Bankrupt and unable to force a decision, Spain agreed to a twelve-year truce and dealt with the rebels as though they were a sovereign state — the recognition it had spent forty years refusing. Oldenbarnevelt negotiated it against the bitter opposition of Maurice, who wanted to fight on. The Dutch used the truce to found the East India Company's empire, the Bank of Amsterdam, and the first stock exchange.
The de facto victory, twelve years of it, and it nearly destroyed the Republic from within. The peace faction and the war faction turned on each other in a religious quarrel between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants; in 1619 Maurice had Oldenbarnevelt — the man who had built the Dutch state — beheaded on the Binnenhof. The Republic survived Spain more easily than it survived itself.
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After a week of desperate retreat, Lee's exhausted Army of Northern Virginia was surrounded. Lee met Grant in Wilmer McLean's parlor and surrendered, effectively ending the Civil War.
The end of four years of the bloodiest war in American history. Grant offered generous terms — Confederate soldiers could keep their horses and go home. The Union was preserved.
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Irgun and Stern Gang fighters attack the Arab village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem, killing between 100 and 120 Arab civilians — including women and children. The massacre was widely publicized across the Arab world, causing panic among Arab civilian populations and accelerating the mass flight that became the Nakba. Haganah forces condemned the attack but did not intervene. Palestinian and Arab accounts of the atrocity spread rapidly, often with exaggeration, multiplying the psychological effect.
Deir Yassin was the most consequential single event in causing the Palestinian refugee crisis. The massacre's extensive publicity — amplified by both Arab and Jewish sources for different reasons — convinced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs that fleeing was safer than remaining. It accelerated the mass flight that emptied dozens of Arab towns and villages in the following weeks. It was condemned by the Jewish Agency and Haganah leadership, but the paramilitaries who carried it out faced no punishment.
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