The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Dr. Ilan
Pappe
July 2007
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Israel
is an unfinished business
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Dr. Ilan Pappe
The present dismal reality unfolding in the Middle East has
clear historical roots and a journey into the past may help to
illuminate what lies behind the destructive policies of Israel
in both Palestine and Lebanon.
Zionism arrived in Palestine in the late 19th as a colonialist
movement motivated by national impulses.
The colonisation of Palestine fitted well the interests and
policies of the British Empire on the eve of the First World
War.
With the backing of Britain, the colonisation project expanded,
and became a solid presence on the land after the war and with
the establishment of the British mandate in Palestine (which
lasted between 1918 and 1948).
While this consolidation took place, the indigenous society
underwent, like other societies in the rest of the Arab world, a
steady process of establishing a national identity.
But with one difference. While the rest of the Arab world was
shaping its political identity through the struggle against
European colonialism, in Palestine nationalism meant asserting
your collective identity against both an exploitative British
colonialism and expansionist Zionism.
Thus, the conflict with Zionism was an additional burden. The
pro-Zionist policy of the British mandate there naturally
strained the relationship between Britain and the local
Palestinian society.
This climaxed in a revolt in 1936 against both London and the
expanding Zionist colonisation project.
At the end of November 1947, the UN offered to divide Palestine
into two states almost equal in their territorial space. The
Jews were only one third of the population by 1947 and most of
them had arrived in Palestine only a few years earlier.
The categorical Palestinian refusal to go along with this deal,
backed by the Arab League, allowed the Zionist leadership to
plan carefully the next step. Between February 1947 and March
1948, a final plan for ethnic cleansing was prepared.
The Zionist leadership defined 80 percent of Palestine (Israel
today without the West Bank) as the space for the future state.
This was an area in which one million Palestinians lived next to
600,000 Jews.
The idea was to uproot as many Palestinians as possible. From
March 1948 until the end of that year the plan was implemented
despite the attempt by some Arab states to oppose it, which
failed. Some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, 531 villages
were destroyed and 11 urban neighbourhoods demolished.
Half of Palestine's population was uprooted and half of its
villages destroyed. The state of Israel was established in over
80 percent of Palestine, turning Palestinian villages into
Jewish settlements and recreation parks, but allowing a small
number of Palestinian to remain citizens in it.
The June 1967 war allowed Israel to take the remaining 20
percent of Palestine.
This seizure defeated in a way the ethnic ideology of the
Zionist movement. Israel encompassed 100 percent of Palestine,
but the state incorporated a large number of Palestinians, the
people who Zionists made such an effort to expel in 1948.
The fact that Israel was let off easily in 1948, and not
condemned for the ethnic cleansing it committed, encouraged it
to ethnically cleanse a further 300,000 Palestinians from the
West Bank and the Gaza strip.
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