Review: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Ilan Pappé)

Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian and professor at the University of Exeter. He got his B.A. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1979 and a Ph.D. from Oxford in 1984. Pappé founded and directed the Academic Institute for Peace in Givat Haviva, Israel, between 1992 and 2000 and was the Chair of the Emil Tuma Institute for Palestine Studies in Haifa between 2000 and 2006. He is regarded as one of Israel’s “New Historians”. He uses the British and Israeli government records released in the early 1980s to expose a long history of brutalizing and expelling the indigenous Palestinian population. Pappé is an advocate for an international boycott against Israel, the one-state solution, supports the right of return for members of the Palestinian diaspora, and calls for the end of the Israeli occupation. 

The most important sources for learning about Palestine are and always have been, from Palestinians. However, for those who are coming to this topic, having been exposed to nothing but Zionism, there is value in a critical Israeli perspective. In a political climate where antisemitism has been weaponized in order to shut down legitimate critique of the Israeli government, maybe more people will listen to an Israeli jew who is calling out his own government, his own colonial culture, and his own history. 

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity from 1948 to the present. He dismantles the myth that Palestinians left their land voluntarily and uses archival evidence, mainly government records relating to “Plan Dalet,” to demonstrate how ethnic cleansing was the deliberate goal of early Israeli military maneuvers during what Israel calls the “Israeli War of Independence,” and what Palestinians have come to call the “Nakba” (Catastrophe in Arabic.) Between 1948 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed, civilians were murdered, and almost a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes. Using the U.N.’s own definition of ethnic cleansing, Pappé argues that these crimes were deliberate and part of the long-standing Zionist policy to establish a Jewish ethnostate. 

This book was painful to read. It has been over 100 days of watching every tactic, justification, and war crime that this book details happen again and on camera. I do not understand how there are still those who don’t see current events for what they are: an attempt at genocide. 

I posed a couple of questions in my last post, Pictures of Horrible Things, one of which was, “How fucking dare we look away from this?”

Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time seeking answers, and for each of the books I have read, I will try to present, to the best of my ability, what progress I have made towards an understanding. 

From The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, I have learned that we dare to look away because that is what we did in 1948 and 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians is not something that happened overnight. Over 70+ years of occupation, the West has perpetually either looked the other way or actively supported this genocide. We have to be better than this. Nothing is so “complicated” that the right book can’t help.