1948 Revisited
Professor Ilan Pappe's ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ will most certainly be classified as one of the most painstakingly researched books on the Israel-Palestine question to emerge to date. This work has been fittingly dedicated by the author to the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. Pappe was born in Haifa (Israel) in 1954. He received his doctorate from Oxford University in 1984. Having taught for over two decades at the University of Haifa in Israel, he is now on the faculty list of the University of Exeter in the UK. Pappe is hardly a stranger to the pages of this journal, having been a regular contributor to it (as well as serving on its editorial board), since its
inception in the early years of this decade under the co-editorship of the late Michael Prior. Pappe is one among the ‘New Israeli Historians’ along with others such as Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and the present Editor of Holy Land Studies, Nur Masalha. In many ways, Pappe is carrying on the work of many other writers in the field of revisionist Israeli history and particularly those of writers such as Benny Morris, Nur Masalha and Walid Khalidi, albeit in a more nuanced, emphatic and clear manner.Pappe has always been controversial within his own homeland as the most ‘revisionist’ within the segment of the new historiography that has come out of Israel. He is a substantial writer, with over five major works on Middle Eastern history and politics to his credit. Pappe's present work is the most forthright of his many works, asserting the truth that the vast majority of the Palestinian people, who became refugees as a result of the 1948 war, were violently and forcefully displaced from the land. The book's relevance obviously lies in its writing by an Israeli academic and one that was born and has long been resident in the state of Israel. The book reads chronologically, which again adds to its attractiveness to the reader. Pappe forensically chronicles the death and destruction of historic Mandatory Palestine at the hands of the Zionist forces of the nascent state of Israel. As he has acknowledged, Pappe has built on the work of many Palestinian scholars and researchers who have painstakingly sought to reveal, to the fullest extent possible, the devastation that has accompanied the European ‘Zionist’ annexation of Palestine that started in the late nineteenth century and still continues without abatement today.
The most striking aspect of Pappe's work is the systematic way in which he details the various campaigns that the forces of the Mandatory Palestinian Jewish ‘Yishuv’ undertook to drive out the native Arab population from large parts of the then state of Palestine. Pappe is clear in his introduction to the book that he wants to make the case for the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Palestine, a word that came into the popular lexicon following the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, but which has a much older historical record, stretching right back, as Pappe rightfully maintains, to biblical times and the advent of European colonialism in the middle of the last millennium. The book includes some very potent pictorial images from the Nakba of 1948 that seek to convey visually the impact of this catastrophe on the native Palestinian populace, in comparison to the victorious and emergent Jewish forces of the ‘new’ state of Israel. Pappe thus reveals his close knowledge with the land and former ethnography of Palestine and his book forms a potent memoir and image bank, both mental as well as physical, of that period.
Pappe is right when he mentions that the problem with the earlier Israeli ‘revisionists’ like Benny Morris was their sole use of official Israeli archival sources and military records without the use of contemporary Arab sources and the rich oral history of the conflict so widely available among the people of Israel-Palestine, both Palestinian Arabs as well as Israeli Jews. He has sought to remedy this lacuna in this book, by bringing the missing ‘second half’ to light. He has also sought to focus clearly on Plan D (Plan Dalet), the master blueprint of the 1948 war authorised by David Ben-Gurion that resulted in the destruction and depopulation of much of Mandatory Palestine. Pappe records in detail the manner in which the Jewish Yishuv's intelligence-gathering wing operated and the silent cooperation extended to the military forces of the Yishuv by the British authorities in Palestine. Pappe's purpose here is to show how planning played such an important role in the Zionist colonisation and occupation of British Palestine. Pappe's book reveals what all serious post-colonial researchers on Israel-Palestine and mandatory Palestine have long maintained that the British mandatory authorities were very much complicit in the Zionist Jewish takeover of Palestine at the time.
Pappe has also written on the extensive refoliation programme undertaken by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in the destroyed village lands of Palestine. He shows how the JNF took a conscious decision to refoliate the areas rendered vacant by the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages by the simple expedient of planting fast-growing European-origin conifer and fir trees that would hide all evidence of the human habitation that once existed in these areas. These created forests are visible to anybody travelling along the highways linking the main cities within the present state of Israel today, and each covers the remains of many destroyed Palestinian villages. One area of historical research manifestly lacking in this work and probably beyond its scope would have been a clearer and deeper archival research-based account of the responsibility of and role played by the post-World War I British mandatory administration of Palestine in paving the way for the further Jewish colonisation and Zionist takeover of Palestine. This will probably have to be left to some student of Middle Eastern history willing to undertake a deeper and more concise survey of the National Archives at Kew pertaining to the Palestine Mandate period in British colonial history. All in all, Pappe has left us with a good analysis of the 1948 war and the reasoning and planning as well as the actual implementation on the ground that went into securing Palestine for the Yishuv minus the vast majority of the Palestinian people, evicted inhumanly from their own land, and still condemned to remain refugees in 2010. This book must remain a tribute to a native Israeli's painstaking effort to research and record the history of his land and the fate of the majority of its original inhabitants, namely the Palestinian Arab people.
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