Deir Yassin Remembered (2006)

Speaker 1: ولا بكيت عند رالي بكيت سلطان حالي ولا بكيت في عز دلال بكيت في عز دلال عند رالي يريتني متك يريتني متك.

Speaker 2: How did you first learn about Derya Sinan?

Speaker 3: OK, I knew about Derya Sinan since I was a child. Deir Yassin has been mentioned for all the Palestinian community and people since 40 years or more. But most of the history that is transferred from one generation to the other is through words, from the parents to the kids.

Speaker 4: I know a little bit about Deir Yassin. If my grandmother didn't tell me, there is no one that can tell me. Especially in Israel, the Education Ministry or the government, they have like a policy to— in the schools, not to learn, not to tell people about what happened, just to make it more Israeli.

Speaker 5: There is a key and a door, and which, you know, because the refugees always return to old house. So the first time I heard about the Yazidis, when I was a kid, you know, and we start ask question that why Why we are refugee? And, you know, because I born in Saudi Arabia, and we moved to Syria to live with the rest of my family, my sister and my brother, because there was no school for girls in Saudi Arabia at that time. Deir Yassin, it was a symbol, because it was the first and a big massacre. A lot of people know about it.

Speaker 6: This is the site of the village of Deir Yassin. The village is still intact. Deir Yassin is one of the few villages that remained intact after 1948. The Deir Yassin village is now a mental health center. So the buildings are used, and they're all fenced in. You can't go into the village. Around here, in all the lands of Deir Yassin, is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. And this wall here is the Deir Yassin cemetery. There's no entrance to it. And you'll see what the condition of the cemetery is like.

Speaker 7: The village of Deir Yassin traces back 700 years or more. It was a village of about 750 people. Mostly stonecutters who quarried limestone and cut it and shipped it to different places in the area. Most of the Arab houses in the village were heavy-cut limestone houses with arches and gateways and so forth. Their land was desired to build a Jewish state. Their land was in the corridor between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and there was a plan formulated to drive all of the non-Jews out of that area. These were Arabs that were living there peaceably. And were driven out because they were not Jews.

Speaker 8: Oh!

Speaker 6: If somebody didn't know it, they wouldn't know that this is a cemetery. It's also been not exactly plundered, but besides deteriorating, you know, we were here last year and a bunch of the religious kids here kind of jumped over the wall with us and started to run around and show us things. I mean, they didn't have any sense of where it was, really. Because it wasn't Jewish, it had no meaning. It had no sanctity to it.

Speaker 1: السلام عليكم. الله يسلمك. ما استعملنا كلمة الله يسلمك؟ إيش كان عمرك حجي لما صارت المتبحة؟ لكن لما طلعت عند راسين كان عمر عشرين سنة. Only twenty years.

Speaker 2: Was their house where the hospital is now?

Speaker 1: Is that yeah, her family house.

Speaker 7: As the battle began, and it began at about 3:30 to 4 o'clock in the morning, many of the people from Deir Yassin, the younger people, were able to flee down the mountainside toward Ain Karem. In the west. What they thought would be an easy target actually turned out to be much more difficult. 4 of their people were killed and 32 were wounded. So they asked the Haganah for help, Haganah being the main Jewish defense force. The Haganah had originally not supported The attack on Deir Yassin. But they did agree to help to try to get the wounded out. The Haganah had a strike force, an elite force called the Palmach. The Palmach sent 17 men with a 2-inch mortar, and within an hour, they killed all of the resistance at Deir Yassin. It was at that point that the professional soldiers of the Palmach left. The Irgun and the Stern Gang, humiliated in front of real soldiers and angered by the loss of 4 of their own, began to systematically murder men, women, and children Most of those who were killed, somewhere between 110 and 130, were women and children and old men over 60 years old.

Speaker 1: The first thing that struck me about the ذبحوا مجال قال زهران سبعة وعشرين نفر فعاتبوا واحدة أولاد التنين معاهم وبالزلمة معاهم محمد أم سلاسل محمد. Her family was Zahran from Aqil. She she lost thirty seven سبعة وثلاثين واحد اخسرته من هارتكون. 8, 37.

Speaker 6: They took men and boys, and there was a whole procession. Put them on trucks, and they did a whole parade down Jaffa Road. And they marched them downtown. All the Jews were standing and clapping and everything else, that we won this whole victory in Deir Yassin. And then they took them and they executed them, all of them.

Speaker 8: I'm sorry.

Speaker 9: They multiply more or less the number to 250 people who were killed, in order to— for the Zionists, in order to say that you Arabs have to run away; if not, this is what will happen to you. And for the Palestinians, they try to say that— look to the world. They try to say to the world, look how cruel The Zionists are, and you have to come to help us.

Speaker 2: That, I guess, is why Deir Yassin was heard about, because it was an act done for publicity purposes, in a way. Like, they did this and they wanted people to know that it happened.

Speaker 7: It's reported on April 10th in the New York Times. New York Times. This was an exaggeration designed to scare the Arabs, to cause them to leave Palestine, to drive them out.

Speaker 8: I'm a Palestinian.

Speaker 3: Many villages, small and a bit large, suffered of the same things. People were massacred by Jewish terror groups at that time. And it was meant, really, that people would run away from their villages and their homes.

Speaker 9: In Labun, there happened one massacre. Of twelve people, I think.

Speaker 4: The Kuwaiti, the Arabi, the Basra.

Speaker 1: In forty-eight, we have Lifta, we have Colonia, we have Firiwi, Biraim, Iqrit, Damoun.

Speaker 10: I remember stories of people telling us that in some situation where the Zionist movement has some actors who has relation to Arab villages, and they would come to the one— to the head of that village as a friend. And they will tell them, I heard secretly that the Haganah is coming tomorrow for your village, so take your family and go.

Speaker 7: Deir Yassin and the massacre at Deir Yassin was the reason That many, many Arabs— the estimates are between 750,000 and 900,000 Arabs— were driven from their homes in 1948.

Speaker 3: When Israel was created, it displaced another nation. It is not only that they started living in an empty place. The place, Palestine, and the villages and the mountains and the hills were inhabited by another nation.

Speaker 7: Arabs were not called out or left voluntarily. To reorganize and come back in and drive the Jews to the sea. That is, that's a myth, a lie.

Speaker 5: What happened in 1948? Why there is refugee outside? Not because we are, you know, we choose to be refugee. We forced to be refugee, you know.

Speaker 7: They were ethnically cleansed. And those people today Now are something like three and a half million, three and a half million people who were originally driven out of Palestine.

Speaker 10: I don't know if I'm speaking now about Dariasin or I'm speaking about Kufar Qasim or I'm speaking about. I'm not speaking about Tantura, or I'm speaking about other massacres. It's the whole story of the Nakba. It's the story of my own people. It's the story of how I was able to remain. So, by chance, I'm here. By chance, I was able to stay. By chance, I was able to be born to a young man and woman who were staying in 1948.

Speaker 6: It still has a certain serenity to it, this place.

Speaker 9: It's beautiful.

Speaker 6: I mean, even in the middle of the city, you have trees that were from this time, from, you know, before '48. A piece of stone that was obviously broken off that was a part of some gravestone or some tomb.

Speaker 2: You can't, in a way, live in Israel without knowing, on a subconscious level, that you're living on someone else's land. There's the cacti, you know, coming up of where a village used to be. And then I'll keep looking around, and then I see the houses or the ruins of the walls.

Speaker 8: I'm a Palestinian.

Speaker 6: Just right here is the sign. You want to get the sign, probably, right? Now, here they might chase us away, so you should do it. Hi.

Speaker 8: Hi.

Speaker 9: That's our historian.

Speaker 6: He's going to come and tell me.

Speaker 7: OK.

Speaker 6: Can I please ask you to shut down for a minute your camera and explain something?

Speaker 3: The Israeli public now don't want to admit that they are treating another nation in a vicious and incorrect and inhumane way. They have been occupying another nation for more than 40 years. It's another culture, another religion, another type of living. Even the food is different. Even the way people dress is different. And yet they don't want to accept that they are occupying another nation. They always think of it as if it's a benevolent occupation, as if the Arabs and the Palestinians are benefiting from the Israeli occupation.

Speaker 6: You know, we're still in that situation of saying, no, this is our country exclusively.

Speaker 7: We're Judaizing it.

Speaker 6: The people that lived here had no claim to this land. They were not rightful inhabitants. And so what we did is not wrong. On the contrary, what we're doing until today is redeeming the land for the Jewish people. And as long as that's the view of most people, you're not going to have the reconciliation and the acknowledgment.

Speaker 2: The intense fear that Israelis have of Palestinians, like, where does it come from? Because it's so vast, it's so big. And at some point I came up with the conclusion that because the Nakba is suppressed, because the fact that you're living on somebody else's land is suppressed, and you can't really deal with it. But you have to, like, justify to yourself in some way. I have to believe that they all want to kill me, because if I don't believe that they all want to kill me, then how come I've kicked them off their land, and how come I can live here when they can't?

Speaker 9: So this is all the places that they have, you know, raids, attacks and conquests. And there is Deir Yassin mentioned. There was attack. I mean, of course, nothing about massacre. In the schools, they teach the pupils something like more or less, OK, we had this war. We fight it. It was just war, of course. We fought for our independent state, and because of the Holocaust, and because of many things, and the Arabs wanted to kick us from here, and so on, and all these stories. And most of the war, or most of what we did, was justified. But there was one case of Deir Yassin that was ugly case and inhuman and so on. We have to be careful not to help the state of Israel or the, you know, the Israeli society to continue telling that there was— it was the only massacre, or more or less this is what we've been told. Until we deal with these With what happened in the Palestinian Nakba, the expulsions, the massacres, the ethnic cleansing and so on, we will not be able to live here in peace, never. It's a continuous tragedy. The Nakba is not something that happened and that's it. It continues running our life.

Speaker 8: I'm a Palestinian.

Speaker 10: I realized that you could know the history and you could feel guilt about the history, but that doesn't make you more active towards preventing the history from coming back. The only thing to prevent from coming back is taking responsibility.

Speaker 8: I'm sorry.

Speaker 6: To the Palestinians that are citizens of our country, that live with us, let's acknowledge that this happened. Let's put up some signs. Make it a part of our heritage, as well. Make it inclusive.

Speaker 8: I'm a Palestinian.

Speaker 3: It has to be corrected in history, and we as Palestinian people have to remember these massacres the same way that the Jewish people remember the massacres that happened to them in history.

Speaker 6: Let's take the Deir Yassin village, which is one of the few intact villages. Let's turn it into an educational center, a remembrance place, A museum, and let's use this as a real opportunity to heal and to reconstruct the relationships of Jews and Palestinians in this country.

Speaker 4: وضاع على يديه السناسل ربط يديه في There you see, it's important for me because it's my history. It's my parents' history. It's my grandmother's history.

Speaker 11: She found children standing in one place. We don't know where to go. We are from Deir Yassin, and we ran from our houses, and the Israelis brought us to Jaffa Gate, and now we don't know where to go. This is an ayah safada, first elementary. When they left Deir Yassin, they had nothing, only the clothes which they have on themselves. So she had to make for them clothes and We give them everything, not only food. These are from Deir Yassin. Also, these are from Deir Yassin. Fatima Mahmoud Asaad, the same family. They are also from Deir Yassin.

Speaker 3: There is now an association called Deir Yassin Remembered to bring up that awareness feeling worldwide and even among the Palestinians. The Palestinians in the diaspora only know the name Deir Yassin, but they don't know the details. It's a symbol for the Palestinian struggle for independence. It should be remembered, and a monument, at least, Has to be erected on the site of Dariusi. طوع.

Speaker 9: حتى الورد، الورد.

Speaker 8: حتى الورد عندي، حتى الورد عشان السينما.

Speaker 7: There you see, Remembered has built a memorial. It's in Geneva, New York. It was built And dedicated on the very day that Edward Said, one of the board members of Dar es Salaam Remembered, passed away. For many people, it looks like an abstract sculpture. But a Palestinian recognizes it as an olive tree instantly. In Scotland, there's also a memorial by Kelvin Grove Museum, started by a group of Scottish people in 1988 on the 40th anniversary of the Darién Massacre. And every year, about 40 to 50 Scottish people come there on April 9th, and they say a few prayers, and they remember what happened In that day, I had only 138 Palestinian jinees.

Speaker 11: I said to myself that I must live with this money and these children, or I should die with them, because I thought that if The Palestinian— if the children will die, then all the Palestinians will die. How can this great nation will be— will die? So I have to be— to work with them. That was on the 25th of April, 1948, after the massacre of Deir Yassin and Al-Fusayl. And you were 8 years old?

Speaker 7: Very interested in some of these photographs that you've taken, Paul, from some of the commemorations, because obviously the London commemorations have been the biggest. You know, we had 30 commemorations last year.

Paul: I sometimes think that the I think that this actually is actually where Daye Husein commemoration is really at.

Speaker 5: Oh, yeah?

Paul: Ordinary people in towns and villages up and down the UK getting together commemorating Daye Husein, right? You sometimes get 2 or 3 people, that's all. They light a candle, they say a few prayers.