The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Palestine is a small region of West Asia on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. This region includes modern Israel and the State of Palestine. According to some, it also includes parts of northwestern Jordan. This region, which has been inhabited since as early as the third millennium BCE, sits at a geographical crossroads of religion, commerce, and culture. Palestine is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity. Throughout history, many powers have fought to control this region, including the Egyptians, Assyrians, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, and British.

Pappé’s book addresses the central event of Palestine’s modern history: The establishment of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948 and the implications that this event had for the large Arab population that was living there at the time. Beginning in the early 1900s, small groups of Zionist Jews began immigrating to Palestine, where they planned to create a Jewish nation-state. The Zionist Movement, which originated in Eastern Europe in the 1880s, was motivated by centuries of antisemitic persecution in the West. Zionists aimed to create a homeland where Jewish people would be free of such persecution. They chose Palestine as the site of this future nation-state because this region was the ancient home of the Jewish people, known in the Old Testament as Eretz Israel, the “Land of Israel.”

By 1920, control of Palestine had passed from the diminishing Ottoman Empire to the British Empire. At this time, Zionist Jews, most of them from Eastern Europe, formed a very small minority of the population of Palestine, which was overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab. Nevertheless, the Zionists were able to convince the British to create a “mandate” for a Jewish state in Palestine, leading to the period of “Mandatory Palestine.” The Arab population of Palestine, which had been living in the country for much longer than the Jewish Zionist settlers, objected to the British Empire’s mandate. Tensions between Jews and Arabs in Palestine escalated until 1947 when the British declared that they would withdraw from Palestine and leave the question of the country’s future to the newly-established United Nations (UN). The UN favored a partition of Palestine into two countries, one controlled by the Jewish Zionists and one controlled by the Arabs. The Palestinians boycotted UN negotiations in protest. The plan to establish a partition passed even though the Jews were still a small minority in Palestine at the time.

When the UN’s “Partition Resolution” was passed, the Zionist leadership under David Ben-Gurion set out on an aggressive militant campaign to expel the Palestinians from much of Palestine—not just the areas allocated to the Zionists by the Partition Resolution. Though the Zionists claimed that the Arab people of Palestine left their homes voluntarily, Palestinians refer to what happened in 1948 as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” and many Palestinian and Arab sources have since spoken out about the atrocities the Zionists committed during this time. From the beginning of 1948, Arab states began sending troops into Palestine to combat the Zionists and prevent them from expelling the Palestinians. By 1949, the new Jewish State of Israel (declared on May 15, 1948) had defeated most of the Arab armies and occupied nearly all of Mandatory Palestine, except the West Bank. In the process, the Zionists expelled nearly 800,000 Palestinians, who became refugees and were not allowed to return.

After 1948, very few Palestinians were left within the newly founded State of Israel. Two parts of Mandatory Palestine remained in non-Zionist control: the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt and the larger West Bank, which passed into the control of the Jordanian King Abdullah. Palestinians continue to live in these areas to this day. In 1967, however, the “Six-Day War” resulted in Israel’s occupation of both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Israel’s occupation of these territories and the military rule to which they subjected the Indigenous Palestinian populations have triggered more conflict and bloodshed.

In 2012, the State of Palestine was admitted into the UN as a non-member state. It is governed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), though the militant organization Hamas has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007 and maintains a significant presence in the West Bank. Palestinians still hope for freedom from Israel’s control, though peace between Israelis and Palestinians has remained elusive.