Read and reread
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
a book by Ilan Pappe
(2006)
By Jacques Werstein
Reading Ilan Pappe's book written in 2006,
The Ethnic Cleansing of
Palestine
, is particularly topical today in order to understand what is at
stake, in a situation where the Palestinian Authority, in the person of Mahmud
Abbas, is putting its request to the UN for recognition of the Palestinian
State, of which it intends to assume the leadership.
The UN is confronted, since its creation
with the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict
. It has recognised and recognises among its members the State of
Israel
open to the immigration of Jews from all the countries where they are
dispersed
and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation” (PLO) a member
with observance status representing all Palestinians who lived on Palestinian
Mandate territory up till the partition of Palestine, adopted by the UN the 29th
November 1947. They were chased out during the Nakba by Zionist, then Israeli
armed forces. The PLO's first and foremost mandate is the demand to be able
to return to their homes, the right for all to return, right that the UN
recognised the 11th December 1948!
Taking this into account, it can reasonably be questioned whether Mahmud Abbas's demand is compatible with PLO representation and its mandate of continuing to defend in the UN, the right to return for Palestinian refugees. Besides, it is well known that several Zionist currents, with Lieberman, are demanding that the Palestinians who live in Israel (and have Israeli nationality) be expelled and sent to the pseudo Palestinian State. Mahmud Abbas's demand is a direct threat to this population. Should the Palestinians in the refugee camps and the diaspora abandon their right to return home?
Wouldn't that be making the Palestinian people pay a high price for UN recognition of the Palestinian rump state, in charge of keeping order alongside the State of Israel ? Do the Palestinians have to abandon for ever all perspective of a single democratic , secular, Palestinian State, with equal rights for its Jewish and Arab components, in the absence of which no return is conceivable ? Must it submit to barbarism?
The hue and cry of the media can be heard everywhere with their solution to the conflict : a return to the pre 1967 Palestine.
Partition, war and ethnic cleansing
Ilan Pappe's book,
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
, has the great
merit of reminding us that before the Zionist military occupation of the West
bank and Gaza in 1967, the
Palestinian State
did not exist. Palestine,
after the Ottoman occupation, was the Palestine Mandate, under the occupation of
the British Empire. In 1967 it was already dislocated by Partition and the
ethnic cleansing that this allowed, with the aim of setting up a Zionist State
on the major part of its territory. Partition and ethnic cleansing are the
pillars of the construction of the Israeli State and remain so, against the
Palestinian people and the peoples of the Middle East.
Ilan Pappe organised his research round these pillars on which the Zionist
movement has built its State and first of all on the ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinian inhabitants of Palestine, that is denied everywhere. His work
corrects the Zionist version according to which , the
the war of independence
of Israel
that defeated the invasion of the Arab armies, was to have been
the founding act of the Jewish State that the State of Israel celebrates every
year. He gives an answer to this (P. xvi):
When it created its
nation-state, the Zionist movement did not wage a war that ‘tragically but
inevitably’ led to the expulsion of ‘parts of’ the indigenous
population’… the main goal was the ethnic cleansing of all of
Palestine, which the movement coveted for its new state.
. And he proves it.
Of course the Zionist movement did not create a
Nation State
in
Palestine. No more than the French colonists did in Algeria. Ilan Pappe then
no longer uses this term. He prefers (p. 253) the term of
White (western)
fortress
, in a
black
(Arab) world that clearly situates the origins
of this State in the Zionist movement, sponsored , armed, then transformed into
a State by Imperialism.
To write this book, Ilan Pappe got together a considerable number of documents
from archives, military reports, accounts from the minutes of official meetings
of the Zionist movement and the Israeli Sate, from personal diaries and
correspondence, but also from works undertaken by Israeli and Palestinian
researchers, from the depositions of those having taken part in ethnic
cleansing, officers and soldiers and their Palestinian victims. The repertory
of these comprises 20 pages of substantiated notes. He confronts and compares
them, analyses and reconstructs the development of the discussions, decisions
and their implementation,
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
has the
makings of an historical investigation and indictment. He writes in his foreword
(p. xvi),
In many ways it is indeed my own
J’Accuse
against the
politicians who devised, and the generals who perpetrated, the ethnic
cleansing… because there is no other way for us to fully understand the
roots of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict
.
To-day, the official Zionist version of what the Nakba is, can be consulted on
the web site of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
The Zionist
movement, then Israel never demanded the expulsion of Palestinians and when the
Palestinians were chased from their homes, it was never done in a systematic or
organised fashion. But the refugee problem has been created mainly and
primarily by the leaders of the Arabs of Palestine, and the heads of Arab States
encouraging them to go into exile while awaiting their return on the ruins of
the Jewish State, crushed at birth ...
Ilan Pappe recalls that Israeli
school books go even further asserting:
there was a Jewish attempt to
persuade the Palestinians to remain.
This official Zionist version is adopted by all Western governments, for whom Israel is the only democratic State in the Middle East and everyone knows the considerable efforts these heads of State go to, to export and extend this democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya.
They
have never demanded the expulsion of the Palestinians ...
Ilan Pappe refers (p.23) to a letter from David Ben Gurion dated 1937, before
the Holocaust then, when the founder of the Israeli State, of which he was to be
Prime Minister explains to his son,
‘the Arabs will have to go’
but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.
The
minutes of the Jewish Executive Agency give an account of the discussion engaged
in June 1938 on the future of the population living in Palestine. Ben Gurion
in order to dissipate hesitation came out with (p.xi):
I am for compulsory
transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it
. In a Trade Union Assembly of
the Zionist Confederation Histadrut of which he was the leader, Ben Gurion
strongly contradicted a speaker who had just said:
we are not fighting
Palestinian peasants, but effendis
(Arab squires). This was his answer:
you are wrong, our enemies are Palestinian peasants
. As for Yossef Weitz
who was the head of the Jewish National Fund in charge of the organisation of
receiving and distributing to Jews, land bought off Squires, he was careful to
make sure the land was first of all cleared of the Arab peasants that worked it.
He never stopped insisting:
It is our right to transfer the Arabs. The Arabs
must go.
Ilan Pappe assembles piece by piece the elements of a dossier that clearly establishes, in contradiction with the assertions of Zionist propaganda, echoed by all Western governments, that there was never a voluntary exodus of Palestinians, in reply to the call from their leaders and the heads of Arab States, in reaction to the proclaiming of the State of Israel the 14 th May 1948.
So, concerning the fact that the young Israeli State with its political and
military leaders,
the heroes of the war of independence
, would never
have organised systematic violence and exactions -the rare examples being
regrettable but unavoidable acts of violence in any war - Ilan Pappe produces
to contradict this, the minutes of Ben Gurion's
council committees
,
when he was
defence minister
of the Zionist movement. He set up this
personal
council committee
of eleven members, old Zionist leaders and
young officers. It notes that as from the beginning of December 1947 , (p. 87)
Ben Gurion and his close associates nonetheless understood perfectly
(…) the ability of the Jewish forces to seize, even before British had
left, many of the areas the UN Partition Resolution had allocated to the Jewish
state. ‘Seizing’ meaning only one thing: the massive expulsion of
the Palestinians living there from their homes, businesses and land in both the
cities and the rural areas
.
The 10
th
December 1947 the council committee took a stand in favour of
engaging an intimidation campaign
, that the army, the Haganah called
violent recognition operations
which entailed a demonstration of force
against the villages. The village of Balad al-Cheikh was chosen, where lay the
body of one of the most venerated and charismatic Palestinian leaders of the
thirties, killed by the British in 1935. His assassination had sparked off a
general strike and the setting up of strike committees for the independence of
Palestine, against British occupation, for a stop to Jewish immigration and a
ban on the sale of Palestinian land. The revolt begun in 1936 was crushed with
much bloodshed three years later by the English army, side by side with the
Zionist brigades, thanks to the betrayal of the effendis (squires),. It marked
the whole of the future history of Palestine. Crushing Balad al-Cheikh was
supposed to show the villagers that any resistance to Zionist forces was
useless. A local commander received the order (p.59)
to encircle the village,
kill the largest possible number of men, damage property, but refrain from
attacking women and children
. The attack took place the 31
st
December 1947.
It resulted in more than 60 Palestinian deaths, not all men. During the
following council committee meeting, the decision was taken for future
operations, to abandon this distinction between men and women, that complicated
things unnecessarily.
Urban space also came under attack; Haïfa, the biggest port of Palestine,
its refinery where Palestinian and Jewish workers had come out together on
several strikes against the British occupier (p.58)
this class
conscienciousness was curbed in the 1920s and 1930s by both national
leader-ships, in particular by the Jewish Trade Union movement, but it continued
to motivate joint industrial action against employers of all kinds, and inspire
mutual help at times of recession and scarcity
. (p.58)
From the morning
after the UN Partition resolution was adopted, the 75 000 Palestinians in the
city (Haïfa) were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly instigated by
the Irgun and the Hagana ... The Jewish troops rolled barrels full of
explosives and huge steel balls down into the Arab residential areas, and poured
oil mixed with fuel down the roads which then they ignited. The moment
panic-striken Palestinian residents came running out of their homes to try to
extinguish these rivers of fire, they were sprayed by machine-gun fire …
The early eruption of violence put a sad end to a relatively long history of
workers’ cooperation and solidarity in the mixed city of
Haïfa…
Zionist armed forces on the ground were called upon to take advantage everywhere
and immediately of eventual angry reactions of Palestinians to the announcement
of the UN decision to split Palestine, by turning them out of their homes and
driving them forcibly to the border. Cleaning up brigades developed in number
coordinating their action. Three months later, reports from the front were
already considered so convincing by Ben Gurion, (200 towns and villages had been
destroyed, 350 000habitants had been driven out) that his
council
committee
drew up and launched on all fronts the fourth cleansing plan of
Palestine (Daleth). This plan did not limit its action to the territories
attributed by the UN to the Jewish State and coordinated all its forces in
order to systematically accelerate up the ethnic purification of the occupied
territories before the departure of the English planned for the 14th May 1948.
The months of the Nakba horror
Ilan Pappe retraces the months of the Nakba horror in these towns and villages.
(p.93)
The Jews wanted the port city but without the 75,000 Palestinians who
lived there, and in April 1948 they achieved their objective
. The British
soldiers were due to leave a month later by boat from Haifa where their forces
were in great number. They were contained in a
buffer zone
which was the
only obstacle preventing Jewish forces from a direct assault on and takeover of,
the Palestinian areas, where more than 50,000 people still resided.
They
were still in charge of maintaining law and order. They were informed about what
the Zionists were preparing. They could have intervened and stopped it.
Their general summoned the Jewish municipal officials and informed them that his
soldiers were going to evacuate the
buffer zone
within two days. Two days
later, the day planned for the Zionist attack, he received four improvised and
exhausted Palestinian leaders, whom he advised to leave the town, where most of
the families had lived since the middle of the 18th century.
They understood
that the British would not protect them, they were doomed to be expelled. They
told (him) they wanted to leave in an organised manner. The Carmeli Brigade made
sue they would leave in the midst of carnage and havoc
. Mordechai Maklef,
operations officer in the Carmeli brigade (who later became Chief of Staff of
the Israeli army) gave his soldiers clear and simple orders:
Kill any Arab
you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with
explosives.
The orders were faithfully executed and
the shock and terror
were such that… people began leaving en masse. In panic they headed
towards the port where they hoped to find a ship or a boat to take them away
from the city
. Straight away
Jewish troops broke into and looted their
houses.
Loudspeakers howled inviting the crowd (p.95, 96)
to gather in the old
marketplace next to the port, and seek shelter until an orderly evacuation by
sea could be organised.
…
The Carmeli brigade officers …
ordered their men to station three-inch mortars… and to bombard the
gathering crowd below… When the shelling began this was the natural
destination for the panic-stricken Palestinians… ‘Men stepped on
their friends and women on their children. The boats in the port were soon
filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned
over and sank this all their passengers.
When the ethnic cleansing had reached its objective in the summer 1949, 531
towns and villages had been destroyed in 78% of the territory of ancient
Palestine. The Zionist leaders, who had secretly negotiated from 1947 on, then
during the
strange war
with Abdallah of Jordan ( trusty ally of the
British Empire) , the attribution of the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt ,
had won and occupied for the Jewish State, 22% more territory, destined for the
Arab
State.
The partition voted by the UN attributed to the 66% of
Arab
Palestinians,
44% of the territory of Palestine that should have been peopled almost
exclusively by
Arabs
. To the 30% of Jews of Palestine it had attributed
56% of the Palestine of 1947 where half Jews half Palestinians were to live side
by side. At the end of the forced cleansing of 800 000 Palestinians driven out
of their homes to the border, there remained only 160 000 Palestinians in 78%
of the territory of Palestine where the State of Israel had been proclaimed.
Ilan Pappe remarks that, at no moment up till the present day have Western
powers, condemned or recognised this crime against humanity at the origin of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while they were very prompt in doing this in
Yugoslavia.
The Defence Minister, Ben Gurion had built up the
Defence forces of
Israel
merging the Hagana, the Stern group and the Likud into a single
Zionist army of ethnic purification in order to systematically uproot the
Palestinian population of Palestine.
Thousands of Palestinians have been
implacably and savagely killed by Israeli soldiers of all origins, all ranks and
all ages. No one of these soldiers has ever been judged for war crimes, in spite
of overwhelming proof.
Writes Ilan Pappe. Over several months, the
offensive accelerated up , became more systematic, strengthened by arms sent in
by Stalin. The military Chief of Staff, Yigaël Yadine was exultant:
To-day we have all the weapons we need ...
The
war of independence
of the young State of Israel struggling for
survival like a reckless David facing up to the powerful armies of the Arab
Goliath , is just a fable. The massacre of Palestinians and their expulsion
from Palestine, the ethnic cleansing began before any intervention of Arab
States and continued after their retreat. Indeed, the only consequential armed
force, Abdallah of Jordan’s Arab League, commanded by a British officer,
had negotiated secretly with the State of Israel to occupy and to remain only on
the territories that were planned to revert to it in the end.
The list of the massacres is frightening: in Beersheba, defended by volunteers,
when the fighting was over, the soldiers taken prisoner and all the inhabitants
of the town that the Israeli troops suspected of having taken up arms, were
assembled and were shot down at random. In Tantura
one of the largest of the
coastal villages
(P.133)
the offensive came from all four flanks ... The
Jewish troops found themselves with a very large number of villagers on their
hands. They were herded at gunpoint down to the beach. The Jewish troops then
separated the men from the women and children, and expelled the later to nearby
Furaydis… The hundreds of men collected on the beach were ordered to sit
down and await the arrival of an Israeli intelligence officer who lived in the
nearby settlement of Givat Ada. He went along with a local collaborator, hooded
as at Ayn al-Zaytun, and picked out individual men (from 10 – 50 years
old) and took them out in small groups to a spot further away where they were
executed. The men were selected according to a pre-prepared list drawn from
Tantura’s village file, and included everybody who had participated in the
1936 Revolt, in attacks on Jewish traffic, who had contacts with the Mufti
.
But before these executions the village occupation unit had spread death in the
houses and on the streets. And yet when the attack took place the villagers had
already signified that they capitulated by waving a white flag. The order given
to detachments was to rapidly empty town and villages of their populations. One
very simple order among many others can be read: (p.141)
Our mission: attack
to occupy … kill the men, destroy and set fire to Kabri, Umm al-Faraj and
Nahr
. A satisfied report; (p.132 bas)
There were sixty-four villages
within the area that stretched between Tel-Aviv and Haïfa … Only
two of these villages were spared in the end
. A letter full of enthusiasm
from Ben Gurion himself, the 7th February 1948: (p.68)
Ever since Jerusalem
was destroyed by the Romans - the city was not as Jewish as it is now… If
we persist it is quite possible that in the next six or eight months …
there will be considerable changes in the demographic composition of the
country.
The bloody traces of the brigades led to a succession of
massacres: Dawaimeh, kfar Kassem, Hula, Sahiha, Sa'sa, Lydda, Safsaf, Ein
Zeitoun, Mi'ar, Bassa, deir Yassin, Balad al-Cheik, Haim Avinoam ( this list
is not complete) for which
traces of direct orders for massacres cannot be
found, nor total or true condemnation of those that took place. Sometimes local
commanders were left the choice of “cleansing
and
destroying the
villages of your district
, observes the author on the basis of military
reports.
But the State of Israel,
the white Western fortress
as Ilan Pappe calls
it, is not the only one to refuse to recognise the ethnic cleansing of
Palestine at the roots of the 800 000 Palestinian refugees and to refuse to give
an answer to their demand for reparation, by implementing the right for the
refugees to return.
The British Empire that up till the 14th May 1948 was mandated to ensure law and order in Palestine is responsible for having ordered its 75 000 soldiers to stay with grounded arms and not to intervene at any moment while the Zionist forces purified Palestine. What's more it stopped the UN intervening, what the UN will not do either after the departure of the English.
The United States, who organised the Palestine partition vote at the UN, with Stalin's support, and who pushed aside the English to take their place in the region , were the first to recognise the State of Israel and congratulate Ben Gurion. Stalin supplied the arms and ensured military supremacy for the Zionists in order to eliminate the contingents from Arab States and cleanse the territories taken over from their Palestinian inhabitants.
The support of all of these stems from their agreement that at the gates of the
Suez Canal and the oil fields a
white Western fortress
contributes to
the maintaining of the order established by the agreements of Yalta and Postdam
for the benefit of Imperialism.
Already, the role given the
National Jewish Foyer
by Balfour's
declaration in 1917 installed it within the territory in order to help the
British dominate Palestine. This role was revealed to the eyes of the world
particularly when
side by side English soldiers and Zionist brigades
assassinated 5 000 Palestinians and imprisoned 9 000 others between 1936 and
1939
in order to crush the Palestinian revolt raising the independence flag of
the Palestinian Nation against the British and Zionist occupation. The United
States who took the place of the English then armed the State of Israel to the
teeth on the rubble of Palestine.
Wipe out all trace of crime
The State of Israel has done everything to try and wipe out all trace of Palestinian presence before 1948: it has rewritten History and geography to accredit the version according to which the Jewish people had returned to rebuild the ancient kingdom of the Hebrews on its deserted land. It has torn up the olive trees whose fruit and oil are part of the Palestinian tradition and replaced them by pine trees and cypresses. It has meticulously buried under buildings, public parks, forests, the ruins of houses, of former villages and Palestinian districts in the towns. It has wiped out Palestinian names and christened places with Hebrew names. Any contradiction of the Zionist version would be a mark of anti-Semitism.
So it was that the 21st March 2010, the Knesset adopted a Bill banning any celebration of the Nakba. The 15th May 2011, on the Golan plateau, at the Lebanese frontier, in the Gaza strip, on the West Bank, in Jerusalem all the Palestinian rallies commemorating the Nakba and demanding the right for refugees to return were strafed by Zionist forces killing eight demonstrators and wounding thousands of others. All memories of the crimes, of ethnic cleansing must be suppressed!
Ilan Pappe writes (p.253 haut) :
unless Israel acknowledges the cardinal role
it has played, and continues to play, in the dispossession of the Palestinian
nation, and accepts the consequences this recognition of the ethnic cleansing
implies, all attempts to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict are bound to
fail
.
And he adds a little further:
But the aim of the Zionist project has always
been to construct and then defend a ‘white’ (Western) fortress in a
‘black’ (Arab) world … (p.255) Level of social violence
inside the Fortress are high, and the standard of living of the majority is
constantly dropping … Rejecting the Palestinian refugees’ Right of
Return is a tantamount to making an unconditional pledge to the continuing
defence of the ‘white’ enclave, and to upholding the Fortress
.
Five years after writing this book , in September 2011, doesn't the demand
by the Palestinian Authority of Mahmud Abbas for recognition of the State of
Israel, acclaimed by certain and barred by the veto announced by the United
States, express their apprehension of an explosion of the Palestinian
population, delivered up to the exactions of Jewish settlers , helped by
soldiers;; a population that is suffocating in the terrifying dead end of the
Bantustans, in which the
white Fortress
and its US Godfather, but also
the Palestinian Authority, imprisons it ?
Could the recognition of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the concrete
realisation of the right to return to Palestine for the refugees, be obtained in
any other way than by the setting up of a single Palestinian democratic and
secular State with its Jewish and Arab components, within the frontiers of the
Palestine Mandate? Isn't that what Ilan Pappe implies when he highlights
his work (p.ix)
this book … it is written first and foremost for the
Palestinian victims of the 1948 ethnic cleansing. Many of them are friends and
comrades (…) since I learned about the Nakba. I have carried with me
their suffering, their loss and their hopes. Only when they return will I feel
that this chapter of the catastrophe has finally reached the closure we all
covet, enabling all of us to live in peace and harmony in Palestine.
