Deir Yassin and the Invention of Israel’s ‘Original Sin’

In this series, we examine some of the most enduring myths surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict by tracing their historical roots and political consequences.

Israel and its Discontents – Part 2

Often invoked as proof of Zionist brutality, the 1948 clash at Deir Yassin has fuelled the narrative of ‘settler colonialism’. Yet historical scrutiny reveals not ethnic cleansing but a propaganda victory that still distorts debates from Gaza to Ivy League campuses.

The Deir Yassin massacre during the first Arab-Israeli War of 1948 has become a foundational moment in Palestinian memory and a potent symbol in the now-dominant narrative of Zionist brutality and ethnic cleansing.

For decades, it has been portrayed as the original sin of Israeli statehood: a brutal slaughter of allegedly over 250 Arab villagers by Jewish militias on April 9, 1948. It has become even more infamous than the Lydda and Ramla expulsions.

But in his rigorously researched book, ‘The Massacre That Never Was’ (2018), historian Eliezer Tauber dismantles the Deir Yassin myth with forensic precision.

The village, west of Jerusalem, was the site of a bitter battle on as Jewish forces, mainly from the Irgun (the right-wing Zionist militia) and Lehi, founded by Avraham Stern - a more radical underground group pejoratively dubbed the ‘Stern Gang’ - fought to lift the siege on Jerusalem during the 1947–48 war. The aim was to secure supply routes and repel armed Arab forces who had blockaded Jewish areas following the UN Partition Plan.

Tauber, meticulously cross-referencing Arab and Jewish testimonies, family records and battlefield evidence, could confirm that only 61 were killed in active combat at Deir Yassin of the total 101 dead (there was no evidence of 250 villagers being slaughtered). There was certainly no rape or lined-up executions. Of the 101 Arabs killed, the vast majority were armed combatants, some disguised as women, others firing from stone houses that had to be breached with explosives.

So where did the myth begin? It was Husayn al-Khalidi, secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, who told journalist Hazim Nusayba to exaggerate the event for maximum propaganda effect. From al-Khalidi’s point of view, this would provoke Arab states into military action. He even coached survivors to claim rape, mutilation and robbery - none of which had occurred. Western officials swallowed the story whole, with some British and UN representatives bizarrely comparing Deir Yassin to the Nazi horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Arab radio stations, especially in Jordan and Egypt, amplified and mythologised the massacre, unintentionally accelerating Palestinian flight in surrounding areas due to panic.

That American readers had to wait four years for an English edition of Tauber’s book is revealing in itself. One prominent university press refused to publish it, citing fears it would sell only to the right-wing community while tarnishing their reputation - a telling indictment of intellectual cowardice where empirical evidence is given short shrift over the ‘fear’ of offending the leftists and Arabists dominating Middle Eastern studies in American universities today. 

But Israel’s early history is certainly not spotless either. The Irgun and Lehi committed acts that remain stains on the Jewish national memory. However, an important distinction is in order here: David Ben-Gurion strongly condemned the Deir Yassin incident. Likewise, the assassination of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in September 1948 by Stern Gang militants was swiftly condemned by the Israeli higher authorities.

The Israeli government swiftly outlawed the group and arrested its leaders. Unlike in Arab political culture, where acts of terrorism have too often been glorified, the Jewish extremists were marginalised and delegitimised by the very state they had helped bring into being.

The very fact that Menachem Begin, one of the architects of the Irgun, would later become prime minister and sign a peace treaty with Egypt - returning the entire Sinai Peninsula in exchange for recognition - illustrates not the triumph of extremism, but its taming. Whatever his past, Begin’s tenure following his 1977 election win was defined more by statecraft than by ideology. Far from glorifying his militant roots, Begin governed within the bounds of law and relinquished territory for peace - an act almost unthinkable among Israel’s regional adversaries.

More broadly, Israel’s early experience with underground militias - Irgun, Lehi, Palmach - led to an institutional architecture that prioritised civilian control, legal accountability and democratic oversight. Unlike the armed factions that dominate much of the Arab world, Israeli paramilitary groups were disbanded, absorbed into a unified army or outlawed outright following Independence in 1948.

But the myth of Deir Yassin has been a powerful element of the Palestinian victimhood narrative, taught to generations and wielded by both militant and mainstream political actors as foundational grievance. It has lived on as part of Hamas propaganda, Palestinian Authority textbooks and activist theatre as far afield as India.

It has been repurposed as emotional ammunition to justify violent ‘resistance,’ delegitimize Israel’s very existence, and portray Zionism as inherently genocidal.

The myth of Jewish ‘settler colonialism’ collapses under the weight of history for no other modern independence movement is more deeply tied to both historical presence and continuous cultural continuity with the land in question. Jews are not foreign intruders in the land but its original inhabitants, whose sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) long predates the rise of Islam or the birth of most modern states.

Long before European empires carved up the Middle East, the Jews had already fought - and won - a war of anti-colonial resistance on their ancestral soil. In 167 BCE, the Maccabees, a priestly family from Judea, led a revolt against the Seleucid Empire’s efforts to impose Hellenistic religion and culture upon the Jewish population. Their victory restored Jewish sovereignty for nearly a century under the Hasmonean dynasty, with Jerusalem as its capital.

The Romans, seeking to erase Jewish ties to the land, renamed it ‘Palaestina,’ a term that stuck. The Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE by the Romans, sending Jews into a prolonged diaspora. But dispersion did not erase identity. Daily prayers, ritual practice, and Jewish law sustained the memory of Zion across millennia.

The return of Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries was not a European colonial venture but a national reconstitution, built on a continuous historical, legal and spiritual connection to the land.

The charge is made more grotesque when one considers those making it. Left-leaning intellectuals apply the term “settler-colonial” to Jewish self-determination yet ignore far more clear-cut historical examples - chiefly, the Islamic conquest of India.

Over nearly a millennium, successive waves of Arab, Turkic, Afghan and Mughal invaders subjugated the Indian subcontinent, transforming its demography, religious landscape and political order, prompting eminent historian Will Durant to call the Islamic conquest of India “the bloodiest story in history” and “a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing.”  Was this episode not ‘settler colonialism’? Yet it rarely provokes moral outrage from the same circles that obsess over Zionism.

None of this excuses bigotry or injustice on either side. Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein’s chilling 1994 massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs rightly provoked outrage across Israel and beyond. Yet a fringe of religious nationalists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir (who once kept Goldstein’s photo at home) have disturbingly venerated him. The Israeli government, Chief Rabbinate and most of society swiftly condemned the act.

This underscores an often-ignored reality: while Palestinian violence against Israelis is lionised in large segments of Arab society - from Hamas parades to state TV broadcasts - Jewish violence against Arabs is universally condemned, prosecuted, and marginalised in Israel’s public life. In the contest of moral symmetry, the facts still matter.

Many of Israel’s fiercest critics sit in places like Cambridge, Columbia, and Delhi. They are children of privilege, raised on the fruits of liberalism but blind to its burdens. That some Indian elites, both at home and abroad, equate a 77-year-old Jewish state with ‘settler colonialism’ and Iran’s theocratic regime with ‘noble resistance’ speaks less to Israel’s reality than to their own warped moral compass, and a deeper impulse to project domestic frustrations onto foreign battlegrounds.