The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Quotes

“وعندما زارت غولدا مئير, وهي واحدة من الزعماء الصهيونيين الكبار, حيفا بعد أيام قليلة, وجدت من الصعب عليها في البداية أن تكبت إحساساً بالرعب عندما دخلت البيوت حيث كان الطعام المطبوخ ما زال على الطاولات, والألعاب والكتب التي تركها الأطفال (الفلسطينيون) على الأرض, وحيث بدا الأمر كأن الحياة تجمدت في لحظة واحدة. وكانت مئير جاءت فلسطين من الولايات المتحدة, التي هربت عائلتها إليها في إثر المذابح المنظمة في روسيا, وذكرتها المناظر التي شاهدتها ذلك اليوم بأسوأ القصص التي سمعتها من عائلتها عن الوحشية ضد اليهود قبل عقود. لكن ذلك لم يؤثر, كما يبدو, في عزمها أو عزم زملائها على المضي قدماً في التطهير العرقي لفلسطين.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“نحن لم نبك ساعة الوداع! فلدينا لم يكن وقت ولا دمع ولم يكن وداع! نحن لم ندرك لحظة الوداع أنه الوداع فأنى لنا البكاء! طه محمد علي 1988, لاجئ من قرية صفورية”
― إيلان بابه, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication-driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.’ David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 19381”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“This book is written with the deep conviction that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must become rooted in our memory and consciousness as a crime against humanity and that it should be excluded from the list of alleged crimes.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“إذا ما سقت اليوم سيارتك في اتجاه الجنوب الشرقي من مدينة الرملة وقطعت مسافة 15 كم تقريباً, وخصوصاً في يوم شتائي عندما تخضّر شجيرات الرّتم الشائكة الصفر عادة, والتي تغطي سهول فلسطين الداخلية, فإنك ستصادف منظراً غريباً: صفوفاً طويلة من الأنقاض والحجارة في حقل مشكوف تحيط بساحة مربعة متخيلة كبيرة نسبياً؛ إنها أنقاض السياجات الحجرية لدير أيوب, وبينها أنقاض سور حجري منخفض بني سنة 1947 لأسباب جمالية أكثر منه لحماية القرية, التي كان يقطن فيها نحو 500 نسمة. وكان سكان هذه القرية يعيشون في بيوت حجرية أو طينية على شاكلة البيوت المنتشرة في المنطقة. وكانوا قبل الهجوم اليهودي مباشرة يحتفلون بافتتاح مدرسة جديدة تسجل فيها عدد لا يستهان به من التلاميذ, 51 تلميذاً, وتحقق ذلك بفضل الأموال التي جمعوها من بعضهم البعض, والتي كانت كافية أيضاً لدفع راتب المعلم. لكن ابتهاجهم سرعان ما تبدد عندما دخلت سرية مؤلفة من عشرين جندياً يهودياً القرية التي كانت, مثل كثير من القرى في كانون الأول-ديسمبر, لا تمتلك أية آلية للدفاع, وشرعوا في إطلاق النار عشوائياً على البيوت. وقد هوجمت القرية لاحقاً ثلاث مرات قبل ان يجري إخلاؤها بالقوة في نيسان-أبريا 1948, ومن ثم تدميرها كلياً.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Half of the indigenous people living in Palestine were driven out, half of their villages and towns were destroyed, and only very few among them ever managed to return.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“ethnic cleansing is an effort to render an ethnically mixed country homogenous by expelling a particular group of people and turning them into refugees while demolishing the homes they were driven out from.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The human geography of Palestine as a whole was forceably transformed. The Arab character of the cities was effaced by the destruction of large sections, including the spacious park in Jaffa and community centres in Jerusalem. 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, from which all traces of the indegenous population were elided.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Human Rights, adopted as General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III), 10 December 1948, the day before Resolution 194 declared the unconditional right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“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.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Israelis enjoy telling Palestinians they should be happy they live in ‘the only democracy’ in the region where they have the right to vote, but no one is under any illusion that voting comes with any actual political power or influence.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“I have no illusion that it will take more than this book to reverse a reality that demonises a people who have been colonised, expelled and occupied, and glorifies the very people who colonised, expelled and occupied them.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“1897 Zionist Congress calls for a home for Jewish people in Palestine Pamphlet by founder of socialist Zionism, Nahman Syrkin, says Palestine “must be evacuated for the Jews”.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“In this building, on a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country.3 The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Palestinian sources show clearly how months before the entry of Arab forces into Palestine, and while the British were still responsible for law and order in the country – namely before 15 May – the Jewish forces had already succeeded in forcibly expelling almost a quarter of a million Palestinians.12”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“But beyond numbers, it is the deep chasm between reality and representation that is most bewildering in the case of Palestine. It is indeed hard to understand, and for that matter to explain, why a crime that was perpetrated in modern times and at a juncture in history that called for foreign reporters and UN observers to be present, should have been so totally ignored.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“…what the Palestinians are demanding and what for many of them has become a sine qua non is that they be recognized 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 a moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche. Israeli Jews would have to recognize that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“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’.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Today, these documents of complaint read more as an attempt by ‘sensitive’ Jewish
politicians and soldiers to absolve their consciences. They form part of an Israeli ethos that can best be described as ‘shoot and cry’, the title of a collection of expressions of supposedly moral remorse by Israeli soldiers
who had participated in a small-scale ethnic cleansing operation in the June 1967 war.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The Zionist policy was first based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks in February 1947, and it transformed into an initiative to ethnically cleanse the country as a whole in March 1948.6 Once the decision was taken, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Sa‘sa was attacked at midnight – all the villages attacked under the ‘Lamed-Heh’ order were assaulted around midnight, recalled Moshe Kalman. The New York Times (16 April 1948) reported that the large unit of Jewish troops encountered no resistance from the residents as they entered the village and began attaching TNT to the houses. ‘We ran into an Arab guard,’ Kalman recounted later. ‘He was so surprised that he did not ask “min hada?”, “who is it?”, but “eish hada?”, “what is it?” One of our troops who knew Arabic responded humorously [sic] “hada esh!” (“this is [in Arabic] fire [in Hebrew]”) and shot a volley into him.’ Kalman’s troops took the main street of the village and systematically blew up one house after another while families were still sleeping inside. ‘In the end the sky prised open,’ recalled Kalman poetically, as a third of the village was blasted into the air. ‘We left behind 35 demolished houses and 60–80 dead bodies’ (quite a few of them were children).73 He commended the British army for helping the troops to transfer the two wounded soldiers – hurt by debris flying through the air – to the Safad hospital.74”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The initial reaction may be riots, but eventually they will understand the message.’ The main goal was thus to assure that the population would be at the Zionists’ mercy, so their fate could be sealed. Ben-Gurion seemed to like this suggestion, and wrote to Sharett three days later to explain that the general idea: the Palestinian community in the Jewish area would be ‘at our mercy’ and anything the Jews wanted could be done to them, including ‘starving them to death’.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“In other words, Zionism secularised and nationalised Judaism. To bring their project to fruition, the Zionist thinkers claimed the biblical territory and recreated, indeed reinvented, it as the cradle of their new nationalist movement.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The attempt to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as Nazis was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“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.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Behind these draconian measures on the part of the Israeli government to prevent any discussion of the Right of Return lies a deep-seated fear vis-à-vis any debate over 1948, as Israel’s ‘treatment’ of the Palestinians in that year is bound to raise troubling questions about the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The world looks on as the strongest military power in the region, with its Apache helicopters, tanksand 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.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“As president of the Swedish Red Cross, Bernadotte had been instrumental in saving Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War and this was why the Israeli government had agreed to his appointment as a UN mediator: they had not expected him to try to do for the Palestinians what he had done for the Jews only a few years before.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine