h o l l i s 's Reviews > The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Don't take the lack of rating to mean this isn't well written or informative or emotionally impactful. It's all those things but I don't rate non-fiction as a rule.

I don't know what to say about this book except that if you come out the end (hell, if you make it to chapter one) still believing the state of Israel is in the right and the actions of the Zionists are acceptable, there's no convincing you otherwise. Because you've seen the atrocities live on social media, in the photos, the reports, the conditions that existed (though many of us were ignorant to, myself included) even pre-bombing. And if this still doesn't change your opinion of the situation.. nothing will. Certainly not this review which won't even be a review. Instead I'll be pasting in some passages not to provide context and not for your consideration. But because everything that was done, and continues to be done, is horrible and horrifying and it's right there in black and white. Full of facts and receipts (or in this case footnote references) of the premeditated evil that was and continues to be perpetrated today.

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.

Besides their trauma, the deepest form of frustration for Palestinians has been that the criminal act these men were responsible for has been so thoroughly denied, and that Palestinian suffering has been so totally ignored, ever since 1948.

Approximately thirty years ago, the victims of the ethnic cleansing started reassembling the historical picture that the official Israeli narrative of 1948 had done everything to conceal and distort. The tale Israeli historiography had concocted spoke of a massive “voluntary transfer’ of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had decided temporarily to leave their homes and villages so as to make way for the invading Arab armies bent on destroying the fledgling Jewish state.

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.

Israeli, and in particular American, public opinion, however, succeeded in perpetuating the myth of potential destruction or a ‘second Holocaust’ awaiting the future Jewish state. Exploiting this mythology, Israel was later able to secure massive support for the state in Jewish communities around the world, while demonising the Arabs as a whole, and the Palestinians in particular, in the eyes of the general public in the US. The reality on the ground was, of course, almost the complete opposite.

Under the watchful eyes of UN observers who were patrolling the skies of the Galilee, the final stage of the ethnic cleansing operation, begun in October 1948, continued until the summer of 1949. Whether from the sky or on the ground, no one could fail to spot the hordes of men, women and children streaming north every day. Ragged women and children were conspicuously dominant in these human convoys: the young men were gone – executed, arrested or missing. By this time UN observers from above and Jewish eyewitnesses on the ground must have become desensitised towards the plight of the people passing by in front of them: how else to explain the silent acquiescence in the face of the massive deportation unfolding before their eyes?

[..] three years after the Holocaust, what went through the minds of those Jews who watched these wretched people pass by?

In order to forestall international indignation over collective dispossession, the Israeli government appointed a custodian’ for the newly acquired properties, pending a final decision over their fate. 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.

But return or resettlement was not the only issue. There was also the question of the money expropriated from the 1,300,000 Palestinians, the ex-citizens of Mandatory Palestine, whose finances had been invested in banks and institutions that were all seized by the Israeli authorities after May 1948. Neither did Israel’s proposed policy of resettlement address the issue of Palestinian property now in Israeli hands. A member of the committee was the first governor of the national bank, David Horowitz, and he estimated the combined value of property ‘left by the Arabs’ at 100 million pounds. To avoid becoming embroiled in international investigations and scrutiny, he suggested as a solution: ‘Maybe we can sell it to American Jews?

As the owner of lands in general, along with other agencies that possess state land in Israel such as the Israeli Land Authority, the army and the government, the Jewish National Fund was also involved in establishing new Jewish settlements on the lands of the destroyed Palestinian villages. Here, dispossession was accompanied by the renaming of the places it had seized, destroyed and now recreated. This mission was accomplished with the help of archaeologists and biblical experts who volunteered to serve on an official Naming Committee whose job it was to Hebraize Palestine’s geography.

The world looks on as the strongest milita power in the region, with its Apache helicopters, tanks and bulldozers, attacks an unarmed and defenseless population civilians and impoverished refugees, among whom small groups poorly equipped militias try to make a brave but ineffective stand.

Israel’s “treatment’ of the Palestinians in [1948] is bound to raise troubling questions about the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole. This makes it crucial for Israelis to keep a strong mechanism of denial in place, not only to help them defeat the counter-claims Palestinians were making in the peace process, but – far more importantly – so as to thwart all significant debate on the essence and moral foundations of Zionism.

For Israelis, to recognise the Palestinians as the victims of Israeli actions is deeply distressing, in at least two ways. As this form of acknowledgement means facing up to the historical injustice in which Israel is incriminated through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, it calls into question the very foundational myths of the State of Israel, and it raises a host of ethical questions that have inescapable implications for the future of the state.

[..] 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.

And finally, as we reached the end, this seemed like a very prescient note to end on :

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.

Organisations such as Hizbullah and Hamas, which dare to question Israel’s right to impose its unilateral will on Palestine, have faced Israel’s military might and, so far (at the time of writing) are managing to withstand the assault. But it is far from over. [..] the risk of even more devastating conflict and bloodshed has never been so acute.

I won’t lie. There were so many names, both of people and towns, the numbers of expelled persons and those who died, so much of which I won’t remember. But nonetheless the writing was very easy to follow and the impact of it all will linger as it provides so much context and historical trauma to the events we have seen, and continue to see, play out in front of us every day.

This was the first reading I’ve done on the history of Palestine and its occupation and while it was hard, and it took time to get through, it definitely won’t be the last. Very much recommended.

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This review can also be found at A Take From Two Cities.