On the 9th of April 1948 the village of Deir Yassin ceased to exist as a Palestinian village. For it was on that day when members of various right-wing Zionist gangs attacked the village and killed at least 107 people, injuring many more.
The Zionist terrorist groups involved were principally the Irgun and the Stern gangs but almost certainly supported by other military factions within the Jewish community and the ‘official’ Israeli armed forces, the Haganah.
There are various arguments as to why the village was attacked but really what these boil down to is an effort to seek a justification for the action of the terrorists.
Yes, there was a war going on, but that doesn’t mean to say that a heavily armed militia force has the right to go into a village and basically kill any anybody they find at the location.
It has been argued that Palestinian fighters had attacked Zionist forces from the vicinity of the village but then you come across the sticky justification that was used by the German Fascists when they destroyed the village of Lidice, in Czechoslovakia, killing all adult males and sending the women and children to concentration camps, after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. This took place only 6 years earlier in June 1942.
(It is well worth mentioning here that there are many ‘Deir Yassin’s’ in 20th century history. The village of Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges in France was similarly attacked by the Nazis in June 1944. The Albanian village of Borovë suffered a similar fate in July 1943 after Partisans had attacked a Nazi convoy in the nearby mountains only days before. And we should not forget the United States atrocity of the massacre of My Lai on March 16th, 1968 during the Vietnam War.)
Unfortunately, all that the Jews who were fighting for the establishment of the State of Israel had learnt from their experience under the Nazis, from the 1930s to the end of the Second World War, were the terrorist tactics of those very same people who had persecuted Jewish and other people throughout Europe and their thirst for other peoples’ lands.
Invaders, fascists and imperialists will often justify their actions by saying that it was the other side that made the first move. However, it has to be remembered that the Palestinians were fighting for their homeland. It was the Zionists who were the usurpers, taking land that didn’t belong to them (whatever justification they sought from the 2,000-year-old religious texts).
The majority of the members of the Zionist terrorist groups were very recent immigrants to the country and sought to establish the legitimacy of the Jewish claim to the territory by the use of force and terror.
I have no intention of going through the claims and counterclaims here as they really are not relevant. Nothing justifies the indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Whether it was part of the original plan or not what the massacre did achieve was the terrorising of the local Palestinian population, in neighbouring villages as well as the village of Deir Yassin itself. Many of the Palestinians in the vicinity sought to get as far as possible away from these various Zionist, terrorist groups.
Those not killed or injured at Deir Yassin left with whatever they could carry with them. And it was the creation of this climate of fear which was probably the biggest achievement for the Zionists in the attack upon the village.
Killing Palestinians was good, frightening the rest away was even better.
But the massacre at Deir Yassin in 1948 was not unique in Palestine and there were a number of similar attacks on other villages in the subsequent years (Zeita, Beit Nuba and Yalu in 1967, for example).
Perhaps in 2021 there are not the same sort of atacks on Palestinian villages as happened at Deir Yassin but the Israeli Armed Forces continue to maintain a regime of terror and a total disruption of the daily lives of Palestinians with checkpoints and forced searches, etc.
Even the reaction of the Israeli government (which was given control over huge swathes of Palestinian land by the imperialist powers on 14th May 1948) to the massacre is similar to what is commonplace nowadays.
Although there was no ‘official’ Jewish representation in the attack upon Deir Yassin such an action would not have happened without some sort of sanction from those waiting to take political power. There was no condemnation of the attack and certainly no punishment of those who perpetrated the massacre. Quite the opposite. If only privately the attack would have been seen as part of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ that was part of Zionist philosophy from the earliest days and resulted in the removal of potential ‘trouble-makers’.
And the fate of the actual buildings of Deir Yassin is being replicated today.
Within two or three years of the massacre the buildings had been taken over as part of a Jewish hospital. Later, other buildings were demolished and Palestinian cemetery was cleared for the construction of a major rod.
Since the massacre Deir Yassin has been erased from the map of Palestine as a Palestinian village and has become absorbed into the Jewish state.
This is exactly the same as is happening now throughout many parts of Palestine where Zionist settlers are taking over Palestinian land, making villages unsustainable and making the life of the people intolerable. This is in an effort to force the people to leave the land, leave the country and leave the territory to Israel so the state can establish its own racist, apartheid society where the only people who are welcomed are Jewish.
In remembering the events of 9th April 1948 we should make sure we realise that the same terrorist tactics are being used 73 years later and for basically the same ends – that is, Israel for the Jews only.
(Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel) in 2021 was commemorated on 7th/8th April, only a day before the anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre. Few Israeli citizens, I imagine, considered that the juxtaposition of these dates should have been cause for a time of reflexion.)
Light at the end of the tunnel, bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover, the Sun will come out tomorrow. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
In Britain, in the absence of any strategy to deal with the covid-19 pandemic, we were told the justification for all the restrictions, the ‘lock downs’, having to listen to incompetents spout on as if they knew what they were saying and forcing upon us, being told that we are all suffering mental health problems due to all these activities, that it would all be worth it as the vaccine (that admittedly came sooner than most non-scientists expected, but which, in many ways, had been half developed before the first death from covid in 2019) would mean a rapid return to the ‘new normal’ – not the same normality but one that would be slightly tweaked due the events of the last year or so.
And that ‘justification’ seems to have worked – politically, at least. After all the uncertainty, after all the U-turns of the last year, after the total lack of any strategy whatsoever, after the plethora of contradictions (e.g., following the science, not following the science) the ‘popularity’ of the Buffoon has been on the rise since the beginning of the vaccine programme at the end of 2020.
The success of the programme had nothing whatsoever to do with the Buffoon or his government of buffoonettes. It was down to publicly funded research, the NHS and a compliant population which thought that things would gradually get better if they followed the recommendations. To date more than half the total population of the UK has now been vaccinated at least once.
But now comes the new reality, the new ‘truth’.
The efficacy of the cheapest vaccine is being questioned (see below) and those more risk averse scientists are starting to make even more noise that any vaccine might be fighting a losing battle against the new variants (also see below).
But this doesn’t make sense – or shouldn’t in the 21st century with all our advances in science and technology.
From the very beginning of this blog it has been argued that something is fundamentally wrong with society if the response to a pandemic is exactly the same as it was in the 14th century when the bubonic plague (The Black Death) handed a third (or more) of the population of the world to the Grim Reaper. In a world with a population of 8 billion plus people just dealing with one virus is going to have (and already has had) huge consequences – the uncertain ‘collateral damage’.
For many people of the world – and not just those in the so-called less developed countries – there are more problems (and with more immediacy) to deal with than the covid virus. They have been having to deal with these problems for generations and although rarely acting to change the very basis of society (the root cause of many of the defining issues being the existence and stranglehold of capitalism on the life of the world’s people) which really might see a way out they have been able to survive, more or less. That will become even more difficult if the richer countries of the world continue in the same way as they have been acting now for almost 18 months – that is in a purely selfish response to the pandemic.
There are, however, positives in this parochial and selfish approach to a problem that transcends borders.
People throughout the world might start to see that they are being conned by the political and economic system that is making such a pig’s ear out of dealing with the pandemic – whilst at the same time shovelling billions of the people’s money into the hands of the richest section of society.
There’s been little news of reaction to the failings of their ‘leaders’ in the poorer countries of the world but there have been periodic angry responses in the more ‘developed’ countries to government failings.
I have for long thought that such ‘natural’ disasters would be the spur to make people realise that the old system – which has been exploiting and oppressing them for millennia – was past its sell by date and would get off their knees and take their own fate in their own hands.
Matters have been surprisingly quiet so far, little and sporadic public manifestations of anger, but if the mysterious ‘they’ keep on keeping the carrot at the end of the stick they might find they become a victim of their own over-confidence.
Trial of AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine in children paused amid rare blood clots probe. Now, perhaps, it’s the cynic in me but is it just coincidence that the only vaccine that is being torn apart for possible ‘risks’ – when all vaccines hold potential ‘risks’ – is the only one of the growing number that is being distributed at cost? All the other producers of vaccines (at least those that have so far been produced in the so-called ‘west’) are set to make the killing of their lives in the next few years and, surprise, surprise, there’s been no questioning of their safety. When vaccine programmes get ‘paused’ when the number of cases of blood clots is statistically unmeasurable seems, to me, to be a slight over-reaction – unless there’s a hidden agenda.
Still no definitive answer. But …. WHO covid-19 origins report says lab leak ‘extremely unlikely’.
Then …. WHO chief calls for deeper probe into laboratory leak covid origin theory. There seems to be a desperate search to find someone (as long it’s not themselves) guilty for the pandemic. If it was a ‘man made’ virus which, I thought, had been discounted months ago, and if it could be blamed on the Chinese all well and good. The probable fact that it was caused by the way capitalism has raped and degraded the planet is the last reason ‘they’ want to accept.
Death Rate
A total of 150,116 deaths have now occurred in the UK where covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate – as of 30th March 2021.
Virus variants likely evolved inside people with weak immune systems. And many of those will be the world’s poor.
Test, track and trace
Just when the system is looking that it might be able to do what it should have done 12 months ago one of the private companies running the lucrative contract decides to show its incompetence as an employer as well as a service provider. Call centre staff to be monitored via webcam for home-working ‘infractions’.
Secret filming exposes contamination risk at test results lab. Might just be journalists looking for a scare story or …. ?
How do the police act in a pandemic?
From the police side;
Police ‘acted appropriately’ at Sarah Everard vigil – the view of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC).
From those on the receiving end;
A criminal record: 10 times Bristol police abused local people. (And that’s not taking into account the fact that it took the Bristol police more than four days to learn that the ‘broken bones’ sustained by some of the uniformed thugs weren’t broken at all. But the ‘rectification’ of the original story didn’t get the same media coverage as the original story following the demonstration.)
Bristol Kill the Bill: The protesters’ perspective – even the BBC seems to be placing most of the blame of the police.
Kill the Bill protests: More than 100 arrested in London. What’s interesting about this article is that the police are already attempting to introduce into the public consciousness the idea that demonstrations should be curbed because they might upset and indeterminate section of the public. Commander Ade Adelekan, who led the policing operation for the protest quoted: ‘… as the afternoon wore on it became clear that a small number of people were intent on remaining to cause disruption to law-abiding Londoners.’ (My emphasis.)
All in this together
Perhaps – but not if you spawned the Buffoon. The new travel restrictions for the majority of us don’t include the rich with second homes in other countries. Covid travel rules will include ‘Stanley Johnson loophole’ for second homes.
Penguin Random House keeps furlough cash despite strong sales – on total sales of €3.8 billion last year.
UK government threatened with legal action over WhatsApp use.
UK Government ‘forced into major U-turn’ on NHS deal with Palantir – which involved personal health information about all NHS patients being at the mercy of a private company that would kill to be able to sell such information.
Poverty statistics ‘show tenants need more help to clear covid-19 debts’ – in Scotland, but as has been stated earlier, there’s no reason to think the situation is not dissimilar in the rest of the UK.
A Government report included data which showed that, even before the pandemic struck, 43% of households receiving Universal Credit experienced food insecurity.
Poverty in the rest of the world
Ted Cruz, Texan Republican – the one who took an illegal (even in the standards of the US covid restrictions) journey into Mexico – stated (without a hint or irony) that poverty ‘has been a part of American life since this country was founded’. Ted Cruz accuses Democrats of trying to cancel poverty – and there’s a problem with that? Definitely for the super-rich.
Two views on the same topic of how criminals have been able to have a field day due to poor monitoring of the cash handouts. The Buffoon doesn’t worry – it’s not his money they’re stealing.
After months of saying no way – the idea gets close to becoming a reality. This is an issue that’s not going away. The Buffoon will use the ‘carrot’ of a return to the ‘new normal’ to convince a sizeable proportion of the population to accept this insidious monitoring. Here are just a few articles that demonstrate how this started out.
World leaders call for international pandemic treaty. Just to give the impression they are doing something. But they told us before the end of 2019 they were prepared for such an eventuality and we have seen what that ‘preparation’ has led to.
Ramallah, March 23, 2021 — ‘I thought she was dead,’ We’am told Defense for Children International – Palestine following a January incident when Israeli settlers attacked her and her children outside their West Bank home. An Israeli settler struck We’am’s 10-year-old daughter, Hala, in the face with a stone, injuring her. ‘I tried to carry her but I could not carry her alone.’
Palestinian children living in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, find themselves in a hyper-militarized environment where they are vulnerable to violence at the hands of Israeli settlers and soldiers.
Violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property is widespread and occurs daily throughout the West Bank. Israeli settlers perpetrate violence, damage, and destroy Palestinian property, take over land, and commit other offenses against Palestinian civilians living in the occupied West Bank.
Defense for Children International – Palestine documented four Israeli settler attacks in the occupied West Bank between January 17 and February 15, 2021, that injured six Palestinian children between the ages of three and 13. The attacks occurred in close proximity to a number of illegal Israeli settlements spanning the occupied West Bank. Two of the children required hospitalization following the attacks, according to evidence collected by DCIP.
Israeli settlers attack 10-year-old Palestinian girl outside her home
On January 17, settlers from the illegal Jewish-only settlement of Yitzhar attacked the Palestinian village of Madama, in the northern West Bank governorate of Nablus, injuring 10-year-old Hala Q. The girl’s mother, We’am, told DCIP that approximately 20 masked Israeli settlers used rocks to smash windows in homes along their street and that the settlers had attempted to attack the village three weeks prior, but were held off by local residents. Hala was on her way to her uncle’s home nearby to study when she was attacked by an Israeli settler.
‘He was a tall man, wearing jeans, and his face was masked with a cloth, holding a huge rock,’ Hala told DCIP. ‘He threw the rock at my face, and I fell down in front of the house and partially passed out. I felt that someone was pulling me, but I had no power to move at all, then I completely lost consciousness.’
Both Hala’s five-year-old sister, Masa, and We’am sustained injuries to their legs during the attack.
‘When I went out, the masked settler who was standing next to Hala fled the scene.’ We’am, the girls’ mother, told DCIP. ‘I thought she was dead. I tried to carry her but I could not carry her alone.’
Aided by her nine-year-old son, Karam, We’am took Hala into the home, where the family hid while they waited for someone to help them transport Hala to the hospital. The Israeli settlers, who were approximately 15 meters (49 feet) away, threw stones at the house for almost ten minutes, according to We’am.
‘Hala’s face was covered with blood,’ We’am said. ‘My other children were panicking as we were hiding in the house and still hearing the stones smashing our windows.’
Once the attack subsided, neighbors took Hala in a private car to Rafidia Surgical Hospital in Nablus City. Hala was evaluated and had bleeding in her nose and mouth, bruises under her left eye, and a broken tooth. Once she regained consciousness, she was discharged and returned home.
‘None of us could sleep that night,’ Hala told DCIP. ‘We were still scared that the settlers would attack us again. Until this moment we are still living in fear.’
Despite living in the same territory, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are subject to Israeli military law, while Israeli settlers living illegally in permanent, Jewish-only communities built on Palestinian land are subject to the Israeli civilian legal system. Since Israeli forces occupied the West Bank in 1967, Israeli authorities have established more than 200 Jewish-only settlements that house around 700,000 Israeli citizens, according to the Times of Israel.
Yitzhar is widely known as a hotbed of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians. The illegal settlement was founded in 1983 as a military outpost that soon turned into a civilian settlement. Nearby villages previously used the land for agricultural purposes, and Palestinian villagers are frequently targeted with violence by Yitzhar settlers. The Od Yosef Chai yeshiva is based in Yitzhar and is known for encouraging its students to perpetrate violence against Palestinians. The yeshiva was previously located in Nablus until it moved to Yitzhar in 2000 during the Second Intifada.
30 Israeli settlers attack Palestinian family planting olive trees
On February 15, settlers from Brakha, an illegal Jewish-only settlement south of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, attacked and injured two girls, aged eight and 10, who were on their land in Burin, some 50 meters (164 feet) west of Brakha. Rafeef I., 10, told DCIP that she, her parents, 11-year-old brother, eight-year-old sister, and an adult cousin were planting olive trees on their land around 4 p.m. when a group of 30 Israeli settlers, some armed, descended towards them from the illegal Brakha settlement.
‘We felt so scared when we saw them approaching us,’ said Rafeef, who told DCIP that the settlers threw stones at the family from a distance of around 30 meters (98 feet). ‘We tried to escape and a stone hit my back so hard that I started screaming and crying, but I kept running back to the village. My eight-year-old sister Alanoud started crying and screaming and saying that she had been hit by a stone. She fell to the ground.’
The Israeli settlers fired live ammunition and tear gas canisters in their direction, and the family fled to their village by car. The settlers also injured Rafeef’s mother in the attack and destroyed the family’s olive trees. ‘We can’t sleep normally because of what happened,’ Rafeef told DCIP.
Despite being civilians, Israeli settlers are issued firearmsby the Israeli government and many subscribe to ultra-nationalistic beliefs that manifest in extreme violence towards Palestinians, including children. Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians are motivated by the drive to dispossess Palestinians of their land, according to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din.
Palestinian toddler hospitalized after Israeli settler attack
Alaa S. told DCIP that his three-year-old son was hospitalized after Israeli settlers attacked his family while they drove from Ramallah to visit family in Tubas, a city in the northeastern West Bank, on January 21, 2021. As the car approached a junction near an Israeli checkpoint located close to the illegal Israeli settlement of Beit El, the family noticed a person in the road ahead signaling with a flashlight for the car to stop.
‘We thought he was an Israeli police officer asking us to stop to make sure that we were wearing masks because of the coronavirus pandemic,’ said Alaa. ‘My wife slowed down the car gradually until it came to a full stop and then within a few seconds, people started throwing stones at the car from all directions while talking to each other in Hebrew. We realized we had been ambushed by a group of settlers.’
The Israeli settlers broke the left rear window of the car, where three-year-old Jad S. sat beside his six-year-old brother, Majd. The terrified family drove to the junction where two Israeli police cars and a military vehicle were stationed, and Alaa reported the attack to the Israeli police officers and soldiers. Alaa noticed that Jad had sustained injuries to his face, and a police officer called an ambulance, which arrived approximately 20 minutes later.
A Palestinian ambulance also arrived at the scene and provided the family with first aid, before taking Alaa and the two children to the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah. Jad was discharged the following day at 12:30 p.m. On January 28, Alaa filed a complaint with Israeli police at the Beit El police station. He has yet to hear from the station regarding an outcome.
‘The rest of us were not injured, but we were all traumatized,’ said Alaa. ‘My sons had nightmares during the nights after the incident. They would wake up crying and screaming and saying stones were being thrown at them. They are scared to leave the house or get into the car. They are saying they do not want to go to Tubas, and they are refusing to sleep alone in their room.’
Impunity is rampant for Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians. According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, 91 percent of investigations into ideological crimes against Palestinians are closed with no indictments filed.
Israeli settler assaults 13-year-old Palestinian boy walking home
Haitham A., 13, told DCIP that an Israeli settler attacked him on February 6, 2021, as he walked home with his parents around 8 p.m. in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron. The family had entered the area through an Israeli checkpoint at Jabal al-Rahma, near their home, when five Israeli settlers repairing a motorbike in the street noticed the family.
One of them, a 14-year-old boy, followed the family. Haitham’s mother noticed the settler following them and alerted her son.
‘I turned around and saw the settler was so close. He hit me with his hand on my head, on the right ear, and he ran away into the settlement, but he was stopped by soldiers at the gate,’ Haitham told DCIP. ‘My father followed him and asked him why he hit me. The soldiers called the police. My ear was all red.’
Israeli police forces took the family to Ja’bara police station near the illegal Israeli settlement of Givat HaAvot, where Haitham was taken to an interrogation room, shown videos of the incident, and asked to provide a statement.
In 1984, the illegal Israeli settlement of Tel Rumeida was established inside the Palestinian Tel Rumeida neighborhood in Hebron. Functionally closed by Israeli authorities to non-residents since 2015, Tel Rumeida is heavily militarized, and Palestinians face frequent Israeli settler and soldier violence.
About 200 meters (655 feet) from Tel Rumeida, Hebron’s city center, including the historic Old City, the old market, and the Ibrahimi Mosque, is under full Israeli military and civil control as part of a 1997 agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was approved by the Palestinian Authority. The city was split into two areas, H1, which is under nominal Palestinian Authority control, and H2, controlled by the Israeli military. About 34,000 Palestinians and 700 Israeli settlers live in the H2 area, and thousands of Israeli forces patrol the area, according to B’Tselem.
Israeli authorities consistently fail to investigate complaints filed against settlers. According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, between 2005-2019, 82 percent of investigative files on ideological crimes against Palestinians were closed due to police failures.
It is rare for charges to be filed and even rarer for Israeli settlers to be convicted for violence or offenses against Palestinians. One recent exception was when an Israeli court found Israeli settler Amiram Ben-Uleil, 25, guilty of the racially motivated murder of a Palestinian toddler and his parents. In the early hours of July 31, 2015, Ben-Uleil and another masked man threw firebombs into the home of 18-month old Ali Dawabsheh, four-year-old Ahmad, and their parents, Saad and Riham, in the northern occupied West Bank village of Duma. Only Ahmad, who sustained burns to over 60 percent of his body, survived.
DCIP has documented 73 settler attacks on Palestinian children since January 2015.
Israel is obligated to protect Palestinian civilians under Article 4 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which applies to situations of armed conflict, including occupation. Despite this, Israeli soldiers deployed throughout the occupied West Bank rarely protect Palestinians from settler attacks and have even participated in some cases.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits Israel, the occupying power, from transferring its civilians to the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It also prohibits Israel from transferring Palestinians, the protected population, unless necessary for the protected population’s security or out of military necessity. Violations of Article 49 are grave violations of international humanitarian law and amount to war crimes.
The United Nations Security Council reaffirmed the prohibition on establishing settlements in Resolutions 446, 452, 465, and most recently, 2334. Despite this prohibition, Israel began establishing settlements for Israeli civilians shortly after it occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in 1967. Israeli authorities frequently displace Palestinian communities and appropriate Palestinian farmland to establish these Jewish-only settlements.
