The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

In the first part of Chapter 3, “Palestine’s Population,” Pappé describes the demographics of Palestine in December 1947, when the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began. At that time, the country had a mixed population of Palestinians and Jews, with the Palestinians making up a two-thirds majority. Most of the cultivated land in Palestine was owned by Palestinians, with many Jewish immigrants preferring to live in cities and towns rather than in the countryside. Jewish settlements in Palestine were scattered and often isolated, and as a result, were often built more like military garrisons. A solution to the mounting tensions between the Jews and Palestinians proving elusive, the British finally turned the matter over to the UN in 1947.

The next section, “The UN’s Partition Plan,” discusses how the UN tried to solve the problem posed by Palestine by adopting a partition solution very similar to the one previously envisioned by the British. The Special Committee for Palestine (UNSCOP) was set up to iron out the details. The plan put forward by the UNSCOP suggested a two-state solution in which the Jewish and Palestinian states would be bound together in a single economic unit. The City of Jerusalem would be governed by a UN-administrated international regime.