https://farid.ps/articles/the_deir_yassin_massacre_terror_as_the_cornerstone_of_the_zionist_state/en.html
On the morning of April 9, 1948, the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem, awoke to a nightmare orchestrated not by nameless shadows, but by men whose names would later be inscribed in the foundations of a state. Irgun and Lehi, two Zionist paramilitary groups, launched an attack that lasted hours but left behind scars that time has not been allowed to heal. At least 107 civilians were killed - many of them women, children, and the elderly. But in a massacre defined by savagery, one story stands out like a wound that will never close.
Abdoul Ra’ouf Al-Shareef was just a child. His father, Hamed, ran a bakery in the village. When the attackers arrived, they demanded that he throw his own son into the communal oven. When he refused, they beat him unconscious. Then they took the boy and burned him alive in front of the smoldering wreckage of his home.
This is not a rumor or folklore. Survivor testimonies, collected by Palestinian historians and international observers alike, corroborate the event. It is a matter of historical record, buried not for lack of evidence but because of what it reveals: that the creation of the Israeli state was not merely accompanied by violence, but conceived through it. And what was done to Abdoul Ra’ouf was not random - it was terrorism, by every legal, moral, and human standard.
According to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 49/60 (1994), terrorism is defined as:
“Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public… for political purposes.”
The European Union’s Framework Decision on Combating Terrorism (2002) echoes this, defining terrorism as acts committed with the aim of:
“seriously intimidating a population, unduly compelling a government… or seriously destabilising or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country.”
By these standards, the actions of Irgun and Lehi - particularly at Deir Yassin - were not military operations. They were not clashes between armed equals. They were criminal acts of terror, intended to intimidate, destabilize, and forcibly remove a civilian population in order to establish a state on its ruins.
The targeting of civilians, the use of psychological warfare, and the intention to provoke mass flight among Palestinians - these were deliberate, systematic, and ideologically driven. And as such, they meet all legal criteria for terrorism under customary international law, including those articulated in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which criminalizes acts intentionally directed against civilian populations as crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Had Abdoul Ra’ouf Al-Shareef been an Israeli, a European, or an American child, his death would have shaken the world. It would have made front-page headlines. Political leaders would have wept at press conferences. Condemnations would have been swift, sanctions threatened, and perpetrators hunted.
But Abdoul Ra’ouf was Palestinian. His village had no embassy, no lobby, no state. The ovens of his father’s bakery had no global audience. The world met his death with silence - a silence that reverberates to this day. The asymmetry of empathy is not just an emotional failing; it is a moral indictment of a world order that divides the innocent into those whose lives matter and those whose deaths can be excused as collateral.
The Deir Yassin massacre was no aberration. It was part of a wider pattern of attacks that shared common tactics: striking civilian centers, planting bombs in markets, targeting the elderly and the young, and using extreme violence not to win battles but to terrify a population into flight.
These were not spontaneous acts of desperation. They were premeditated crimes, executed to create terror, erode morale, and compel political surrender. The British government at the time classified the Irgun as a terrorist organization and placed a bounty on Menachem Begin, its leader. Begin lived in hiding under a false identity - not as a freedom fighter, but as a fugitive.
And yet, just three decades later, Begin stood as Prime Minister of Israel. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Herut party he founded would become Likud, the ruling party of Israel today. The line from Deir Yassin to Netanyahu is not symbolic - it is direct and continuous, a political lineage rooted in bloodshed and normalized through power.
In one of the most morally piercing interventions in the history of the conflict, Albert Einstein, joined by thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Sidney Hook, wrote a letter to The New York Times (December 4, 1948), denouncing Menachem Begin and his Herut party. The letter explicitly compared their ideology and tactics to those of Nazi and Fascist regimes.
“The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Herut Party… a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”
Einstein, a Jew and a Zionist of conscience, recognized that a state built on terror would not be a haven for Jews, but a curse upon them. His warning was not heeded. The world preferred the illusion of a miraculous birth over the truth of a violent one.
The Deir Yassin massacre was not a tragic side effect of a war for independence. It was a deliberate tool of nation-building, part of a coordinated campaign to depopulate Palestine. The Nakba - the catastrophe that saw over 700,000 Palestinians expelled - did not happen in a vacuum. It was prepared by massacres, reinforced by bombings, and finalized by terror.
Terrorism was not incidental to the birth of Israel. It was foundational.
To burn a child alive in his father’s oven is not an act of war. It is an act of genocidal intent. And when such acts are not only tolerated but rewarded with statehood, legitimacy, and international silence, we have not merely failed justice - we have inverted it.
The world today wrings its hands over the intractability of the conflict, as though it were born of ancient hatreds or religious intransigence. But the root is here, in the ashes of Deir Yassin, in the silence over Abdoul Ra’ouf’s murder, in the normalization of terrorism when it serves the powerful.
To remember Abdoul Ra’ouf is to challenge the moral architecture of our age. It is to say that Palestinian lives are not disposable. That terror, when deployed by the victors, is still terror. That silence, when it protects the strong, is complicity.
And it is to echo Einstein’s plea: Do not build a future on the bones of the innocent.
Justice begins with truth. And the truth is this: the state of Israel was born in terror. And unless that foundation is acknowledged, the bloodshed will continue - not because of fate, but because of denial.