The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

• Author: Steadman, Hugh
• Position: Book review

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THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE Author: Ilan Pappe Published by: One World Publications, Oxford, 2006, 313pp, US$27.50.

Ilan Pappe is (or was) a senior lecturer of political science at Haifa University. He has written what may prove to be the definitive record of the caesarean operation by which the state of Israel was born. His book is a celebration of moral courage in that his history of the catastrophe (the 'nakba') that befell the Palestinian Arabs runs entirely counter to the officially propagated mythology most generally embraced by his compatriots.

The British mandate in Palestine ended in May 1948. Simultaneously, the state of Israel formally declared its independence--but not its borders (a declaration for which the Palestinians are still waiting). In fact, Israel had been operating as a state, in all but name, from November 1947, when UN General Assembly Resolution 181 declared the intention to partition Palestine into two states. The UN Resolution that doomed their society had been passed without any participation being invited from the Palestinian Arabs and in the face of their unanimous rejection.

As the British forces withdrew, the Arab League nations reluctantly decided to send units of their military to the assistance of their Palestinian neighbours. One of the central tenets of Zionist mythology is that this invasion posed a dire threat to the existence of Israel. The myth goes on to maintain that the Palestinians became refugees as a result of their treasonable welcome to these invaders and their obedience to instructions from the Arab High Command to leave their homes in order to provide a clear battlefield on which the Jews could all be slain.

In his first chapters, Pappe reviews the history of the long-proclaimed intention of the Zionist leadership to cleanse Palestine of its Arab population. The central portion of the book describes, in painstaking and painful detail, almost village by village, how, under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, the Zionists grasped the opportunity presented by the end of the Second World War to plan and execute that intent.

At the time of the UN resolution, which gave 55 per cent of the mandated territory to Israel, the one-third of the population who were Jewish (the vast majority of whom were city-based, recent immigrants) owned less than 6 per cent of the land. A year later, the state of Israel held 78 per cent of the land and the vast majority of Palestinians...