The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapter 9-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Role of Historical Narratives in Nation-State and Identity Building

According to Pappé, the reason that the Nakba and The Experiences of the Palestinian Diaspora have remained largely unknown to the general public is due to Israel’s nation-state and identity-building program. Pappé explains how the Zionists tailored an official historical narrative about the establishment of the State of Israel that denies the war crimes and ethnic cleansing carried out against the Indigenous Palestinian population that had been living in Palestine. The official historical narrative hinges on the claim that the Palestinians who left the country in 1948 left voluntarily to make way for the invading Arab armies whose goal was to prevent the Zionists from establishing a Jewish state. Pappé argues that this claim is a myth. Through archival research, Pappé demonstrates that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was a foundational tenet of Zionist ideology dating to their arrival in the country and that the Zionist leadership under David Ben-Gurion was already putting their ethnic cleansing program into effect by December 1947, before any Arab armies had entered the country, with the final blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine finalized as Plan Dalet in March 1948.

In addressing “the deep chasm between reality and representation” in historical accounts of 1948 (28), Pappé considers the ideological motivations of the Zionists and the modern State of Israel for ethnically cleansing the country and then fabricating a historical narrative that denies this ethnic cleansing. The goal of the Zionist Movement had always been the creation “of a purely Jewish state, both as a safe haven for Jews from persecution and a cradle for a new Jewish nationalism” (34). To create this “purely Jewish state,” the Zionists set out to dispossess the Indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, and between the end of 1947 and the middle of 1948 nearly 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from the country while hundreds of their villages and towns were destroyed. This mass dispossession was not the consequence of war, as the official Israeli history claims, but the result of a methodical plan of ethnic cleansing developed by the Zionist leadership. The Zionists’ ethnic cleansing operations included the destruction of Palestinian villages, towns, and neighborhoods; confiscation of Palestinian property; and deportation of Palestinian communities. In the process, Pappé claims, Israeli forces committed massacres, torture, and rape. Thus, while Israel refers to the 1948 conflict as their “War of Independence,” the Palestinians refer to this event as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”

Since 1948, however, Israel and its supporters have consistently denied the Nakba, even excluding discussion of the Nakba from subsequent peace talks. As a result of this systematic denial of its own history of human rights violations, Israel has been able to define itself as a sovereign Jewish state built by and for a people who had been systematically persecuted throughout history. Pappé writes:

For Israeli Jews to accept [the Nakba] would naturally mean undermining their own status of victimhood. This would have political implications on an international scale, but also—perhaps far more critically—would trigger moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche: Israeli Jews would have to recognise [sic] that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare (260).

However, Israel’s denial of the Nakba has only served to further alienate and antagonize the Palestinians. Thus, as Pappé insists, unless Israel acknowledges the Nakba, there can be no lasting peace in the region.

In addition, Pappé notes that Israel has attempted to rewrite the ancient history of the region to support the narratives that justify Zionist colonization. Israel employed archaeologists and historians to assign Hebrew names to replace Arabic ones, creating a sense of Jewish historical continuity that erased centuries of continuous Palestinian life. Israel also razed Palestinian villages and replaced them with new towns and national parks, bringing the geography of Israel in line with the new historical narratives undergirding their national identity.

The Nature of Ethnic Cleansing

In the Preface, Pappé identifies the actions the Zionists took against the Palestinians in 1948—especially their operations as guided by Plan Dalet—as “a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation” (14; cf. 22). In Chapter 1, Pappé discusses several widely agreed-upon definitions of ethnic cleansing to justify his classification of the Nakba as ethnic cleansing. Definitions of ethnic cleansing surveyed by Pappé—many of them drawing heavily on events from modern history such as the actions of the Croat militants against the Muslims of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s—agree on basic principles: “ethnic cleansing is an effort to render an ethnically mixed country homogenous by expelling a particular group of people and turning them into refugees while demolishing the homes they were driven out from” (22). Pappé argues that this describes precisely what the Zionist leadership of Israel did to the Indigenous Palestinians.

Pappé discusses other aspects of ethnic cleansing throughout the book. Ethnic cleansing operations, for example, need not necessarily have a “master plan,” as “most of the troops engaged in ethnic cleansing […] know beforehand what is expected of them” (22). Thus, in 1948, the Zionist troops on the ground—including the Hagana as well as the Irgun and Stern Gang—often took the initiative to intimidate Palestinians or destroy their villages even when no explicit orders had been given them from higher up. The troops on the ground, that is, knew that the Zionist goal was the expulsion of as many Palestinians as possible from the country, and they were generally eager to do their part to realize this goal. Pappé also highlights the role of massacres and other war crimes as “a key tactic to accelerate the flight of the population earmarked for expulsion” (22). Several massacres occurred during the Nakba, including at Deir Yassin and Tantura. Finally, Pappé writes that “[l]ater on, the expelled are then erased from the country’s official and popular history and excised from its collective memory” (22). This too happened in the case of the Nakba, which is peremptorily denied in official Israeli historical narratives. Israeli renaming of villages and geographical areas represents the final stage of ethnic cleansing when the process shifts from overt violence to cultural erasure.

In explaining the thesis and importance of his book, Pappé suggests that adopting the “paradigm” of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the explanation for the Nakba and the events of 1948 will allow more people to understand the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Pappé writes, “I have no doubt that the absence so far of the paradigm of ethnic cleansing is part of the reason why the denial of the catastrophe has been able to go on for so long” (17). For Pappé, the actions of the Zionists in 1948 must be interpreted as ethnic cleansing—and therefore as a war crime under international law—not for the sake of spite or even for legal reasons (at the time of writing, most of the Zionist leaders involved in the Nakba were no longer living), but because he believes that only by acknowledging this reality can Israel hope to make peace with the Palestinians. Denying the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians allows it to continue; only by acknowledging it, Pappé says, can ethnic cleansing finally end, and peace be achieved.

The Experiences of the Palestinian Diaspora

Content Warning: This section contains detailed descriptions of ethnic cleansing, including but not limited to war crimes and the mass suffering and displacement of Palestinians.

Pappé devotes much attention to The Experiences of the Palestinian Diaspora during and after the Nakba to illustrate his thesis that the dispossession and displacement of the Palestinians should be understood as ethnic cleansing. He details the atrocities carried out against the Palestinians, especially those at Haifa and Jaffa. At Haifa, for example, Pappé explained how between 55,000 and 60,000 Palestinians—rendered leaderless by the departure of their elites from the city—were picked off by Jewish Zionist forces who used terrorist tactics such as bombing civilian businesses and broadcasting intimidating noises to achieve their goals. The Zionist military operations in Haifa were even given intimidating names, such as Operation “Scissors” (misparayim) and Operation “Cleansing the Leaven” (bi’ur hametz). The departure of the Palestinians was particularly chaotic, though in many ways characteristic of the dispossession and displacement of the Palestinians at other sites. The Palestinians at Haifa were given conflicting messages, with the Zionist militants ordering them to evacuate while the British officials posted at the site backed up the message, even as the Jewish mayor of Haifa promised that no harm would come to the Palestinians if they stayed. When the Palestinians did evacuate, they were shelled and shot at by Jewish forces while they tried to escape, and many were killed.

Pappé discusses how the methods the Zionists used against the Palestinians shaped the Palestinians’ experiences during the Nakba. These methods included “large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning” (13). Outside of “official” operational orders, however, the Zionist forces also used brutal tactics such as massacres and rape, as recorded in accounts of the Palestinians’ experiences in 1948 and beyond. In upper Galilee, where Palestinian and Arab resistance was more determined than elsewhere, Palestinian towns and villages were subjected to several massacres, implemented as a tactic to frighten and demoralize the other Palestinians holding out in the region.

Finally, Pappé emphasizes that the experiences of the Palestinians have continued to influence the Palestinian Diaspora long after 1948. During the occupation, Jewish forces continued their mistreatment of the Palestinians in an effort to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes. At Jaffa in particular, occupying Israeli forces often robbed, beat, or raped the Palestinians who remained within the new country’s borders. Since 1967, the Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) have been subject to Israeli military rule and segregation. All Palestinian efforts to seek freedom have failed, undermined by the indifference of Western powers such as the US and the UN as well as Israel’s denial of the atrocities they committed during the Nakba. Nakba’s denial has thus become not only a central part of the Jewish Israeli identity but also of the negative experiences of the Palestinian Diaspora since their dispossession and displacement in 1948.