Bloody Ghost

On April 9, 1948, in the first days of the Arab-Israeli war, Jewish terrorists of the Stern Gang and Irgun Z-vai Leumi encircled Deir Yassin, an Arab village a few miles west of Jerusalem, and by loud speaker demanded its surrender. Their leader carried a cautionary wire from the regional commander of the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israeli army: "I learn you plan an attack on Deir Yassin. I have no objection [but] I warn you against blowing up the village ..."

The village of Deir Yassin replied to the terrorists with gunfire; a battle began. Up to then, the Palestine fighting had been marked by sporadic cruelty on both sides; thereafter Deir Yassin became a symbol of surpassing horror.

Storming the village, the terrorists butchered everyone in sight; the corpses of 250 Arabs, mostly women and small children, were later found tossed into wells. Shamefacedly, the Jewish Agency (the shadow government) announced its "horror and disgust at the barbarous manner in which this action was carried out" and cabled the statement to Jordan's King Abdullah, leader of the Arab coalition. (Three months later, fed up with the terrorists' irresponsibility, the Haganah itself fought a pitched battle with the Irgun troops, forced them to disband as a private army.)

Deir Yassin became a synonym among Arabs for Jewish brutality. Last week, in a Tel Aviv court, its bloody ghost rose again to plague the new Jewish state. Four Irgunists wounded in the massacre had demanded war veterans' pensions; the Israeli Defense Ministry had rejected their requests, ruling that their wounds had not been suffered in "organized action against Arab bands or invaders." The Tel Aviv court decided otherwise, held that the Deir Yassin attack (but not the massacre) was, in fact, an organized action, and commanded the reluctant Ben-Gurion government to pay the pensions. The news rated hardly an inside paragraph in Israeli newspapers but was bitterly received in the Arab world.

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