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Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Nothing prepared me for this book. I had thought I was well versed in the Palestinian side of the story of the Zionist conquest of Palestine. I was mistaken. The book in question is Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Based on heretofore little known Israeli archives, including military archives (the IDF: Israel Defense Force), as well as the memoirs of the major Zionist leaders, especially Ben-Gurion, and the testimony of hundreds of Palestinians who experienced the catastrophe. Pappe had been professor at Haifa University, but now lives in England, where he holds the chair in history at the University of Exeter. Pappe shows that from its very beginning the Zionist agenda in Palestine included the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Today, thanks to the Serbian campaigns in Kosovo, the world calls this sort of forcible removal of people at gunpoint, including the massacres of unarmed civilians and the complete destruction of over 500 villages, ethnic cleansing. It has a special place among the crimes against humanity. Pappe’s thesis is: there can be no healing of the Palestine-Israel strife as long as Israel and its supporters continue in their state of denial. The ethnic cleansing became a systematic policy beginning in 1937 in the wake of the Palestinian uprising against the British. It continued, often with British help, and later with the UN standing helplessly by all through the intervening years, including the “phony war.” It continues right up to today, with American and European complicity. Israeli school children are as in the dark as are Christian pilgrims and tourists when they visit the Holy Land and are given the Israeli history of the land. This book shows us the dimensions of the work ahead of any peace-makers who want to bring justice and peace to such an aggrieved population. Ed Dillon Ed is a priest in the diocese of
Rochester, N.Y. |