Ilan Pappé’s Latest Book Exposes Zionist Ethnic Cleansing as Premeditated

By James Abourezk

A NUMBER OF years ago a book publisher asked me to co-author a book on the Arab-Israeli dispute with Hyman Bookbinder, a spokesman for the American Jewish Committee. We each wrote half of the book, then went on a nationwide book tour which involved a series of debates on the issue as a way to promote sales of the book. The book was titled Through Different Eyes, and the publisher was an American Jew by the name of James Adler. The literary agent who came up with the idea was Ron Goldfarb, also a Jew. Given that the Palestinian side had never gotten the coverage that it should have, the fact that both Adler and Goldfarb pushed the idea will lead me to argue against anyone who tries to say that the American Jewish community is monolithic in its view toward Israel.

I also thought it was an excellent way to get the Palestinian side of the story told to a much larger audience than usual. Together, we did more than 75 joint appearances around the United States, debating before regular audiences, in synagogues, in hotel ballrooms, on radio and television stations—in short, anywhere we could find an audience.

Before writing the book, I immersed myself in the literature of the dispute, reading everything that I could get my hands on, all of which served me well during the debates in which Bookbinder and I participated. I relied quite heavily on Donald Neff’s Middle East Warriors trilogy (available from the AET Book Club), which are the best histories in print on the 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars fought between the Arabs and the Israelis.

But how I wish that Ilan Pappé had already written The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (also available from the AET Book Club) when I was studying the matter in depth. His excellent book on the subject was written with an historian’s eye, using in-depth research, diaries written by the leaders of the Zionist movement, and interviews whenever they were available. The story he tells of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is one, as Pappé says, that has been largely ignored in the Western media. As a result, the Israelis have been given virtually free rein to do whatever they have wanted with the Palestinians and with the land the Zionists stole both before and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, with little or no complaint by the world community—and, in particular, little or no complaint by the United States government and media.

The monstrous tragedy of the European Holocaust during WWII became a bonanza for the Zionist movement and its leaders. Pappé informs us, however, that the plans by the Zionists to take over Palestine and make it their own country were first developed beginning in the 1920s, then supplemented during the 1930s and 1940s.

It was clear to the leadership, notably David Ben-Gurion, that the Zionist project could only be realized through the creation in Palestine of a purely Jewish state, without the inconvenience of Palestinians to muck things up. That was the objective, and the means to achieve this objective continued to develop as the years went on. What is troubling about Pappé’s revelations is that so much of the planning by the Zionists to take over all of Palestine by force was done without any real public disclosure either by the press or by historians.

In December of 1947, Ben-Gurion made a speech to senior members of his party—the Mapai—in which he noted that the U.N. partition resolution, 181, that was so disastrous for the Palestinians, left “40 percent non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state…Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty…Only a state with at least 80 percent Jews is a viable and stable state.”

It should be noted here that Resolution 181 was passed by the U.N. General Assembly, thus making it a non-binding resolution, unlike Security Council resolutions. But that mattered little, as the Zionist movement seized on its passage and has ever since argued that the U.N. created Israel. To the misfortune of the Palestinians, the dozens of non-binding General Assembly resolutions passed since that time requiring Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories have been ignored by Israel and by its chief sponsor, the United States.

What aided the Zionists in their cleansing project was the inventory the movement took of each Palestinian village during the mandatory period following World War I. That inventory included a topographical map of each village and its surroundings, the names of Palestinians who might be a threat to the cleansing operation, as well as the “Hebraic” origins of each village. It was thought by the Zionists that some of the villages were “quite new,” having been built in the 1830s.

By the late 1930s the archives of information were virtually complete. The inventory included each village’s access to roads, quality of the land, water springs, the main sources of income, its socio-political composition, religious affiliations, names of the village mukhtars, its relationship with other villages, the names of individual men between the ages of 16 to 50, as well as the village’s “index of hostility” to the Zionist project. The inventory also contained a list of everyone who had been involved in the revolt of 1936 (against the British, when they were allowing Jewish immigration into Palestine). By 1947, the inventory included lists of “wanted persons” in each village, which lists were used by Jewish troops in their 1948 search-and-arrest operations.

The plans for ethnic cleansing developed by the Zionist leadership involved, at first, retaliatory attacks by the Haganah (the military wing of the Jewish Agency) in response to anticipated Palestinian violence—with help, of course, from the Irgun and the Stern Gang (the two Jewish terrorist groups that invented Middle East terrorism). Orders were given to the Jewish military to clean out entire villages, sometimes by frightening the Palestinian inhabitants, and other times by simply murdering everyone in sight.

Although there were pockets of Palestinian resistance over the years before 1948, Pappé explains that most Palestinians wanted no part of the violence being introduced into their homeland by the Jewish military. That nonviolent strain at first gave the Zionist leadership serious problems as it tried to implement its policy of “reacting” to Palestinian resistance to its settlement plans. Pappé describes secret meetings in Ben-Gurion’s home with the Zionist leadership where complaints were voiced that the peacefulness of the Palestinians deprived the Jewish military of its rationale for its ethnic cleansing operations. Eventually, the military—including the Jewish terrorist groups—was ordered to take the offensive and not to wait for Palestinian attacks on Jews. That order, as we now know, resulted in the destruction both of the people and the structures in a great number of villages, which included the well-known Deir Yassin massacre.

Zionist political expertise far surpassed that of the Palestinian leadership, a leadership which had largely collapsed as a result of the British crackdown during the earlier Palestinian uprisings. The Jewish community owned less than 6 percent of the land in Palestine at the time the British Mandate ended, but the Zionist leadership demanded—and got—from the U.N. at least half of the land of Palestine.

As Pappe writes:

On 42 percent of the land, 818,000 Palestinians were to have a state that included 10,000 Jews, while the state for the Jews was to stretch over almost 56 percent of the land which 499,000 Jews were to share with 438,000 Palestinians. Jerusalem, with a population of 200,000, was to become internationalized and was to be equally divided between Arabs and Jews.

Ben-Gurion told his inner circle of Zionist leaders that there “are no territorial boundaries for the Jewish state” in light of the refusal of the Arabs to cooperate with the U.N. after it passed 181.

The injustice of the U.N.’s action, which fueled the ethnic cleansing already underway, was barely commented on by any of the leading Western newspapers then covering Palestine, and the lack of such coverage persists to this day.

The formalized plan for ethnic cleansing was Plan D, or Plan Dalet, adopted by the Zionist leadership in March of 1948. Plan Dalet was quite specific in its directions for ethnic cleansing:

These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state. (From Plan Dalet, March 10, 1948).

Armed and Dangerous

Another part of the Zionist propaganda that lingers to this day is the myth that the Jewish armed forces were able to defeat a superior combined Arab army. But on the eve of the 1948 war, the Jewish military had about 50,000 troops, of which 30,000 were fighters and 20,000 auxiliaries. The irregular Palestinian paramilitary had no more than 7,000 troops, and even that relatively small fighting force lacked structure and hierarchy and was poorly equipped. By the end of the summer of 1948 the Jewish forces numbered 80,000, and the combined Arab armies from neighboring countries never exceeded 50,000. While the Arabs’ weapons supply had been blocked by the British, Israel’s Communist Party wangled a large shipment of heavy arms from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.

During Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the news was full of the targeting of Haifa with Hezbollah rocketry, and the resultant suffering of the city’s Jewish inhabitants. What was missing last summer was the history of how the Zionists ethnically cleansed Haifa in 1948. Although the British military was responsible for keeping law and order in Haifa, and in other parts of Palestine, when Zionist troops targeted Haifa for cleansing the British commander told Palestinian leaders that it would be better if the Palestinians left the city. Zionists employed loudspeakers directing Palestinian residents either to leave their homes or be killed. Although Haifa’s Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levi, begged the Palestinians to stay, the operations officer of the Carmeli Brigade, Mordechai Maklef, issued orders to his troops to “kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.” (Maklef later was rewarded by being appointed the Israeli army’s chief of staff).

Haifa’s Palestinians had gathered in panic near the city’s port to attempt to escape when the Zionists began shelling the gathering with mortars. What followed was a mass exodus of the families trying to escape. As one survivor recalled:

Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers.

When reports of the massacre reached London the British government finally decided to take some sort of action. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was furious, but General Montgomery (of World War Two fame) defended the British commander who had advised the Palestinians to leave, and who refused to help them when they were attacked.

The cleansing of Haifa was repeated time and time again throughout Palestine. When Palestinians would leave their homes under threat of death and violence, Jewish troops routinely would go in and loot what they had left behind. Even the holy city of Jerusalem was not spared, as Palestinians were forcibly cleansed both by killing and by “transfer” out of the city, followed by heavy looting of the city and its environs.

One of the worst incidents took place in Acre when the Haganah injected typhoid germs into the city’s water supply. With the typhoid epidemic in full swing, Jewish forces then used loudspeakers to cleanse the city with, “Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man.”

On May 27, 1948, the Egyptians caught two Jews, David Horin and David Mizrachi, trying to inject typhoid and dysentery viruses into Gaza’s wells. The Egyptians executed the two men, but at the time Ben-Gurion only noted the incident in his diary without protest. Jaffa’s entire population of 50,000 was expelled, with only slightly less panic than that observed in Haifa.

In his book Pappé discusses the attempts by some of the Jewish military to cleanse their own consciences, describing such efforts as “shoot and cry.” The Palestinians were dehumanized in order to make it easier to kill them. Some of the Jews underwent “moral remorse” at what had been done, allowing them to continue to enjoy the benefits of the ethnically cleansed country without burdening their conscience.

By the time the surrounding Arab countries decided to send in troops, a quarter of a million Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed from Palestine, and two hundred villages had been destroyed and dozens of others emptied of their populations.

Although Pappé discusses what are described as “peace efforts” following the cleansing of Palestine, his point is well taken that most peace efforts involve the United States and Israel cutting deals without consulting the Arabs. Anyone who knows anything at all about the Arab-Israeli dispute is forced to painfully laugh at the motions made by a series of American secretaries of state who, like the current one, Condoleezza Rice, lay down conditions to Hamas for “peace talks” such as the requirement that it must first recognize Israel’s right to exist before they can be part of any talks. If it were not such a serious matter, such conditions would be the longest running joke of our civilization.

With the knowledge of the thuggery perpetrated by the Zionist movement against the Palestinians, one can only see despair and hopelessness in the future. It is the United States that continually enables the Israeli government to continue its aggressive posture and its ability to ignore what needs to be done to stop the violence against the Palestinians. It is a violence that is barely reported anymore in the American press—which, as we know, allows Israel to continue its thuggery without being called to account. As one of my friends—a Jew—once said to me, “Israel has nothing to do with Judaism, but it has everything to do with fascism.”

Pappé ends his book with the following:

The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness—Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is its ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for the Palestinians.

What makes matters seem hopeless is the way in which the world ignores Israeli crimes in the occupied territories. From the humiliation visited upon Palestinians at the dozens of checkpoints throughout the occupied areas, to the violence visited on the people of Gaza, there is no accounting, and thus nothing to prevent this oppression from continuing into the future.

Ilan Pappé has contributed an amazing work for those who are interested in the origins of Israel’s invasion and its subsequent brutal occupation of Palestine. One can only hope that those in power in the U.S. government will learn something from it, thereby hopefully putting a stop to the crimes being committed on a daily basis by Israel.

James Abourezk is a former U.S. senator (D-SD) and founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He now practices law in Sioux Fall, SD.