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A review by mussa
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé
4.75
Notable excerpts from the book:
“In 1948, 85% of the Palestinians living in the areas that became the state of Israel became refugees.”
“…After it had been occupied, the soldiers of Brigade Seven ran amok, firing randomly at anyone in the houses and on the streets.”
“Survivors recall how four women and a girl were raped in front of the other villagers and how one pregnant woman was bayoneted.”
“By 31 October [1948], the Galilee, once an area almost exclusively Palestinian, was occupied in its entirety by the Israeli army.”
“The pace of demolition was deliberately accelerated with the specific aim of invalidating any discussion on the subject of refugees returning to their houses, since those houses would no longer be there.”
“Since the beginning of the Intifada in September 2000 over 2,500 children have been arrested.” -- I think of this quote when I see 'bring them home' signs carried by ignorant Israel apologists here in Canada.
“Ben Gurion was angry when the Israeli press reported how well Israeli POW’s were treated [by the Arab Legion of Jordan].”
“Two months after the Israelis had occupied Jaffa, Red Cross representatives discovered piles of dead bodies…A curfew was imposed every night between 5 pm and 6 am, he explained, and anyone found, the orders stated clearly, ‘will be shot’.”
“The mosque was a hundred years old when the Israeli government gave the go-ahead to have it bulldozed on 25 July 2000, ignoring a petition addressed to the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, beseeching him not to authorize this official act of state vandalism.”
“Zionism employs to supplant all history that contradicts its own invented Jewish past [on Palestinian land].”
“Yitzhak Rabin… as minister of defence, he had ordered his troops to break the bones of Palestinians who confronted his tanks with stone in the first Intifada…”
“Behind these draconian measures on the part of the Israeli government to prevent any discussion of the Right of Return lies a deep-seated fear [in regard to] any debate over 1948, as Israel’s ‘treatment’ of the Palestinians in that year is bound to raise troubling questions about the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole. This makes it crucial for Israelis to keep a strong mechanism of denial in place, not only to help them defeat the counterclaims Palestinians were making in the peace process, but — far more importantly — so as to thwart all significant debate on the essence and moral foundation of Zionism.”
“For the Israeli Jews to accept [that the Palestinians be recognized as the victims of an *ongoing* evil, consciously perpetrated against them by Israel], would naturally mean undermining their own status of victimhood… This would trigger moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche: Israeli Jews would have to recognize that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.”
Warning: Read this book and you will inevitably feel surges of rage swell within you. This is the hardest book I’ve ever read. My heart is heavy knowing the truth about what happened to Palestinians before and after 1948. The state of Israel has been racist and inhumane since before even its inception. Their history of indiscriminately murdering civilians started decades ago and the many horrifying events that preceded and followed the Nakba are well documented in this book. My blood boils at the thought that men like Ben Gurion were, and are, and will be, allowed to hold positions of power from which they spread injustice, and violence at the cost of innocent men women and children who don’t look like them, or speak the same language or follow the same faith. Not to mention the “superpowers" of the world i.e. Britain and the USA who enabled the violence and bloodshed. Mass murder and displacement. It happened to Palestinians in 1947-1949 and it’s happening again today. It was, is, and always will be wrong and unjustifiable, to expel a people from their homes. I strongly believe that israel had no right to set up a state in Palestine and the British and the UN had no right to give them the green flag to do so. It was sickening to read about the vile creation of such a racist and unethical state whose creation was reliant on the (still today, unrecognized and unreconciled) ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. I think this book also highlights the irony of the accusations the state of israel, makes against Palestinian resistance fighters even today. Every accusation they make is not only a confession of their current behaviours, but those too of their predecessors who established the occupation and enforced the violent expulsions. Terrorism. Barbarism. The killing of children. The mass rape of women and girls alike. Sickening was reading these well-documented cases of rape, that the occupation was built on. Worse that said cases went unpunished or at best, punished by a year or two in prison and no more. The only thing that kept me grounded when reading the history of the Nakba and about these sick zionist bastards (like, for example, and only to name a few, those Israeli soldiers who set roads on fire then fired machine guns at the civilians trying to put it out, or those who—after forcing the owners out, if not murdering them—ordered the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian houses to prevent the return of its people and to replace villages with settlements for jewish immigrants, or the haganah units who bombed the houses in a small village of barely 200 while the villagers slept at night, or those who destroyed and desecrated mosques that had been on the land for decades, existing beautifully as peaceful places of worship and architectural marvels, long before the establishment of the state that demolished them) is the thought that justice will indeed be served, if not in this life, in the next. Another excerpt that also gives me hope that we will one day, in our lifetime, see the apartheid state and racist zionist regime crumble is the following:
"This position [the principal of maintaining an overwhelming Jewish majority at all costs] is not unlike that of the medieval Crusaders whose Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem remained for nearly a century a fortified isolated island as they shielded themselves behind the thick walls of their impenetrable castles against integration with their Muslim surroundings, prisoners of their own warped reality. A more recent example of this same kind of siege mentality we find in the white settlers in South Africa during the heyday of Apartheid rule. The aspiration of the Boers to maintain a racially pure, white enclave, like that of the Crusaders in Palestine, held out only for a brief historical moment before it, too, collapsed."
israel is, today, as I write this, self-destructing, with its brutal Genocide on Gaza, that the people of the world are watching unfold. I would think that it's only inevitable that countries, like Iran, Yemen and Lebanon, will take action against israel. God willing it's only a matter of time before israel's racist colonialism becomes its own undoing, and we get to witness a free Palestine.
“In 1948, 85% of the Palestinians living in the areas that became the state of Israel became refugees.”
“…After it had been occupied, the soldiers of Brigade Seven ran amok, firing randomly at anyone in the houses and on the streets.”
“Survivors recall how four women and a girl were raped in front of the other villagers and how one pregnant woman was bayoneted.”
“By 31 October [1948], the Galilee, once an area almost exclusively Palestinian, was occupied in its entirety by the Israeli army.”
“The pace of demolition was deliberately accelerated with the specific aim of invalidating any discussion on the subject of refugees returning to their houses, since those houses would no longer be there.”
“Since the beginning of the Intifada in September 2000 over 2,500 children have been arrested.” -- I think of this quote when I see 'bring them home' signs carried by ignorant Israel apologists here in Canada.
“Ben Gurion was angry when the Israeli press reported how well Israeli POW’s were treated [by the Arab Legion of Jordan].”
“Two months after the Israelis had occupied Jaffa, Red Cross representatives discovered piles of dead bodies…A curfew was imposed every night between 5 pm and 6 am, he explained, and anyone found, the orders stated clearly, ‘will be shot’.”
“The mosque was a hundred years old when the Israeli government gave the go-ahead to have it bulldozed on 25 July 2000, ignoring a petition addressed to the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, beseeching him not to authorize this official act of state vandalism.”
“Zionism employs to supplant all history that contradicts its own invented Jewish past [on Palestinian land].”
“Yitzhak Rabin… as minister of defence, he had ordered his troops to break the bones of Palestinians who confronted his tanks with stone in the first Intifada…”
“Behind these draconian measures on the part of the Israeli government to prevent any discussion of the Right of Return lies a deep-seated fear [in regard to] any debate over 1948, as Israel’s ‘treatment’ of the Palestinians in that year is bound to raise troubling questions about the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole. This makes it crucial for Israelis to keep a strong mechanism of denial in place, not only to help them defeat the counterclaims Palestinians were making in the peace process, but — far more importantly — so as to thwart all significant debate on the essence and moral foundation of Zionism.”
“For the Israeli Jews to accept [that the Palestinians be recognized as the victims of an *ongoing* evil, consciously perpetrated against them by Israel], would naturally mean undermining their own status of victimhood… This would trigger moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche: Israeli Jews would have to recognize that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.”
Warning: Read this book and you will inevitably feel surges of rage swell within you. This is the hardest book I’ve ever read. My heart is heavy knowing the truth about what happened to Palestinians before and after 1948. The state of Israel has been racist and inhumane since before even its inception. Their history of indiscriminately murdering civilians started decades ago and the many horrifying events that preceded and followed the Nakba are well documented in this book. My blood boils at the thought that men like Ben Gurion were, and are, and will be, allowed to hold positions of power from which they spread injustice, and violence at the cost of innocent men women and children who don’t look like them, or speak the same language or follow the same faith. Not to mention the “superpowers" of the world i.e. Britain and the USA who enabled the violence and bloodshed. Mass murder and displacement. It happened to Palestinians in 1947-1949 and it’s happening again today. It was, is, and always will be wrong and unjustifiable, to expel a people from their homes. I strongly believe that israel had no right to set up a state in Palestine and the British and the UN had no right to give them the green flag to do so. It was sickening to read about the vile creation of such a racist and unethical state whose creation was reliant on the (still today, unrecognized and unreconciled) ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. I think this book also highlights the irony of the accusations the state of israel, makes against Palestinian resistance fighters even today. Every accusation they make is not only a confession of their current behaviours, but those too of their predecessors who established the occupation and enforced the violent expulsions. Terrorism. Barbarism. The killing of children. The mass rape of women and girls alike. Sickening was reading these well-documented cases of rape, that the occupation was built on. Worse that said cases went unpunished or at best, punished by a year or two in prison and no more. The only thing that kept me grounded when reading the history of the Nakba and about these sick zionist bastards (like, for example, and only to name a few, those Israeli soldiers who set roads on fire then fired machine guns at the civilians trying to put it out, or those who—after forcing the owners out, if not murdering them—ordered the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian houses to prevent the return of its people and to replace villages with settlements for jewish immigrants, or the haganah units who bombed the houses in a small village of barely 200 while the villagers slept at night, or those who destroyed and desecrated mosques that had been on the land for decades, existing beautifully as peaceful places of worship and architectural marvels, long before the establishment of the state that demolished them) is the thought that justice will indeed be served, if not in this life, in the next. Another excerpt that also gives me hope that we will one day, in our lifetime, see the apartheid state and racist zionist regime crumble is the following:
"This position [the principal of maintaining an overwhelming Jewish majority at all costs] is not unlike that of the medieval Crusaders whose Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem remained for nearly a century a fortified isolated island as they shielded themselves behind the thick walls of their impenetrable castles against integration with their Muslim surroundings, prisoners of their own warped reality. A more recent example of this same kind of siege mentality we find in the white settlers in South Africa during the heyday of Apartheid rule. The aspiration of the Boers to maintain a racially pure, white enclave, like that of the Crusaders in Palestine, held out only for a brief historical moment before it, too, collapsed."
israel is, today, as I write this, self-destructing, with its brutal Genocide on Gaza, that the people of the world are watching unfold. I would think that it's only inevitable that countries, like Iran, Yemen and Lebanon, will take action against israel. God willing it's only a matter of time before israel's racist colonialism becomes its own undoing, and we get to witness a free Palestine.