LadyEagle said:
We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation. Menachem Begin
I've been looking into a little history lately LE, maybe you can help me out with this. Have you heard of Deir Yassin?
"Deir Yassin Massacre was not the only factor in the flight of the Palestinians during 1948.."
On April 9, 1948, 57 years ago, the combined Jewish terrorist groups of the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, who would become Israeli Prime Minister in 1977, and the Stern Gang, also known as LEHI, led by Israel Shamir, who would succeed Begin as Israeli Prime Minister in the early eighties, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin on the western edge of Jerusalem and massacred as many a 250 men women and children. (Some researchers have put the number of killed at about half that though they do not deny the savageness of the violence.)
With the outbreak of hostilities earlier that year, the Arab residents of Deir Yassin had signed an agreement with the adjacent neighboring largely Jewish village of Giv'at Shaul promising to be good neighbors and to share information regarding the movement of strangers in village territory and to safeguard vehicles traveling between villages.
The attackers, operating as an uncontrolled rabble rather than a military unit, fired indiscriminately, blew up houses with their inhabitants inside, executed men women and children by firing at close range, and dumped many of the bodies into wells and into the nearby quarry. There were also reports of rapes and mutilations. The villagers succeeded in wounding 40 and may have defeated the invaders had the invaders not been saved by the Palmach, the elite Jewish force. The Jewish terrorists then loaded some of the captured villagers into trucks to be paraded through the streets of Jerusalem in a victory parade before returning and executing them. The terrorists invited journalists in to the village to display the heaped corpses and general chaos.
Menachem Begin said at the time,
"We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation."
Much later he later boasted that the panic that descended on the Arabs, as a result of Deir Yassin, caused them to flee from the cities of Tiberias and Haifa.
According to Meir Pa'il, a Palmach intelligence officer who claims to have spent part of the afternoon of April 9 in the village:
"In the quarry near Givat Shaul I saw the five Arabs they had paraded in the streets of the city. They had been murdered and were lying one on top of the other ... I saw with my own eyes several families [that had been] murdered with their women, children and old people, their corpses were lying on top of each other ... The dissidents [Irgun and Stern Gang] were going about the village robbing and stealing everything: chickens, radio sets, sugar, money, gold and more ... Each dissident walked about the village dirty with blood and proud of the number of persons he had killed". (Morris, Revisited)
There were other massacres during the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians of 1948, perhaps two to three thousand Palestinians were massacred, according to historian Ilan Pappe, however the Deir Yassin massacre had implications well beyond the immediate slaughter. It was reported over and over on Arab radio and became staple propaganda that was proclaimed from mobile loud speakers broadcast into the Arab areas of the major cities by Irgun and the Haganah (the precursors of the Israeli Defense Forces).
Deir Yassin was not the only factor in the flight of the Palestinians during 1948, but it was a significant component of the Zionist psychological warfare campaign.
At least 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their cities, villages, and homes in order to clear the land for a Jewish state. Those refugees and their descendants now number about 5 million, the largest and longest standing refugee population in the world
SOURCE
For the record I am against the use of terrorism in all forms. I cannot bring myself to play word games and newspeak with it and call it anything but what it is, I feel the same about fascism, and communisim. I deplore it on the grounds that it is evil no matter who the perpetrators are. If Iran uses terrorism, then it is evil, if the U.S. or Israel uses it then it is evil. I will not make different rules or be politically correct for different groups. A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist in my book.
