The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“In other words, I want to make the case for the paradigm of ethnic cleansing and use it to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948. I have no doubt that the absence so far of the paradigm of ethnic cleansing is part of the reason why the denial of the catastrophe has been able to go on for so long.”

Pappé states the thesis of his book, which rests on his conviction that the “paradigm of ethnic cleansing” must be used to understand the conflict between the Palestinians and the Zionists in 1948. This thesis is founded on the idea that the “paradigm of war,” according to which the Palestinians were forced out of their country because of their conflict with the Zionists, is both inaccurate and the reason that so many people in the world do not acknowledge that what the Zionists did to the Palestinians was a crime against humanity.

“[E]thnic cleansing is an effort to render an ethnically mixed country homogenous by expelling a particular group of people and turning them into refugees while demolishing the homes they were driven out from. There may well be a master plan, but most of the troops engaged in ethnic cleansing do not need direct orders: they know beforehand what is expected of them. Massacres accompany the operations, but where they occur they are not part of a genocidal plan: they are a key tactic to accelerate the flight of the population earmarked for expulsion. Later on, the expelled are then erased from the country’s official and popular history and excised from its collective memory. From the planning stage to final execution, what occurred in Palestine in 1948 forms a clear-cut case, according to these informed and scholarly definitions, of ethnic cleansing.”

Having considered several academic and diplomatic definitions of ethnic cleansing, Pappé lays out what he considers to be the nature of ethnic cleansing. According to Pappé’s definition, the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 “forms a clear-cut case” of ethnic cleansing, and this must be widely acknowledged (as Pappé asserts throughout his book) for political as well as moral reasons.

“This book is written with the deep conviction that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must become rooted in our memory and consciousness as a crime against humanity and that it should be excluded from the list of alleged crimes.”

For Pappé, it is important to raise awareness about the enormity of what was done to the Palestinians in 1948. Because Pappé regards the events of 1948 as such a clear-cut case of ethnic cleansing, he is adamant that the legal qualifier “alleged” be dropped when speaking of this case, even though legal redress for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 is no longer feasible since most of the officials involved in the ethnic cleansing were already dead by the time of writing.