[A-List] Planning The Terror That Created Israel

["Tony B." <tal1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Planning The Terror That Created Israel


from International Socialist Review (www.isreview.org)

Jan/ Feb issue

ISR Issue 57, January-February 2008

REVIEWS
Planning the terror that created Israel
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Ilan Pappé

OneWorld Publications, 2006 (paper 2007)
320 pages . $15 (paper)
Review by MOSTAFA OMAR
ISRAELI HISTORIAN Ilan Pappe, whose parents fled persecution in Nazi Germany 
in the 1930s, minces no words in telling the real story of Zionism's crimes 
against the Palestinians:

It is the horrific story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a crime 
against humanity that Israel has wanted to deny and cause the world to 
forget. Retrieving it from oblivion is incumbent upon us; it is the very 
first step we must take if we ever want reconciliation to take a chance, and 
peace to take root, in the torn land of Palestine and Israel.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé explains and documents that the 
true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority 
Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian 
population. He meticulously (and painfully) reconstructs the story of how 
Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this 
expulsion and how they intiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally 
decided to leave.

The same Western governments that have been quick to denounce ethnic 
cleansing in Darfur or Bosnia and Kosovo, writes Pappé, have failed to 
recognize that the same awful crime also happened to the Palestinians sixty 
years ago and continues today.
Myth and reality

Israel's official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers 
in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbors; that 
Zionist leaders were willing to accept UN resolution 181 of November 1947, 
which called for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab 
state, but that it was the Palestinians who rejected that plan; and that the 
Palestinians became refugees when they "voluntarily" fled their homes to 
make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry 
out what they called a "second Holocaust" against Jews.

Palestinian historians such as Walid Khalidi and Salim Tamari have 
repeatedly documented the crimes Israel committed in 1948 and afterwards, 
using historic records as well as the testimonies of Palestinian refugees. 
For his own research, Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying 
almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs 
of Israel's "founding fathers."

These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders 
of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian 
population. Pappé details how these Israeli "heroes" executed the plan in 
the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, 
rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native 
population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story 
that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for 
the past sixty years.
Pappé has belonged to the school of historical revisionists pioneered by the 
Israeli historian Benny Morris in the late 1980s with The Birth of the 
Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949. In that book, Morris also researched 
declassified Israeli military archives and found that the Zionist leadership 
and militias committed certain crimes during the war of 1948 that led to 
Palestinian expulsion and flight. Morris maintained that these crimes were 
not the result of any advance plan of expulsion, but rather the result of 
the dynamics of the conflict-much the same as other bad things that happen 
in all wars.

The "transfer" plan

Looking at the same documents Morris used, however, Pappé concluded that 
Morris selectively used data and ignored many events that point starkly to a 
conscious plan of expulsion. He goes on to argue that the founders of 
Zionism-from Theodore Herzl to David Ben-Gurion-had always planned to expel 
the native Palestinian population as a prerequisite for creating an 
exclusive Jewish state in Palestine.

For example, in 1937 Ben-Gurion told the Jewish Agency Executive, the 
organization charged with procuring land for Jewish settlements in 
Palestine, "I am for compulsory transfer; I don't see anything immoral in 
it." Ten years later, Ben Gurion maintained his opposition to sharing 
Palestine with the Arabs by rejecting the UN partition plan because he 
believed it didn't allocate at least the majority of Palestine to the Jewish 
state.

Pappé argues that the partition plan was, from the beginning, unfair to the 
Palestinians because they still made up two-thirds of the population in 
1947, while the UN allocated only 42 percent of the land to them. Meanwhile, 
the UN allocated 56 percent of Palestine to foreign Jewish colonizers who 
only made up a third of the population. Despite this injustice to the native 
population, the founding father of Israel actually insisted on getting more 
and more land. In a speech delivered to his own Mapai Party on December 3, 
1947, Ben-Gurion made his aims clear:

There are 40 percent non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state. 
This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state.. Only a state with 
80 percent Jews is a viable state.

Zionist leaders believed that it was not possible to achieve a Jewish 
majority in the country simply through immigration, since most Jews fleeing 
Nazi Germany's Holocaust wanted to head West, not to Palestine. Therefore, 
Pappé writes, they concluded that there was only one way to achieve this 
goal of a majority Jewish state on the majority of the land of historic 
Palestine-the ethnic cleansing of the natives.

Preparing for ethnic cleansing

Since the early 1930s, these founding fathers worked hard to prepare for a 
majority Jewish state with very few or no Arabs. First, they successfully 
strengthened Jewish economic, social, military, and political institutions 
that could become the basis of the new state. They also took advantage of 
British openness to Jewish immigration during the British colonial mandate 
period of 1917-48. In addition, they worked to weaken the Arab political 
leadership by fighting alongside British forces to crush most of the 
Palestinian political and military infrastructure during the Arab revolt of 
1936-39. At the end of the Second World War, they launched a relentless 
campaign of terrorist attacks against British interests in Palestine to 
drive the British out.

They also authorized a committee of Jewish historians and Arabists (a term 
that refers to specialists in Arabic culture) to compile a detailed, secret 
map of every Arab town and village in Palestine. They recorded the location 
and topography of the villages, the degree of land fertility, and 
availability of water, the number of inhabitants and the names of all adult 
males, the number of guards and weapons, the names of individuals who took 
part in or sympathized with the 1936 revolt, and even recorded a description 
of the Mukhtar's (mayor's) living quarters.

Leaders such as Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Moshe Allon met for years on a 
biweekly basis in the "Red House" in Tel Aviv as a group called The 
Consultancy. They drew and revised a sophisticated plan to carry out the 
"transfer" of the Palestinians at an opportune time in order to secure a 
Jewish majority in Palestine. In the third updated version of that plan 
(compiled at the end of the 1930s and referred to as Plan C or gimel in 
Hebrew), these leaders agreed on the necessity of carrying out the following 
steps:

. Killing the Palestinian political leadership;
. Killing Palestinian inciters and financial supporters;
. Damaging Palestinian transportation;
. Damaging Palestinian water wells, mills, etc.;
. Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc.

Within a few months, the same "founding fathers" drew up the final version 
of the plan, now named Plan D, or dalet in Hebrew. These leaders ordered 
their militias and gangs to start implementing Plan D only hours after the 
UN issued resolution 181 in November 1947. The long nightmare for the 
Palestinians would only get worse. Zionist militias began to attack and 
expel villagers with or without provocation inside lands allocated to either 
the Jewish or Arab state.

Qisarya was the first village to be expelled in its entirety, on 15 February 
1948. The expulsion took only a few hours and was carried out so 
systematically that the Jewish troops were able to evacuate and destroy 
another four villages on the same day, all under the watchful eyes of 
British troops stationed in police stations nearby.

The people of the village of Sa'sa were among the early victims. On the 
night of February 15, 1948, troops from Palmach (which had the largest 
Zionist militias) "took the main street of the village and systematically 
blew up one house after another while families were still sleeping inside." 
Moshe Kalman, the Jewish officer in charge of the operation later recalled, 
rather poetically, "In the end, the sky prised open. We left behind 35 
demolished houses (a third of the village) and 60-80 dead bodies (quite a 
few of them were children)."

Declassified Israeli military archives confirm that the Zionist militias 
carried out at least thirty-seven large-scale massacres in that period. Some 
of the worst massacres and rape cases took place in villages such as Deir 
Yassin on April 9, 1948, where one survivor, Fahim Zaydan, described what 
Jewish troops did:

They took us one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his 
daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and 
shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over 
him-carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her, 
they shot her too.

The news about the fate of the villagers in Deir Yassin spread like wildfire 
across Palestine, with Jewish troops cruising through other villages 
promising the villagers the same fate if they didn't leave. And though more 
recent accurate accounts of the number of those killed in Deir Yassin 
suggest a figure of 170 men, women, and children, Zionist propaganda 
broadcast over loudspeakers in the weeks that followed the massacre claimed 
that they actually killed over 300, in order to elevate the panic among 
Arabs.

On October 28, 1948, Palmach troops committed another massacre in the 
village of Dawaymah, described by Pappé as more brutal than the massacre in 
Deir Yassin. In just a few hours, all houses were blown up and 455 people 
were executed, including 170 women and children. The remaining 6,000 
inhabitants-who included 4,000 refugees expelled earlier that year from 
other villages-were forcibly expelled. According to Israeli archives, "The 
Jewish troops who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: 
babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in 
houses, and men stabbed to death."

In all those villages that were attacked, the map compiled earlier by the 
Arabists proved to be extremely useful. It gave the Jewish troops complete 
understanding of the best way to attack those villages. And with the help of 
paid informants, it allowed them to pick out and immediately execute all 
potential resisters.

By the end of the war, Zionist troops had destroyed more than 420 
Palestinian villages and turned their inhabitants into refugees. The same 
ill fate that befell the Palestinian countryside also befell the Arab 
population in cities-both Arab or mixed. The campaign against the 
Palestinian cities was also as relentless and brutal as that against the 
villages.
On the first day of Passover, April 21, 1948, Jewish troops began Operation 
Scissors (later renamed Operation Cleansing the Leaven or Bi'ur Hametz in 
Hebrew) to cleanse the mixed sea-port city of Haifa in the north of its 
fifty thousand Arab inhabitants. The troops attacked by rolling barrel bombs 
from the hills onto Arab streets and using heavy artillery while 
loudspeakers threatened the Palestinians to leave or else. Thousands of 
Palestinians fled to the port, attempting to get on boats to leave, but even 
there, Jewish troops continued to shoot, leading to more panic with parents 
trampling their own children. Many drowned when overloaded fishing boats 
capsized. This all happened under the nose of the British forces who were 
still stationed in the city and didn't fulfill an earlier promise to protect 
the city's Palestinian inhabitants.

Another example of what Pappé calls the urbicide, (killing of cities) of 
Arab Palestine is the attacks on the two cities of Acre and Baysan. On May 
6, 1948, Jewish troops laid siege with intensive bombardment. Loudspeakers 
shouted everywhere: "Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy to the 
last man."

According to British doctors in the city's Lebanese Red Cross hospital, the 
troops also caused an outbreak of typhoid and dysentery among Arabs and even 
British soldiers by poisoning the water supply with germs. These germs were 
developed by the Biological Warfare Science Corps program, set up by 
Ben-Gurion himself in the 1940s and ironically known by its acronym HEMED, 
which means "sweetness" in Hebrew.

Exhausted, starved, and fearing more death and destruction, the Palestinian 
inhabitants of Acre and Baysan finally surrendered in a matter of days only 
to be loaded by Jewish soldiers at gunpoint onto trucks that drove them to 
their future refugee camps. By the end of the war most major Palestinian 
cities had become totally or almost totally empty of their Arab inhabitants.

By the spring of 1949, Israel had conquered up to 80 percent of historic 
Palestine. It expelled 800,000 Palestinians, or 75 percent of the native 
Arab population, from their homeland, turning them into refugees and 
preventing them from coming back at the end of the war. The founding fathers 
had finally succeeded in securing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. 
Some 660,000 Jews imposed military rule on 150,000 Arabs who dug in and didn't 
flee. The rest of the Palestinians were dispersed as refugees in the 
remaining 20 percent of their own country or in neighboring Arab states-made 
to live as refugees for the following sixty years. Today, they number over 
six million.

Setting the record straight

Pappé makes a couple of critical points. First, he explains that the Arab 
resistance to the Zionist efforts of ethnic cleansing was actually quite 
weak. While Ben-Gurion, in public speeches, delivered fiery public warnings 
against a "second Holocaust," he expressed utter confidence in private 
meetings that the nascent state of Israel would crush all Arab armies and 
resisters.

This confidence was based on his knowledge that Jewish troops outnumbered 
and out-gunned all the Arab armies combined. In addition, the Soviet Union 
allowed Czechoslovakia to supply the Jewish side with new tanks and air 
power while Britain formed an embargo on arms sales to the Arabs.

Pappé shows that the majority of the Palestinians, especially villagers, 
never fully comprehended the gravity of the Zionist threat in 1948. They had 
no idea that the Zionist project meant not to exploit them but to expel 
them. Indeed, in the early months of 1948, many were going on with their 
lives, even planning future harvests.

Second, Pappé demonstrated that Benny Morris was wrong to claim that the 
expulsion started after the Arab armies entered Palestine on May 15, 1948. 
He uses the same archives that Morris looked at to show massacres and 
expulsions beginning and spreading as early as December 1947.

The price: The future

Like all Israelis who dare to tell the true story of what happened, Pappé 
was ostracized. He received death threats and was forced out of his job as a 
distinguished senior lecturer at the University of Haifa last summer. Citing 
an atmosphere of hate and bigotry, he decided to accept a job at Exeter 
University in England.

There, he continues to argue that Israel must admit its historic crime in 
order to begin the process of reconciliation. He also argues that the state 
of Israel is racist to the core and must be democratized and purged of hate. 
The first step towards democratization is eliminating the Jewish character 
of the state, allowing all Palestinian refugees to return, and establishing 
total equality between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

He is full of hope that this future is possible through the Palestinian 
struggle for national liberation. Pappé likens the resistance to Palestine's 
olive trees, a national symbol of pride. Israelis keep trying to destroy 
them by planting pine trees over them, but the olive trees keep growing 
back.