In the pre-dawn hours of April 9, 1948, five weeks before the establishment of the State of Israel, men of the right-wing underground freedom fighter organizations Etzel and Lehi converged on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. By the end of the day’s battle, the myth of a massacre had become the seed of a previously unknown Palestinian national consciousness.
The Arabs of Palestine had always considered themselves part of the Arab nation. Senior Israeli military historian Dr. Uri Milstein identifies Deir Yassin as the turning point when Palestinian Arabs began to aspire to national identity in order to defend themselves from the danger that this false myth aroused in their minds.
The Deir Yassin affair is also a founding myth of the new Israeli left, as David Ben-Gurion’s left-wing Jewish leadership used public accusations of a massacre in internal power struggles with the right-wing leaders Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
Using archival sources and abundant eyewitness interviews, Dr. Milstein here describes what really happened in the infamous Deir Yassin battle, as well as two actual massacres of the period: the massacre of Jewish doctors and nurses by an Arab force in Jerusalem, and the massacre of Arabs in the village of Ein Zaytun in the Upper Galilee by the very same Jewish left-wingers who had disseminated the lie about Deir Yassin. He sheds clarity on the massacre that never was, analyzing who stood to gain from the blood shed and how it developed into the founding myth of the Palestinian nation.
Dr. Uri Milstein is the grandson of the sister of Israel’s national poetess, Rachel Bluwstein. He was born in Israel, served in the paratroops and fought in three wars. For fifteen years he served as the official historian of the paratroops. He also taught military history and military thought at the IDF’s Command and Staff College. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy and a doctorate in political sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published dozens of books and hundreds of articles in Hebrew and English on Israel’s wars, on military philosophy, and on the cornerstones of modern behavior.
