Realising what has been happening in Israel and Palestine for a very long time

by Dr Matin Baraki

“The ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” If a person of non-Jewish faith had written such a book, he would inevitably have been branded anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli. But the Haifa-born historian Ilan Pappe is the son of German parents of Jewish faith who fled from the German fascists. He studied in Jerusalem and was a professor at the University of Haifa until 2007.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the expulsion of the Arab people of Palestine from their homeland was conceptualised at the first Zionist congress in Basel in August 1897, where Theodor Herzl presented his strategy for a “Jewish state”.
  On 10 March 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, met with eleven Jewish immigrant officials in Tel Aviv and decided to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Although the country was still under the British mandate, they began to attack the Arab-Palestinian settlements under the leadership of Moshe Dayan, later Minister of Defence, Menachem Begin and Yitzchak Rabin, both later Prime Ministers and the latter even a Nobel Peace Prize winner. In a short space of time, eleven neighbourhoods and totally 531 Palestinian settlements were evacuated or cleansed, numerous villages were razed to the ground and 800,000 people fled to save their lives. This is the quintessence of the book – briefly summarised on the back cover. “The mission was successfully accomplished” (p. 103), emphasised the Jewish fighters. On 7 February 1948, Ben Gurion visited the evacuated and destroyed village of Lifta and stated: “When I come to Jerusalem now, I have the feeling of being in a Jewish (Jvrit) city.” (p. 103) Ben Gurion even said: “If we continue undeterred, it is quite possible that in the next six to eight months there will be considerable demographic changes, very considerable changes in our favour.” (p. 130 f.)
  It was time to act “vigorously and brutally” (p. 105). He called for “merciless” action against all families, “including women and children”. During the operation, “it was not necessary to distinguish between guilty and innocent” (ibid.), he emphasised. Fahim Zaydan, a boy of twelve at the time, later recalled the murder of his family. The Jewish murder squad had taken people out of their homes one by one, murdered an old man, then his daughter, then his own brother. “When my mother bent over him screaming – she was still holding my little sister Hudra, who she was breastfeeding – they shot her too.” (p. 130) In Deir Yassin, the Jewish troops carried out a massacre with up to 170 fatalities (p. 131) and another massacre in Khirbat (p. 132). In Haifa and the surrounding area, the “ethnic cleansing” had assumed such a “deadly speed” (p. 154) that people were expelled from 15 villages in a short time. Ilan Pappe describes that 300 people lived in some of these villages and 5,000 in others.
  These are just a few examples from the prehistory of the Palestine-Israel conflict. The entire book is riddled with countless brutalities and crimes committed by the Israeli occupiers against the Palestinian people. At the end of the book, I asked myself: How can the descendants of people whose grandparents and parents experienced Auschwitz treat another people so cruelly, as has been happening in Palestine since 1948 and is currently happening in Gaza? Anyone who reads the book carefully will also find an appropriate answer to this question in Ilan Pappe.
  If you want to understand today’s Palestinian resistance and the Israeli war, you should definitely read this excellently researched, extremely interesting and informative work and consider the facts it documents. This book is particularly recommended for people who consider even the slightest criticism of Israeli government policy to be anti-Semitic. The author and publisher are to be thanked for the new edition that has now been published. •



New German edition: Pappe, Ilan. Die ethnische Säuberung Palästinas. Westend Verlag, Neu-Isenburg, 4. Aufl. 2024, ISBN 978-3-86489-258-5;
English Original: Pappe, Ilan. The etnic cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld, 2007; ISBN 978-1-85168-555-4

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