As Israelis celebrate, Palestinian mourn

[ProgressiveMuslim]

Posted: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 8:35 AM
Filed Under: Tel Aviv, Israel
By Lawahez Jabari, NBC News Producer
JERUSALEM – Women screaming and children trying to escape a village on fire.

These are just two of the images that two Palestinian sisters, Fatima and Zeinab Jaber, 65 and 71, live with from an event they witnessed 60 years ago.

They are haunted, too, by the memory of their mother, Nuzah, who they recall crying as she rushed members of their family to safety.

And they are their last recollections of their home, the village of Deir Yassin, as it was being overrun and destroyed by armed Jewish militant groups.

The attack on Deir Yassin in April 1948 is one of the most well-documented in a series of expulsions the former British Mandate of Palestine that led up to the foundation of Israel – an episode that Palestinian recall bitterly as "Nakba" ("the Catastrophe").

So while Israelis are celebrating 60 years of independence on May 14, many Palestinians will be commemorating what they call "Catastrophe Day" on May 15 – an annual day of remembrance for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who were displaced as Israel was being born.

‘I still hear my brother's voice screaming’
As a result of fighting leading up to Israel’s declaration of independence and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, approximately 700,000 Palestinians were forced off their land. They were either expelled by the Haganah, a military force which later became the core of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and other paramilitary groups, or they fled under the threat of more violence.

Up to 418 Arab villages in Palestine were taken over by Israelis during the period, and the massacre at Deir Yassin is remembered as one of the most brutal episodes of the time.

"I still hear my brother's voice screaming before they killed him, my grandmother was begging them to leave him alone," said Fatima Jaber, while her sister nodded in silent agreement during a recent interview. (Fatima married, but kept her family name). They now live in a tiny house in Beit Hanina, a predominantly Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

"We lost all our family. The Jews killed my father, grandmother and my brother before we ran away with my mother that day. After a while we knew that 47 relatives were killed," said Zeinab, as she started crying like a child. "My brother was about to get married the same week. He was 22 years old. we are living alone without any family."

The Deir Yassin village was located in the hills next to the Jewish neighborhood of Givat Shaul, on the outskirts of what is now West Jerusalem. There are various accounts of what happened in Deir Yassin, but there is agreement on the essentials – that two underground Jewish paramilitary groups, the Lehi and the Irgun – the latter by headed by Menachem Begin, a future Israeli prime minister – attacked the village on April 9, 1948.

According to most reliable reports, a force of 132 men from these units killed between 107-120 villagers – including men, women and children. (For years the death toll was cited as 254, but Bir Zeit University, a prominent Arab university on the West Bank, published a comprehensive study in 1987 and found that the death toll did not exceed 120).

Campaign of terror
The massacre is considered by many historians to be part of a strategy to terrify the Palestinian populations enough so that they would leave their homes and land, thus enabling them to be occupied by Jews.

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http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/05/14/1016772.aspx