Silencing History: U.S. University Publishers Shun Book “Ending the Deir Yassin Myth” - by Miriam Elman

Anti-Israel faculty reviewers worry the book will undermine the Palestinian narrative

Miriam Elman..
Legal Insurrection..
18 March '18..

Why have American academic presses rejected a book manuscript by Dr. Eliezer Tauber, a former dean and highly-regarded Israeli history professor at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies?

Tauber is an award-winning and prolific expert on the early phases of the Arab-Israeli conflict. By all accounts, his latest book about the April 9, 1948 battle in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin has “many strengths” and provides the most comprehensive investigation to date of what was both a seminal event in Israel’s War of Independence and in the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.

A book of this caliber and importance should really be of great interest to American publishers.

But so far—after three years of trying to convince an American university press to publish his book—none have agreed to give Tauber a contract for the English-language version of Deir Yassin: The End of a Myth.

Academic publishing is a tough business, and even first-rate manuscripts can be passed over if the scholarship isn’t a perfect fit for a publisher’s list or on account of a bottleneck in the pipeline—which isn’t uncommon for elite presses.

But something else, very damaging to academia, is going on here.

That’s because the U.S. university presses which Tauber approached reportedly rejected his book on the say-so of anti-Israel faculty reviewers and members of their editorial boards. Apparently, these faculty are worried that Deir Yassin: The End of a Myth could upend the way a lot of American and English-language readers assess the Palestinian narrative of 1948, so they’re advising acquisition editors not to adopt it.

If that’s true, then it’s a scandal of mega proportions.

Basically, it would be another indication that the virulently anti-Israel perspective which currently dominates in many disciplines in the Humanities and soft Social Sciences, especially Middle Eastern Studies, is truly having a corrosive impact on American higher education by undermining viewpoint diversity and hindering the growth of knowledge.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Reflections on Deir Yassin, the Nakba, and War Crimes - by Dr. Arnon Groiss

...Anyone expressing an aversion to war crimes should be expected to do so with regard to all parties to a conflict. Accusations of war crimes directed at one side only, without the slightest sign of self-criticism regarding one’s own atrocities, indicate a fundamental lack of integrity. Moreover, alongside denunciation of past cases, one should emphatically act against incitement to future war crimes, such as those spelled out or implied in the new Palestinian schoolbooks. Anyone who fails to do so is actually encouraging war crimes.

Dr. Arnon Groiss..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 653..
22 November '17..

Two important Hebrew-language books were published recently: Deir Yassin: The End of the Myth by Eliezer Tauber (Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir 2017), and Nakba and Survival: The Story of the Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948-1956 by Adel Manna (Van Leer Institute Press, Hakibbutz Hameuhad Publishing House 2017). The value of these books emanates from their comprehensive presentation of data and facts hitherto not discussed.

Prof. Tauber, of Bar-Ilan University, gathered all the available testimonies related to the Deir Yassin battle from all involved parties, including both villagers and members of the attacking Etzel and Lehi underground groups. On the basis of these testimonies he provides a minute-by-minute analysis of the battle in the village’s various areas, indicating the death circumstances of each victim.

According to Tauber, Deir Yassin was the first case of house-to-house fighting in the 1948 war, as the defenders did not run away but fought from their houses until the end. The attackers broke into the houses by blowing up their doors, hurling hand grenades inside, and storming in while shooting. This resulted in many casualties, including non-combatants. Yet except for one case in which an attacker shot dead non-combatants who had surrendered and stepped out of their house, all the rest were killed during house-to-house fighting.

This conclusion is based on testimonies gathered from both surviving villagers and attackers.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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CAMERA - Hey, New York Times: Where are the Fact Checkers?

Alex Safian PhD
CAMERA Media Analysis
13 June '11


http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=35&x_article=2065

A long article about Jerusalem in the June 12 Travel Section of the New York Times was yet another example of the decline in standards and the absence of fact-checking at the country’s – if not the world’s – leading newspaper. Josh Hammer's Jerusalem Outings Go Beyond the Biblical was a feature article, not breaking news, thus removing any excuse like lack of time for the material errors that slipped through.

Hammer, Newsweek’s former Jerusalem Bureau Chief, first goes astray in claiming that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was involved in the Deir Yassin fighting (which he terms a massacre) during Israel’s War of Independence:

After the April 1948 massacre by Jewish paramilitary forces of 120 Arab civilians in the nearby village of Deir Yassin (killings in which former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been implicated), Ein Karem was evacuated, and resettled by Israelis.

In fact, Ariel Sharon was not involved in the Deir Yassin battle in any way, and he has never previously been “implicated” in the events there. Hammer is probably confusing him with former Prime Ministers Menachem Begin or Yitzhaq Shamir.

Hammer also refers in his article to the “Jerusalem National Fund”:

Twenty years ago the Jerusalem National Fund took possession of this hillside sweep of pine and cypress forests, terraced the slopes, and began cultivating olives, figs and pomegranates using ancient methods. The fund also carved out trails through the reserve.

There is no such thing as the Jerusalem National Fund. There is a pro-Palestinian organization known as the Jerusalem Fund, but based on the forestry and planting work described in Hammer’s article, the reference should probably be to the Jewish National Fund (JNF). (After we contacted the Times the JNF error was corrected in the online version.)

Finally, turning back to the question of the fighting in Deir Yassin, Hammer’s description of it as a massacre has been called into question in recent years, based on new testimony from Arab participants. For example, an eyewitness to the fighting, Ayish Zeidan, was quoted in the British newspaper the Telegraph to the effect that most of those killed were fighters and those helping the fighters:

The Arab radio talked of women being killed and raped, but this is not true... I believe that most of those who were killed were among the fighters and the women and children who helped the fighters. The Arab leaders committed a big mistake. By exaggerating the atrocities they thought they would encourage people to fight back harder. Instead they created panic and people ran away. (Daily Telegraph, April 8, 1998)

Furthermore, as noted by the Jerusalem Report in an April 2, 1998 article, a BBC documentary independently reported Palestinian admissions that the events in Deir Yassin had been intentionally distorted:

In a BBC television series, "Israel and the Arabs: the 50 Year Conflict," Hazem Nusseibeh, an editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948, describes an encounter at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem's Old City with Deir Yassin survivors and Palestinian leaders, including Hussein Khalidi, the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee (the representative body of the Arabs of British Palestine).

"I asked Dr. Khalidi how we should cover the story," recalled Nusseibeh, now living in Amman. "He said, 'We must make the most of this.' So we wrote a press release stating that at Deir Yassin children were murdered, pregnant women were raped. All sorts of atrocities."

A Deir Yassin survivor identified as Abu Mahmud, said the villagers protested at the time. "We said, 'There was no rape.' [Khalidi] said, 'We have to say this, so the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews.'"

Based on these and similar admissions, it is misleading for Hammer to refer to the fighting at Deir Yassin as a massacre, when even Palestinian sources have called this into question.

Full disclosure – I went to high school with Josh Hammer, but have had no contact with him since.

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Green-Lined: Turning around Deir Yassin Day

Yisrael Medad
Green-Lined/JPost
07 April '11

If you do not know as yet, this Saturday, people will be observing what is called the “Deir Yassin Massacre (1948) Commemoration Day.” As one site notes,

The event will be taking place on April 9, the same day of a massacre in 1948 in an Arab-populated village just on the edge of Jerusalem, near the Jewish neighborhood of Givat Shaul.

According to these promoters,

“The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when around 120 fighters from the Irgun and Lehi Zionist paramilitary groups attacked Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, a Palestinian-Arab village of roughly 600 people. The invasion occurred as Jewish militia sought to relieve the blockade of Jerusalem during the civil war that preceded the end of British rule in Palestine. Around 107 Palestinian villagers and four Israeli soldiers were killed during the battle.”

That number of casualties is one of the lowest I have ever seen. Many sources take at face value the number of 254 which the commander at the scene, Mordechai Raanan, just picked out of the air at the moment when conducting an on-the-scene press conference:

A final body count of 254 was reported by The New York Times on April 13, a day after they were finally buried…A 1987 study undertaken by Birzeit University's Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society found "the numbers of those killed does not exceed 120."

Not many people are aware that in the new film “Miral,” several characters represent Deir Yassin orphans and that the orphanage the sister of the Mufti, Hind Husseini, established was for the first children who were transported, alive and well, by the Irgun from the village to Jerusalem’s Old City.

The attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem (today, the Har Nof neighborhood) was not, as claimed, a "massacre" nor was it a premeditated killing. As we now know from Arab sources and other independent research, (see Bregman, Ahron & El-Tahri, Jihan, "The Fifty Years War, Israel and the Arabs," Penguin Books, BBC Books, London, 1998. pp. 27-34 and Klein, Morton A., “Deir Yassin History of a Lie, ZOA, NY 2005) the number of dead at the village was between 93 and 110, at the most. All of them were killed during the course of the battle, in house-to-house fighting. There were no mutilations or atrocities caused to the corpses as per testimony from the villagers themselves. The attacking combined force of Irgun and Lehi units brought with them a loudspeaker to the village entrance to warn the inhabitants. They also left an escape route open, which led to Ein Karem, so as not to have to harm the inhabitants unnecessarily and hundreds took advantage of this Jewish act of kindness in battle. All these preparations and actions belie any intent of a massacre.