On Deir Yassin by a Hagana Veteran Who Was There

At the Hagana Archives in Tel Aviv, I met Shraga Peled and in talking, he mentioned to me that he was a bit of an outsider in that in his memoirs, he expressed sympathy for the Irgun's Deir Yassin operation.

I asked him about it and he showed me the book, "Stories from the Archives", published in 2006 by a company called Kavim.

Here's the frontispiece:

The two pages dealing with Deir Yassin follow below:

For those who cannot read Hebrew, I will summarize:

He notes that both Irgun and Hagana sources mention that a unit of the Palmach participated in the battle, each one telling his own version and here is his. He served in the Shai,, or Intelligence Unit and was a photographer with two cameras, a Leica and a Minoc, a spy's camera. I went out to Deir Yassin when the bodies were still warm. I snapped a few pictures of some not-very-nice scenes. Also one at the stonequarry where bodies lay. Since he wasn't in the village at the time of the action, he can't relate exactly what happened but he doesn't think any persons were concentrated there to be shot after the battle. The quarrey was a bit outside the village and people fled to it. There was a tree at the entrance and it was buring and an Arab was tied to it and he was told it was the work of the Irgun. The pictures, he was told, are some place in a restricted file.

At the end of the battle, the Irgun arranged a victory procession through town with old people up on trucks driving down Ben-Yehuda Street. He didn't feel comfortable with that but in war, as it war and he forgives the Irgun all.

The Irgun history asserts that at the end of the fighting was over, in addition to hundreds of villagers who had retreated to Ein Karem via the path left purposefully open, downes had surrendered and they were taken prisoner. The prisoners, mostly women and children, were loaded onto trucks and taken to East Jerusalem, where they were handed over to their Arab brethren at the Damascus Gate area.

Morover,

...there was bitter fighting at Deir Yassin. More than 100 Arab fighters were well equipped and had large amounts of ammunition. The Arabs occupied fortified positions in stone buildings, while the attackers were exposed to enemy fire. The fierce gunfire directed from the houses forced the attackers to charge, throw grenades and, in several cases, to blow up houses. As a consequence, women and children were among the dead.

According to all the documents and testimonies, it is clear today that fewer than one hundred Arabs were killed at Deir Yassin, and not the 240 as published. Moreover, this was the first instance in the War of Independence where battle had taken place in a built-up area, and such fighting typically claims numerous victims. For the same reason, the number of Irgun and Lehi members injured by Arab fire was 35% of the force (5 dead and 35 wounded).

^