The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappé

All in all, Israel had taken over 3.5 million dunam of land in rural Palestine.

Typical of previous Zionist conduct, this ‘pragmatic’ solution became policy until a ‘strategic’ decision would follow to change it (i.e., by redefining the status of the dispossessed assets). The Custodian was thus a function the Israeli government created in order to fend off any possible fallout from UN Resolution 194 that insisted that all refugees be allowed to return and/or be compensated. By putting all private and collective possessions of the expelled Palestinians under its custody, the government could, and in effect did, sell these properties to public and private Jewish groups and individuals later under the spurious pretext that no claimants had come forward. Moreover, the moment the confiscated lands from Palestinian owners were put under government custodianship they became state lands, which by law belonged to the Jewish nation, which, in turn, meant that none of it could be sold to Arabs.

In many ways, the new settlements did not look much different from the army bases – new fortified bastions where once villagers had led their pastoral and agricultural lives.

This transformation was driven by the desire to wipe out one nation’s history and culture and replace it with a fabricated version of another,

Ben-Gurion visited the city to inspect the scene of the intended destruction himself, and also ordered the destruction of the covered marketplace, one of the most beautiful markets of its kind.

Supreme Muslim Council,

stood al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni.

After 1948 Israel confiscated all these endowments, with all the properties incorporated in them, and transferred them first to the Custodian, then to the state, and eventually sold ...

The mosque was a hundred years old when the Israeli government gave the go-ahead to have it bulldozed on 25 July 2000, ignoring a petition addressed to the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, beseeching him not to authorise this official act of state vandalism.

‘Israeli Arabs’

They were put under a military regime based on British Mandatory emergency regulations which, when they were issued in 1945, none other than Menachem Begin had compared to Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws. These regulations virtually abolished people’s basic rights of expression, movement, organisation, and equality before the law. They left them the right to vote for and be elected to the Israeli parliament, but this too came with severe restrictions. This regime officially lasted until 1966, but, for all intents and purposes, the regulations are still in place. The Committee for Arab Affairs continued to meet, and as late as 1956 some of its more prominent members seriously advocated plans for the expulsion of the ‘Arabs’ from Israel. Massive expulsions continued until 1953. The

The Bedouin in the Negev were subjected to expulsions up to 1962,

In the dead of night 750 people were put on trucks and driven away. Their houses were demolished and the 8000 dunam they owned were confiscated and then given to families who were collaborating with the Israeli authorities.

The Land Robbery: 1950–2000

whether a Jewish settlement or a Zionist forest would take its place.

These were all constitutional laws determining that the JNF was not allowed to sell or lease land to non-Jews.

The legislative takeover of the land and the process of turning it into JNF property was completed in 1967 when the Knesset passed a final law, the Law of Agricultural Settlement, that also prohibited the sub-letting of the Jewish-owned land of the JNF to non-Jews (until then only sale and direct lease were prohibited).

The Palestinian minority in Israel, seventeen per cent of the total population after ethnic cleansing, has been forced to make do with just three per cent of the land.

In other words, today 1.3 million people live on that two per cent.

One study has estimated that seventy per cent of the land belonging to the Palestinians in Israel has been either confiscated or made inaccessible to them.

The three aims of keeping the country Jewish, European-looking and Green quickly fused into one.

Later visits by relatives of some of Mujaydial’s original villagers revealed that some of the pine trees had literally split in two and how, in the middle of their broken trunks, olive trees had popped up in defiance of the alien flora planted over them fifty-six years ago.

Wherever almond and fig trees, olive groves or clusters of cactuses are found, there once stood a Palestinian village:

Near the now-uncultivated terraces, and under the swings and picnic tables, and the European pine forests, there lie buried the houses and fields of the Palestinians whom Israeli troops expelled in 1948.

However, guided only by these JNF signs, visitors will never realise that people used to live there – the Palestinians who now reside as refugees in the Occupied Territories, as second-rate citizens inside...

The true mission of the JNF, in other words, has been to conceal these visible remnants of Palestine not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also by the narr...

most sophisticated audiovisual equipment displays the offi...

Palestine as an ‘empty’ and ‘arid’ land before the arrival of Zionism

This is not part of a need to tell a different story in its own right, but is designed to annihilate all memory of the Palestinian villages that these ‘green lungs’ have replaced.

In other words, what the JNF texts represent as an ‘ecological concern’ is yet one more official Israeli effort to deny the Nakba and conceal the enormity of the Palestinian tragedy.

It proudly proclaims that these forests and parks were built upon ‘arid and desert-like areas’, and that ‘Israel’s forests and parks were not always here. The first Jewish settlers in the country, at the end of the 19th century, found a desolate land with not a mite of shade.’

JNF is the principal agency whose job it is to prevent all acts of commemoration at these ‘forests’, let alone visits of return, by Palestinian refugees whose own houses lie entombed under these trees and playgrounds.

conceals the houses and the lands of at least six Palestinian villages.

none of the villages of Dishon, Alma, Qaddita, Amqa, Ayn al-Zaytun or Biriyya are ever mentioned.

Such is the fate of one of the best known villages, Ayn al-Zaytun, which was emptied in May 1948, during which many of its inhabitants were massacred.

It covers the ruins of Lajjun, Mansi, Kafrayn, Butaymat, Hubeiza, Daliyat al-Rawha, Sabbarin, Burayka, Sindiyana and Umm al-Zinat.

Both the JNF’s virtual and real tour through the park gently guide the visitor from one recommended spot to another, all carrying Arabic names: these are the names of the destroyed villages, but here presented as natural or geographical locations that betray no earlier human presence.

peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland in the spring of 1949.

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.

Early initiatives came from the British, French and Russian delegations at the UN, but soon the reins were handed over to the Americans as part of a successful attempt by the US to exclude the Russians from all Middle-Eastern agendas.

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.

right wing, the ‘Greater Israel’ people, and the left wing, the ‘Peace Now’ movement. The former were the so-called ‘redeemers’, people for whom the Palestinian areas Israel had occupied in 1967 were the ‘regained heartland’ of the Jewish state. The latter were dubbed ‘custodians’, Israelis who wanted to hold on to the Occupied Palestinian Territories so as to use them as bargaining chips in future peace negotiations.

When the Greater Israel camp began establishing Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, the ‘custodian’ peace camp appeared to have no problem with the building of settlements in particular areas that immediately became non-negotiable for peace: the Greater Jerusalem area and certain settlement blocks near the 1967 border.

The moment the American apparatus responsible for shaping US policy in Palestine adopted these guidelines, they were paraded as ‘concessions’, ‘reasonable moves’ and ‘flexible positions’ on the part of Israel. This is the first part of the pincer movement Israel now executed to completely eliminate the Palestinian point of view – of whatever nature and inclination. The second part was to portray that point of view in the West as ‘terrorist, unreasonable and inflexible’.

The first of Israel’s three guidelines – or rather, axioms – was that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict had its origin in 1967:

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.

natural resources. The third Israeli axiom is that nothing that occurred prior to 1967, including the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing, will ever be negotiable.

totally removes the refugee issue from the peace agenda and sidelines the Palestinian Right of Return as a ‘non-starter’.

For the Palestinians, of course, 1948 is the heart of the matter and only addressing the wrongs perpetrated then can bring an end to the conflict in the region.