The Deir Yassin massacre is recalled as a pivotal element in the fear surrounding the 1948 war: rumors that Jewish forces intended to exterminate Arabs, linked to what had happened at Deir Yassin, contributed to the panic during Haifa’s mass Arab flight. The novel places this memory within a wider argument about war, displacement, and the stories people tell to justify what followed.

The massacre as remembered

In a conversation with Gershom Wald, Shmuel recalls how, as a boy, he had believed that Jews were just and outnumbered, while Arabs were hostile and intended to drive the Jews from their land. That certainty gives way in his account to an escalating sequence of violence in Haifa: attacks on Jewish buses, Jewish reprisals in nearby villages, the killing of Jewish refinery workers by an Arab crowd, further reprisals, and armed positions between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods.

Against this background, Shmuel says that a deadly fear spread among Haifa’s Arabs. Rumors held that Jews planned to exterminate them, as they had the inhabitants of Deir Yassin, which Shmuel describes as nearby, across the hill from the house. The massacre thus appears in the conversation not as an isolated reference but as a story circulating amid the breakdown of trust and the growth of communal violence.

Connection to Haifa’s Arab exodus

In April 1948, about a month before the British withdrawal, tens of thousands of Arabs left Haifa in boats and fishing vessels bound for Lebanon. Shmuel notes that Jewish leaders in Haifa issued appeals on the final day urging the Arab population to stay, but those appeals did not stop the departure. In his account, fear had already taken hold; the rumor about Deir Yassin helps explain why reassurances could no longer be trusted by those who believed themselves threatened.

Shmuel distinguishes Haifa from Lod and other places, where, he says, Arabs were not asked to remain but were killed or expelled. This qualification complicates any single account of wartime displacement: the Haifa appeals existed, but they did not undo the wider conditions of violence, fear, and forced departure. By invoking Deir Yassin within this contrast, the narrative links a specific remembered massacre to the broader experience of Palestinian displacement without treating every locality as having followed the same course.

Competing accounts and continuing memory

Shmuel returns in thought to Haifa’s Arab neighborhoods, some now occupied by Jewish immigrants, and to the thousands of Arabs who chose to remain. He wonders whether what happened had to happen. His father insists there was no alternative, describing the war as a total, existential struggle between populations rather than armies, in which whole populations were displaced, as in other conflicts. Shmuel’s mother assigns blame to the British, while Atalia has described her father, Shaltiel Abravanel, as out of step with his time.

The massacre’s place in this recollection is therefore tied to a contest over explanation and responsibility. Shmuel’s memories retain both the fear that shaped the exodus and the evidence of different outcomes: appeals to stay in Haifa, flight to Lebanon, expulsion and killing elsewhere, and Arab families who remained. The narrative does not resolve these accounts into a single verdict. Instead, Deir Yassin’s remembered presence exposes how public rumors, personal recollection, and later justifications continue to shape the meaning of the war and its deaths.