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April 7,
2003
55 Years After the Massacre
Remembering
Deir Yassin
By JULES RABIN
I want to talk today about two things.
The first one is a process to which I
will give the awkward name, "Deir-Yassin-ization."
The second thing I want to talk about,
at the end, is what I, an American Jew, have to do with the village
of Deir Yassin, located 5000 miles from here, and how I am connected
with the calamity that overtook that place one day 55 years ago,
when 130 Israeli fighters stormed into the village and in the
course of that single day wantonly killed over 100 men, women,
and children, out of a population of 750.
First, about "Deir-Yassinization":
I think the meaning of the term is apparent.
It represents, simply, the recurrence
of events of the kind that took place at Deir Yassin.
While the original Deir Yassin event
took place a long time ago, it is a tragic fact of our time that
miniature and piecemeal Deir Yassins are now occurring daily
throughout the Palestinian territories ... a shooting here, a
bulldozer demolition there, a terrified child, or a man or woman
humiliated to the dust in another place.
Always in the cause of Israeli self-defense,
and with the incitement of unbounded retribution against Palestinians
who have perpetrated or are suspected of having perpetrated,
or of planning to perpetrate, or of being the kinds of persons
who on the spur of an unspeakable moment might tomorrow perpetrate
violence against Israelis ... retribution which in violation
of the laws of modern warfare is collectivized to include the
families and neighbors and the entire neighborhoods of individuals
whom faceless security officials have adjudged to be guilty and
have summarily sentenced to die.
At Deir Yassin itself, in April, 1948,
more than 100 Palestinians were killed in a single day. Now,
in these present days, we see reports of 1, 2, 5, or more Palestinians
killed in the course of almost each new day. It might take weeks
or months -- really not many months, sad to say -- for the cumulative
toll of any of those series of days where 1 or 2 or 5 fatalities
have been counted, to match the number of over a hundred people
killed outright in Deir Yassin on that one day 55 years ago.
The somber fact is that in just the last 30 months, since the
beginning of the present Intifada, the numerical equivalent of
a dozen Deir Yassins have taken place. And that form of death
in low numbers steadily duplicated continues every day as I speak:
a detail of contemporary history that makes, now, a small, droning
sound in the mind of the distant observer, if it registers there
at all.
The killing of Palestinians in the last
two years has been going on with a regularity that is inexorable,
and with an inexorability that already has numbed our sensitivity.
So regular have the deaths become as to be forgettable to the
distant onlooker. The reporting of Palestinian deaths by the
American media is for the most part rendered in the detached
manner of enumeration: two Palestinians were killed today in
Nablus, one yesterday in Gaza City. End of story.
Inexorable, piecemeal, and dismally cumulative.
That is the character of the amalgamated Deir Yassin that today's
Palestine has become.
To understand this process of Deir-Yassinization
that I'm speaking of, think of tempo the rate at which
events occur and think of expanse the breadth and
extent of the territory in which those events occur.
The tempo of the killing of Palestinians
is, on any given day, on a smaller scale than it was in the original
Deir Yassin, 55 years ago. But the days become weeks, the weeks
have become months and years, as death creeps almost daily and
multiply into the wrecked streets and houses of what is left
of Palestine. Death creeps in, and the bulldozers grind away,
taking down house after house, and demolishing olive trees by
the thousands, some of them older by centuries than the idea
of Zionism itself, and older than the idea of our own America.
The original Deir Yassin was concentrated
in time and space. It fell out on a single day, and fell on a
single village. The piecemeal Deir Yassins of the present time
burst out unexpectedly in any of the hundreds of Palestinian
hamlets, villages, and towns that Israeli tanks and troops choose
to make their current objective. There is no place where Israeli
rockets, helicopter gunships, and sharpshooters, with a power
and selectivity that seems almost divine, cannot reach. Death
comes out of the sky, programmed and ordained by strategists
at headquarters, or out of the guns of sharpshooters whose positions
merges with the featureless distance. Of course we know that
most of the Israeli shooters are 20-year-old boys, and not at
all divine. They have been granted by their superiors the power
of life and death over men old enough to be their grandfathers,
over women they are too immature to wed, and over babies they
are too young to father themselves.
***
Deir Yassin was a large human tragedy
and it belongs to the whole world, just as the Holocaust belongs
to the whole world. Everyone who has an inch of space left in
the part of his consciousness that reckons with the grim things
of life, should attend to Deir Yassin, as we have attended to
the Jewish Holocaust which was its companion-event in the dark
1940's.
I feel called upon, especially as an
American Jew, to keep Deir Yassin and all its spawn of smaller
Deir Yassins, in my thoughts. Even without being a Zionist, I
retain, as a Jew, a kinship with the people of Israel. They,
from their side, certainly claim me as a kinsman, and offer me
the prize of automatic citizenship. The state of Israel assures
me that all that it does, it does in my behalf, inasmuch as I
am a Jew, too,
All that Israel does ....
But what if I find abhorrent a great
and growing roster of the acts which have been carried out by
the Israeli state, for my benefit, as it claims, and in my name?
It is then that I am obliged especially
and am singled out, as a Jew, to object, to speak, to clamor
-- as I have been clamoring, as much as my average selfish nature
has allowed and goaded me to do, at intervals, for two years
now, against what I would now call the constant Deir-Yassinization
of the Palestinian people.
Primo Levi, the distinguished Jewish-Italian
writer who survived Auschwitz and later, as some people believe,
took his own life because his grief at the world we have become
was too great for him to bear, with his death-camp wisdom said
a curious thing. He said, with oracular directness, that today,
the Palestinians have become the Jews of the Israelis.
I think Levi was right. And I think that
this perverse Judaization of the Palestinian people by the Israeli
state, which is to say the subjection and casting down and casting
out of them by that state, is one of the mordant ironies of the
last half century, a turning of history that is enough to make
the devil laugh.
That is why I, a Jew, have come here
today to speak with remorse about the calamity of Deir Yassin.
Because some of my people were responsible for that atrocity.
And because they have made the devil laugh at all of us Jews
for that. And because as Jew calls to Jew, I am called by the
Judaized Palestinians of today to look deep down into the stony,
dry well they have been dumped into, and tell what I see there.
Jules Rabin
lives in Marshfield, Vermont. He can be reached at: jhrabin@sover.net
Yesterday's
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