The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
by Ilan Pappé
book review by Mostafa Omar
International Socialist Review,
January-February 2008
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, whose parents
fled persecution in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, minces no words
in telling the real story of Zionism's crimes against the Palestinians:
It is the horrific story of the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine, a crime against humanity that Israel has
wanted to deny and cause the world to forget. Retrieving it from
oblivion is incumbent upon us; it is the very first step we must
take if we ever want reconciliation to take a chance, and peace
to take root, in the torn land of Palestine and Israel.
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,
Pappé explains and documents that the true goal of the
founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish
state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population.
He meticulously (and painfully) reconstructs the story of how
Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork
for this expulsion and how they intiated their plan in 1948 when
the British finally decided to leave.
The same Western governments that have
been quick to denounce ethnic cleansing in Darfur or Bosnia and
Kosovo, writes Pappé, have failed to recognize that the
same awful crime also happened to the Palestinians sixty years
ago and continues today.
Myth and reality__Israel's official version
of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine
never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbors; that
Zionist leaders were willing to accept UN resolution 181 of November
1947, which called for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish
state and an Arab state, but that it was the Palestinians who
rejected that plan; and that the Palestinians became refugees
when they "voluntarily" fled their homes to make room
for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry
out what they called a "second Holocaust" against Jews.
Palestinian historians such as Walid Khalidi
and Salim Tamari have repeatedly documented the crimes Israel
committed in 1948 and afterwards, using historic records as well
as the testimonies of Palestinian refugees. For his own research,
Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying almost
exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the
memoirs of Israel's "founding fathers."
These sources leave no doubt that, in
the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated
plan to expel the native Palestinian population. Pappé
details how these Israeli "heroes" executed the plan
in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use
of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion
of the native population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate
and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying
to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years.
Pappé has belonged to the school
of historical revisionists pioneered by the Israeli historian
Benny Morris in the late 1980s with The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem 1947-1949. In that book, Morris also researched
declassified Israeli military archives and found that the Zionist
leadership and militias committed certain crimes during the war
of 1948 that led to Palestinian expulsion and flight. Morris maintained
that these crimes were not the result of any advance plan of expulsion,
but rather the result of the dynamics of the conflict-much the
same as other bad things that happen in all wars.
The "transfer" plan__Looking
at the same documents Morris used, however, Pappé concluded
that Morris selectively used data and ignored many events that
point starkly to a conscious plan of expulsion. He goes on to
argue that the founders of Zionism-from Theodore Herzl to David
Ben-Gurion-had always planned to expel the native Palestinian
population as a prerequisite for creating an exclusive Jewish
state in Palestine.
For example, in 1937 Ben-Gurion told the
Jewish Agency Executive, the organization charged with procuring
land for Jewish settlements in Palestine, "I am for compulsory
transfer; I don't see anything immoral in it." Ten years
later, Ben Gurion maintained his opposition to sharing Palestine
with the Arabs by rejecting the UN partition plan because he believed
it didn't allocate at least the majority of Palestine to the Jewish
state.
Pappé argues that the partition
plan was, from the beginning, unfair to the Palestinians because
they still made up two-thirds of the population in 1947, while
the UN allocated only 42 percent of the land to them. Meanwhile,
the UN allocated 56 percent of Palestine to foreign Jewish colonizers
who only made up a third of the population. Despite this injustice
to the native population, the founding father of Israel actually
insisted on getting more and more land. In a speech delivered
to his own Mapai Party on December 3, 1947, Ben-Gurion made his
aims clear:
There are 40 percent non-Jews in the areas
allocated to the Jewish state. This composition is not a solid
basis for a Jewish state. Only a state with 80 percent Jews is
a viable state.
Zionist leaders believed that it was not
possible to achieve a Jewish majority in the country simply through
immigration, since most Jews fleeing Nazi Germany's Holocaust
wanted to head West, not to Palestine. Therefore, Pappé
writes, they concluded that there was only one way to achieve
this goal of a majority Jewish state on the majority of the land
of historic Palestine-the ethnic cleansing of the natives.
Preparing for ethnic cleansing__Since
the early 1930s, these founding fathers worked hard to prepare
for a majority Jewish state with very few or no Arabs. First,
they successfully strengthened Jewish economic, social, military,
and political institutions that could become the basis of the
new state. They also took advantage of British openness to Jewish
immigration during the British colonial mandate period of 1917-48.
In addition, they worked to weaken the Arab political leadership
by fighting alongside British forces to crush most of the Palestinian
political and military infrastructure during the Arab revolt of
1936-39. At the end of the Second World War, they launched a relentless
campaign of terrorist attacks against British interests in Palestine
to drive the British out. _They also authorized a committee of
Jewish historians and Arabists (a term that refers to specialists
in Arabic culture) to compile a detailed, secret map of every
Arab town and village in Palestine. They recorded the location
and topography of the villages, the degree of land fertility,
and availability of water, the number of inhabitants and the names
of all adult males, the number of guards and weapons, the names
of individuals who took part in or sympathized with the 1936 revolt,
and even recorded a description of the Mukhtar's (mayor's) living
quarters.
Leaders such as Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir,
and Moshe Allon met for years on a biweekly basis in the "Red
House" in Tel Aviv as a group called The Consultancy. They
drew and revised a sophisticated plan to carry out the "transfer"
of the Palestinians at an opportune time in order to secure a
Jewish majority in Palestine. In the third updated version of
that plan (compiled at the end of the 1930s and referred to as
Plan C or gimel in Hebrew), these leaders agreed on the necessity
of carrying out the following steps:
o Killing the Palestinian political leadership;_o
Killing Palestinian inciters and financial supporters;_o Damaging
Palestinian transportation;_o Damaging Palestinian water wells,
mills, etc.;_o Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting
places, etc.
Within a few months, the same "founding
fathers" drew up the final version of the plan, now named
Plan D, or dalet in Hebrew. These leaders ordered their militias
and gangs to start implementing Plan D only hours after the UN
issued resolution 181 in November 1947. The long nightmare for
the Palestinians would only get worse. Zionist militias began
to attack and expel villagers with or without provocation inside
lands allocated to either the Jewish or Arab state.
Qisarya was the first village to be expelled
in its entirety, on 15 February 1948. The expulsion took only
a few hours and was carried out so systematically that the Jewish
troops were able to evacuate and destroy another four villages
on the same day, all under the watchful eyes of British troops
stationed in police stations nearby.
The people of the village of Sa'sa were
among the early victims. On the night of February 15, 1948, troops
from Palmach (which had the largest Zionist militias) "took
the main street of the village and systematically blew up one
house after another while families were still sleeping inside."
Moshe Kalman, the Jewish officer in charge of the operation later
recalled, rather poetically, "In the end, the sky prised
open. We left behind 35 demolished houses (a third of the village)
and 60-80 dead bodies (quite a few of them were children)."
Declassified Israeli military archives
confirm that the Zionist militias carried out at least thirty-seven
large-scale massacres in that period. Some of the worst massacres
and rape cases took place in villages such as Deir Yassin on April
9, 1948, where one survivor, Fahim Zaydan, described what Jewish
troops did:
They took us one after the other; shot
an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too.
Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front of
us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him-carrying my little
sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her, they shot
her too.
The news about the fate of the villagers
in Deir Yassin spread like wildfire across Palestine, with Jewish
troops cruising through other villages promising the villagers
the same fate if they didn't leave. And though more recent accurate
accounts of the number of those killed in Deir Yassin suggest
a figure of 170 men, women, and children, Zionist propaganda broadcast
over loudspeakers in the weeks that followed the massacre claimed
that they actually killed over 300, in order to elevate the panic
among Arabs.
On October 28, 1948, Palmach troops committed
another massacre in the village of Dawaymah, described by Pappé
as more brutal than the massacre in Deir Yassin. In just a few
hours, all houses were blown up and 455 people were executed,
including 170 women and children. The remaining 6,000 inhabitants-who
included 4,000 refugees expelled earlier that year from other
villages-were forcibly expelled. According to Israeli archives,
"The Jewish troops who took part in the massacre also reported
horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women
raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death."
In all those villages that were attacked,
the map compiled earlier by the Arabists proved to be extremely
useful. It gave the Jewish troops complete understanding of the
best way to attack those villages. And with the help of paid informants,
it allowed them to pick out and immediately execute all potential
resisters.
By the end of the war, Zionist troops
had destroyed more than 420 Palestinian villages and turned their
inhabitants into refugees. The same ill fate that befell the Palestinian
countryside also befell the Arab population in cities-both Arab
or mixed. The campaign against the Palestinian cities was also
as relentless and brutal as that against the villages.
On the first day of Passover, April 21,
1948, Jewish troops began Operation Scissors (later renamed Operation
Cleansing the Leaven or Bi'ur Hametz in Hebrew) to cleanse the
mixed sea-port city of Haifa in the north of its fifty thousand
Arab inhabitants. The troops attacked by rolling barrel bombs
from the hills onto Arab streets and using heavy artillery while
loudspeakers threatened the Palestinians to leave or else. Thousands
of Palestinians fled to the port, attempting to get on boats to
leave, but even there, Jewish troops continued to shoot, leading
to more panic with parents trampling their own children. Many
drowned when overloaded fishing boats capsized. This all happened
under the nose of the British forces who were still stationed
in the city and didn't fulfill an earlier promise to protect the
city's Palestinian inhabitants.
Another example of what Pappé calls
the urbicide, (killing of cities) of Arab Palestine is the attacks
on the two cities of Acre and Baysan. On May 6, 1948, Jewish troops
laid siege with intensive bombardment. Loudspeakers shouted everywhere:
"Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy to the last
man."
According to British doctors in the city's
Lebanese Red Cross hospital, the troops also caused an outbreak
of typhoid and dysentery among Arabs and even British soldiers
by poisoning the water supply with germs. These germs were developed
by the Biological Warfare Science Corps program, set up by Ben-Gurion
himself in the 1940s and ironically known by its acronym HEMED,
which means "sweetness" in Hebrew. _Exhausted, starved,
and fearing more death and destruction, the Palestinian inhabitants
of Acre and Baysan finally surrendered in a matter of days only
to be loaded by Jewish soldiers at gunpoint onto trucks that drove
them to their future refugee camps. By the end of the war most
major Palestinian cities had become totally or almost totally
empty of their Arab inhabitants.
By the spring of 1949, Israel had conquered
up to 80 percent of historic Palestine. It expelled 800,000 Palestinians,
or 75 percent of the native Arab population, from their homeland,
turning them into refugees and preventing them from coming back
at the end of the war. The founding fathers had finally succeeded
in securing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. Some 660,000
Jews imposed military rule on 150,000 Arabs who dug in and didn't
flee. The rest of the Palestinians were dispersed as refugees
in the remaining 20 percent of their own country or in neighboring
Arab states-made to live as refugees for the following sixty years.
Today, they number over six million.
Setting the record straight__Pappé
makes a couple of critical points. First, he explains that the
Arab resistance to the Zionist efforts of ethnic cleansing was
actually quite weak. While Ben-Gurion, in public speeches, delivered
fiery public warnings against a "second Holocaust,"
he expressed utter confidence in private meetings that the nascent
state of Israel would crush all Arab armies and resisters.
This confidence was based on his knowledge
that Jewish troops outnumbered and out-gunned all the Arab armies
combined. In addition, the Soviet Union allowed Czechoslovakia
to supply the Jewish side with new tanks and air power while Britain
formed an embargo on arms sales to the Arabs.
Pappé shows that the majority of
the Palestinians, especially villagers, never fully comprehended
the gravity of the Zionist threat in 1948. They had no idea that
the Zionist project meant not to exploit them but to expel them.
Indeed, in the early months of 1948, many were going on with their
lives, even planning future harvests.
Second, Pappé demonstrated that
Benny Morris was wrong to claim that the expulsion started after
the Arab armies entered Palestine on May 15, 1948. He uses the
same archives that Morris looked at to show massacres and expulsions
beginning and spreading as early as December 1947.
The price: The future__Like all Israelis
who dare to tell the true story of what happened, Pappé
was ostracized. He received death threats and was forced out of
his job as a distinguished senior lecturer at the University of
Haifa last summer. Citing an atmosphere of hate and bigotry, he
decided to accept a job at Exeter University in England.
There, he continues to argue that Israel
must admit its historic crime in order to begin the process of
reconciliation. He also argues that the state of Israel is racist
to the core and must be democratized and purged of hate. The first
step towards democratization is eliminating the Jewish character
of the state, allowing all Palestinian refugees to return, and
establishing total equality between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.
He is full of hope that this future is
possible through the Palestinian struggle for national liberation.
Pappé likens the resistance to Palestine's olive trees,
a national symbol of pride. Israelis keep trying to destroy them
by planting pine trees over them, but the olive trees keep growing
back.
Ilan Pappe page
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