Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,

One World, Oxford,   2006,  261pp

 

A Book review by Raphael Israeli.

 

An Arabic saying contends that  mbayyin al-kitab min ‘unwano ( the book is self-evident from its title) . Never was it so easy to condemn a book judging only from its title. When we speak about ethnic cleansing, what comes to mind is the massive uprooting of  ethnic groups, by force, in order to achieve a demographic or ethnic change in a certain area, or to punish restive ethnic groups by exiling them en masse from their land. Stalin did that to the Chechens and Germans, Germans to Jews and Gypsies, Turks to the Greeks from Anatolia and to  CIrcassians from the Caucasus, Serbs to Muslims from Bosnia and Kosovo, the Albanians to the Serbs from Kosovo, and any number of other unfortunate occurrences of this sort. In most of these cases, the population transfer, as it is called euphemistically, was accomplished  amidst more or less pain and misery, but the end result has been a balance sheet of vast movements of people, usually against their will. That is ethnic cleansing.

 

In the Arab-Israeli wars many people have been forcefully removed from their homes, lands and made to evacuate entire villages and neighborhoods. For example, the areas of the Dead Sea  (Kalia, Beit Ha-‘Arava), Northern Jerusalem (Atarot, Neve Ya’akov) and Hebron (the city itself and then the Etzion Bloc with several flourishing Jewish settlements) in 1948; the evacuation of all Jews from the Yamit and Ophira areas in 1982 where several scores  of stunningly successful Jewish settlements in the desert were forced to leave under the peace treaty with Egypt; and more recently the forced evacuation of the Gaza Strip and the uprooting of 20 prosperous Jewish settlements (Gush Katif) under  Israel’s disengagement  scheme of 2006. To forget all that record of Jewish transfers, and to concentrate on the uprooting of the Palestinians from Israel, as if it were unprovoked and unilaterally perpetrated against Palestinians, is not only unfair, false and bad historiography, but also intellectually dishonest, misleading and reflects a will to mark points among a certain brand of anti-Semitic readers whose main purpose in life is to bash Israel, Zionism and the Jews.

 

The most striking travesty of history consists in the skewed presentation by the author of the otherwise irrefutable facts on the ground:  while most, or all, of the above cases of population transfer were “successful” in the sense that they attained their goal, and the areas in question were cleansed from the “undesirable” ethnic group at the end of the process, the way vast swathes of Europe became judenrein, the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine” was in all evidence a major failure. Let the numbers speak : there were altogether 1.2 million Arabs in Western Palestine in 1948, now there are close to 5 million (3.5 in the West Bank and Gaza, 1.3 in Israel Proper). A population that grew  four-fold in 60 years, namely which doubled every generation of 20 years,  (something parallel to the natural growth in Egypt , Syria and the rest of the Arab world which knew no “ethnic cleansing” on the part of those horrible Israelis during that period of time), cannot be said to have been “ethnically cleansed”. So, one would expect a little respect to the facts, the numbers and the statistics, if nothing else.

 

When we advance beyond the title of this eye-catching volume of one-sided “history”, which earned  its author the epithet of “Israel’s bravest, most principled and most incisive historian”, by  other writers who are either ignorant of history, or bent  on bashing Israel and the Jews even at the cost of distorted “history”, or both, the picture is more nuanced and can be argued one way or the other. Even granted that many of the detailed cases discussed and documented by Pappe reflect a certain reality,  it is the generalizations and the  conclusions drawn by the author which lead him astray and mislead his readers, especially the uninitiated among them. Had the unbiased context been laid out fairly and squarely before the readers, one could then make the judgment for oneself. But to  apportion the blame to one party, and making the other a bunch of saintly victims, simply does not add up in view of the known record. This amounts to  dispatching the  venomous arrow against his own people and then draw the target around it. Why he did that is a totally different question, which  conjures up matters of psychology which lay beyond the purview of this essay. Here we will remain  true to this ideologically –driven book, its structure, its  selective documentation and its  damning conclusions.

 

Many books have come out these past decade or two, notably by revisionist historians  who showed  how composite, multi-layered and  diverse was the picture of the exodus of the Arabs of Palestine. No one historian in Israel would claim today that all of the 700,000 Palestinians who left their towns and villages during the war did it of his own volition. There was certainly a mix of premeditated expulsions  like in the Lod-Ramla battles; massacres (on both sides) which pushed some Arabs to flee for their lives; Arab elites, especially from the cities, who had the means to leave temporarily in order to return as victors (they left their homes furnished when they took the keys with them); the bulk of the villagers who were simply caught in the cross fire and sought salvation for their families in exile; many other villagers who collaborated with Zionists and would prefer to seek accommodation with them rather than fight them, as Hillel Cohen has shown in his admirable book; tens of thousands of displaced Arabs who left their villages and converged on cities like Nazareth where they felt better protected; and the general atmosphere of war which causes people to make wrong judgments and take hastened and unwise decisions. All these elements were there, therefore to summarize that exodus under the all-encompassing  slogan of “ethnic cleansing”, simply does not meet any basic yardstick of truth,  simplistically attractive as it may be.

 

Pappe, regardless of his writings and “findings” about the exodus of Palestinians in 1948,  has been ideologically committed to one Palestine, exactly following the ideal formulated by the Mufti  and the pacifist and  naïve Jewish Brith Shalom led by President Magnes of Hebrew University, which did not find any resonance among the Jewish population then. He cares little about Jewish nationalism (Zionism), though he does not reserve the same castigation for the Arab Palestinian national movement. In other words, he regards with indifference the submersion of the Jewish-Zionist idea into Palestinian nationalism and does not mind the least to raise his children in an Arab culture which is not his. For him, the state is a utilitarian framework in which any human can have his expression, except that he should also know that the end of a Jewish state is also the end of democracy, development, freedom, science, prosperity, high-tech and all the other perks which were brought about by the Jewish state and make it so different from the Arab environment. Left to its devices,  any Arab-majority state in Palestine would not be different from the chaos of Gaza, the poverty of Egypt , the dictatorships of Syria and  Libya, the corruption of Saudi Arabia  and the backwardness of all the rest. Except for Pappe, no Israeli shares in that blind vision, which accepts cutting his alienated country’s GNP to one tenth of what it is today if it were to be governed by Arabs. But he, to justify his utopian pipe-dream, is also ready to re-write history, demonize the Jews who scuttled his scheme, and bolster the Palestinians who from their position of recalcitrant and negative opponents of Jewish nationalism, are elevated to the status of martyrized victims.

 

A more balanced (and truthful) analysis of the situation  in the 1947-9 period would reveal the following:

1.  The Zionist enterprise was founded since its inception, knowing its demographic weakness, on compromise and partition. The Peel Commission and then the Partition Plan were accepted by the Zionists and rejected by the Arabs, who under their Mufti Husseini insisted on the whole and undivided Palestine. The Mufti’s collaboration with Hitler during the War in the annihilation of the Jews and the declaration by Azzam Pasha, the Secretary of the Arab League, about the impending massacre of all Jews, combined with the repeated attacks on the Jewish settlements, did not augur well for the existential future of the Jews in Palestine, let alone their independence. So, from the outset, the  predisposition among the Jews after the horrors of the Holocaust, was one of fear, suspicion and determination to fight for survival, especially that many Arabs were prepared to assist them in that endeavor (for a price)

2.     Had the Arabs accepted all those compromises, and the Palestinian Arabs  refrained from waging war on the nascent Jewish state, opportunities for accommodation could have run their course. Jewish perception of Arab adamant views as genocidal attempts on their lives by necessity hardened their own views, and in a situation of facing annihilation if they did not overcome their enemy, they naturally chose  to overpower it or exile it, rather than face extinction themselves. Had the Jews of Europe been exiled instead of sent to crematoria, most of them would have survived the war.

3. The fact that there was NO ethnic cleansing, as the present-time demography  undeniably shows,  may have in the long run triggered the long and insoluble conflict which does not end. For as long as the Palestinians see a chance to reverse historical developments and annihilate the state of Israel, they persist in their politicidal dreams,  propped as they are by people like Pappe, who mobilized a formidable support for them in the Western world by his  vindictive rewriting of history. So, contrary to his hopes and statements, Pappe unwittingly encourages the continuation of bloodshed and conflict, and in that regard he is not the Palestinians’ friend, but their worst enemy as he will bring to their further bleeding and sacrifice, instead of prodding them to compromise and accommodation with reality.

4. At the same time that those Palestinians left their country , under expulsion, flight, voluntary exile or otherwise, the same amount of Jews fled from Arab countries to settle in Israel, where they were absorbed into the system. Their flight was not effected under war conditions and simply emanated from their oppressive dhimmi status that they could no longer bear. Therefore, this unplanned exchange of populations, which resolved one problem though it did nothing to settle the other, remains a living  reminder that population transfers, though they may be painful and inhuman in their time, can also bring a problem to an end after a few generations, as it happened with Jewish immigrants to Israel, and as the Arabs bluntly refused to see unfolding among the Palestinians.

5. Pappe may be content to be a Jew in an Arab land, though he preferred to settle in Sussex, not in Gaza or Casablanca. And he is well aware that Arabs, with the same history, language, tradition and  customs have found their national expression in 21 Arab states. Nonetheless  he feels totally mobilized to the cause of creating a 22^nd state. At the same time, he feels that Jews are not entitled to any state, and he is prepared to forsake the only Jewish state there is for the purpose of establishing that 22^nd Palestinian entity. He is also aware that Jews want a state not as a faith but as a people, which saw  Jewish kingdoms and two commonwealths before there was any Arab of Muslim entity to speak of. The majority of Israeli Jews are committed to that idea.

 

In this light, or rather obscurity, many of the contentions of Pappe in this book, which is otherwise well-written, have no leg to stand on, in spite of its copious documentation. Documents are more important for the context in which they were made than for the specific  event they depict. For example, if one states that on August 8, 1945  the Americans dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, a factual statement which is true, any reader who is detached from the context would rightly deem that as an atrocious act against innocent people. But when one understands the treacherous and unprovoked war that the Japanese launched in Pearl Harbour, the amount of bloodshed they caused in the Pacific War, the atrocities and cruelty they inflicted upon the  occupied Asiatic people, the vital role Hiroshima and Nagasaki played in dispatching troops, war materiel and supplies to the occupied territories, and the Tokyo determination to pursue this bloody war and bleed American power to exhaustion, one can more easily comprehend that the bomb did not descend out of the blue on saintly and innocent Japanese cities who lived in peace and love formerly until the “arrogant”, “imperialist” and “cruel” Americans came along to play with their war toys.

 

Examples of these skewed interpretations by the author abound. In his second Chapter (pp. 10-28) for example, the point is made to castigate Israel for its “drive for an exclusively Jewish state”. First of all, this is not true: the Declaration of Independence calls upon the Arabs to stay within the state and contribute peacefully to its construction. Secondly, 60 years later, 20% of the population is Arab. So, where is the Jewish exclusivity? Or were the Jews so impotent and helpless to “cleanse” their country from Arabs had they wished to? Certainly, the Jews wished to establish a Jewish state because there was a Jewish problem to resolve. But to accuse them of exclusivity, while it is Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and  Jordan who have excluded Jews by law,  is again dishonest, untrue and misleading. An Arab majority state, as Pappe would wish to live in, though he did not make that  choice when he could, would not resolve the Jewish problems in the world, and the whole enterprise of providing a home for persecuted Jews would have been defeated. Similarly, Pappe takes all the military operations like Nachshon (pp.86-90) or Palm Tree (pp. 154-5) as premeditated moves within the grand scheme of “ethnic cleansing”, but the truth was that military operations were conducted for their own sake of extricating the fledgling state from the genocidal siege imposed by the invading Arab  states. That  a large exodus of Arabs resulted, was natural due to the reasons for population movements referred to above. But to turn the result into the cause, is tantamount to claiming that America schemed the opening of the Pacific War  for the opportunity to test its nuclear bomb.

 

One is so tired of this one-sided reports and exaggerated accounts, that the whole story loses its credibility, while if a balanced and a less selective account were followed it could have provided an intriguing “another history” of the Arab-Israel dispute at its source. The author’s eagerness to condemn, castigate and demonize his own country is so intense and the hatred of his own people is so blinding, that one wonders how he operated in this environment most of his academic career. In general, turncoats of any sort and against any party, inspire contempt, pity and embarrassment. In this case, the litany of complaints and selective stories that the author chose to elevate to the level of “history”, while cutting specific events from their context, can only cause dismay and wonder. How does a knowledgeable scholar pretend to present the narrative of a conflict by only describing what one party allegedly did to the other? It is like reporting a boxing match  on radio or in writing, by only depicting the punches delivered by the victor, while completely neglecting to mention the steps, defensive and offensive that the losing party took in the process. Is that a fair description of the match? Can anyone claim to have understood the match after that?

 

The last chapters of the book address the recent problems of the unfortunate Israeli disengagement from Gaza, which far from calming the tempers has on the contrary  inflamed them , brought Hamas to power and occasioned daily bombing and shelling  of  Israel. Instead of seeing wrong in that again unprovoked attack on  innocent civilians, the author elected to criticize Israel’s demographic fears and its resulting opposition to the claimed Palestinian “right of return”. France, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain too have begun to fear what the Muslim immigration to their turf might do to their culture and demographic make-up. This is natural for Israelis too, save for Pappe, whose eagerness  to turn Israel into an Arab majority state, where Jewish identity would vanish, if it came to pass one day , may put a final seal on his chances to return home.

 

Raphael Israeli.

 

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.