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In April 1948, Deir Yassin was an Arab village of about a thousand residents. It was captured then by Jewish forces seeking to break the siege of Jerusalem during the war for Israel’s independence. Most of the fighting was done by the underground soldiers of the Irgun and Lehi, with assistance from the Haganah, the official fighting force of the Jewish establishment. A truck-mounted loudspeaker blaring a warning for residents to flee the village fell into a trench that had been dug by villagers. The result was a bloody house-to-house battle with a high death toll. That much everyone agrees...

The Palestinian Authority presented photographs of Holocaust victims as Arab victims of an Israeli massacre on official PA TV, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported. The official PA TV news presented a photograph of hundreds of bodies of Jews which was taken at the Nordhausen concentration camp in Thuringia, Germany, as a picture of Arabs massacred at Deir Yassin in 1948. The picture was taken soon after American forces liberated the camp in 1945. …

For 64 years, since 1948, the recollection of the so-called "massacre" of the Arab village of Deir Yassin has been a crucible and a formative experience in Arab Jewish relations, in Israel in particular, but also throughout the whole Arab world. The massacre story has been an important factor in establishing the idea of a Palestinian nation. The so-called massacre has also been exploited by Israel’s left to undermine acceptance of and confidence in the Zionist state. Now, Dr. Uri Milstein, one of Israel’s most pre-eminent historians, has published a book that appears in English, "The Birth of a Palestinian...

The Zionist Organization of America Deir Yassin: History of a LieMarch 9, 1998 Introduction For fifty years, critics of Israel have used the battle of Deir Yassin to blacken the image of the Jewish State, alleging that Jewish fighters massacred hundreds of Arab civilians during a battle in that Arab village near Jerusalem in 1948. This analysis brings to light, for the first time, a number of important documents that have never previously appeared in English, which help clarify what really happened in Deir Yassin on that fateful day. One is a research study conducted by a team of...