Pappe the Pooper

Ilan Pappe has a new book out. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld; 313 pages; £16.99.

Here's how the Economist sees it:-

For the 1948 crowd, however, this way of thinking about the conflict is a mistake. They argue that peace is impossible unless Israel admits to and atones for the crime they say it committed nearly 60 years ago, in its independence war of 1948. That crime, they say, was deliberately to expel most of the Arabs of Palestine, close to 800,000 people, in order to be sure of having a Jewish majority for the Jewish state. Unless Israel somehow makes amends for this earlier catastrophe, which the Arabs call the nakba, peace is an impossibility.

Ilan Pappe, a political scientist at the University of Haifa, is one of the purest Israeli exponents of the 1948 view. He knows how provocative it is to choose the phrase “ethnic cleansing” for the title of his latest book. But ethnic cleansing, he insists, is precisely what occurred in the first Arab-Israeli war. It was, he says, a long-premeditated crime, implemented ruthlessly and then systematically denied. In 1948 the Zionists did not happen to wage a war that tragically but inevitably led to the expulsion of parts of the indigenous population. The ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine, he maintains, was the main goal all along.

Inside Israel, the historiography of 1948 has been...[that] in the course of the war that followed, the Jews overcame vast odds, guaranteeing their survival and expanding the territory allotted to them under the original plan. In the course of the fighting, most of the Arab population fled.

Mr Pappe, however, goes a good deal further...He insists that there was indeed a master plan. On March 10th 1948, he asserts, 11 men met at the “red house”, the Tel Aviv headquarters of Israel's pre-state army, the Haganah, to put the final touches to Plan Dalet, “a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine”. That evening, military orders were sent to units on the ground to prepare for the expulsion of the Palestinians. Mr Pappe calls this group of men the “consultancy”, an ad hoc cabal of political and military leaders dominated by Ben-Gurion. And population transfer did not just “hover” in the background of their thinking, he says. It was central from the start...

...It is not, alas, so simple. The consultancy rarely kept minutes. Ben-Gurion was a prodigious diarist, but selective in what he recorded. Mr Pappe admits that he does not in fact know what Ben-Gurion said at the supposedly fateful “red house” meeting on March 10th. As for Plan Dalet, this is no new discovery by Mr Pappe. The plan has been public for decades and does not read unambiguously like a master plan for wholesale ethnic cleansing. The aim was to crush the Palestinian militias before the Haganah had to face the invading Arab armies. It gave commanders discretion to occupy or destroy and expel hostile villages or potentially hostile villages; some destroyed swathes of villages and a few did not. And Mr Pappe's detractors will ask why he ignores the orders sent out by the chief of staff of the Haganah, Israel Galili, on March 24th, reminding commanders of the policy to protect the “full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without discrimination”.

And what about the ethnic cleansing attempts at Tel Chai in 1920, Petah Tikva in 1921, Hebron in 1929, Gush Etzion in 1947-48 among others? That's not real ethnic cleanisng?