Remember Deir Yassin as we work for justice

(CHICAGO 04/09/2015) – Thursday, April 9, was the 67th year since militant Zionist groups crept into the small Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in 1948 and massacred men, women and children as they slept. Though, this was not the first such massacre since Zionists began colonizing Palestine, and it certainly wasn’t the last, it is the one tragedy that came to symbolize the Nakba.

Deir Yassin was not the first massacre or even the largest that occurred between the Partition of Palestine in November 1947 and the end of the Zionist war in January 1949. But it was the one Zionist Jews used to terrorize the native Palestinians, causing them to flee their homes and their beloved Palestine.

Deir Yassin has come to symbolize the Nakba, or Catastrophe. It represents the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine that is still continuing today. We have refugees from Deir Yassin with us today in our communities throughout the United States. In fact, Palestinians are the largest refugee population in the world, as well as the longest lasting. Nearly 75 percent of Palestinians are refugees and as a group they make up 40 percent of the world’s refugee population. Israel was built on this legacy of bloodshed and murder. In fact, two militant leaders who perpetrated the massacres of Deir Yassin and elsewhere later became prime ministers of Israel – Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir. And it continues until today, with the occupation, the siege, the apartheid wall and Israel’s attack last summer on Gaza that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians.

But this week, we remember April 8, 1948, when Jewish terrorists crept into the tiny village of Deir Yassin and brutally massacred its slumbering residents. Those who weren’t killed were rounded up and forced into exile, leaving behind everything but the clothes on their backs – and perhaps the key to their homes.

“The Nakba is not just one historical event, but an ongoing event,” said Osama Abu Irshaid, AMP National Policy Director. “The Nakba is a process that developed the systematic dispossession of Palestinians; it’s the destruction of a civil society for the intended purposes of a colonial enterprise to be set in its place.” We must never forget the victims of Deir Yassin.

We must honor the deceased, those permanently in exile and all those who today continue to resist the occupation by striving to bring justice to the Palestinian people.