The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After by Said Edward W

Author:Said, Edward W. [Said, Edward W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, History, Fiction, Philosophy
ISBN: 9780307428523
Amazon: B000XU4TCW
Goodreads: 8683029
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2000-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-two

Deir Yassin Recalled

MY PARENTS, SISTERS, and I left Palestine for the last time during the latter part of December 1947; in addition to the family business in Palestine of which he was a partner, my father was in charge of the Egyptian branch, so in effect when we left Jerusalem for Cairo we were returning to somewhere familiar, to a home, schools, friends, etc. The rest of my extended family was not so lucky. By mid-spring of 1948 every one of them on both sides, paternal and maternal—uncles, aunts, cousins—had become refugees scattered throughout the Arab world. Most went to Jordan, a few to Lebanon, my paternal aunt and most of her grown children to Egypt, where they joined my father in the business of which they too were partners. I recall quite vividly that though I was twelve at the time, I neither was told much about nor was able fully to grasp the nature of the catastrophe that had overtaken us as a people; I am not even sure that I thought of us as members of a specific people. Our household was totally depoliticized, although we came to feel the difficulties of Palestinian refugees in Egypt as somehow involving us. This was natural enough, since I remember it was quite common to see relatives in very reduced circumstances, worrying about how they were going to pay the rent, find jobs, and so on. During the course of 1948, however, it dawned on me imperfectly and incompletely, I am sure, what a true misfortune had befallen Arab Palestine.

No small role was played in this growing awareness of the question of Palestine by the fragmentary reports I heard around our dinner table in Cairo during the spring and summer of 1948 about the Deir Yassin massacre, which took place on April 9, 1948. My aunt and her daughter in particular had been in Jerusalem (about four kilometers away from Deir Yassin) at the time, but had heard only the desperate and horrified accounts of the ordeal of those 250 men, women, and children—innocents all of them—ruthlessly murdered in cold blood by “the Jews,” as everyone called them. More than any single occurrence in my memory of that difficult period it was Deir Yassin that stood out in all its awful and intentional fearsomeness—the stories of rape, of children with their throats slit, mothers disemboweled, and the like. They gripped the imagination, as they were designed to do, and they impressed a young boy many miles away with the mystery of such bloodthirsty and seemingly gratuitous violence against Palestinians whose only crime seemed to be that they were there. Yet it was not until almost a decade later that I was able to understand the context and real meaning of what happened at Deir Yassin.

It used to be thought that the massacre was a deliberate but somehow random terrorist incident planned and executed by Menachem Begin’s Irgun. What we now know is that according to Benny Morris the “operation”

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