THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume X, Issue # 108, April 23, 2008
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
ILAN PAPPE'S THE ETHNIC CLENSING OF PALESTINE:
A BOOK REVIEW
By Seth J. Frantzman
THE WORK OF THE SOCALLED "NEW HISTORIANS" -- THEIR REVISION & DISTORTION OF ISRAELI HISTORY -- THE FULL
STORY:
ISRAELI ACADEMICS & WESTERN REVISIONISTS EXAMINING ISRAEL'S WAR OF INDEPENDENCE FROM AN ARAB
PERSPECTIVE IN WHICH JEWS WERE THE AGGRESSORS & ARABS WERE THE VICTIMS -- ILAN PAPPE'S PROMOTING
REVISIONIST ARGUMENTS THAT PLACE EXCLUSIVE BLAME ON EARLY ZIONISTS FOR VICTIMIZING ARABS & DESTROYING
OPPORTUNITIES FOR PEACE & RECONCILIATION -- PAPPE'S CLAIM THAT THE ZIONISTS MADE SPECIAL PREPARATIONS FOR
ETHNIC CLEANSING OF ARABS FROM PALESTINE -- MANIPULATING EVIDENCE TO FIT AN IMPLAUSIBLE THESIS -- IGNORING
THE REALITIES OF THE TIME -- DISREGARD FOR THE OBLIGATIONS OF THE HISTORIAN -- INDIFFERENCE TO STANDARDS OF
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
FLUNCKING HISTORY
Among many Israeli academics and Western revisionists, it has become fashionable to examine Israel's War of
Independence from an Arab perspective in which Jews were the aggressors and Arabs the victims. [1] This trend began
in 1989 with works by Ben-Gurion University Professor Benny Morris [2] and Oxford University Professor Avi Shlaim,
[3] and developed further with the writings of the late Hebrew University anthropologist Baruch Kimmerling, [4] Neve
Gordon [5] at Ben-Gurion University, and Meron Benvenisti, [6] a political scientist who served as Deputy Mayor of
Jerusalem between 1971 and 1978.
Many of these socalled New Historians and their fellow travelers may have embraced the notion of reverse victimization
in order to rationalize the unexpected survival of Israel in the 1948 and 1967 wars. They present every massacre of Jews
as an understandable response to a Jewish offense, for example, portraying both the April 13, 1948, Mount Scopus
convoy massacre and the May 15, 1948, murders of fifty Jews who had surrendered to the Arab Legion at Gush Etzion
as an Arab reprisal for the April 9-11, 1948, Irgun attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin. [7]
PEPPE'S POLEMICS
Ilan Pappé has now seized on what the New Historians started and brought it to new heights by promoting revisionist
arguments that place exclusive blame on early Zionists for victimizing Arabs and destroying opportunities for peace and
reconciliation. Indeed, it has become the strategy by which Pappé has salvaged his turbulent career: He left Haifa
University in 2007, after the exposure of his research errors undercut his Master's thesis and his endorsement of the
British boycott of Israeli universities prompted the President of the University to call for Pappé's resignation. [8] From
his new position at the University of Exeter, he has promoted his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,
[9] which argues that, even prior to Israel's independence, Zionist officials plotted to expel Arabs from Palestine.
Pappé's thesis is that Israel's Founding Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, working with the Zionist leadership in
Palestine, made special preparations for ethnic cleansing known as Plan D. This plan envisioned the conquest by the
Haganah — the Mandate-era precursor to the Israeli army — of areas occupied by Arabs, but allotted by the United
Nations to the Jewish state.
Pappé's evidence for a Zionist plan to cleanse Palestine of its Arab population derives from his interpretations of the
Haganah archives and the Israel State Archives files. Among the evidence Pappé finds damning are Haganah
intelligence surveys of Arab villages, including information on the number of armed men, the mukhtars (village or
neighborhood headmen), and any anti-Zionist activities. [10] Pappé uses the presence of such lists to suggest
parallels between Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and Palestinian Arab suffering as a result of Israel's
creation. [11]
Pappé also argues that Jewish forces, whether Haganah, Irgun or the Lehi group, which sought to evict the British
from Palestine, attacked Arab villages prior to the May 15, 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence. He writes:
"On a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of
eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young
military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military
orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare
for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast
areas of the country … When it was over, more than half of
Palestine's native population, close to 800,000 people, had
been uprooted." [12]
This passage, characteristic of so much of Pappé's book, is a cynical exercise in manipulating evidence to fit an
implausible thesis. Yigal Yadin, the Chief of Operations of the Haganah, adopted Plan D on March 10, 1948, as
part of preparations for the onset of open warfare between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, warfare that the Arabs
themselves were promising would follow a declaration of Jewish statehood. Morris described it as "a blueprint for
securing the emergent Jewish state and the blocs of settlements outside the state's territory against the expected
[Arab] invasion on or after 15 May," [13] but recognized that "Plan D was not a political blueprint for the expulsion
of Palestine's Arabs." [14]
Pappé does not agree and says that new material from Israeli military archives, a reassessment of older material, and
Palestinian oral history suggest that the plan was far more nefarious. [15] But Pappé, in this example, as in many
others, is blinded by his need to fit events into a preferred narrative, and what little new evidence he includes does
not persuade when considered in the context of historical events — a context that Pappé rigorously obscures.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT
Pappé would have his readers believe that, in the years before the Israeli declaration of statehood, the Arabs living in
Mandatory Palestine were lacking in the hostility to Jews that made Jewish war-planning necessary. To take just one
time period, between the UN General Assembly vote to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947, and Israeli
independence almost six months later, Arab irregulars killed 1,256 Jews in Palestine [16] — almost all of whom were
civilians. Pappé might be onto something if Plan D had been drafted in the absence of Arab violence against Jews, or
if the Arab states surrounding Palestine were not so serious about answering the declaration of a Jewish state with a
war of annihilation. But, inconveniently for Pappé, those were the realities of the time — realities that undermine the
thesis of his book.
The Palestine Post provides a detailed window into the period. Between 1932 and 1948, the paper, which would
later change its name to The Jerusalem Post, was Mandatory Palestine's newspaper of record. An
English-language daily, it catered both to Palestine's British administrators and the relatively small number of Jewish
residents in Palestine who spoke English. It was not always sympathetic to Zionists, especially not to those who
resorted to force of arms, and often sided editorially with the British against the Irgun and Stern Gang. For instance, on
February 20, 1948, it headlined a story about an Irgun attack on British servicemen, "Terrorists Murder Soldier in
Jerusalem." [17] And, rather than ignore the Arab population, The Palestine Post perhaps overemphasized their
claims. Analysis of the newspaper's casualty reports shows that, between November, 1947, and May, 1948, it
over-reported Arab casualties threefold when its figure of over 3,500 is compared to British Mandatory statistics. [18]
The Editors of The Palestine Post did not know how history would be written, and there is every reason to
believe the reports between November 29, 1947, and May 15, 1948, sought to depict events accurately.
Nor should historians ignore context, as Pappé willfully does. Those who read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
will not learn that, in the first week after the passage of the UN partition plan, Arabs murdered 62 Jews. In the following
month, Arabs killed an additional 200. By March 1, 1948, 546 Jews had been murdered and, by Ben-Gurion's Declaration
of Independence, the total was over 1,000. [19] Arab paramilitaries, militias, and terrorists besieged Jerusalem and cut the
Jewish neighborhoods' water supplies and surrounded Jewish villages in the Negev. Arab snipers attacked Jews in
Haifa and other mixed villages. [20] A sniper from Beit Dajan shot a 14-year-old girl, [21] and Arab fighters attacked more
than a dozen kibbutzim between December, 1947, and March, 1948. [22] Massacres were common: Arab rioters killed 39
Jews at Haifa's oil refinery on December 30, 1947, and, two weeks later, Arab irregulars killed 35 Jews trying to reach
Gush Etzion. On February 1, 1948, an Arab terrorist blew up The Palestine Post building and, three weeks later, a
terrorist's bomb killed 44 Jews on Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda Street. Massacres continued for weeks, both inside Palestine
and in the neighboring states. [23] On March 21, the bodies of 11 missing Jews were found; three had been burned. [24]
Local Arab villagers or Bedouins may have precipitated the Autumn, 1947, violence, [25] but, by Spring, 1948, Arab
volunteers from Iraq and Syria were increasingly participating. [26] On April 11, 1948, for example, Egyptian members of
the Muslim Brotherhood attacked Kfar Darom near Gaza City. [27]
In this context — a state of low-level terrorism and violence that Pappé, given the narrative he wishes to promote, is
loath to disclose — it is not the least bit curious that Zionist leaders in Palestine were developing plans to defend
themselves in the case of the outbreak of full-scale war. It would indeed be strange if Jewish strategists were not doing
so.
THE REAL "PLAN D"
While no scholar disputes that Zionist leaders adopted Plan D, Pappé's argument — that Plan D is evidence of a desire
to conduct ethnic cleansing and constituted a war crime — is a leap of logic. The reality of that time period is one in
which Jewish leaders were faced with problems far more urgent and existential than altering the ethnic makeup of certain
territories. On the same day that the Zionist leadership adopted Plan D, British Mandate authorities admitted that Fauzi
el-Kaukji, leader of the Arab Liberation Army, was in Palestine operating in Samaria. [28] Snipers attacked Jews in Haifa,
and Arabs launched mortar attacks on Tel Aviv. There were reports that British forces were evacuating. [29] The Zionist
decision to seize land to deny Arab attackers strategic territorial advantages was inevitable and motivated by legitimate
military considerations. Villages such as Ishwa and Jaffa hosted foreign fighters from Iraq, Syria, and even Yugoslavia,
[30] and thereby, sacrificed their status as noncombatant areas.
The decision to implement Plan D had little effect on the Arab forces, which continued their assault on all parts of the
Jewish yishuv (the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine). [31] As Arab forces tried to isolate and eradicate pockets
of Jews, Jews traveled in convoys that often became the focus of Arab ambushes, [32] some of which involved more
than 500 Arabs. [33] Major Plan D operations, such as Operation Nachson to open the road to besieged Jerusalem,
began on April 6, 1948, just five weeks before Israel's independence.
Nor do the lists that Pappé finds so damning provide conclusive evidence of malfeasance. Cobbled together over the
course of the decade before Israel's independence, the Haganah lists were not a blueprint, but, rather, an intelligence
assessment. In 1943, the Palmach (the Haganah's regular fighting force) and the Haganah Intelligence Service began to
survey villages in order to evaluate their capabilities, should hostilities erupt. Jewish pilots also conducted aerial
surveys.
These intelligence assessments were so parochial that, today, they could serve as a resource for research into Arab
village life of the Mandate period. One representative Haganah intelligence report surveys the hamlet of Beit Umm
el-Mais near Jerusalem and reveals that the sons of Hasan al-Jura moved to the ruins of the village around 1905, that
the village consisted of one clan, and that its residents were illiterate and had no connections to nearby kibbutzim. The
only terror suspect was Ismail Hamdan, who was involved in the 1936-1939 Arab revolt. The village possessed 11
modern rifles divided among 25 men. [34] Another Haganah report noted that the nearby village of Beit Thul was 300
years old, possessed 400 sheep, and that Arab nationalists persecuted members of the village during the revolt. [35]
Nor were the Zionists the only ones to make such assessments. The British kept similar intelligence about kibbutzim
and Arab villages alike, especially during the Arab Revolt, noting items such as the presence of weaponry and the
extent of illegal immigration. [36] Such British lists are evidence of military preparedness and routine intelligence
collection, not evidence of plans to ethnically cleanse the Jewish population. Moreover, the Haganah files may have
saved Israeli lives by portraying an accurate picture of Arab defenses and probably saved Arab lives by enabling the
Israel Defense Forces to avoid collateral damage.
As a work of scholarship, Pappé's book falls short, and it does so in a particularly damning way. He ignores context and
draws far broader conclusions than evidence allows by cherry-picking some reports and ignoring other sources entirely.
He does not examine Arab intentions in the five months between the UN endorsement of Palestinian partition and
Israel's independence, nor does he consider the widespread public statements by Arab officials in Palestine and in
neighboring states declaring their goal of eradicating the Jewish presence in Palestine. [37] It is obvious why a
polemicist such as Pappé would cleanse — so to speak — his narrative of any such references: To avoid doing so
would strike at the core of the reality that he wishes to foist upon his readers, one which precisely inverts the historical
record and turns a coordinated Arab attempt at ethnically cleansing Palestine of its Jews into a Jewish attempt at
ethnically cleansing Arabs.
Pappé's writings may win plaudits among his new British peers, whose disdain for the State of Israel is legendary. But
his disregard for the obligations of the historian and his indifference to academic integrity condemn his work to the
realm of the polemic, not scholarship.
NOTES:
[1] For background on the New Historians, see Efraim Karsh, "Rewriting Israel's History," Middle East Quarterly, June 1996, pp. 19-29.
[2] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem (London: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[3] Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
[4] Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide (New York: Verso Books, 2006).
[5] Neve Gordon, Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics and the Case of Israel (London: Zed Books, 1995).
[6] Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
[7] Shlaim, Collusion, p. 164; Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2006), p. 571; Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem (Chelmsford, U.K.: Grafton Books, 1982) p. 266; Hillel Cohen, author interview, Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University, Nov. 13, 2005; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), pp. 209, 214.
[8] Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv), Apr. 26, 2005.
[9] New York: Oneworld Publications, 2006.
[10] Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, pp. 17-22.
[11] Ibid., pp. xiii, xvii, 235.
[12] Ibid., pp. xii-xiii.
[13] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 163-4.
[14] Ibid., p. 164.
[15] "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," interview with Ilan Pappé, ZNET, Oct. 3, 2006, accessed Aug 3, 2007.
[16] The Palestine Post (Jerusalem), May 6, 1948.
[17] The Palestine Post, Feb. 20, 1948.
[18] The Palestine Post, May 6, 1948; British mandatory figures published in The Palestine Post, Nov. 29, 1947 to May 1, 1948.
[19] The Palestine Post, Jan. 2, 7, 27, Feb. 2, Mar. 2, Apr. 1, May 1, 1948.
[20] The Palestine Post, Dec. 9, 11, 1947.
[21] The Palestine Post, Mar. 21, 1948.
[22] The Palestine Post, Dec. 1947 through Mar. 1948; David Tal, War in Palestine, 1948: Strategy and Diplomacy (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 57-123.
[23] See, for example, Marina Benjamin, Last Days in Babylon (New York: Free Press, 2006), pp. 151-2; for Libya, see Joseph B. Schechtman, On Wings of Eagles: The Plight, Exodus, and Homecoming of Oriental Jewry (New York: A.S Barnes and Company, 1961), p. 138; for Egypt, see Michael M. Laskier, The Jews of Egypt, 1920-1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Middle East Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 1993), pp. 126, 187.
[24] The Palestine Post, Mar. 21, 1948.
[25] The Palestine Post, Dec. 14, 1947.
[26] The Palestine Post, Apr. 19, 1948; Tal, War in Palestine, 1948, p. 20.
[27] The Palestine Post , Apr. 12, 14, 1948.
[28] The Palestine Post, Mar. 11, 1948.
[29] The Palestine Post, Mar. 5, 8, 9, 1948.
[30] The Palestine Post, Mar. 23, 1948; Emilio Traubner, "Sarajevo to Tel Aviv," The Palestine Post, Dec. 3, 194
[31] The Palestine Post, Mar. 19, 1948.
[32] The Palestine Post, Mar. 23, 1948.
[33] The Palestine Post, Mar. 19, 1948.
[34] "Beit Um Al Mies," Village Survey Project of the Shai, Haganah Archives, Tel Aviv, 105/378.
[35] "Beit Thul, May 22, 1943, Village Survey," Haganah Archives, 105/95 A 150.
[36] "General Sir Al Cunningham to Secretary of State for the Colonies: Weekly Intelligence Appreciation, 13 March 1948," Public Record Office, London, CO 537/3869.
[37] Martin Gilbert, The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 37; Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti: Hajj Amin al-Hussaini (Portland: Frank Cass, 1993), pp. 66-9.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Israel & the Arabs -- The Israeli-Arab Conflict
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Islamism & Jihadism -- Radical Islam & Islamic Terrorism
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Seth J. Frantzman is a doctoral candidate in Historical Geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His blog is
available on the Internet at the following URL: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
The foregoing book review by Seth J. Frantzman was originally published in the Middle East Quarterly,
Spring, 2008, and
can be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum, a foreign policy think tank which seeks to
define and promote American interests in the Middle East, defining U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam,
working for Palestinian Arab acceptance of the State of Israel, improving the management of U.S. efforts to promote
constitutional democracy in the Middle East, reducing America's energy dependence on the Middle East, more robustly
asserting U.S. interests vis-ŕ-vis Saudi Arabia, and countering the Iranian threat.
(Article URL: http://www.meforum.org/article/1886)
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
April 23, 2008
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