1) On the other side of the coin, Arab Israelis have numerous advantages. They are basically exempt from various forms of tax so they pay 50% of the price of a car and about 15% of the price of cigarettes. Essentially every nice car in Jerusalem you see is owned by an Arab. They also are exempt from military service, but those who choose to do it can leverage it well. The removals industry, for example, is dominated by Arabs because the easiest way to get a truck license is to join a particular army unit which is well over 95% Arab. I know someone who wanted to a be a truck driver so joined this unit and had to leave after a year because he couldn't cope with the bullying. But if we take all the pluses and minuses that Arabs have, the reasonable take is that Israel is doing a pretty decent job of dealing with a population who identify (for the most part) with Israel's enemies in an ongoing war. I can't think of any country that has done better under analogous circumstances. Of course, since Israeli Arabs have an IQ of around 80, they have lower incomes on average, but that is no-one's fault.
2) It sounds like Hughes is being disingenuous here, but so are you. Israel has good reason to limit Arab immigration, namely so it doesn't turn into another Lebanon. Israel's Arab citizens also gain from this policy.
4) Benny Morris says that the Zionists committed more massacres overall, but significantly fewer per village captured. Ultimately, the pro-Arab argument (as usual) comes down to their being too incompetent to do anything bad.
5) Genocidal intent can be clearly demonstrated from the Arab Palestinian leadership. Some Arab countries did not share this intent, and would perhaps have preferred not to be drawn into the war altogether, but they did anyway. Again, armies that just lose all the time don't usually commit a lot of massacres. I think on this point you are being particularly disingenuous.
6) The fact that many Muslims consider Jews stepping on their holy sites to be insulting ritual defilement is something Israel, and everyone else, must take into account, but it is not considered by reasonable people to be a justification of military action, let alone suicide bombings aimed at civilians. You are just excusing depraved behavior by nutty religious nationalists. I can do the same for Baruch Goldstein; it's not clever.
That’s very thin “discrimination”. Germany, Finland, Armenia, Serbia, Estonia etc have “ethnic” laws of return for their ethnic diasporas.. Israel is the only Jewish state on the planet. Israel has “religious”/ ethnic law of return - non-Jews who converted to Judaism and people who are persecuted “as Jews” (without being Jewish) are eligible: 200 000 black Ethiopian “Jews” were not Jewish but were targeted “as Jews”, hence they were helped to come to Israel. People who were subject to persecution based on Nurenberg Laws without being Jewish ethnically (e.g. people with one Jewish grandparent) are a subject to return.
It’s basically reparatory justice in a very mild form practiced by every nation decolonized from Muslim imperialism or one that had a large diaspora.
JNF? Lol. Take that magnifying glass to any of Israel’s neighbors internal policies with respect to non-Muslims. If it will turn out (as it will) that all of them discriminate in favor of Muslim majority, given the history of aggression against it, Israel is fully justified in reparatory and defensive measures like JNF
Der Yassin ? Read Taube’s book. No serious historian ever did amount of meticulous research he did. He literally found the guy who was taking pictures after the battle. Not to mention that even during the “massacre” legend he dispelled was still flourishing, the alleged “massacre” was roughly 100 people.
As to Taube and Morris being “zionists” - well, Pappe and Muslim historians are rabid “anti-Zionists”, in terms of alleged bias they are no better. After the bias accusations are fairly distributed, all we have is to look at the documents Taube and Morris present. May be it’s the facts that are “Zionist”
>As to Taube and Morris being “zionists” - well, Pappe and Muslim historians are rabid “anti-Zionists”, in terms of alleged bias they are no better. After the bias accusations are fairly distributed, all we have is to look at the documents Taube and Morris present
Lol reading comprehension not your strong point I see. As you would know if only you had mastered 10th grade level English, the point made in the post is that even Morris does not agree with Taube's denialism.
>You're misrepresenting Morris's views of the massacre.>
Here is what Morris actually says in his 2005 paper (a conclusion which, as far as I understand, he is less convinced of in light of Tauber's evidence):
"Over the 1980s and 1990s Israeli archives opened their doors—and the upshot was a basic corroboration of the Arab claim that a series of atrocities had taken place in Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, including the haphazard slaughter of one or more families and of small batches of prisoners of war and the execution of individuals. But the archives offered no corroboration of the tale of one large-scale organized massacre—by which is meant the lining up against a wall or in a field or building of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of unarmed civilians or prisoners of war and their deliberate, organized slaughter. At the same time, Arab investigation revealed that the number of Arab dead at Deir Yassin was far smaller than hitherto published (implicitly undermining the large-scale “massacre” charge). To judge from Uri Milstein’s and Walid Khalidi’s works, the evidence of the Israeli documentation (and of the Bir Zeit University investigation) about the nature and quantity of the killings in Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948 is now seen as almost universally persuasive: Combatants and noncombatants were gunned down in the course of the house-to-house fighting, and, subsequently,after the battle, groups of prisoners and noncombatants were killed in separate, sporadic acts of frenzy and revenge in different parts of the village and outside Deir Yassin. The remaining villagers were then expelled. But this was no Srebrenica"
I think your reading comprehension is seriously hampered by your bias. Morris is slightly more agnostic than Taube, but some of the “agnosticism” is a disagreement about the meaning of the word “massacre”: Morris thinks it’s possible that grenades were thrown into buildings from which shots were fired etc. Both deny that civilians were “lined up and executed” - that’s the thing that islamonazis and their useful idiot-supporters accuse Jews of
You're misrepresenting Morris's views of the massacre.
He denies that the massacre was Yishuv policy, and also denies premeditation on the part of the murderers. He also rejects the traditional Palestinian figures for deaths.
But he does not dispute that large numbers of civilians were intentionally killed, including after the fighting stopped, and does not understand how this could be termed a "battle" rather than a massacre.
"“Dr Hussein Fakhri Al-Khalidi was the one who caused the catastrophe,” a refugee survivor was to say.7 There were no rapes in Deir Yassin, or gender-oriented atrocities. The impact of these things that did not happen was, however, overwhelming, boomeranging on the Palestinians. Following the rule of al-‘ird qabla al-ard (women’s honor before land), the moment the Palestinians heard about rapes they started to leave. Whole families decided to leave. Although tens of thousands of Arabs had left Palestine before the Deir Yassin affair, their numbers dramatically increased after it. While it is impossible to identify the exact reasons that caused each of them to flee, and other factors definitely contributed to the exodus, the available evidence makes it clear that the stories of Deir Yassin significantly contributed to the flight in a way that cannot be dismissed or underestimated. A Palestinian researcher interviewing a couple from Deir Yassin, who vehemently denied the rape allegations, clearly figured out what had happened: “So the Israelis are acquitted on this charge, but the Palestinians lost their lands.”8
The testimonies of both Etzel and Lehi’s combatants and the Arab survivors were surprisingly similar, sometimes almost identical. Actually, this should not be surprising, as both were there when it happened. A remarkable example for this appeared in the memoirs of former Knesset member and minister, Yehoshua Matza (published in 2014). He was among the Lehi combatants following the loudspeaker car and being shot at by the guards standing on the roof of Ahmad Radwan’s house. One of Lehi’s combatants was killed and others were injured. When the guards ran out of ammunition they escaped to the western part of the village, except for
Radwan As‘ad Radwan, Ahmad’s brother. Injured, he descended from the roof into the house and continued to shoot through a window. Lehi’s combatants threw a hand grenade and broke in. Radwan thought to feign sleeping, hiding his rifle beneath the bed, but he was identified as one of the shooters and shot to death. The story, with some variations, appeared in both Matza’s memoirs and in testimonies by Radwan’s niece, Naziha. For Matza, they killed an Arab who had shot at them, possibly injuring or killing his comrades. For Naziha, Lehi’s combatants killed her uncle. Doubtlessly, none of the two read the other’s narrative, but definitely, they described the same episode.9
However, the narratives of both the attackers and the defenders could not prevail over the narratives offered by the Jewish and Palestinian mainstreams, both having their own interests in describing the affair differently. The Jewish mainstream, and later the Israeli Left, exploited the affair to defame the “dissidents,” and later the Israeli Right, as murderers who blackened Israel’s name in the world. The Palestinian establishment created the massacre narrative with descriptions that contradicted the express testimony of the survivors, doing so because it believed it served the Palestinian interest. Yet their decision to exaggerate events led to disastrous results, and it was precisely their realization of their responsibility for the calamity that made them justify the results by clinging to the narrative that the Jews created the Palestinian refugee problem by their murderous acts, such as the Deir Yassin massacre. The Haganah poster distributed after the affair and the Jewish Agency’s condemnation only assisted the Arabs in establishing the massacre allegation. Since then, the massacre narrative has only “improved,” exploited by Palestinian and Arab propagandists to smear Israel’s name for its alleged inhumanity.10
Seventy percent of the about 1,000 inhabitants of Deir Yassin managed to escape the attack (because the attackers let them escape), twenty percent were taken prisoner and later released, and ten percent were killed. As was shown above, the ratio between Arabs killed and injured (about 100 of each) did not suggest massacre. Even more indicative is the fact that double the number of Arabs were taken prisoner as were killed. This is an even better metric, because the decision to take individuals prisoner was an intentional act on the part of the captors (unlike when injuring people). Finally, the very fact that the overwhelming majority, ninety percent, survived the attack is the clearest refutation of the accusation of a massacre.
Sixty-one people out of the 84, whose circumstances of death were ascertained, were killed in battle conditions even if they themselves were not all active combatants. “I believe that most of those who were killed were among the fighters and the women and children who helped the fighters,” one of the survivors stated.11 Forty-two percent of the people killed were males of an age fit for fighting. Twenty- four of the people killed were combatants. Relatively, many heads of families remained alive, while their families were killed (Jum‘a Zahran and ‘Ali Mustafa Zaydan, to mention two salient examples). It was precisely because they were armed combatants that they had the ability and skills to succeed in escaping."
There were no incidents of families being lined up against walls and shot in Deir Yassin. While it was said about six people at most, four of them combatants, that they were killed in the quarries, no survivor reported seeing this with his own eyes. The closest story to the lining up of a family against the wall was the incident of the Zaydan family. When they came out of their house, an Etzel combatant standing nearby holding a Bren opened fire on them, killing eleven and injuring others, apparently as a revenge for a friend being severely wounded near that house shortly before. Many in the village saw the incident. Furthermore, an Associated Press correspondent later interviewed Fahima Zaydan, one of the injured, in the government hospital about the incident. The story soon spread worldwide, constituting the basis for the “lining up against the walls” allegations and the massacre narrative of the affair.
“This is war; whoever gets a bullet drops dead” (Muhammad ‘Ayish Zaydan, a survivor, 1997).12 There is a substantial difference between people killed during fighting and a massacre. Except for the specific incidents listed above, people in Deir Yassin were killed, not massacred.
look at Tauber's evidence (e.g. p 185), here is the key guy- anyone should agree that the guy who lies about being an eyewitness is not a reliable narrator:
"Interviews and testimonies given by Col. (res.) Meir Pa‘il (formerly Pilavsky), from the early 1970s until the late 2000s, constituted one of the major bases for the adherents of the massacre narrative. Pa‘il, a former Haganah officer, claimed to have been in Deir Yassin from the beginning of the battle, to have seen the massacre with his own eyes, reported it to his superiors and taken pictures.
His words also served as a basis for some of the Arab accounts, including those of survivors, presenting the massacre narrative, especially with regard to the alleged executions in the quarries. The fact that a senior Israeli officer supported this narrative was highly significant for them.11
Meir Pilavsky arrived at Deir Yassin at 4:00 p.m., after the battle was already over. He brought with him a photographer, who belonged to Haganah intelligence in Jerusalem, to take pictures. The photographer, Shraga Stahl (later Peled), brought a German Leica camera and a subminiature Minox “spy” camera with him, with two rolls of film. Both reported that they had seen the convoy of prisoners passing through the streets of Jerusalem, which occurred shortly before 4:00 p.m. (which means that they had not yet reached the village by that time). After about an hour in the village they returned to Jerusalem and Pilavsky asked his assistant to develop the negatives of the films, which he did and duly delivered them to his superior, Yehezkel Rabi‘. Pilavsky wrote a report about his time in the village, which he delivered the next day to Shaltiel. He later related that he had opened the report with several lines from a poem written by the Hebrew poet Bialik after the Kishinev pogrom. The report and the photos were sent to Tel Aviv to Yisrael Galili, the Haganah’s chief of staff, who in turn showed them to Ben-Gurion.12
In his report, Pilavsky stated, explicitly, that he had arrived in the village at 4:00 p.m. and stayed for an hour. The content of the report was detailed above, in the section discussing the Haganah’s reports of the battle. It is clear from the report, however, that Pilavsky arrived after the battle had already ended. He reported the “dissident” combatants’ claim that they had finished their job and wanted to go home. He reported a chat with a Lehi commander, who spoke about the battle in the past tense. With regard to the dead Arabs, he wrote, “It is apparent that the Arabs were not killed in battle, but lined up against a wall.” That is an inference he was making, he did not claim to have seen such an event with his own eyes. He also claimed to have seen the bodies of five Arabs in a quarry, Arabs he previously had seen being paraded in Jerusalem. While one may doubt that he would be able to identify scorched bodies, this claim clearly demonstrates that he arrived at the village no earlier than 4:00 p.m. Pa‘il later denied that he wrote the available printed version of the report, a claim that is difficult to evaluate due to the absence of the original handwritten version. He claimed that his original report had been altered in
order to conceal the fact that a Haganah man had been present at the battle. It is possible that the printed version, included in a booklet distributed by the Haganah to its soldiers, was an edited and abridged one (for example, it did not include Bialik’s poem), like the slightly censored Gicherman report that was also included in the booklet. It is, however, highly unlikely that someone falsified the timing of his arrival in order to conceal his presence, taking into account that the booklet also included Weg’s report, which recounted the entire participation of the Palmach in the battle.13
Although one of the major components in Pa‘il’s later testimonies was that he met with the Palmach force that came to assist the attackers, and had a talk with its commander, Yaakov Weg, there was no mention of Weg in his report, nor of his in Weg’s report. Furthermore, Moshe Vachman, Weg’s deputy, explicitly testified that he saw no other Palmach personnel in the village besides their force (Pa‘il belonged to the Palmach).14 Shraga Peled, the photographer, also denied that they arrived at the village during the battle and had witnessed a massacre. He arrived after the battle, he said, and photographed bodies. Pa‘il claimed that they saw the executions in the quarries and took photos from above, but Peled insisted that he was not there when it happened. While he saw the bodies in the quarry and photographed them, it did not seem to him that they had been rounded up there for execution. People who saw the photos in the IDF archives, which have not yet been released to the public, have confirmed that they showed dead bodies but not a massacre or executions taking place. At a later interview Pa‘il contended that Peled’s superior, Rabi‘, came with him to the village, but Rabi‘, too, denied this and said that he only arrived after the battle.15
In his report, Pilavsky claimed that one of Lehi’s commanders invited him to visit the occupied village. Later on, when Pa‘il adhered to the version that he attended the village throughout the battle, he claimed that it was Lehi’s Moshe Edelstein, a past member of the Palmach, who informed him of the upcoming attack. Edelstein vehemently denied this, insisting that Pa‘il was not present during the battle. In a conference in Bar-Ilan University attended by both, Edelstein publicly shouted on Pa‘il: “You were not in Deir Yassin!” Pa‘il blushed but kept silent. Other Lehi men who knew Pa‘il but denied his presence included Zettler, Selivansky and Barzilai, as well as Etzel’s Kaufman and Lapidot.16 Gicherman, the first Haganah man to arrive in the village after the battle, also did not see Pa‘il, nor Peled, nor any other Haganah personnel there when he arrived. It was only the day after that he met Pa‘il, and at his request prepared a detailed report about the affair.17
A week after the battle, Pilavsky published an article in ba-Mahane, the Haganah’s paper, titled “Deir Yassin and Its Disgrace,” in which he explained the differences between the attack on Deir Yassin and similar attacks carried out by the Haganah. The Haganah was only killing rioters, he wrote, and if innocent women and children were occasionally killed, it was unintentionally. The Haganah did not parade women and children after battles. It did not carry out “a massacre for the sake of massacre.” Etzel and Lehi, on the other hand, “disgraced the Hebrew weapon.”18 For the next 23 years, Pa‘il served in the IDF in various positions, during which he referred no more in public to the Deir Yassin affair.
Advanced in years, Pa‘il persisted in expressing his opinions about the affair into the 2000s. In a lengthy interview available in the Yad Tabenkin archives, he repeated all the elements of his narrative in an orderly account. The number of Arabs executed in the quarry rose to 25–30 in this version. The description of the ultra-Orthodox coming to stop the massacre was more graphic (they entered “with their side locks and hats”) and their shouts were in Yiddish. In a later interview given to the historian Norman Rose, the ultra-Orthodox (“appearing from nowhere”) were now described as Hasidic. He characterized the attackers to Rose as “full of lust for murder,” while in a book he published with a partner he portrayed them as “beasts of prey,” shooting at anything moving. Finally, in a filmed joint interview with Peled and Rabi‘ in 2008, despite the fact that in his presence both of them denied that they attended a massacre (both also denied that Deir Yassin was a peaceful village, as claimed by him), he insisted on his version. He remembered things differently.24
Pa‘il’s account of the Deir Yassin affair became a cornerstone for the adherents of the massacre narrative. His version, however, evolved during the years, bolstering the parallel reality he created with various new components, many of them no more than figments of his imagination. While most of the components were present throughout, he was not always consistent in his accounts. Thus, for example, in some of his accounts he joined the Etzel force, while in others the Lehi force. In some of the testimonies, he tried to convince the attackers’ commanders to stop the carnage, while in others he said he could do nothing. The number of Arabs allegedly executed in the quarry, according to him, increased from 5 in his 1948 report to 30 in later accounts. Likewise, the number of Palmach men operating in the village fluctuated. Some elements appeared later, like the Jews from Givat Shaul, who first appeared in the 1970s, became ultra-Orthodox in the 1990s and graduated to become Yiddish-speaking Hasidim in the 2000s. Pa‘il claimed for
years to have been in Deir Yassin when the massacre took place, but the evidence indicates otherwise. Why did he make such claims? It seems that, from the beginning, Pa‘il knew a lot about the affair and collected more information over the years. As with others who were involved in the controversy, he became committed to his version. He evidently believed, that his version of the affair was the true one, whether he was there or not. It was not. "
I think I remember listening to one of his recent talks where Morris admits that his 2005 article was relying too much on second-hand testimonies, testimonies that Taube claims were made for various ideological reasons (some of them being "to scare Arabs"). Unfortunately I cannot find the talk. Tauber does mention Morris' 2005 paper as a "moderate" though. "Not many wrote about Deir Yassin objectively. Among the few, one may count the historians Benny Morris and Yoav Gelber. Morris published “The Historiography of Deir Yassin” (2005), an article surveying the literature written about Deir Yassin by Israelis and Arabs. He devoted three pages of the article to a description of the affair itself, mainly based on Haganah documents. Morris concisely dealt with the affair in some of his other works, about the refugee problem and the 1948 war, establishing that it “had the most lasting effect of any single event of the war in precipitating the Palestinian exodus” (2004, p. 237). A fair description of the affair also appeared in Yoav Gelber, “Propaganda as History: What Happened at Deir Yassin?” (2006). It included some very important insights. He opens the article with, “A wide gap separates what happened in the village from the stories that spread at the time and persist to the present” (p. 307). He concludes it with, “The massacre at Deir Yassin, if what happened in the village deserves this definition, was an almost inevitable outcome of circumstances” (p. 318). In between, he argues that the fact that the civilian population did not realize that the attackers had come to conquer the village for good, and therefore remained in the village during the battle, was the cause for the high number of casualties (pp. 310– 311). His most important historiographical insight is that the testimonies of the survivors correspond to those of the attackers (p. 314). Still, the main flaw of both Morris and Gelber was that they relied too much on Haganah records, whose authors were not present at the battle, rendering their accounts of secondary quality
when compared to those of Etzel and Lehi’s fighters and the Arabs who were there.36"
1) On the other side of the coin, Arab Israelis have numerous advantages. They are basically exempt from various forms of tax so they pay 50% of the price of a car and about 15% of the price of cigarettes. Essentially every nice car in Jerusalem you see is owned by an Arab. They also are exempt from military service, but those who choose to do it can leverage it well. The removals industry, for example, is dominated by Arabs because the easiest way to get a truck license is to join a particular army unit which is well over 95% Arab. I know someone who wanted to a be a truck driver so joined this unit and had to leave after a year because he couldn't cope with the bullying. But if we take all the pluses and minuses that Arabs have, the reasonable take is that Israel is doing a pretty decent job of dealing with a population who identify (for the most part) with Israel's enemies in an ongoing war. I can't think of any country that has done better under analogous circumstances. Of course, since Israeli Arabs have an IQ of around 80, they have lower incomes on average, but that is no-one's fault.
2) It sounds like Hughes is being disingenuous here, but so are you. Israel has good reason to limit Arab immigration, namely so it doesn't turn into another Lebanon. Israel's Arab citizens also gain from this policy.
4) Benny Morris says that the Zionists committed more massacres overall, but significantly fewer per village captured. Ultimately, the pro-Arab argument (as usual) comes down to their being too incompetent to do anything bad.
5) Genocidal intent can be clearly demonstrated from the Arab Palestinian leadership. Some Arab countries did not share this intent, and would perhaps have preferred not to be drawn into the war altogether, but they did anyway. Again, armies that just lose all the time don't usually commit a lot of massacres. I think on this point you are being particularly disingenuous.
6) The fact that many Muslims consider Jews stepping on their holy sites to be insulting ritual defilement is something Israel, and everyone else, must take into account, but it is not considered by reasonable people to be a justification of military action, let alone suicide bombings aimed at civilians. You are just excusing depraved behavior by nutty religious nationalists. I can do the same for Baruch Goldstein; it's not clever.
That’s very thin “discrimination”. Germany, Finland, Armenia, Serbia, Estonia etc have “ethnic” laws of return for their ethnic diasporas.. Israel is the only Jewish state on the planet. Israel has “religious”/ ethnic law of return - non-Jews who converted to Judaism and people who are persecuted “as Jews” (without being Jewish) are eligible: 200 000 black Ethiopian “Jews” were not Jewish but were targeted “as Jews”, hence they were helped to come to Israel. People who were subject to persecution based on Nurenberg Laws without being Jewish ethnically (e.g. people with one Jewish grandparent) are a subject to return.
It’s basically reparatory justice in a very mild form practiced by every nation decolonized from Muslim imperialism or one that had a large diaspora.
JNF? Lol. Take that magnifying glass to any of Israel’s neighbors internal policies with respect to non-Muslims. If it will turn out (as it will) that all of them discriminate in favor of Muslim majority, given the history of aggression against it, Israel is fully justified in reparatory and defensive measures like JNF
Der Yassin ? Read Taube’s book. No serious historian ever did amount of meticulous research he did. He literally found the guy who was taking pictures after the battle. Not to mention that even during the “massacre” legend he dispelled was still flourishing, the alleged “massacre” was roughly 100 people.
As to Taube and Morris being “zionists” - well, Pappe and Muslim historians are rabid “anti-Zionists”, in terms of alleged bias they are no better. After the bias accusations are fairly distributed, all we have is to look at the documents Taube and Morris present. May be it’s the facts that are “Zionist”
>As to Taube and Morris being “zionists” - well, Pappe and Muslim historians are rabid “anti-Zionists”, in terms of alleged bias they are no better. After the bias accusations are fairly distributed, all we have is to look at the documents Taube and Morris present
Lol reading comprehension not your strong point I see. As you would know if only you had mastered 10th grade level English, the point made in the post is that even Morris does not agree with Taube's denialism.
>You're misrepresenting Morris's views of the massacre.>
Here is what Morris actually says in his 2005 paper (a conclusion which, as far as I understand, he is less convinced of in light of Tauber's evidence):
"Over the 1980s and 1990s Israeli archives opened their doors—and the upshot was a basic corroboration of the Arab claim that a series of atrocities had taken place in Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, including the haphazard slaughter of one or more families and of small batches of prisoners of war and the execution of individuals. But the archives offered no corroboration of the tale of one large-scale organized massacre—by which is meant the lining up against a wall or in a field or building of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of unarmed civilians or prisoners of war and their deliberate, organized slaughter. At the same time, Arab investigation revealed that the number of Arab dead at Deir Yassin was far smaller than hitherto published (implicitly undermining the large-scale “massacre” charge). To judge from Uri Milstein’s and Walid Khalidi’s works, the evidence of the Israeli documentation (and of the Bir Zeit University investigation) about the nature and quantity of the killings in Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948 is now seen as almost universally persuasive: Combatants and noncombatants were gunned down in the course of the house-to-house fighting, and, subsequently,after the battle, groups of prisoners and noncombatants were killed in separate, sporadic acts of frenzy and revenge in different parts of the village and outside Deir Yassin. The remaining villagers were then expelled. But this was no Srebrenica"
I think your reading comprehension is seriously hampered by your bias. Morris is slightly more agnostic than Taube, but some of the “agnosticism” is a disagreement about the meaning of the word “massacre”: Morris thinks it’s possible that grenades were thrown into buildings from which shots were fired etc. Both deny that civilians were “lined up and executed” - that’s the thing that islamonazis and their useful idiot-supporters accuse Jews of
You're misrepresenting Morris's views of the massacre.
He denies that the massacre was Yishuv policy, and also denies premeditation on the part of the murderers. He also rejects the traditional Palestinian figures for deaths.
But he does not dispute that large numbers of civilians were intentionally killed, including after the fighting stopped, and does not understand how this could be termed a "battle" rather than a massacre.
And here is a part of Tauber's conclusion:
"“Dr Hussein Fakhri Al-Khalidi was the one who caused the catastrophe,” a refugee survivor was to say.7 There were no rapes in Deir Yassin, or gender-oriented atrocities. The impact of these things that did not happen was, however, overwhelming, boomeranging on the Palestinians. Following the rule of al-‘ird qabla al-ard (women’s honor before land), the moment the Palestinians heard about rapes they started to leave. Whole families decided to leave. Although tens of thousands of Arabs had left Palestine before the Deir Yassin affair, their numbers dramatically increased after it. While it is impossible to identify the exact reasons that caused each of them to flee, and other factors definitely contributed to the exodus, the available evidence makes it clear that the stories of Deir Yassin significantly contributed to the flight in a way that cannot be dismissed or underestimated. A Palestinian researcher interviewing a couple from Deir Yassin, who vehemently denied the rape allegations, clearly figured out what had happened: “So the Israelis are acquitted on this charge, but the Palestinians lost their lands.”8
The testimonies of both Etzel and Lehi’s combatants and the Arab survivors were surprisingly similar, sometimes almost identical. Actually, this should not be surprising, as both were there when it happened. A remarkable example for this appeared in the memoirs of former Knesset member and minister, Yehoshua Matza (published in 2014). He was among the Lehi combatants following the loudspeaker car and being shot at by the guards standing on the roof of Ahmad Radwan’s house. One of Lehi’s combatants was killed and others were injured. When the guards ran out of ammunition they escaped to the western part of the village, except for
Radwan As‘ad Radwan, Ahmad’s brother. Injured, he descended from the roof into the house and continued to shoot through a window. Lehi’s combatants threw a hand grenade and broke in. Radwan thought to feign sleeping, hiding his rifle beneath the bed, but he was identified as one of the shooters and shot to death. The story, with some variations, appeared in both Matza’s memoirs and in testimonies by Radwan’s niece, Naziha. For Matza, they killed an Arab who had shot at them, possibly injuring or killing his comrades. For Naziha, Lehi’s combatants killed her uncle. Doubtlessly, none of the two read the other’s narrative, but definitely, they described the same episode.9
However, the narratives of both the attackers and the defenders could not prevail over the narratives offered by the Jewish and Palestinian mainstreams, both having their own interests in describing the affair differently. The Jewish mainstream, and later the Israeli Left, exploited the affair to defame the “dissidents,” and later the Israeli Right, as murderers who blackened Israel’s name in the world. The Palestinian establishment created the massacre narrative with descriptions that contradicted the express testimony of the survivors, doing so because it believed it served the Palestinian interest. Yet their decision to exaggerate events led to disastrous results, and it was precisely their realization of their responsibility for the calamity that made them justify the results by clinging to the narrative that the Jews created the Palestinian refugee problem by their murderous acts, such as the Deir Yassin massacre. The Haganah poster distributed after the affair and the Jewish Agency’s condemnation only assisted the Arabs in establishing the massacre allegation. Since then, the massacre narrative has only “improved,” exploited by Palestinian and Arab propagandists to smear Israel’s name for its alleged inhumanity.10
Seventy percent of the about 1,000 inhabitants of Deir Yassin managed to escape the attack (because the attackers let them escape), twenty percent were taken prisoner and later released, and ten percent were killed. As was shown above, the ratio between Arabs killed and injured (about 100 of each) did not suggest massacre. Even more indicative is the fact that double the number of Arabs were taken prisoner as were killed. This is an even better metric, because the decision to take individuals prisoner was an intentional act on the part of the captors (unlike when injuring people). Finally, the very fact that the overwhelming majority, ninety percent, survived the attack is the clearest refutation of the accusation of a massacre.
Sixty-one people out of the 84, whose circumstances of death were ascertained, were killed in battle conditions even if they themselves were not all active combatants. “I believe that most of those who were killed were among the fighters and the women and children who helped the fighters,” one of the survivors stated.11 Forty-two percent of the people killed were males of an age fit for fighting. Twenty- four of the people killed were combatants. Relatively, many heads of families remained alive, while their families were killed (Jum‘a Zahran and ‘Ali Mustafa Zaydan, to mention two salient examples). It was precisely because they were armed combatants that they had the ability and skills to succeed in escaping."
There were no incidents of families being lined up against walls and shot in Deir Yassin. While it was said about six people at most, four of them combatants, that they were killed in the quarries, no survivor reported seeing this with his own eyes. The closest story to the lining up of a family against the wall was the incident of the Zaydan family. When they came out of their house, an Etzel combatant standing nearby holding a Bren opened fire on them, killing eleven and injuring others, apparently as a revenge for a friend being severely wounded near that house shortly before. Many in the village saw the incident. Furthermore, an Associated Press correspondent later interviewed Fahima Zaydan, one of the injured, in the government hospital about the incident. The story soon spread worldwide, constituting the basis for the “lining up against the walls” allegations and the massacre narrative of the affair.
“This is war; whoever gets a bullet drops dead” (Muhammad ‘Ayish Zaydan, a survivor, 1997).12 There is a substantial difference between people killed during fighting and a massacre. Except for the specific incidents listed above, people in Deir Yassin were killed, not massacred.
look at Tauber's evidence (e.g. p 185), here is the key guy- anyone should agree that the guy who lies about being an eyewitness is not a reliable narrator:
"Interviews and testimonies given by Col. (res.) Meir Pa‘il (formerly Pilavsky), from the early 1970s until the late 2000s, constituted one of the major bases for the adherents of the massacre narrative. Pa‘il, a former Haganah officer, claimed to have been in Deir Yassin from the beginning of the battle, to have seen the massacre with his own eyes, reported it to his superiors and taken pictures.
His words also served as a basis for some of the Arab accounts, including those of survivors, presenting the massacre narrative, especially with regard to the alleged executions in the quarries. The fact that a senior Israeli officer supported this narrative was highly significant for them.11
Meir Pilavsky arrived at Deir Yassin at 4:00 p.m., after the battle was already over. He brought with him a photographer, who belonged to Haganah intelligence in Jerusalem, to take pictures. The photographer, Shraga Stahl (later Peled), brought a German Leica camera and a subminiature Minox “spy” camera with him, with two rolls of film. Both reported that they had seen the convoy of prisoners passing through the streets of Jerusalem, which occurred shortly before 4:00 p.m. (which means that they had not yet reached the village by that time). After about an hour in the village they returned to Jerusalem and Pilavsky asked his assistant to develop the negatives of the films, which he did and duly delivered them to his superior, Yehezkel Rabi‘. Pilavsky wrote a report about his time in the village, which he delivered the next day to Shaltiel. He later related that he had opened the report with several lines from a poem written by the Hebrew poet Bialik after the Kishinev pogrom. The report and the photos were sent to Tel Aviv to Yisrael Galili, the Haganah’s chief of staff, who in turn showed them to Ben-Gurion.12
In his report, Pilavsky stated, explicitly, that he had arrived in the village at 4:00 p.m. and stayed for an hour. The content of the report was detailed above, in the section discussing the Haganah’s reports of the battle. It is clear from the report, however, that Pilavsky arrived after the battle had already ended. He reported the “dissident” combatants’ claim that they had finished their job and wanted to go home. He reported a chat with a Lehi commander, who spoke about the battle in the past tense. With regard to the dead Arabs, he wrote, “It is apparent that the Arabs were not killed in battle, but lined up against a wall.” That is an inference he was making, he did not claim to have seen such an event with his own eyes. He also claimed to have seen the bodies of five Arabs in a quarry, Arabs he previously had seen being paraded in Jerusalem. While one may doubt that he would be able to identify scorched bodies, this claim clearly demonstrates that he arrived at the village no earlier than 4:00 p.m. Pa‘il later denied that he wrote the available printed version of the report, a claim that is difficult to evaluate due to the absence of the original handwritten version. He claimed that his original report had been altered in
order to conceal the fact that a Haganah man had been present at the battle. It is possible that the printed version, included in a booklet distributed by the Haganah to its soldiers, was an edited and abridged one (for example, it did not include Bialik’s poem), like the slightly censored Gicherman report that was also included in the booklet. It is, however, highly unlikely that someone falsified the timing of his arrival in order to conceal his presence, taking into account that the booklet also included Weg’s report, which recounted the entire participation of the Palmach in the battle.13
Although one of the major components in Pa‘il’s later testimonies was that he met with the Palmach force that came to assist the attackers, and had a talk with its commander, Yaakov Weg, there was no mention of Weg in his report, nor of his in Weg’s report. Furthermore, Moshe Vachman, Weg’s deputy, explicitly testified that he saw no other Palmach personnel in the village besides their force (Pa‘il belonged to the Palmach).14 Shraga Peled, the photographer, also denied that they arrived at the village during the battle and had witnessed a massacre. He arrived after the battle, he said, and photographed bodies. Pa‘il claimed that they saw the executions in the quarries and took photos from above, but Peled insisted that he was not there when it happened. While he saw the bodies in the quarry and photographed them, it did not seem to him that they had been rounded up there for execution. People who saw the photos in the IDF archives, which have not yet been released to the public, have confirmed that they showed dead bodies but not a massacre or executions taking place. At a later interview Pa‘il contended that Peled’s superior, Rabi‘, came with him to the village, but Rabi‘, too, denied this and said that he only arrived after the battle.15
In his report, Pilavsky claimed that one of Lehi’s commanders invited him to visit the occupied village. Later on, when Pa‘il adhered to the version that he attended the village throughout the battle, he claimed that it was Lehi’s Moshe Edelstein, a past member of the Palmach, who informed him of the upcoming attack. Edelstein vehemently denied this, insisting that Pa‘il was not present during the battle. In a conference in Bar-Ilan University attended by both, Edelstein publicly shouted on Pa‘il: “You were not in Deir Yassin!” Pa‘il blushed but kept silent. Other Lehi men who knew Pa‘il but denied his presence included Zettler, Selivansky and Barzilai, as well as Etzel’s Kaufman and Lapidot.16 Gicherman, the first Haganah man to arrive in the village after the battle, also did not see Pa‘il, nor Peled, nor any other Haganah personnel there when he arrived. It was only the day after that he met Pa‘il, and at his request prepared a detailed report about the affair.17
A week after the battle, Pilavsky published an article in ba-Mahane, the Haganah’s paper, titled “Deir Yassin and Its Disgrace,” in which he explained the differences between the attack on Deir Yassin and similar attacks carried out by the Haganah. The Haganah was only killing rioters, he wrote, and if innocent women and children were occasionally killed, it was unintentionally. The Haganah did not parade women and children after battles. It did not carry out “a massacre for the sake of massacre.” Etzel and Lehi, on the other hand, “disgraced the Hebrew weapon.”18 For the next 23 years, Pa‘il served in the IDF in various positions, during which he referred no more in public to the Deir Yassin affair.
Advanced in years, Pa‘il persisted in expressing his opinions about the affair into the 2000s. In a lengthy interview available in the Yad Tabenkin archives, he repeated all the elements of his narrative in an orderly account. The number of Arabs executed in the quarry rose to 25–30 in this version. The description of the ultra-Orthodox coming to stop the massacre was more graphic (they entered “with their side locks and hats”) and their shouts were in Yiddish. In a later interview given to the historian Norman Rose, the ultra-Orthodox (“appearing from nowhere”) were now described as Hasidic. He characterized the attackers to Rose as “full of lust for murder,” while in a book he published with a partner he portrayed them as “beasts of prey,” shooting at anything moving. Finally, in a filmed joint interview with Peled and Rabi‘ in 2008, despite the fact that in his presence both of them denied that they attended a massacre (both also denied that Deir Yassin was a peaceful village, as claimed by him), he insisted on his version. He remembered things differently.24
Pa‘il’s account of the Deir Yassin affair became a cornerstone for the adherents of the massacre narrative. His version, however, evolved during the years, bolstering the parallel reality he created with various new components, many of them no more than figments of his imagination. While most of the components were present throughout, he was not always consistent in his accounts. Thus, for example, in some of his accounts he joined the Etzel force, while in others the Lehi force. In some of the testimonies, he tried to convince the attackers’ commanders to stop the carnage, while in others he said he could do nothing. The number of Arabs allegedly executed in the quarry, according to him, increased from 5 in his 1948 report to 30 in later accounts. Likewise, the number of Palmach men operating in the village fluctuated. Some elements appeared later, like the Jews from Givat Shaul, who first appeared in the 1970s, became ultra-Orthodox in the 1990s and graduated to become Yiddish-speaking Hasidim in the 2000s. Pa‘il claimed for
years to have been in Deir Yassin when the massacre took place, but the evidence indicates otherwise. Why did he make such claims? It seems that, from the beginning, Pa‘il knew a lot about the affair and collected more information over the years. As with others who were involved in the controversy, he became committed to his version. He evidently believed, that his version of the affair was the true one, whether he was there or not. It was not. "
I think I remember listening to one of his recent talks where Morris admits that his 2005 article was relying too much on second-hand testimonies, testimonies that Taube claims were made for various ideological reasons (some of them being "to scare Arabs"). Unfortunately I cannot find the talk. Tauber does mention Morris' 2005 paper as a "moderate" though. "Not many wrote about Deir Yassin objectively. Among the few, one may count the historians Benny Morris and Yoav Gelber. Morris published “The Historiography of Deir Yassin” (2005), an article surveying the literature written about Deir Yassin by Israelis and Arabs. He devoted three pages of the article to a description of the affair itself, mainly based on Haganah documents. Morris concisely dealt with the affair in some of his other works, about the refugee problem and the 1948 war, establishing that it “had the most lasting effect of any single event of the war in precipitating the Palestinian exodus” (2004, p. 237). A fair description of the affair also appeared in Yoav Gelber, “Propaganda as History: What Happened at Deir Yassin?” (2006). It included some very important insights. He opens the article with, “A wide gap separates what happened in the village from the stories that spread at the time and persist to the present” (p. 307). He concludes it with, “The massacre at Deir Yassin, if what happened in the village deserves this definition, was an almost inevitable outcome of circumstances” (p. 318). In between, he argues that the fact that the civilian population did not realize that the attackers had come to conquer the village for good, and therefore remained in the village during the battle, was the cause for the high number of casualties (pp. 310– 311). His most important historiographical insight is that the testimonies of the survivors correspond to those of the attackers (p. 314). Still, the main flaw of both Morris and Gelber was that they relied too much on Haganah records, whose authors were not present at the battle, rendering their accounts of secondary quality
when compared to those of Etzel and Lehi’s fighters and the Arabs who were there.36"