– AWTW
(In India student activist ask often about any good book on Israel-Pelestine question dealing the history of the dispute also. ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ is a book written by Israeli historian and senior lecturer at Haifa University Ilan Pappe. the book deals right from the british invasion of Pelestine.but it may be hard to find it in India.we are posting AWTW review of the book.)
Palestinians call what happened to them in 1948 the Nakba – Arabic for catastrophe. It was perpetrated by Zionist leaders looking to form the state of Israel on Palestinian land without the Palestinians.
During the Nakba almost a million Palestinians (half the population at that time) were brutally forced from their land, villages and homes, fleeing with only the possessions they could carry. Many were raped, tortured and killed. To ensure that there would be nothing for the Palestinians to return to, their villages and even many olive and orange trees were so well razed that few visible remnants remain. When the Nakba ended, there had been 31 documented massacres and probably others. Some 531 villages and 11 urban neighbourhoods were emptied of their inhabitants.
Former Arabic village and road names were Hebrewized. Ancient mosques and Christian churches were destroyed. Theme parks, pine forests (trees not native to the region) and Israeli settlements sit atop many of the old Palestinian villages. All this was to wipe out any physical evidence that the land belonged to Palestinians and give finality to the Nakba.
How many times have you had a discussion about the plight of the Palestinians with supporters of the existence of the Israeli state and met the argument that the problem arose from Palestinian intolerance of Jewish settlers? How many people know – or admit – that from the beginning Zionism had planned to permanently expel the Palestinian people from their land? In many Western countries, Nakba denial is as obligatory as Holocaust denial is condemned. How did this happen?
‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ by Israeli historian and senior lecturer at Haifa University Ilan Pappe explores the period of the Nakba (One World Publisher, Oxford, 2006). The premise is that the Nakba was nothing less than an act of ethnic cleansing, normally regarded by international law as a crime against humanity. To support this theory, the author outlines various definitions from different current sources, including “an ethnically mixed area being turned into a pure ethnic space”. He shows how the slaughter and/or forced expulsion of the Armenians in Turkey, the Tutsis in Rwanda and the Croatians and Bosnians in former Yugoslavia is akin to what the Zionists did to the Palestinians on a massive scale in 1948 and are still doing today. Pappe also draws a connection between ethnic cleansing and colonialism as it occurred in North and South America as well as Africa and Australia…….. Read the rest of this entry »
