Review of Ilan Pappé's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

[Dear Athens Coalition, I have posted below a review of Ilan Pappé's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which we're reading for our meeting next week (May 12, 2010, 4 pm, UCM). This review gives some context for why such a book won't receive much attention in the U.S., given our "special" relationship with Israel as fellow settler-colonial states. Given the emphasis by the Puritans on "America" as the new Jerusalem and the new Zion, it is no surprise that the immediacy of this bi-national identification should be so strong and automatic, and that it has centuries-long roots in the exceptionalist self-conceptions of Americans. Both nations, in other words, were founded on and still conceived of in terms of the divine sanction of Manifest Destiny. Add to this the hundred-year-long U.S. emphasis on the Middle East oil reserves as strategic American interests, the apocalyptic vision of some fundamentalist Christians cheering on an Israeli-Arab Armageddon as a way to hasten the return of Christ, and the easy erasure of any and all actions by Israel by the shadow of the tragic Jewish Holocaust. (See also Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.) — George Hartley]

January 27 / 28, 2007

Counterpunch

Ilan Pappe and the Nakba Deniers

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

By JOHN WHITBECK

For anyone who possesses a strong stomach and an equally strong desire to know the truth, I strongly recommend Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's new book "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine", which makes painstakingly and painfully clear the extent to which the expulsion of the great majority of Palestinians from their homes and homeland between 1947 and 1949 (an expulsion absolutely essential to create a "Jewish state" in a country where, in 1947, the population was still 70% Muslim and Christian and these non-Jews still owned 94% of the land) was meticulously planned, programmed and documented, ruthlessly carried out and, thereafter, efficiently covered up, sanitized, erased from minds and memories and, to the extent necessary, denied. Pappe also makes clear that the cleansing spirit and cleansing practices have continued ever since, with public discussion in Israel of the "demographic threat" posed by those Palestinians still remaining in Palestinian never more openly conducted and with a recent poll showing 68% of Israeli Jews in favor of expelling all Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Unfortunately, this book, published in England (and available from amazon.com), is highly likely to go unreviewed and largely unnoticed in the United States, a country where objective historical truth is much less popular than "revealed truth" and pure fantasy and where the Israel-First Lobby starts with a distinct home-field advantage in pursuing its successful efforts to convince American public opinion that American interests and values are identical to Israeli interests and values and to make American foreign policy and America's wars indistinguishable from Israeli foreign policy and Israel's wars.

While most of mankind, being comprised of peoples who have themselves been the victims of colonialism and racism, views racial-supremicist settler-colonial states founded upon the genocide or ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population as an abomination, Americans, exceptionally, are favorably inclined toward such states. The reason is simple. Until very recently [still very prominently, in fact—George], America was [and remains] itself such a state, and the official Israeli narrative replicates the widely accepted American narrative of brave pioneers bringing civilization and economic advancement to a backward and savage land.

Furthermore, notwithstanding its history, America, as a nation, appears to have no regrets and to be troubled by no sense of national guilt. While, for reasons having less to do with bearing universal witness against man's inhumanity toward his fellow man than with justifying one particular instance of such inhumanity, there is a Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, there are no museums there devoted to the genocide of the Native Americans, to slavery or to the century of legalized segregation which followed abolition.

In addition, a significant proportion of the American population embraces a perverted interpretation of Christianity which ignores the humane message of Jesus Christ and the Golden Rule and focuses the devotions of its adherents not on God but, rather, on "God's Chosen People", through whose success in ethnically cleansing Palestine and provoking cataclysmic warfare these so-called "Christians" hope to achieve their personal, selfish "rapture" and "salvation".

Still, even in America, where Nakba denial is as obligatory as Holocaust denial is condemned, objective historical truth is available in Professor Pappe's book for anyone who cares.

John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer, is author of "The World According to Whitbeck". He can be reached at:jvwhitbeck@awalnet.net.sa