The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

 

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé is a difficult book to quickly review.  Part of this is because of the complexity of the topic – and how fraught any historical investigation of the war that gave birth to Israel and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians inevitably becomes.  

Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from the Holy Land from 1947 to 1949.  This fact seems beyond dispute.  Palestinians lived in large swatches of the Holy Land, and then were forced to leave.  There is complexity here: some left from fear, others were forced; their homes and villages were destroyed. In the end, the country of Israel was, except for a population of Palestinians in the Galilee, largely "cleansed" of Palestinians. 

Pappe presumes that the ethnical cleansing was the reason for the war and not the result of Israeli armies conquering territory.  Does it matter that much?  Probably not.  Plan Dalet, the largest effort by the Israeli forces to capture territory, can either be seen as a military endeavor – an effort to create a contiguous Israeli territory, or primarily a mission to remove Palestinians from the Holy Land.  Again, does it matter?  Not very much.  The result was the same.  One can view Plan Dalet in two ways: the military mission as paramount, to create a continuous country, and the other as a mission to get rid of Arabs.  This is Pappe’s position.  He downplays Arab and Palestinian armed resistance to Israel – as if they were not much of a threat at all, except for Jordan’s Arab Legion.  

It is difficult not to see this as a purely ideology view.  And the numbers tell the story.  The pre-state Yishuv and wartime Israel had a population of 600,000, and 6,000 died in the War of Independence.  The loss of one percent of a small population is tremendous.  Pappe is not interested in this.  He never mentions this number.

This is an important book, that highlights the horrors of war.  The twentieth century was largely the story of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and population transfers.  We need a book like Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder (and his other works) that ties together the Holocaust with other genocide/transfer events in Europe.  I think to truly understand the Nakba, it needs to be tied together with other such events in the twentieth century, like the Partition of India.  As far as I know, that book has yet to be written.