The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappé

following the exile and destruction they had experienced in 1948. These national emotions were to find their embodiment in 1968 in the PLO, whose leadership was refugee-based and whose ideology was grounded in the demand for the moral and factual redress of the evils Israel had inflicted upon the Palestinian people in 1948.1

The Lausanne conference was based on UN Resolution 194 and centred around the call for the refugees’ Right of Return. For the UN mediation body, the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), unconditional return of the Palestinian refugees was the basis for peace, together with a two-state solution dividing the country equally between the two sides, and the internationalisation of Jerusalem. Everyone involved accepted this comprehensive approach: the US, the UN, the Arab world, the Palestinians and Israel’s foreign minister, Moshe Sharett. But the endeavour was deliberately torpedoed by Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and King Abdullah of Jordan, who had set their minds on partitioning what was left of Palestine between them. An election year in America and the onset of the Cold War in Europe allowed these two to carry the day and make sure the chances for peace were swiftly buried again. They thereby foiled the only attempt we find in the history of the conflict at a comprehensive approach to creating genuine peace in Palestine/Israel.

The American effort totally relied on the prevailing balance of power as the main avenue through which to explore possible solutions. Within this balance of power, Israel’s superiority after 1948 and even more so after the June war was unquestionable, and thus whatever the Israelis put forward in the form of peace proposals invariably served as the basis for the Pax Americana that now descended on the Middle East. This meant that it was given to the Israeli ‘Peace Camp’ to produce the ‘common’ wisdom on which to base the next stages and provide the guidelines for a settlement. All future peace proposals thus catered to this camp, ostensibly the more moderate face of Israel’s position towards peace in Palestine.

The first of Israel’s three guidelines – or rather, axioms – was that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict had its origin in 1967: to solve it, all one needed was an agreement that would determine the future status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In other words, as these areas constitute only twenty-two per cent of Palestine, Israel at one stroke reduced any peace solution to only a small part of the original Palestinian homeland. Not only that, it demanded – and continues to demand today – further territorial compromises, either consonant with the business-like approach the US favoured or as dictated by the map agreed upon by the two political camps in Israel.

The result was a vicious circle of violence. Desperate Palestinian reactions to Israeli oppression in the form of suicide bomb attackers against both the Israeli army and civilians led to an even harsher Israeli retaliation policy that in turn prompted more young Palestinians – many coming from 1948 refugee families – to join the guerrilla groups advocating suicide attacks as the only means left to them of liberating the Occupied Territories. An easily intimidated Israeli electorate brought a right-wing government back into power, whose policy differed little, at the end of the day, from the previous ‘Oslo’ government.

the outbreak of the second Intifada. Like the first Intifada, this was initially a non-militarised popular protest. But the eruption of lethal violence with which Israel decided to respond caused it to escalate into an armed clash, a hugely unequal mini-war that still rages. The world looks on as the strongest military power in the region, with its Apache helicopters, tanks and bulldozers, attacks an unarmed and defenseless population of civilians and impoverished refugees, among whom small groups of poorly equipped militias try to make a brave but ineffective stand.

Recognizing Palestinian victimhood ties in with deeply rooted psychological fears because it demands that Israelis question their self perceptions of what ‘went on’ in 1948. As most Israelis see it – and as mainstream and popular Israeli historiography keeps telling them – in 1948 Israel was able to establish itself as an independent nation-state on part of Mandate Palestine because early Zionists had succeeded in ‘settling an empty land’ and ‘making the desert bloom’.

But what the Palestinians are demanding, and what, for many of them, has become a sine qua non, is that they be recognised as the victims of an ongoing evil, consciously perpetrated against them by Israel. For Israeli Jews to accept this would naturally mean undermining their own status of victimhood. This would have political implications on an international scale, but also – perhaps far more critically – would trigger moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche: Israeli Jews would have to recognise that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.

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, as became clear in 2000 when the Oslo initiative broke down over the Palestinians’ Right of Return.

the aim of the Zionist project has always been to construct and then defend a ‘white’ (Western) fortress in a ‘black’ (Arab) world. At the heart of the refusal to allow Palestinians the Right to Return is the fear of Jewish Israelis that they will eventually be outnumbered by Arabs.

A more recent example of this same kind of siege mentality we find in the white settlers in South Africa during the heyday of Apartheid rule. The aspiration of the Boers to maintain a racially pure, white enclave, like that of the Crusaders in Palestine, held out only for a brief historical moment before it, too, collapsed.

The withdrawals in May 2000 from southern Lebanon and, in August 2005, from the Gaza Strip, tell us that the Israeli government has shifted its sights to concentrate on aspects it deems more valuable to keeping the Fortress impenetrable: nuclear capability, unconditional American support, and a strong army.

These realities are known to the captains of the ship of state, and yet none of this alarms them: their primary goal is to keep the population of the state ‘white’, that is, non-Arab.

Neither does the way the Americans go about ‘democratising’ the Middle East, as currently pursued by US troops in Iraq, make life inside the ‘white’ Fortress any less anxious, as the invasion of Iraq is so closely identified with Israel by the Muslim world. Levels of social violence inside the Fortress are high, and the standard of living of the majority is constantly dropping. None of these concerns is dealt with: they are almost as low on the national agenda as the environment and women’s rights.

That this is possible we see from the close social relationships that Palestinians and Jews have created between themselves over these long and troubled years and against all odds, both inside and outside Israel.

But the window of opportunity will not stay open forever. Israel may still be doomed to remain a country full of anger, its actions and behaviour dictated by racism and religious fanaticism, the features of its people permanently distorted by the quest for retribution. How long can we go on asking, let alone expecting, our Palestinian brothers and sisters to keep the faith with us, and not to succumb totally to the despair and sorrow into which their lives were transformed the year Israel erected its Fortress over their destroyed villages and towns?

the Green House is the epitome of the denial of the Zionists’ master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that was finalised not far away along the beach, in Yarkon Street, on the third floor of the Red House.

Not all the Jews in Israel are blind to the scenes of carnage that their army left behind in 1948, nor are they deaf to the cries of the expelled, the wounded, the tortured and the raped as they keep reaching us through those who survived, and through their children and grandchildren. In fact, growing numbers of Israelis are aware of the truth of what happened in 1948, and fully comprehend the moral implications of the ethnic cleansing that raged in the country. They also recognise the risk of Israel re-activating the cleansing programme in a desperate attempt to maintain its absolute Jewish majority.

Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is not correctly identified.

The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness – Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is its ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for the Palestinians.

The Israeli attacks on Gaza and Lebanon in the summer of 2006 indicate that the storm is already raging. Organisations such as Hizbullah and Hamas, which dare to question Israel’s right to impose its unilaterial will on Palestine, have faced Israel’s military might and, so far (at the time of writing) are managing to withstand the assualt. But it is far from over. The regional patrons of these resistance movements, Iran and Syria, could be targeted in the future; the risk of even more devastating conflict and bloodshed has never been so acute.

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