The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapter 9-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapter 9-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 9 Summary: “Occupation and Its Ugly Face”

Chapter 9 turns to the ways the Palestinians continued to suffer under occupation once Israel had completed its ethnic cleansing operations. Israel’s offenses included “Inhuman Imprisonment” (the first section of Chapter 9), in which search-and-arrest operations led to the imprisonment of many male villagers. Palestinian men were initially held in pens and later moved to centralized prison camps. During the occupation, Israeli intelligence was careful to capture “returnees” but also “suspicious Arabs.” Roadblocks and new ID card requirements were also introduced. Five new prison camps were built to hold the many Palestinians detained by the Israeli government, the largest in Jalil and Atlit. Pappé describes how prisoners were “hounded” by guards who were often ex-Irgun and Sterm Gang. Even worse were the conditions of the labor camps built in Sarafand, Tel-Litwinski, and Umm Khalid. The Red Cross, though aware of the inhumane conditions at the prison and labor camps, limited their criticism because they did not wish to speak too harshly of the Jewish state so soon after the Holocaust.

The second section, “Abuses Under Occupation,” addresses the human rights violations perpetrated against the Palestinians under occupation, the worst of which occurred at Jaffa. These violations included looting of private homes as well as religious and educational places, beatings, and torture. The situation in Jaffa soon became so egregious that the Minister of Minorities, Bechor Shitrit, was sent to investigate, though he did little to ameliorate the situation. In Haifa, Palestinians were moved to the tiny neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas, which became functionally a ghetto. There are also accounts of rapes that occurred during the occupation, some recorded by the UN, some by Ben-Gurion in his diary, and many more in Palestinian oral histories.

In the next section, “Dividing the Spoils,” Pappé explains how Israel established the Committee for Arab Affairs in August 1948 to deal with international pressure to repatriate the Palestinians and to figure out what to do with all the money, property, and land they confiscated during the Nakba. Though the committee initially included more humane voices such as Bechor Shitrit and Moshe Sharett, it was soon taken over by Weitz and Danin, who moved to destroy and confiscate Palestinian property while resettling formerly Palestinian sites with Jewish immigrants. A “Custodian” was created for the confiscated properties, a legal sleight-of-hand that allowed the government to buy up confiscated Palestinian property and land when no one came forward to claim it.

The next section, “Desecration of Holy Sites,” discusses how the Muslim holy sites belonging to the Waqf endowment were confiscated by Israel in 1948 and sold off. Though some mosques and churches were destroyed, many were repurposed as commercial buildings.

“Entrenching the Occupation” explains how the Committee for Arab Affairs placed the roughly 150,000 Palestinians still left in Israel under a military regime. Massive expulsions continued until 1953, with the Bedouins subjected to expulsions until 1962. In a subsection entitled “The Land Robbery: 1950-2000,” Pappé expands upon how the JNF used confiscated Palestinian land for new Jewish settlements as well as for parks and forests. To streamline this process, they introduced legislation such as the Law for Absentee Property, passed in 1950, and laws preventing the selling, leasing, and subletting of land to non-Jews. Allotting land to Jewish settlements was prioritized over forestation, though Israel did seek to present itself as very “green.” After the Nakba, the Palestinians became a 17% minority holding only 3% of the land. Operation Sof-Sof in the 1960s made a final attempt to dispossess the Palestinians in Galilee, but villagers refused to leave.

Chapter 10 Summary: “The Memoricide of the Nakba”

The first section, “The Reinvention of Palestine,” discusses the role of archaeologists and biblical experts in the naming committee set up “to Hebraize Palestine’s geography” (240)—a project carried out in conjunction with the JNF. The committee created a new ancient history for the country. Much Palestinian land passed from the JNF to Elad, the Jewish settlers’ NGO, while other land was turned into parks and forests.

The next section, “Virtual Colonialism and the JNF,” discusses Israel’s forestation program. The JNF planted mostly conifers rather than the flora indigenous to the region, supporting the country’s wood industry while making the Jewish state look more European. This forest program would lead the world to view Israel as ecologically responsible. The JNF continues to cover up the fact that many Palestinian villages are buried beneath their parks and forests, propagating the myth that Palestine was empty and uncultivated before the Zionists arrived. In the final section of the chapter, “The JNF Resort Parks in Israel,” Pappé discusses some of the largest resort parks in Israel that sit on top of what was once Palestinian land: the forest of Birya (built over six destroyed villages), Ramat Menashe Park (where scenic spots have been named after destroyed Palestinian villages), and the orchards around Jerusalem.

Chapter 11 Summary: “Nakba Denial and the ‘Peace Process’”

Some Palestinians were left in Israel under military rule while others were scattered throughout neighboring Arab states. The UN involved the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in creating a special Palestinian refugee agency, and in 1950 the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) was set up to “look after the refugees’ daily concerns” (251). Palestinian nationalism soon reemerged in the form of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which pushed for the Right of Return. The Palestinians had to confront “two manifestations of denial” (251): international denial as peace brokers ignored Palestinian concerns, and Israel’s refusal to acknowledge the Nakba.

In the section titled “First Attempts at Peace,” Pappé discusses the UN peace conference in Lausanne in spring 1949. Based on UN Resolution 194, this conference demanded the Palestinians’ right of return, a two-state solution, and the internationalization of Jerusalem. The plan was agreed upon by the US, the UN, the Arab world, the Palestinians, and Israel’s foreign minister Moshe Sharett, but it was sabotaged by Ben-Gurion and King Abdullah of Jordan, who wanted to divide Palestine between themselves. This, says Pappé, was the last true attempt at peace. What followed was an “obvious lull” in the peace progress until 1967, when the “Six-Day War” initiated another round of peace talks. Since Israel was very clearly the dominant power now, however, the US allowed Israel’s interests to shape peace talks, which consequently went nowhere. Israel wound up remaining in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the West Bank. Increasingly, Israel was represented as a reasonable state while the Palestinians were represented as terrorists.

In the next section, “The Exclusion of 1948 from the Peace Process,” Pappé outlines Israel’s three peace guidelines: first, that the origins of the conflict were in 1967, meaning that only the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the rest of the original Palestinian homeland, would be negotiable; second, that everything in the occupied territories can be further divided, meaning not just the territory but also the people and natural resources contained within them; and, third, that nothing that happened before 1967—including the Nakba—would be negotiable. In the decades after 1967, Israel tried to make deals with King Hussein of Jordan, who wanted more than Israel would give him, and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, who in 1977 tried to secure internal autonomy for the Palestinians in the occupied territories. The First Palestinian Intifada (“uprising”) in 1987 removed autonomy from the picture, though Israel did agree to accept Palestinians as partners in future negotiations. During his prime ministry in Israel, Yitzhak Rabin again started discussing peace. Before his assassination in November 1995, Rabin signed the Oslo Accords in September 1993 with the Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, still ignoring 1948 but agreeing to move forward. Soon after, however, a new cycle of violence and Palestinian reactions to Israel’s oppression led to harsh retaliation.

In the next section, “The Right of Return,” Pappé begins with the Camp David summit meeting in the summer of 2000 between Israeli PM Ehud Barak, US President Bill Clinton, and Arafat. Though the PLO had weakened considerably by this time, they refused to accept Israel’s harsh terms, which agreed to cede only the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank, excluding Jerusalem. Arafat’s refusal to sign triggered the Second Intifada in September 2000. The peace process was revived in 2003 with the Road Map and Geneva Accord, but Israel still effectively controls Gaza, and the Geneva Accord recognizes the Palestinians’ Right of Return, but only to the West Bank or Gaza Strip. It does not acknowledge the Nakba.

Chapter 12 Summary: “Fortress Israel”

Israel has developed legislation and policies to prevent Palestinians from becoming a “demographic danger.” Sometimes these policies lead to outbreaks of violence or further raids on Palestinian villages, for instance, the 2006 raid on Jaljulya. In the section entitled “The ‘Demographic Problem,’” Pappé discusses the different methods Israel has weighed to prevent the Palestinians from becoming a “demographic danger” by keeping their population at around 20% of the Jewish state. Solutions that Israel has considered include pulling out of Gaza, building a Segregation Wall, and transferring all remaining Palestinians in Israel to the West Bank. Israel twice boosted its population with large Jewish immigrations in 1949 and the 1980s. Still, the “demographic problem” persists, and since the Palestinians have a higher birthrate than Jews in Israel, there is a real fear on the part of many Jews in the country that they will soon be outnumbered by an Arab population.

When Israel realized that the Arab world continued to hate them, they tried an expansionist policy, taking over the rest of Palestine and parts of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. In the 2000s, they switched to prioritizing defense, especially maintaining nuclear capability, US support, and a strong army.

Epilogue Summary

The short Epilogue has one section, titled “The Green House.” Pappé looks at the Faculty Club of Tel-Aviv University, originally the house of the mukhtar of the Palestinian village of Shaykh Muwannis. The club’s menu card, however, includes only the claim that the house once belonged to the fictitious “Shaykh Munis,” becoming the “epitome of the denial of the Zionists’ master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” (271). Pappé critiques the university, supposedly an institution of learning, and its role in the denial of the Nakba. Pappé again reflects on the extent of Israel’s devastation of the Palestinians in 1948, remarking that more and more Jewish Israelis now know what really happened and reiterating that only by acknowledging the Nakba can real progress be made toward peace.

Chapter 9-Epilogue Analysis

The final chapters of the book explore Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land from 1948 to the 21st century. The Role of Historical Narratives in Nation-State and Identity Building becomes a particularly important theme in this section, as it is only through careful control of their country’s official history that Israel has been able to maintain their desired status quo. One way Israel achieved this was via the “de-Arabization” of the history and geography of Palestine. The Zionists employed archaeologists and biblical scholars to find Hebrew toponyms for places within Israeli borders, including new names for many villages and towns taken from the Palestinians. The new names have roots in Jewish scripture, meant to suggest a continuity of Jewish presence in the country from antiquity: “the motive for Hebraizing the names of the evicted villages was ideological and not scholarly […] [It was] in essence none other than a systematic, scholarly, political and military attempt to de-Arabise [sic] the terrain—its names and geography, but above all its history” (241). By erasing centuries of Palestinian history, the Israeli state creates a historical narrative that supports their claims to the land they have stolen.

Israel’s control of its official history also involves categorical denial of the Nakba and The Experiences of the Palestinian Diaspora in 1948. This “Nakba Denial,” according to Pappé, is one of the main factors that has prevented peace in the region. Because Israel refuses to acknowledge that they deliberately and violently ethnically cleansed Palestinians in 1948—eventually even instituting a diplomatic policy of refusing to negotiate anything that happened before 1967—and because the Nakba of 1948 is precisely what is at the heart of the Palestinian position, no meaningful dialogue, much less peace, has ever been possible. Pappé explains that Israel’s denial of the Nakba is essential to maintaining their view of their identity and legitimacy. Acknowledging the Nakba would inevitably force Jewish Israelis to seriously question “the essence and moral foundations of Zionism” (259). Though this kind of questioning would be extremely uncomfortable, in Pappé’s view, it is only the questioning—and even rejection—of Zionism that would enable peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Thus, though the overtly violent phase of ethnic cleansing has slowed in the decades since 1949, Israel continues to perpetuate cultural forms of ethnic cleansing by erasing the history of the people they displaced. Pappé argues that this phase is fundamental to The Nature of Ethnic Cleansing, and that it is at the heart of the continuing outbreaks of violence. Pappé highlights the ways in which the Zionists have embraced the values and strategies of European colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East, maintaining power in a country that they settled in the first half of the 20th century. The only way to maintain this power, of course, is by maintaining a powerful military, not unlike the European imperial powers that had preceded them: hence “Fortress Israel.” The Zionists even changed Israel’s topography to look more European, planting conifers throughout the country instead of indigenous flora. Thus, as Pappé writes, Israel’s rigid stance in negotiations with the Palestinians since 1948 takes on a new significance, and “[r]ejecting the Palestinian refugees’ Right of Return is tantamount to making an unconditional pledge to the continuing defence [sic] of the ‘white’ enclave and to upholding the Fortress” (269). Israel’s legitimacy as a nation relies on maintaining its settler-colonial origin myths and suppressing The Experiences of the Palestinian Diaspora and The Nature of Ethnic Cleansing. Maintaining those myths necessitates ongoing violence.

Yet it is not only Israel that is to blame for the failure of peace negotiations in the region. No less culpable is the international community at large, especially Western powers such as the US and UN. Though the UN did pass a resolution in 1949 that aimed to force the Palestinians’ Right of Return and a two-state solution, this was the last true attempt at peace that would have given justice to the Palestinians. After this attempt at a solution failed and the US became the primary mediator in the conflict, the interests of Israel have taken precedence over those of the Palestinians. Thus, even as late as 2000, during the Camp David summit, the US and Israel continued to refuse to negotiate on what the Palestinians saw as the “three essentials of the conflict” (256): the Right of Return, control of Jerusalem, and the future of the Israeli settlements. The breakdown of peace talks at Camp David triggered the second Intifada in September 2000, just as the breakdown of peace talks throughout the 1970s and 1980s had triggered the first Intifada in 1987. Reflecting on these consistent failures at achieving peace, Pappé ends his book with a warning: If Israel does not soon acknowledge the reality of what they did in 1948 and the rights of the displaced Palestinians, the situation will only grow worse and more violent.