The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine essays

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine essays Three years after the Allied victory of World War II and the tragic details of the Holocaust were revealed to the world, the United Nations recognized Israel as an independent state on May 15th, 1948. Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is a revisionist work that aims to reveal, as Pappe believes, the true narrative of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. His main thesis is that David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, and other Jewish leaders planned and executed a detailed and brutal ethnic cleansing of the Arab population residing in Palestine. Pappe contends that the plan, entitled Plan D or Plan Dalet, was carefully crafted for the Hagana, the precursor to the Israeli army, to carry out even before the British Mandate was lifted and UN Partition went into effect. He contends that early Zionists are mainly to blame for violence towards the Arabs, and that in discussing the events of 1948, the "ethnic cleansing paradigm" should replace the "paradigm of war" when researching and discussing what is at the ideological core of such events.[1] Benny Morris, another revisionist historian wrote the precursor to Pappe's work in 1987, entitled The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. He states that Morris used the "war paradigm" to describe the events of 1948, and that evicting Arabs from their homeland was inevitable. It is evident in the Preface that Pappe's work is a move further away from the Zionist narrative, one closer to Morris', in comparison to that of his own work to He claims the previous revisionist works, particularly Morris's, are incomplete based on the fact that Morris relied mainly on Israeli documents and did not include Arab or oral sources. Based on his research, he contends that uprooting Palestinians began before Israel was an official state and new borders for Israel were drawn. He uses other historians' work as a reference when explaining...