The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Consequently, even if Pappé’s chronology is correct, and there is no reason to doubt this, the book does not provide a sufficient explanation for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. No matter how meticulous the planning by the leaders of the Yishuv (settlers) was, it would have been to no avail without an unusual concatenation of international events (the genocide of European Jewry, the onset of the cold war, the closing of liberal democratic gates to Jewish refugees, the emancipation of colonies in North Africa, and last but not least the hegemony of the model of the ethnic nation-state as the only available avenue for national emancipation)."-- Ephraim Nimni, 2010 |
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The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) is a book by Ilan Pappé in which the author claims that during the 1948 Palestine war around 720,000 Palestinian Arabs of the 900,000 who lived in the territories that became Israel, fled or were expelled from their homes.
The causes of this exodus are controversial and debated by historians. In his own words, Ilan Pappé "want[s] to make the case for the paradigm of ethnic cleansing and use[s] it to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and public debate about, 1948."
The thesis of the book is that the forced move of Palestinians to the Arab world was an objective of the Zionist movement and a must for the desired character of the Jewish state. According to Pappé, the 1948 Palestinian exodus resulted from a planned ethnic cleansing of Palestine that was implemented by the Zionist movement leaders, mainly David Ben-Gurion and the other ten members of his "consultancy group" as referred to by Pappé. The book argues that the ethnic cleansing was put into effect through systematic expulsions of about 500 Arab villages, as well as terrorist attacks executed mainly by members of the Irgun and Haganah troops against the civilian population. Ilan Pappé also refers to Plan Dalet and to the village files as a proof of the planned expulsions.
See also
- 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
- Exodus of Palestinians in 1948
- History of Israel
- 1948 Arab–Israeli War
- List of Arab towns and villages depopulated during the 1948 Palestinian exodus
- Nur-eldeen Masalha
- Palestinian refugee
