Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe and ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’

Is Israel guilty of ethnic cleansing? Dr Ilan Pappe, called by some as the "most hated Jew in Israel", says YES. But fellow Israeli Professor Efraim Karsh says he is "fabricating history". Ilan Pappe in debate with fellow Israeli Professor Efraim Karsh on Sky News:

Fabricating history? Does this so called Professor have a brain? What are all these millions of refugees all around the world? Where did hundreds of villages disappear? Am I fabricated? Me, myself, fabricated? An fabricated uprooted Palestinian... heh... good one. Can I go home now, Zionist friends?

Ilan Pappe addresses the Palestine-Israel conflict and links the ethnic cleansing of 1948 to prospects for a lasting peace in the region in his new book, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" (to be published by Oneworld Publications, November 2006).

As Israel stands accused by Amnesty International of committing war crimes in Lebanon following its almost 5-week bombardment of that country, which left over a thousand civilians dead and almost a million displaced, a prominent Israeli historian at HaifaUniversity revisits the formative period of the State of Israel to investigate the treatment of the indigenous Palestinians.

In his controversial new book, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," Ilan Pappe investigates the fate suffered by the indigenous population of 1940s Palestine at the hands of the Zionist political and military leadership. During this period, around a million people were expelled from their own country at gunpoint, civilians were massacred, and over 400 Palestinian villages deliberately destroyed. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called "ethnic cleansing."

With meticulous research, and drawing heavily on recently declassified military archives and cabinet meeting minutes, as well as the diaries and memoirs of the key players, Pappe methodically reconstructs the strategic planning and military operations during the British Mandate and the run-up to independence. He goes on to offer a detailed account of the events of 1947-8 as they unfolded, which eventually led to one of the biggest refugee migrations in modern history.

This is no moral rant against the past, but a passionate plea to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 as the root cause of the ongoing Palestine-Israel conflict. Pappe argues persuasively that the consequent dispossession of a million native Palestinians from their homeland, and the continued denial of their right of return, constitute an abuse of international human rights, which he decisively links to Middle East politics today, and the prospects for a lasting peace in the country and, therefore, in the region. [Source]

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