History Forum / General / General Topics / June 2008

Over two hundred and fifty Palestinian villages were also destroyed.

Early in the morning of April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed
by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village
with about 750 Palestinian residents.

The village lay outside of the area to be assigned by the United
Nations to the Jewish State; it had a peaceful reputation. But it was
located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Deir Yassin was slated for occupation under Plan Dalet and the
mainstream Jewish defense force, the Haganah, authorized the irregular
terrorist forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang to perform the
takeover.

In all over 100 men, women, and children were systematically murdered.
Fifty-three orphaned children were literally dumped along the wall of
the Old City, where they were found by Miss Hind Husseini and brought
behind the American Colony Hotel to her home, which was to become the
Dar El-Tifl El-Arabi orphanage.

Part of the struggle for self-determination by Palestinians has been
to tell the truth about Palestinians as victims of Zionism. For too
long their history has been denied,

and this denial has only served to further oppress and deliberately
dehumanize Palestinians in Israel, inside the occupied territories,
and outside in their diaspora.

Some progress has been made. Westerners now realize that Palestinians,
as a people, do exist. And they have come to acknowledge that during
the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of Palestinians were
killed and over 700,000 were driven or frightened from their homes and
lands on which they had lived for centuries.

http://www.deiryassin.org/index1.html