Talk:Deir Yassin massacre

Parking some material

Parking this here until I work out where to put it:

"Some of the fighters alleged that they had shot women only because some male villagers had dressed as women. Yehoshua Gorodentchik of the Irgun said the fighters had, "found men dressed as women and therefore they began to shoot at women who did not hasten to go down to the place designated for gathering the prisoners." Yair Tsaban was one of several youths who joined the burial team on April 12:

"What we saw were [dead] women, young children, and old men. What shocked us was at least two or three cases of old men dressed in women's clothes. I remember entering the living room of a certain house. In the far corner was a small woman with her back towards the door, sitting dead. When we reached the body we saw an old man with a beard. My conclusion was that what happened in the village so terrorized these old men that they knew being old men would not save them. They hoped that if they were seen as old women that would save them.""

Yeshurun Shiff, an adjutant to David Shaltiel, district commander of the Haganah in Jerusalem, was in Deir Yassin on April 9 and April 12. He wrote: "[The attackers chose] to kill anybody they found alive as though every living thing in the village was the enemy and they could only think 'kill them all.'... It was a lovely spring day, the almond trees were in bloom, the flowers were out and everywhere there was the stench of the dead, the thick smell of blood, and the terrible odor of the corpses burning in the quarry."

Vote

The term Deir Yassin massacre is inaccurate, and was among the many wartime propaganda tools used during the Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, I tried to provide sourced edits complete with pictures showing how Deir Yassin villagers ambushed Jewish traffic. During the assault on the village, Jewish militiamen came under fire from sentries as they approached, had to battle their way through each house against heavily armed fighters sometimes dressed as women or blow them up, and faced heavy sniper fire from the Mukhtar's house. The progress was slow and painful, and it was only when the Haganah brought up a mortar which took out the snipers that saved the day. Jewish paramilitaries lost 4 dead and 35 injured. It was, in technical terms, a battle. I suggest we rename it Battle of Deir Yssin.--RM (Be my friend) 00:54, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

• Support Per RM. AgadaUrbanit (talk) 02:08, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
• Comment This has been extensively discussed already. See the archive Talk:Deir Yassin massacre/massacre-battle discussions for why "Deir Yassin massacre" is the right title. --Frederico1234 (talk) 08:03, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
• Against As Frederico1234 notes above, this has been discussed extensively, several times. See [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. Each time, the clear consensus has been to keep the existing title. To continually raise this begins to seem vexatious. This is clearly the common name for the incident: 13,000+ Google hits, compared to just 69 for "battle of Deir Yassin". I have not checked under all possible alternative spellings of the place name, but this is overwhelming. No reason has been adduced for a change against common usage, except "I don't like it". RolandR (talk) 16:20, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
  • You must have misspelled something [9]. ―cobaltcigs 00:45, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
    • an honest mistake, of course!!! 174.112.83.21 (talk) 21:24, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
• Against -- Please stop being disruptive. This has been discussed numerous times, and there has been an overwhelming consensus to keep the title as it is. The current title is clearly the most common name in reliable sources, by any measure. Can we just go ahead and close this conversation and not waste everyone's time making them respond to the same empty arguments that have been brought up in the last 9 move discussions? -- Jrtayloriv (talk) 17:36, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
• Against The policy says that article titles are based on what reliable English-language sources call the subject of the article. They say it was a massacre. That is understandable since even the most favorable reports say that the Jewish militias gunned-down entire families. That makes it a massacre, whether or not anyone believed that some members of the village may have taken part in the hostilities. harlan (talk) 17:59, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
• Against Again, same discussion, same POV, same propaganda arguments. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 23:53, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
• Comment Please cite Wikipedia policies that support your argument for renaming the article. WP:COMMONNAME supports the current name. — Malik Shabazz ^Talk/_Stalk 00:00, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
• Support A massacre may have happened, but it was in the context of the battle, and that is the sticking point here. Most articles titled massacre are perpetrated against non-armed combatants, e.g. 1929 Hebron massacre. 1/3 of this article deals with the battle, 1/3 with the massacre and 1/3 with the aftermath. This article does not deal with the massacre only. The first large chunk is about the battle. It was the battle that led to the massacre - not the other way around. It may be known more commonly as the massacre, but those sources are focusing on the actual massacre itself, while our article contains other info about the whole incident, which was in essence a military conflict between two warring sides. Chesdovi (talk) 00:17, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
• Against per Roland. --Supreme Deliciousness (talk) 09:57, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
• Another case of if you dont succeed try try again. Reenem, you attempted this here in the not so distant past. Reliable sources call this event the Deir Yassin massacre. That you or set of users do not like that it is called the Deir Yassin massacre or do not think it was a massacre is irrelevant to what the title of the article should be. Edits such as this show the racist propaganda sites you have attempted to use in this article. Masada2000 may not think this was a massacre, but actual reliable sources say that what occurred here was a massacre and the name for this massacre is the Deir Yassin massacre. WP:NAME is clear on this point, the most common English name for an event is the name that the Wikipedia article will be. Arguments such as "it wasnt really a massacre" have absolutely no basis in policy and as such have no validity in determining the title of the article. In case I wasnt clear, obvious oppose. nableezy - 16:28, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose. Res ipsa loquitur. Sol Goldstone (talk) 16:50, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
• Comment If this rename is opposed, I will propose removing the folloing material: —Preceding unsigned comment added by Chesdovi (talk • contribs) 17:41, 29 August 2010 (UTC) Thanks Nab. Chesdovi (talk) 17:52, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Extended content

==Background== ===Political and military situation=== Further information: 1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine The UN's Corpus Separatum proposal for Jerusalem included Deir Yassin. The invasion of Deir Yassin took place after the United Nations proposed on November 29, 1947 (UN Resolution 181) that Palestine should be divided into an Arab state and a Jewish one. Jerusalem was to belong to neither state, but was to be administered separately; Deir Yassin lay within the boundaries of the proposed plan for Jerusalem. The Arabs rejected the proposal, and civil war broke out. British rule in Palestine ended on May 14, 1948, and Israel declared its independence that day. Several Arab armies invaded at midnight on May 15, triggering the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In the months leading up to the end of British rule, in a phase of the civil war known as "The Battle of [the] Roads," the Arab League-sponsored Arab Liberation Army (ALA)—composed of Palestinians and other Arabs—attacked Jewish traffic on major roads in an effort to isolate the Jewish communities from each other. The ALA managed to seize several strategic vantage points along the highway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—Jerusalem's sole supply route and link to the western side of the city where 16% of all Jews in Palestine lived—and began firing on convoys traveling to the city. By March 1948, the road was cut off and Jerusalem was under siege. In response, the Haganah launched Operation Nachshon to break the siege. On April 6, in an effort to secure strategic positions, the Haganah and its strike force, the Palmach, attacked al-Qastal, a village two kilometers north of Deir Yassin overlooking the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. On April 9, Irgun and Lehi forces attacked nearby Deir Yassin. ===Deir Yassin=== Map showing the village neighborhood in the 1940s. Deir Yassin was a Palestinian-Arab village of several hundred residents, all Muslim, living in 144 houses. The International Red Cross reported that there were 400 residents; Yoav Gelber writes 610, citing the British mandatory authority figures; and Menachem Begin's biographer, Eric Silver, 800 to 1,000. It was situated on a hill west of Jerusalem 800 meters above sea level, overlooking the main highway entering Jerusalem. The village was relatively prosperous, thanks to the excavation of limestone from the village quarries, which allowed the residents to make a good living from stone-cutting. By most accounts, they lived in peace with their Jewish neighbors in nearby villages, particularly those in Givat Shaul, an Orthodox community just across the valley, some of whom reportedly tried to help the Deir Yassin villagers during the Irgun-Lehi invasion. On January 20, 1948, the villagers met with leaders of the Givat Shaul community to form a peace pact. The Deir Yassin villagers agreed to inform Givat Shaul should Palestinian militiamen appear in the village, by hanging out certain types of laundry during the day—two white pieces with a black piece in the middle—and at night signaling three dots with a flashlight and placing three lanterns in a certain place. In return, patrols from Givat Shaul guaranteed safe passage to Deir Yassin residents, in vehicles or on foot, passing through their neighborhood on the way to Jerusalem. Yoma Ben-Sasson, Haganah commander in Givat Shaul, said after the village had been captured that, "there was not even one incident between Deir Yassin and the Jews." ====Arab militia==== Arab militiamen had tried to set up camp in the village, leading to a firefight that saw one villager killed. Just before January 28, Abd al Qadir had arrived with 400 men and tried to recruit some villagers, but the elders voiced their opposition and the men moved on. The leader of the village, the mukhtar, was summoned to Jerusalem to explain to the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the Palestinian-Arab leadership, what the village's relationship was with the Jews: he told them the villagers and the Jews lived in peace. No steps were taken against him, and he was not asked to cancel the peace pact. On February 13, an armed gang of Arabs arrived to attack Givat Shaul, but the Deir Yassin villagers saw them off, the result of which was that the gang killed all the village's sheep. On March 16, the AHC sent a delegation to the village to request that it host a group of Iraqi and Syrian irregulars to guard it. The villagers said no then, and again on April 4, though Irgun fighters said they did encounter at least two foreign militiamen during the April 9 invasion. The view that the relationship between Deir Yassin and its neighbors was invariably peaceful is disputed by Yehuda Lapidot (underground name, "Nimrod"), the Irgun's second-in-command of the operation to take the village. He writes that there had been occasional skirmishes between Deir Yassin and Givat Shaul residents, and that on April 3, shots had been fired from Deir Yassin toward the Jewish villages of Bet Hakerem and Yefe Nof. He writes that the village was defended by 100 armed men, that ditches had been dug around it, that Iraqi and Palestinian guerrillas were stationed there, and that there was a guard force stationed by the village entrance. Morris writes that it is possible some militiamen were stationed in the village, but the evidence is far from definitive, in his view. In Gelber's view, it is unlikely that the peace pact between Deir Yassin and Givat Shaul continued to hold in April, given the intensity of hostilities between the Arab and Jewish communities elsewhere. He writes that shots had been exchanged on April 2 between Deir Yassin and several Jewish communities. Over the next few days, the Jewish community at Motza and Jewish traffic on the road to Tel Aviv came under fire from the village. On April 8, Deir Yassin youth took part in the defence of the Arab village of al-Qastal, which the Jews had invaded days earlier: the names of several Deir Yassin residents appeared on a list of wounded compiled by the British Palestine police. ===Irgun and Lehi militia=== File:Mbegin2.jpg Israel's sixth prime minister, Menachem Begin, was Irgun leader at the time of the attack, though not present. Further information: List of Irgun attacks The Jewish forces that entered Deir Yassin belonged in the main to two extremist, underground, paramilitary groups, the Irgun (Etzel) (National Military Organization) and the Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), also known as the Stern Gang. The Irgun was aligned with the right-wing revisionist Zionist movement and Lehi, although not politically aligned, viewed itself as an anti-imperialist movement. Formed in 1931, Irgun was a militant group that broke away from the mainstream Jewish militia, the Haganah. During the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, in which Palestinian Arabs rose up against the British mandate authorities in protest at mass Jewish immigration into the country, Irgun's tactics had included bus and marketplace bombings, condemned by both the British and the Jewish Agency. Lehi, originally an Irgun splinter group, was formed in 1940 following Irgun's decision to declare a truce with the British during World War Two. Lehi subsequently carried out a series of assassinations designed to force the British out of Palestine. In April 1948, it was estimated that the Irgun had 300 fighters in Jerusalem, and Lehi around 100. A third group that took part, though to a lesser extent, was the Palmach, the armed wing of the Haganah, whose leadership was aligned with the political Left (see Mapai). Morris writes that two Palmach squads evacuated the wounded, and helped to invade and secure some of the villagers' houses. When the Irgun and Lehi fighters ran low on ammunition, they obtained thousands of rounds from the Haganah. Haganah squads also provided covering fire, and fired on villagers fleeing south towards Ayn Karim. ==Battle plans== ===Decision to attack=== David Shaltiel, Haganah commander in Jerusalem, approved the attack. Lapidot writes that the attack on the village was important for two reasons. Firstly, in the view of Irgun and Lehi, Deir Yassin posed a threat to Jewish neigborhoods and the main road to the coastal plain. Secondly, he writes that it was the first time Jewish forces had gone on the offensive, as opposed to responding to attacks. It would show the Arabs that the Jews had become proactive and that they intended to fight for Jerusalem. Eric Silver writes that Irgun and Lehi commanders approached David Shaltiel, the Haganah commander in Jerusalem, for approval to attack the village. He was initially reluctant, because the villagers had signed a non-aggression pact, and suggesting attacking Ein Karem instead. The Lehi and Irgun commanders complained that the proposed mission would be too hard for them, and Shaltiel ultimately yielded on condition that the attackers remained in the village rather than leaving it empty, in case it became an Arab military base. His approval was met with resistance. Meir Pa'il, an intelligence officer with the Palmach, the Haganah's strike force, objected to violating the peace pact with the village, but Shaltiel maintained that he had no power to stop the guerrillas. Yitzchak Levi proposed that the inhabitants be notified, but Shaltiel refused to endanger the operation by warning them. According to Morris, it was agreed during planning meetings that the residents be expelled. Lehi further proposed that any villagers who failed to flee be killed in order to terrify the rest of the country's Arabs. Most of the fighters at the meetings, from both the Irgun and Lehi, favored killing the male villagers, but the Irgun command, including Menachem Begin, rejected those proposals. According to Yehuda Lapidot of the Irgun, the troops were specifically ordered not to kill women, children, or prisoners. ===Pre-attack briefing=== According to the Haganah, the attack force consisted of about 120 men—80 from the Irgun and 40 from Lehi. They met on April 8, a few hours before the attack began, for briefings. Lehi met at the Etz Hayim base, and the Irgun at Givat Shaul. Lapidot writes that the mood at the Irgun meeting was festive. It was the first time such a large number of underground fighters had met openly, and the collaboration between the groups increased their sense of solidarity. They chose a password to reflect the mood, "Ahdut Lohemet," "Fighters' Solidarity": this was the phrase that would signal the start of the attack. According to Lapidot, Mordechai Raanan, the Irgun commander in Jerusalem, stressed that women, children, and the elderly must not be harmed, and that the villagers were to be warned by loudspeaker to give them a chance to escape. The road to Ayn Karim would be left open so they could head there. ==The attack== ===Invasion=== Irgun statement in Hebrew about the attack English translation After the briefing, the fighters were driven to their assigned positions. A Lehi unit approached Deir Yassin from the direction of Givat Shaul, while one Irgun unit moved in from the east, and a second from the south. Despite their confidence, the fighters were by all accounts ill-prepared, untrained, and inexperienced. The loudspeaker that was meant to encourage the villagers to leave wasn't working properly, and the truck carrying it got stuck in a ditch outside the village, though Abu Mahmoud, a villager, told the BBC in 1998 that he did hear the warning. At 04:45, a village sentry spotted them moving in. He called out in Arabic, "Mahmoud," and one of the Irgun fighters thought he had said "Ahdut." He responded with the second half of the password, "lohemet," and the Arabs opened fire. Irgun and Lehi commanders had believed the residents would flee, but the fighters encountered resistance. The residents did not realize that the point of the attack was conquest, thinking it just a raid, and failed to run while they had the chance. The villagers' sniper fire from higher positions in the west, especially from the mukhtar's house, effectively contained the attack. Some Lehi units went for help from the Haganah's Camp Schneller in Jerusalem. The men had no experience of attacking an Arab village in daylight, and lacked support weapons. They resorted to house-to-house attacks, throwing hand grenades through the doors and windows before entering, a couple of grenades per house, following an order from Ben Zion Cohen, the Irgun's commander. Ezra Yachin recalled, "To take a house, you had either to throw a grenade or shoot your way into it. If you were foolish enough to open doors, you got shot down—sometimes by men dressed up as women, shooting out at you in a second of surprise." The Lehi forces slowly advanced house by house. Weapons failed to work, a few tossed hand grenades without pulling the pin, and a Lehi unit commander, Amos Keynan, was wounded by his own men. Meanwhile, the Irgun guerrillas on the other side of the village were also having a difficult time. By 7:00 a.m., discouraged by the Arab resistance and their own increasing casualties, Irgun commanders relayed a message to the Lehi camp that they were considering retreating. Lehi commanders relayed back that they had already entered the village and expected victory soon. The large number of wounded was a problem. A Magen David Adom station was called for an ambulance. The fighters took beds out of the houses, and doors off their hinges, laid the wounded on them, and ordered villagers to carry the injured to the ambulance, forcing them to act as screens. They believed the villagers would not shoot at their own people, but they did, according to Milstein. The Irgun arranged to receive a supply of explosives from their base in Givat Shaul, and started blasting their way into house after house. In certain instances, the force of the explosions destroyed entire parts of houses, burying Arab fighters and civilians. At least two Haganah members on the scene reported the Lehi repeatedly using a loudspeaker to suggest the residents surrender; over 100 were taken prisoner by the end of the day. At about 10:00 am, a Palmach unit from the Haganah arrived with an armored vehicle and a two-inch mortar. The mortar was fired three times at the mukhtar's house, which stopped the sniper fire. Lehi officer David Gottlieb said the Palmach had accomplished "in one hour what we could not accomplish in several hours."

• Support Per RM. --DavidAppletree (talk) 19:30, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

That isnt a reason as Reenem did not provide a single policy backed reason for why the name should not be Deir Yassin massacre. But thanks for playing. nableezy - 19:46, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Policy trumps voting

Ok, lets be clear. This is not an issue that can be voted on just like that. This issue has been discussed to pieces several times. So, if you want to rename this, show that Battle of Dier Yassin is more frequent used than Massacre of Dier Yassin. Getting a vote count of a bunch of like minded people is not enough. And to add, most killed were innocent villagers, including the baker, the teacher, etc. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 03:20, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Our article is not just about the massacre. That needs to be made clear. It was in the context of the battle. Chesdovi (talk) 12:21, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

The article is about the massacre. It also gives the background to the massacre as well as its aftermath. This makes the article broad in coverage. That's a good thing, not a bad thing; See WP:GACR point 3. --Frederico1234 (talk) 18:23, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Check out point 3b. Chesdovi (talk) 20:48, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

• Support per Chesdovi. if this article is called massacre, then all the info about the battle should be moved to a new article called battle. there can be a small paragraph kept here for background, but the bulk will be in the new article. the current title of this article does not properly represent the contents. 174.112.83.21 (talk) 21:27, 29 August 2010 (UTC)