Is it any surprise that the Israeli government has decided to suspend its dealings with the United Nations Human Rights Organisation? While the world has been preoccupied with has been going on in Syria, in recent weeks the number of Palestinians who have been shot at from the sky has begun to rise once more, with little comment from anyone. Any group or organisation dealing with human rights is bound to comment adversely on Israel's behaviour. It has always been so. Israel's action is to do what it has always done: distract the world's attention away from what is happening on the ground by creating some other issue for the international community to think about. The most recent distraction being used by the Israeli authorities to turn the world's attention away from its behaviour is to talk about the threat posed to it by Iran. As usual, the international community, led by the United States, has fallen for the distraction, allowing a member state of the United Nations to talk quite openly about attacking another member state. What horror could be unleashed on the world if this rhetoric is allowed to be put into action. What is just as alarming, though, is the way Israel is able to manipulate events and divert the world's discourse away from facts on the ground. This has always been the case in the matter of settlement building. While its leaders have visited Washington and talked of peace, its bulldozers have been razing Palestinian homes to the ground and building yet more illegal settlements in the West Bank. It is true that the authorities in Tel Aviv are at a loss as to what to do at the moment. They have been terrified for more than a year now by the events they have seen unfolding around them in the Arab World. As Western-supported dictators fall one by one as they are ousted by popular uprisings, Israel can see that its own future is much less certain than it had been thought to be. Even in Egypt, once the cornerstone of the Western-backed policy to keep Israel safe, has seen open calls for the closing of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo and even for the Treaty with Israel to be re-negotiated. One of the blackest days in the history of Palestine and in the history of the Israeli presence there took place on April 9, 1948. It is at once both symbolic of the Catastrophe that was befalling the Palestinians and of the cruelty which the Israelis were prepared to use to drive them out. It is another symptom of the world's willingness to look the other way while Israel is allowed to carry out its policy of terror. The small Palestinian village of Deir Yassin sat on a hill to the West of Jerusalem, eight hundred metres above sea level. It was close to the Jewish neighbourhood of Givat Shaul. The villagers had come to an understanding with the Hagana in Jerusalem that they wished to live peacefully and would pose no threat to the new Israel if they were left alone to get on with their lives. Perhaps because of this agreement, the Hagana chose not to be involved themselves in what happened, but chose instead to allow two other terror groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, to carry out the massacre. Quite without warning, the soldiers entered the village and began shooting at villagers indiscriminately, firing randomly and killing many. The remaining villagers were then gathered together and shot. The bodies were abused. Many of the village women were raped before being shot. Quite how many people died is not clear. Recent research suggests a figure of 93, which is much down on the previous figure of 170 and considerably less than the 254 that was originally announced at the time of the massacre, to instill terror into the hearts of other villages and encourage their inhabitants to pack up their bags and leave. Those who carried out the murders showed no remorse at what they had done, inviting members of the international press corps to view the piles of dead bodies. Some months after the massacre at Deir Yassin, when the full horror of what had happened became known, Albert Einstein and twenty seven prominent Jews living in New York wrote a letter to the New York Times on December 4, 1948 condemning the massacre and noting the role played by the Irgun in the killing. The Jewish Agency at the time, responding to popular Jewish opinion, which was horrified at what had happened, sent a letter of apology to King Abdullah of Jordan. No letter of apology could bring back the thirty babies that had been murdered that bloody day. The very name of Deir Yassin sends a shiver down the spine, not only because of the massacre itself, but of the mentality that allowed it to happen. The greatest tragedy of all is that that mentality still exists and that such massacres continue to happen, while the world looks on. What happened to the people in the Gaza Strip in January 2009 was nothing new to the people of Palestine. It is important that the world not be allowed to forget. For the past sixty or more years, history has very cleverly been re-written. From being a state founded on terror, Israel has managed to re-invent itself as this model of democracy in the region, surrounded by enemies. The region's dictators, taken their cue from abroad, have allowed this myth to go unchallenged. Perhaps one of the greatest outcomes of what is happening now across the Arab World is that the truth of what happened in Palestine will no longer be covered up and will not be allowed any more to continue.In remembering Deir Yassin at this time we remember reality. No number of distractions can alter what is fact. British Muslim writer, Idris Tawfiq, is a lecturer at Al-Azhar University . The author of eight books about Islam, he divides his time between Egypt and the UK as a speaker, writer and broadcaster. You can visit his website at www.idristawfiq.com.
