"The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" a book by Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe

Book Review for Emel Magazine - July 2006 - issue 46

Ilan Pappe is one of a few Israeli-Jewish historians who has re-examined the Israeli-Palestine conflict in a way that is so controversial, it has caused many Israeli’s to believe him to be a mercenary working for the Arab world. This book deals with Israeli policy in 1948 which in Pappe’s words surmounted to the ‘expropriations of Palestinian property and/or campaigns of ethnic cleansing’ in and around this period of time.

In a drive for an exclusively Jewish state the Zionist forces uprooted 800,000 Palestinian people destroying 531 villages. Pappe argues that ‘this crime was utterly forgotten and erased from minds and memories’ and the ideology that enabled the depopulation of half of Palestine’s native people in 1948 is ‘still alive and continues to drive the inexorable cleansing of those Palestinians who live their today’.

Shocking, telling and illuminating, Pappe’s research and findings come from declassified Israeli government papers and unlike many historians before him, he uses Arab sources and turns to oral history to achieve a better grasp of what he calls was the ‘systematic planning behind the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948’.

He conjectures that there is no other way for us to fully understand the roots of the contemporary conflict and he is encouraged by others who like him are now aiming to provide a more truthful description of the enormity of the crimes the Israeli soldiers committed in and since 1948.

The conviction with which Pappe delivers the histories of unrecognised crimes against the Palestinian people has caused respected historians and writers like John Pilger to appraise him to be “Israel’s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian”. This very conviction led Pappe in 2007 to endorse a boycott of Israeli Universities which led to his resignation as Senior Lecturer from the University of Haifa.

In the book Pappe quotes a fellow Israeli-Jewish Professor at Haifa University: “…if we want to remain alive, we have to kill and kill and kill […] if we don’t […] we cease to exist. […] Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee ‘peace’ – it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelmingly majority of Jews.”

Pappe’s pivotal message is that he wants to make a case for the ‘paradigm of ethnic cleansing’ and use it to replace the ‘paradigm of war’ as the basis for current and future scholarly research and public debate about the unending conflict. Pappe argues that without recognition of such crimes against humanity, punishable by international law, a solution to the conflict cannot be found.

Who are to blame and who need to be held accountable? A caucus of characters, well known to most readers of the subject, who prepared the plans for the ethnic cleansing and supervised its execution until they successfully uprooted half of Palestine’s native population. Pappe calls for the unconditional return of the refugees to their homes.

The book reconstructs the methods used for executing the master plan of expulsion and destruction, exposes the ideology behind such acts and explains how such an ideology continues in a variety of means today. A heart-wrenching account for any reader to absorb especially since these crimes are still, regarded as ‘alleged’.

On the subject of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, previous to the publishing of this work, Pappe has been recorded to have warned that the ‘violent storm’ raging will continue to do so through the Arab and Muslim worlds and also within Britain and the United States as long as the democratic superpowers and bodies remain inactive.

Still, Pappe is optimistic about the movement of Israeli Jews like him who are going against the grain, be they few and far between; it is they that he believes hold the key to reconciliation and peace in the torn land of Palestine.