The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

The Preface begins in the “Red House”—the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Hagana, the underground militia of the Zionists—on March 10, 1948. On this day, explains Pappé, 11 Zionist leaders “put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” (13). This plan, known as Plan D (from the Hebrew word Dalet), would use violence to expel the Indigenous Arab and Muslim population of Palestine to make way for the exclusively Jewish state imagined by the founders. The result of Plan D, which took six months to complete, was the displacement of over half of Palestine’s Indigenous population of nearly 800,000 people, the destruction of 531 villages, and the emptying of 11 urban neighborhoods.

Pappé defines this event—known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe”—as a case of ethnic cleansing and thus as a crime against humanity. According to Pappé, the mass dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 is one of few modern crimes against humanity that remains widely unacknowledged as such. Pappé emphasizes the importance of a historiographical account that reassesses prevailing Israeli narratives so that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians can be addressed politically and morally.