"Is there a place and time where the state of Israel goes too far, where memory and contemporary life is so abusive that the entire enterprise has to be abandoned? Is there a time and place where a Jew must simply cut ties with the state and the ideology behind it [...] and simply declare oneself an enemy of this project which has so enamored and consumed post-Holocaust Jewish life? [...] can anything be done from the Jewish side to halt the expansion, slow the inevitable march or even reverse the process which insures victory for the Israelis and defeat for the Palestinians? [...] Could the refusal to commemorate Deir Yassin signal a refusal to end the cycle of ongoing expansion and displacement?"
(Marc H. Ellis, "Remembering Deir Yassin")

The background events which made Deir Yassin a symbol lay in the struggle for control over the land of Palestine between Jews and Palestinians, beginning around World War I when Zionist Jews started migrating en masse into Palestine.

Theodore Hertzl (the founding father of Zionism) had romanticized Palestine as "a land without a people, for a people without a land", but as Jews began arriving they discovered the land wasn't empty at all. Ultimately, however, that didn't really matter since, as England's Lord Arthur James Balfour put it in a memorandum of 1919: "The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in (an) age-long tradition [...] of far profounded import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit this ancient land”. Thus the west was practically imposing a European migration, a National home for the Jews, and finally a Jewish state on Palestine - all in cynical disregard for the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the population.

Zionism understood this reality and controlled it well from both ends.

Parliamentary, they supported the proposed UN Partition Plan (according to which 55% of Palestine would be given to the Jews, who by 1947 owned less than 10% of the land and were outnumbered by a two-to-one majority - around 1,269,000 Arabs to 678,000 Jews). Militarily, on the other hand, the Zionist movement was actively violating the very same Partition Plan boundaries, targeting major Arab cities outside the proposed Jewish part and attacking Arab towns within the "Jewish" areas to drive out its populations (even the parts given to the Jewish state in the Partition Plan had a slim majority of Christian and Muslim Palestinians!). Between September and May 14th, 1947, Zionism's goal was basically one: to change the reality and demographic balance of the proposed Jewish State piece of land, as well as to capture additional strategic villages which according to the Partition Plan were supposed to be ij Arab territory- or International, as was the case with Jerusalem. Between that time the Zionist Military ("Haganah") launched sustained attacks on dozens of Arab villages, including Abu Kebir (Jaffa), Dec. 6; Tireh (Haifa), Dec. 13; Khisas (Safed), Dec 19; Qazaza (Ramleh), Dec. 20; Jerusalem, Dec. 29; Balad al-Sheikh (Haifa), Dec. 30; Abu Shusha, Jan. 3, 1948; Shafa Amr (Haifa) and Tamra (Nazareth), Jan. 19; Sukreir (Gaza), Jan, 26; Sa'Sa (Safed), Feb 14; Biyar and Ads (Jaffa), March 5, and many more. They had learned well that, as the early Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote back in 1923: "Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but [...] it is even more important to be able to shoot...".

Within this context, it is of no surprise that the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine (and the Arab League) rejected the UN's partition proposal. They pointed out that the designated "Jewish State" in this unworkable plan did not even have a significant Jewish majority and that the plan, which divided Palestine into six separate segments, was altogether unrealistic: "The 'Jewish State' and 'Arab State' - wrote journalist Ray Hanania - would each consist of three segments each that overlapped the other's proposed state. It looked like a six-square Checker Board, with the Arabs given Red and the Jews given Black".

Under the false impression that the Jews in Palestine supposedly endorsed compromise and the Arabs rejected it, the UN voted formally on November 29, 1947, to recommend the Partition Plan (with some minor modifications). It was approved in the UN General Assembly by a vote of 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions and the entire Arab delegation walking out in protest.

The concept of having "rejected" compromise undermined Arab efforts in the years that followed in every attempt to present their case against the unfairness of the Partition Plan and the circumstances surrounding it (there is even a special term - "Rejectionism" - coined by the Zionists to perpetuate said impression).

On March 19th, 1948, in response to the escalation in the Jewish-Arab conflict, Harry Truman's UN representative called for a suspension of the Partition Plan and for a UN-supervised truce to work on a Trusteeship Plan that would replace the partition. On March 20th, the day after, The Arab League endorsed the trusteeship idea while Chaim Weizmann (Zionist leader and later the first president of Israel) and the Jewish Agency rejected it. Jewish forces were steadily advancing beyond the proposed Partition Boundaries and the Zionist leaders knew they needed something drastic to prevent talks of peace from materializing. On top of that, since time wasn't on their side anyhow, they were also in need of a way to shift the demographic balance as quickly as possible to their favor.

It is in this context that we should see the incident at Deir Yassin, which accomplished both of these aims:
Early in the morning of Friday, April 9th, 1948, two units of the "Irgun Tzvai Leumi" (Etzel) and one unit of the Lehi (a.k.a "the Stern Gang") consisting of 150 armed men and women fighters surrounded Deir Yassin, an Arab village with about 700 Palestinian residents located on the southwestern outskirts of Jerusalem (both the Etzel and the Lehi were dissident Revisionist armed groups who claimed that the "Haganah" - the main, semi-official Zionist armed forces which would later become the Israeli Army - and Ben-Gurion were too compromising).

The village, which lay outside the proposed "Jewish State" area, had a peaceful reputation and good relations with the nearby Jewish settlement Kfar Shaul. However, it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and one plan - kept secret until years afterwards - called for it to be destroyed and the residents evacuated to make way for a small airfield that would get supplies to the Jewish residents of Jerusalem (which had been under an Arab blockade since the UN's Partition was voted on). By noon, over 100, noncombatant people, half of them women and children, had been systematically massacred by Etzel and Lehi fighters, with Twenty-five male villagers who survived the massacre loaded into trucks, paraded through the Mahaneh Yehuda and Zihron Yosef (Jewish) quarters in Jerusalem, then taken to a stone quarry along the road between Kfar Shaul and Deir Yassin and shot (all remaining residents were driven to Arab East Jerusalem).

That same evening members of the Etzel and the Lehi (both headed by people who would later become Presidents of the State of Israel: Menachem Begin and Itzhak Shamir) escorted a party of foreign correspondents to a house in Kfar Shaul, and over tea and cookies described the details of the operation, justifying it with false arguments such as Deir Yassin becoming a concentration point for Arabs planning to attack the western/Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem, or that an Arabic-speaking Jew had warned the villagers over a loudspeaker from an armored car (a fabrication believed by many even today). They also exposed the fact that members of the Haganah knew of the attack and supervised it. Menachem Begin revealed that "Deir Yassin was captured with the knowledge of the Haganah and with the approval of its commander", as a part of its "plan for establishing an airfield".

Amplifying and exaggerating as much as they could about the Deir Yassin incident to spread terror among Arab villages ("As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere", threatened Begin), The Etzel and Lehi managed to get The New York Times to report a body count of 254 - one day after the victims were finally buried. A 1987 study undertaken by Birzeit University's Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society, though, found out that "the numbers of those killed does not exceed 120". The Haganah leadership played down the fact that their men had reinforced the attack, distanced itself from having participated in the massacre and issued a formal statement denouncing the 'dissidents' who committed it (just as they denounced them after the attack on the King David Hotel in July, 1946, where Zionists killed more than 90 British people by blowing up the Hotel to protest British policies not being 'Zionist enough').
But even Ben Gurion's formal apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan could not hide the fact that the Deir Yassin massacre served the Zionists and the future State of Israel well. Menachem Begin himself took pride in the fact that throughout the country, Arabs induced to believe his fabricated exaggerations of "Irgun butchery" were striken with terror and began fleeing for their lives massively. As Ami Isseroff (a Zionist Jew) pointed out regarding the massacre, "The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated".

Deir Yassin, like hundreds of other Palestinian villages to follow, was wiped off the map. A few years after the massacre Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland, Rumania, and Slovakia were already settled there (over the objections of Martin Buber, Cecil Roth and other Jewish leaders, who believed the site of the massacre should be left uninhabited). The center of the village was renamed "Givat Shaul Bet" and as Jerusalem expanded, the land of Deir Yassin became part of the city and is now known simply as the area between Givat Shaul and the Har-Nof settlement on the western slopes of the mountain. the streets built on the ruins of Deir Yassin bear, among others, names of Etzel units - the same group who committed the massacre. In 1980 what was left of Deir Yassin's cemetery was bulldozed by the State of Israel to make way for a new highway.

Like Chaim Weizmann once said, "it was a miraculous clearing of the land". That is the story of the village of Deir Yassin, after which our band is named. We fell that, given the Historical and Political context of Deir Yassin, it is fairly obvious why we would choose such a name; Deir Yassin stands as the starkest early warning of a calculated depopulation of over 400 Arab villages and cities and the expulsion of over a quarter of a million Palestinian inhabitants to make room for survivors of the Holocaust and other Jews from the rest of the world. Like a repressed memory of the collective Zionist conscious, the name Deir Yassin lingers in the background, waiting for more than 50 years now to be fully acknowledged. The Israeli government has never apologized for the massacre; The perpetrators of the massacre at were never punished; Victims were never offered compensation. Even more so: A study released on March 9th, 1998 by Morton Klein, President of the ZOA (Zionist Organization of America), claims that there was no massacre at Deir Yassin at all (!).
Merely using the name "Deir Yassin", as a Hardcore band who lives in Israel, is an attempt to combat this selective amnesia - to bring it to the foreground.

It is often said that the first step to solving a problem is admitting its existence. Therefore, as long as the massacre of Deir Yassin and what it represents are denied or purposely forgotten, as long as the people in Israel keep on hiding Zionism's means by justifying Zionism's ends, a true and just peace between Jews and Palestinians cannot and will not exist - that is what we believe. Therefore, using Hardcore Punk music and attitude, we will do as Tewfiq Zayad, the Late Palestinian Poet and Mayor of Nazareth, prophesized: "...in your throat we shall stay, A piece of glass, a cactus thorn, And in your eyes, a blazing fire."

DIR YASSIN, 1999