Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Pappe has written a great historical work on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947/8 and he shows that it was organised and planned, called Plan D, or plan Dalit, and he has exploded the myths that had been current until his work.
Tell me about the Ilan Pappe book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Pappe has written a great historical work on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947/8 and he shows that it was organised and planned, called Plan D, or plan Dalit, and he has exploded the myths that were current until his work.
What myths?
Well, for example, that the Arab leaders told the Palestinians to leave, or that the Palestinians were Bedouin people who didn’t really live there anyway, and he showed that they were ordinary people in brick and mortar homes who were intentionally forced out. This is very important because the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is the original sin of Zionism and the root of the current problem.
Pappe is part of a group called the New Historians or Revisionist Historians who have undermined the traditional narrative of the birth of the Jewish state. Benny Morris (Professor of Middle Eastern History at Ben-Gurion University) is another, and he says yes they were forced out but it was a good thing and let’s do it again. But Pappe is an anti-Zionist Jew, the son of Holocaust survivors, and a proponent of the one-state solution. He’s not suggesting getting rid of the Jews who are already there. This is an accessible book – a good work of history by someone who is unashamedly politically committed.
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Author and political blogger Robin Yassin-Kassab argues that Palestinians have a strange stateless existence very like the Jews had in the past. They can’t really own anything, and can neither invest in land, because it will be taken away, or in business, because it will be destroyed, so they invest in education and culture. As the land disappears from under their feet, their identity as a nation paradoxically grows stronger.
