The Depth of the Massacre Story : A Commentary and a Japanese Translation of Dayr Yasin. (Series of the Destroyed Palestinian Villages, No. 4). Authored by Sharif Kana’ana and Nihad Zeitawi.

This paper presents a commentary and a Japanese translation of Deir Yassin: The Destroyed Palestinian Villages, No. 4 (1987. Kana’ana, Sharif, and Nihad Zeitawi. Birzeit: Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society.). The original book is written in Modern Standard Arabic (its descriptive part) and in the village dialect (citations from villagers’ speeches). It is one of the publications from a research project conducted from 1986 to 1998 at Birzeit University, located in the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories. This research project aimed to collect and record Palestinian refugees’ oral narratives of their native villages that were destroyed in 1948 because of the establishment of the State of Israel. The book is composed of the following four chapters: (1) The popular history of the village; (2) The clans and families; (3) The village in the 1940s; and (4) The politics, the escape, and the exodus. This project preceded a new wave of historical accounts in Palestinian refugee communities of their original village, and more than 120 similar books have been published since then, recording their homeland based on the former villagers’ narratives. It is noteworthy that these books based on oral history began to be written after the Palestinian diaspora leaders were defeated in Beirut (1982). Many Israeli and Palestinian researchers have argued over the question of why Palestinian Arabs became refugees in 1948. As Israel has ruled most of the area in the region, the historiographies in Israel have dominated the Palestinian historical narrative. Especially after the 1980s, when Israeli historians started to publish their research on the cause of the refugee problem based on the then newly declassified state archives, the "positivist" historiographies gained a great influence over the historical dispute as a whole. In this renewed debate, the Palestinian oral histor y was sidelined again and was regarded as a distor ted narrative. This translated text is dedicated to the village of Deir Yassin, which will always be linked with the massacre that took place in 1948. Although Deir Yassin is the village that has most often been refer red to in the historical dispute, refugees’ memor y of the village reveals the rich layers of folklore that once existed there. The villagers’ narratives show us how much the destruction of their homeland means to them, a point that has long been dismissed in the traditional historical dispute