The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine | Ilan Pappe

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine | Ilan Pappe | The Origins of Apartheid in Israel and Palestine

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The Ethnic Cleansi...

	The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Ilan Pappe Oneworld Publications, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 84 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Jewish Terrorism

This is a must read for anyone who is interested in the history of the Middle East. Pappe chronicles one of the best kept secrets, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Jews only a few short years after the events of WWII. To understand the Intafada and why Hamas has risen to power this volume sets the record straight on the countless war crimes Zionists are guilty of committing even before Palestine was illegally partitioned.

The Origins of Apartheid in Israel and Palestine

In the 1980s, Israel's "new historians" challenged a Zionist narrative that had been publicly unquestioned in Israel and the United States. Among these historians and those of us who have followed their work, Israel could never again be viewed as an underdog David challenged by an Arab Goliath. Since then, much of the debate among those who are increasingly critical of Israel's actions has instead addressed the problem of whether this biblical metaphor should in fact be turned on its head. Although there has for decades been much evidence to support this argument, three recent, well-researched books have made it virtually uncontroversial to assert that the post-World War I Zionist movement, sponsored by superpowers Britain and the U.S. (and indeed by the Soviet Union immediately after World War II), should no more be seen as the underdog than we now see British or Spanish colonialists in relation to Native Americans. In turn, Palestinians can no more be sensibly called anti-Semitic than indigenous Americans can be called "anti-European."

These three books evoke the essence of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict with metaphors of confinement, separation, and exclusion: the "iron cage," the "iron wall," and the "glass wall." In The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Palestinian-American Professor Rashid Khalidi documents British support for a Jewish national movement in Palestine since World War I, and opposition to a Palestinian national movement, most violently during the revolt of 1936-39. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, by which the British ruled from 1923-1948, endorsed a "national home" for the Jewish people while never citing the Palestinians by name. Thus, "the (90%) Arab majority was effectively ignored as a national and political entity."

This favoritism was reflected in the brutal suppression of the Palestinian revolt, which effectively decimated Palestinian leadership and resistance thereafter. It was also reflected in the passivity with which Britain responded after World War II both to Zionist terrorism against the British administration, and to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians which began well before the end of the mandate in May 1948. It has long been conventional Israeli wisdom that the Zionist movement had to confront both a British Goliath and an Arab Goliath, all in the wake of the Holocaust. It is clear that the Zionist David allied itself with the British Goliath, not only overwhelming a Palestinian national movement with profound internal problems, but violently "transferring" over 700,000 Palestinians with relatively little resistance.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has documented the violent expulsion of the Palestinians from the end of 1947 into 1949. It has long been established that the Palestinians fled not in response to "Arab broadcasts," but to violent intimidation by Jewish forces, including unprovoked massacres. Based on Pappé's meticulous research, it is now clear that this ethnic cleansing was premeditated, not retaliatory, and half completed before the feeble intervention of Arab armies in May of 1948. "Official Israeli historiography describes April 1948 as a turning point. . . . If there was a turning point in April, it was the shift from sporadic attacks and counter-attacks on the Palestinian civilian population toward the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing that now followed." This ethnic cleansing was based on a belief among Israeli leaders that an "iron wall" would be required to separate a Jews from Palestinians, who were understood then as now to pose not a military but demographic threat to a Jewish state.

This demographic threat is addressed by Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in the Arab Israeli city of Nazareth, in Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State. The 150,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 are now over 1 million, over 20% of the population, a percentage that increases due to their high birthrate. This presents a problem for a Jewish state that has used a harshly and "legal" discriminatory "glass wall" between its Arab and Jewish citizens that is "needed to cloak the contradictions inherent in the concept of Israel as a `Jewish and democratic' state." These contradictions have been exposed recently by Israeli attacks on unarmed Palestinian civilians during the outbreak of the intifada in 2000, by increasing and unwarranted suspicion of the loyalty of historically quiescent Arab Israelis who demand social equality, and by increasing calls for expulsion by popular right-wing politicians. All of this has resulted in plans to re-draw borders in order to transfer as many as a quarter of Israel's Palestinian citizens to a future Palestinian state, an outcome in no way supported by those effected.

Metaphors of separation, confinement, and exclusion are made literally concrete by the separation wall that has been built inside the occupied West Bank. While largely invisible to Israelis, in areas where visible to Israelis it has been, according to Cook, "painted with murals on the Israeli side, reimagining the view that was now missing while making sure that it was empty of the Palestinian villages that could be seen before its construction." Pappé adds that also eliminated are "the people who live in them."

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Ethnic Cleansing

What a fantastic historical record of long passed events in the Middle East. Well worth the read for anyone interested in knowing this part of the world and why we have the current troubles 60 years later. This dark secret has barely been touched by the media and other so-called experts but is fully worthy of being brought forward to the world. So the Palestinians are NOT terrorists, they just want their land back-quite simple. Therefore the solution is quite simple. Maybe gw should read this book-he can claim that this is the first book he has ever read-a notable achievement. The Palestinians cause is noble, real and must be satisfactorily resolved otherwise war will continue in the ME forever. So when you hear the pundits talk about the "road map to peace", it will dead end unless the Palestinian situation is cleared up. They were there first, this is their land, so lets solve it. The Zionists have alot of nerve yelling racism at every step of the way, when they themselves have taken racism to the highest levels. Thanks for reading this.

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Zionism, the sinking warship

Western Europe and the united states of america have implanted this monster(Zionism) in the midlleast to safeguard it's strategic ambitions in the area.
The very existence of zionism is hostile and is brutal, thus it cannot prevail in the area. A different Israel free of zionism can prevail. The nonproblematic and at times harmonious relationship of arabs and jews through history has been jeoperdized by zionism. Ilan Pappe's book is a document on the basics of zionism.

A Holocaust Isn't All Bad when You're the one of top!

Terrific book, one that US political leaders should read instead of the NY Times, although the latter originally portrayed Israel, Irgun, Stern Gang, etc. as terrorists. Other great reading is "They Dare to Speak Out", "The Other Israel".

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