So, Norman Finkelstein, one of your own, lies?
The village was an Arab Muslim stonecutter community of about 750 people, located a few kilometers east of Kastel on a rocky hillside west of Jerusalem and two kilometers south of the Tel-Aviv highway. Lying inside the United Nations' proposed Jerusalem international zone, its terraced stone houses descended eastward to meet a quarry-studded pathway from Jewish Jerusalem's western suburb, Givat Shaul.(9)
Goldshmidt, raised in that suburb, had been sworn by his father to avenge armed attacks emanating from Deir Yassin against Givat Shaul during Arab-Jewish-British strife of the 1920s and 1930s. But during the 1948 conflict, Deir Yassin was studiously honoring a Haganah-sponsored agreement to refrain from hostilities with neighboring Jewish areas in exchange for protection from Jewish attack. One Lehi member, David Siton, protested that hitting a nonhostile village might endanger western Jerusalem. A Lehi reconnaissance appears to have confirmed the village's nonhostility. And although Irgun district commander Mordechai Raanan insisted Deir Yassin was part of an Arab logistical route to Kastel, he had to concede after another reconnaissance that the town appeared docile.(10)
In fact, the town had nurtured its quietness vigilantly, training guards for watch patrols and carefully maintaining contacts with both sides. Villagers provided intelligence to the Haganah and even cooperated while the Haganah took the strategic Sharafa ridge between Deir Yassin and the nearby ALA base at Ein Kerem. Deir Yassin repeatedly repelled, once with reported loss of life, ALA attempts to infiltrate troops into Deir Yassin. Haganah intelligence confirmed in a secret report after Deir Yassin's capture that the town had stayed "faithful allies of the western [Jerusalem] sector."(11) Yona Ben-Sasson, Haganah commander in Givat Shaul, later recalled that "there was not even one [hostile] incident between Deir Yassin and the Jews,"(12) despite increasing Arab military activity in the vacinity.
