stiffer resistance than anticipated. Tauber would have it that the violence and nature of the fighting led to the massive and disproportionate scale of deaths. Undoubtedly he is at least partly right. The other element Tauber rejects, a more obvious solution and supported by considerable eye-witness testimony and indeed admission by perpetrators, and posed by Morris above, was that many were murdered in vengeance, during and after the fighting. This was in reprisal for the unexpectedly heavy resistance the attackers encountered. This is a key plank of Matthew Hogan’s contention that a massacre did take place. ‘Such anomalies’ in casualty figures, he wrote, ‘coupled with copious and authoritative testimony, put to rest any serious questioning of whether there was or was not a massacre at Deir Yassin.’ Consider for a moment the proportion of fatalities during the Civil War to March 1948. According to Benny Morris, the Yishuv had lost approximately 1,000 dead and the Palestinians a similar number (Kindle 1678, see also note 176). In other words, parity. There was no parity at Deir Yassin.
To wave away this problem, Tauber draws heavily on eye-witness testimony, arranged in such a way to support his thesis that the combatants and civilians nearly all died in the battle. The difficulty with this argument is that plenty of testimony also refers to executions. For instance, Yehoshua Gorodenchik, a squad leader, recalled the massacre of 80 Arab prisoners — a reprisal for the killing of a Jewish militant who had attempted to render first aid to one of them. This Tauber dismisses out of hand, on the basis that no Jewish combatant was killed in such a fashion and that the total number of Arabs killed numbered 101 (p. 156).
While it is certainly true that Gorodenchik was certainly mistaken about the details and scale of the killing, it does not follow that he was wrong that the fighters did not slaughter prisoners. Moreover, Tauber repeatedly cites Gorodenchik in his notes as evidence for other points as and when convenient. He also summarily dismisses other allegations from Jewish sources that prisoners had been shot. He also shrugs off the claims of eyewitness survivors because they contradict other testimony. For instance, Tauber makes much of an interview with a Palestinian survivor, Muhammad ‘Ayish Zaydan, in which he denied that women, children, infants in the arms of their mothers, and pregnant women were killed.
‘Q. It is said that they killed women, men, and small children. A. It is all lies. They only killed men. Them women were killed under the debris. The houses crumpled over them. Q. They demolished houses over people? A. Yes, they demolished four or five houses.’ (p. 151).
Yet, according to Tauber’s own statistics, a large number of women and children were killed. Indeed, much of the thrust of Tauber’s book is that the majority of those killed were through the house breaching tactic deployed by the Irgun and Lehi fighters — not by collapsing houses. Eye-witness testimony is therefore useful when it supports the thesis but to be rubbished when it does not. Similarly, as with Gorodenchik, the same individuals written off as supplying inaccurate testimony in one area of the book are frequently used as sources in other parts of the argument. To my mind, Tauber never satisfactorily resolves these contradictions in argument and evidence.
Of course, another way of reading Tauber’s explanation for how the majority died — blasting into a home filled with civilians and combatants alike and killing everyone inside, including over 20 members of a single family — constitutes a massacre on its own terms. The result was, according to his own statistics, that 31% of fatalities were under the age 14 or 61 or over (p. 159).
Tauber also confuses his evidence, asserting that deaths which were plainly executions were in fact sustained in combat. He cites Yehuda Feder who is said to have mentioned ‘that he shot an armed Arab who was shooting at him, and two young girls who assisted the Arab’ (p.365, note 11). In fact, Feder wrote ‘This was the first time in my life that at my hands and before my eyes Arabs fell. 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’. In short, it was an execution. At least two individuals were stood against a wall and shot — a style of execution that Tauber is at pains throughout the book to claim did not happen.
We see a similar — put bluntly, flawed — reading of evidence when it comes to the question of sexual assaults. For instance, he writes that ‘A Jewish doctor, who accompanied the representatives of the red cross to Deir Yassin, searched the houses and was to testify that the saw no evidence of rape. Two Jewish doctors, who came the day after, also confirmed that all the bodies they saw were full clad.’ Yet he also reports that Yitzhak Levy, a senior intelligence officer in the Haganah, that there were reports of rapes ‘we do not know if this is true).’ (165). This, as well as some testimony, is used to dismiss the allegations of rape out of hand and to dismiss the allegations of the historians, Collins and Dominique — authors of O Jerusalem.
So, what evidence did Collins and Dominique (p. 276) bring to the table? Richard C. Catling, Britain’s Assistant Inspector General of the Criminal Investigation Division, wrote a dossier (classified ‘Secret’) composed of three reports penned in the days after, compiling interrogation reports and physical evidence based on accounts from medical staff at the Government Hospital in Jerusalem and one officer who visited the scene. On inspecting the carnage, this officer found a traumatised group of women who reported what happened at their village. He concluded,
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.
How does Tauber resolve this discrepancy in evidence?
[Catling] reported a visit to the village of Silwan, where a large number of villagers from Deir Yassin found refuge. He wanted to interview women about sexual assaults, but, according to him, they were embarrassed, hysterical, and did not want to talk. He therefore concluded that many sexual offenses had undoubtedly been committed, adding that many schoolgirls had been raped and then murdered. (p. 161)
This is highly dubious reading of Collins and Dominique’s evidence. First, they do not claim that Catling went to Silwan, but that an unnamed ‘interrogating officer’ did. Second, the officer did not state, as Tauber contends, that they did not talk to him. In fact, omitted by Tauber, is the fact that the officer was able to get them to relate their experience though 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’.
Tauber incorrectly reads this as suggestive that the officer failed to elicit a response from these women and that allegations of rape were mere speculation on his part. However, the obvious reading is that he did manage to do so but with great difficulty and ‘coaxing’. Moreover, Collins and Dominique contend that the reports included ‘corroborating [my emphasis] physical evidence obtained through medical examination of survivors.’ How could the physical evidence corroborate statements the officer failed to obtain? The officer also described physical descriptions of women who 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.’ The latter point is important, because Tauber uses other eye-witness testimony to discredit the recollections of survivor Safiyya ‘Atiyya. She claimed to have been raped and witnessed the rape of other women. She ‘saw one man open his pants and leap on her. “I screamed,” she said, “but around me other women were being raped, too. Some of the men were so anxious to get our earrings they ripped our ears to pull them off faster.”’ (Collins and Dominique, p. 275)
In stark contrast, through examining other testimony, Tauber’s reconstruction of events holds that Safiyya opened the door to the attackers while holding a white flag. She and others were taken to a neighbouring house under the guard of a Jewish woman. (p. 163) Yet, in Safiyya’s favour are the Secret reports compiled by the British. The ‘corroborating physical evidence’ included the detail of torn ears where earrings had been ripped away. These details, corroborated by an external source, to my mind, while not absolute proof at least speak to Safiyya’s reliability as a witness — a reliability Tauber would deny her. Bizarrely, while he concedes it is a possibility that these assaults may have taken place later and elsewhere, this does not influence his conclusion that the event never happened.
In summary, perhaps Tauber is right that the events at Deir Yassin were no massacre, but a pitched battle which went awry into bloody calamity because of flawed assumptions on both sides and a general lack of experience. That some war crimes were committed but that it in no way amounted to a massacre complete with sexual violence. However, given the one-sided approach to, and errors in handling of, sources which lace the book, personally I find it very difficult to accept his argument. Deir Yassin was, in all likelihood a massacre. The weight of evidence is too much for Tauber to explain away without falling into clear contradictions and basic misreading of sources. Indeed, the evidence he presents suggests it was a massacre.
