The book that is providing a storm of controversy, from ‘Israel’s bravest historian’ (John Pilger)
Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking work on the formation of the State of Israel.
'Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history.' NEW STATESMAN
Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint.
Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East.
***
'Ilan Pappe is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.' JOHN PILGER
'Pappe has opened up an important new line of inquiry into the vast and fateful subject of the Palestinian refugees. His book is rewarding in other ways. It has at times an elegiac, even sentimental, character, recalling the lost, obliterated life of the Palestinian Arabs and imagining or regretting what Pappe believes could have been a better land of Palestine.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
'A major intervention in an argument that will, and must, continue. There's no hope of lasting Middle East peace while the ghosts of 1948 still walk.' INDEPENDENT
Getting the Picture
"I recall my childhood in 1950s Ontario when I loved pressing coins into collection boxes for tree planting in the allegedly uninhabited deserts discovered by hard-working Israeli pioneers. _x000D_ _x000D_ Fast forward to the 1990s, I was a teacher in Quebec, reading Holocaust literature, including stories about Anne Frank, a little Jewish girl whose family suffered under the Nazis. During this time, my teenage daughter was reading Betty Greene’s Summer of My German Soldier, and we both felt tremendous admiration for the brave Holocaust survivors of our community and everywhere. _x000D_ One day, though, my daughter called me in great distress from her kitchen, where she had sunk to the floor. She'd just heard on the radio that a young woman, Rachel Corrie, was bulldozed alive by an Israeli soldier as she sought to protect a Gazan home from destruction. I ask myself now, how could I have let this go?_x000D_ _x000D_ In 2023, a retired teacher now, I, like so many, was shocked by the events of October 7. I began researching why a group called Hamas would attack Holocaust survivors in Israel and take hostages. When I questioned, on Facebook, why Israel would retaliate to the harsh degree it did, killing innocent women and children in its effort to eradicate Hamas, I was unfriended by a former colleague, a Jewish woman in Montreal. (I soon learned that Hamas had been richly funded by Israel in Israel's effort to discredit and dismantle the legal organization, the PLO, Palestinian Liberation Org. )_x000D_ _x000D_ Determined to find more answers, I read Miko Peled's The General’s Son. I learned that just days after my birth in Montreal in 1948, Plan Dalet, an Israeli attack on 530 unarmed Palestinian villages, occurred, killing 13,000 innocent people. This brutality was authorized by a man called David Grun, an immigrant from Poland who renamed himself Ben Gurion to sound more Semitic. Israel's first four prime ministers were from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Plan Dalet displaced 750,000 Palestinians, making them refugees. _x000D_ _x000D_ I was stunned to learn that post-WW2 Torah-believing Israelis, having suffered the Holocaust, could participate in such Plan Dalet violence, including land grabbing, looting, raping, shooting, burning, bulldozing and killing. _x000D_ _x000D_ Reflecting back to 1967, I remembered being an Expo ’67 hostess in Montreal. At that time, I was reading Viktor Frankl’s 'Man’s Search for Meaning' and enjoying evenings at Terre des Hommes. I now wonder if the many Jewish news correspondents invited by our boss knew about the ongoing Naksa, the Israeli seizure of Palestinian territories in the West Bank that year. _x000D_ _x000D_ 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' is a detailed description of Zionist entitlement, colonialism, barbarism, and unspeakable cruelty. I could only listen in short bursts. _x000D_ _x000D_ I see now that, just as I was deceived by the roman catholic church, I had been misled for years. _x000D_ _x000D_ During my weeks of reading Ilan Pappe’s thorough history, I often recalled the horrific post-Holocaust images of living skeletons of men, women, and children in old copies of Life and Time magazines, their frail bones resembling their present-day victims in Gaza. _x000D_ _x000D_ When a respected Jewish German philosopher, Hannah Arendt, published her third book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, she coined the term “banality of evil. ” Her analysis of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, a major Nazi perpetrator, was not at all well received, especially by the Jewish survivors whose families had suffered the horrendous evil ordered by this Nazi official. _x000D_ _x000D_ Arendt argued that anyone could be evil. Her words in part:_x000D_ _x000D_ “For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial…Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period…That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. ” ― Hannah Arendt. _x000D_ _x000D_ I thank the courageous historian and writer Ilan Pappe, for his truthful history that must have been heartbreaking for him to write as a Jewish man. Yet, by doing so, he honoured the best of his values and not those Zionists of an Eichmannic persuasion. _x000D_ _x000D_ Eleanor Cowan, Author of A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer|20735536]"
