The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe

  This system of erasure, however, can never be foolproof. For example, the JNF website tells us something you will not find mentioned on the boards that punctuate the forest paths themselves. Within the many ruins dotting the place the ‘Village Spring’ (‘Ein ha-Kfar’) is recommended as ‘the quietest part of the site’. Often a village spring would be at the heart of the village, close to the village square, as here in Kafrayn, its ruins now providing not only ‘peace of mind’ but also serving the cattle of the nearby kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emek as a resting point on their way to meadows down below.

  Greening of Jerusalem

  The last two examples come from the Jerusalem area. The western slopes of the city are covered with the ‘Jerusalem forest’, another brainchild of Yossef Weitz. In 1956 Weitz complained to the mayor of Jerusalem about the barren sight of the western hills of the city. Eight years earlier, they had of course been covered with the houses and the cultivated lands of Palestinian villages bustling with life. In 1967 Weitz’s efforts finally bore fruit: The JNF decided to plant one million trees on 4,500 dunam that, in the words of the website, ‘encircle Jerusalem with a green belt.’ At one of its southern corners, the forest reaches the ruined village of Ayn Karim and covers the destroyed village of Beit Mazmil. Its most western point stretches over the land and houses of the destroyed village of Beit Horish, whose people were expelled as late as 1949. The forest extends further over Deir Yassin, Zuba, Sataf, Jura and Beit Umm al-Meis.

  The JNF website here promises its visitors unique sites and special experiences in a forest whose historical remnants ‘testify to intensive agricultural activity’. More specifically, it highlights the various terraces one finds carved out along the western slopes: as in all other sites, these terraces are always ‘ancient’ – even when they were shaped by Palestinian villagers less than two or three generations ago.

  The last geographical site is the destroyed Palestinian village of Sataf, located in one of the most beautiful spots high up in the Jerusalem Mountains. The site’s greatest attraction, according to the JNF website, is the reconstruction it offers of ‘ancient’ (kadum in Hebrew) agriculture – the adjective ‘ancient’ is used for every single detail in this site: paths are ‘ancient’, steps are ‘ancient’, and so on. Sataf, in fact, was a Palestinian village expelled and mostly destroyed in 1948. For the JNF, the remains of the village are one more station visitors encounter on the intriguing walking tours it has set out for them within this ‘ancient site’. The mixture here of Palestinian terraces and the remains of four or five Palestinian buildings almost fully intact inspired the JNF to create a new concept, the ‘bustanof’ (‘bustan’ plus ‘nof’, the Hebrew word for panorama, the English equivalent for which would probably be something like ‘bustanorama’ or ‘orchard-view’). The concept is wholly original to the JNF.

  The bustans overlook some exquisite scenery and are popular with Jerusalem’s young professional class who come here to experience ‘ancient’ and ‘biblical’ ways of cultivating a plot of land that may even yield some ‘biblical’ fruits and vegetables. Needless to say, these ancient ways are far from ‘biblical’ but are Palestinian, as are the plots and the bustans and the place itself.

  In Sataf the JNF promises the more adventurous visitors a ‘Secret Garden’ and an ‘Elusive Spring’, two gems they can discover among terraces that are a ‘testimony to human habitation 6,000 years ago culminating in the period of the Second Temple.’ This is not exactly how these terraces were described in 1949 when Jewish immigrants from Arab countries were sent to repopulate the Palestinian village and take over the houses that had remained standing. Only when these new settlers proved unmanageable did the JNF decide to turn the village into a tourist site.

  At the time, in 1949, Israel’s naming committee searched for a biblical association for the place, but failed to find any connection to Jewish sources. They then hit upon the idea of associating the vineyard that surrounded the village with the vineyards mentioned in the biblical Psalms and Song of Songs. For a while they even invented a name for the place to suit their fancy, ‘Bikura’ – the early fruit of the summer – but gave it up again as Israelis had already got used to the name Sataf.

  The JNF website narrative and the information offered on the various boards set up at the locations themselves is also widely available elsewhere. There has always been a thriving literature in Israel catering for domestic tourism where ecological awareness, Zionist ideology and erasure of the past often go hand in hand. The encyclopedias, tourist guides and albums generated for the purpose appear even more popular and are in greater demand today than ever before. In this way, the JNF ‘ecologises’ the crimes of 1948 in order for Israel to tell one narrative and erase another. As Walid Khalidi has put in his forceful style: ‘It is a platitude of historiography that the victors in war get away with both the loot and the version of events.’4

  Despite this deliberate airbrushing of history, the fate of the villages that lie buried under the recreational parks in Israel is intimately linked to the future of the Palestinian families who once lived there and who now, almost sixty years later, still reside in refugee camps and faraway diasporic communities. The solution of the Palestinian refugee problem remains the key to any just and lasting settlement of the conflict in Palestine: for close to sixty years now the Palestinians have remained steadfast as a nation in their demand to have their legal rights acknowledged, above all their Right of Return, originally granted to them by the United Nations in 1948. They continue to confront an official Israeli policy of denial and anti-repatriation that seems only to have hardened over the same period.

  There are two factors that have so far succeeded in defeating all chances of an equitable solution to the conflict in Palestine to take root: the Zionist ideology of ethnic supremacy and the ‘peace process’. From the former stems Israel’s continuing denial of the Nakba; in the latter we see the lack of international will to bring justice to the region – two obstacles that perpetuate the refugee problem and stand in the way of a just and comprehensive peace emerging in the land.

  Chapter 11

  Nakba Denial and the ‘Peace Process’

  The UN General Assembly resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for the loss of or damage to property which, under the principles of international law and in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

  UN GA resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948.

  The US government supports the return of refugees, democratization, and protection of human rights throughout the country.

  Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, US State Department, 2003

  While the Palestinians Israel had failed to expel from the country were subjected to the military regime Israel put in place in October 1948, and those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were now under foreign Arab occupation, the rest of the Palestinian people were scattered throughout the neighbouring Arab states where they had found shelter in makeshift tent camps provided by international aid organisations.

  In mid-1949, the United Nations stepped in to try to deal with the bitter fruits of its 1947 peace plan. One of the UN’s first misguided decisions was not to involve the International Refugee Organization (IRO) but to create a special agency for the Palestinian refugees. It was Israel and the Zionist Jewish organisations abroad that were behind the decision to keep the IRO out of the picture: the IRO was the very same body that was assisting the Jewish refugees in Europe following the Second World War, and the Zionist organisations were keen to prevent anyone from making any possible association or even comparison between the two cases. Moreover, the IRO always recommended repatriation as the first option to which refugees were entitled.

  This is how the United Nation Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) came into being in
1950. UNRWA was not committed to the return of the refugees as UN General Assembly Resolution 194, from 11 December 1948, had stipulated, but was set up simply to provide employment and subsidies to the approximately one million Palestinian refugees who had ended up in the camps. It was also entrusted with building more permanent camps for them, constructing schools and opening medical centres. In other words, UNRWA was intended, in general, to look after the refugees’ daily concerns.

  It did not take long under these circumstances for Palestinian nationalism to re-emerge. It was centred on the Right of Return, but also aimed at replacing UNRWA as an educating agency and even as the provider of social and medical services. Inspired by the drive to try to take their fate into their own hands, this nascent nationalism equipped the people with a new sense of direction and identity, following the exile and destruction they had experienced in 1948. These national emotions were to find their embodiment in 1968 in the PLO, whose leadership was refugee-based and whose ideology was grounded in the demand for the moral and factual redress of the evils Israel had inflicted upon the Palestinian people in 1948.1

  The PLO, or any other group taking up the Palestinian cause, had to confront two manifestations of denial. The first was the denial exercised by the international peace brokers as they consistently sidelined, if not altogether eliminated, the Palestinian cause and concerns from any future peace arrangement. The second was the categorical refusal of the Israelis to acknowledge the Nakba and their absolute unwillingness to be held accountable, legally and morally, for the ethnic cleansing they committed in 1948.

  The Nakba and the refugee issues have been consistently excluded from the peace agenda, and to understand this we must assess how deep the level of denial of the crimes committed in 1948 remains today in Israel and associate it with the existence of a genuinely felt fear on the one hand, and a deeply rooted form of anti-Arab racism on the other, both heavily manipulated.

  FIRST ATTEMPTS AT PEACE

  Despite the 1948 fiasco, the United Nations still seemed to have some energy left in the first two years after the Nakba to try to come to grips with the question of Palestine. We find the UN initiating a series of diplomatic efforts through which it hoped to bring peace to the country, culminating in a peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland in the spring of 1949. The Lausanne conference was based on UN Resolution 194 and centred around the call for the refugees’ Right of Return. For the UN mediation body, the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), unconditional return of the Palestinian refugees was the basis for peace, together with a two-state solution dividing the country equally between the two sides, and the internationalisation of Jerusalem.

  Everyone involved accepted this comprehensive approach: the US, the UN, the Arab world, the Palestinians and Israel’s foreign minister, Moshe Sharett. But the endeavour was deliberately torpedoed by Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and King Abdullah of Jordan, who had set their minds on partitioning what was left of Palestine between them. An election year in America and the onset of the Cold War in Europe allowed these two to carry the day and make sure the chances for peace were swiftly buried again. They thereby foiled the only attempt we find in the history of the conflict at a comprehensive approach to creating genuine peace in Palestine/Israel.

  Towards Pax Americana

  After the failure of Lausanne, peace efforts quickly subsided: for nearly two decades, between 1948 and 1967, there was an obvious lull. Only after the war in June 1967 did the world wake up to the plight of the region once again. Or so it seemed. The June war ended with total Israeli control over all of ex-Mandatory Palestine. Peace endeavours started immediately after Israel’s blitzkrieg had run its swift but devastating course, and proved at first more overt and intensive than the ones at Lausanne. Early initiatives came from the British, French and Russian delegations at the UN, but soon the reins were handed over to the Americans as part of a successful attempt by the US to exclude the Russians from all Middle-Eastern agendas.

  The American effort totally relied on the prevailing balance of power as the main avenue through which to explore possible solutions. Within this balance of power, Israel’s superiority after 1948 and even more so after the June war was unquestionable, and thus whatever the Israelis put forward in the form of peace proposals invariably served as the basis for the Pax Americana that now descended on the Middle East. This meant that it was given to the Israeli ‘Peace Camp’ to produce the ‘common’ wisdom on which to base the next stages and provide the guidelines for a settlement. All future peace proposals thus catered to this camp, ostensibly the more moderate face of Israel’s position towards peace in Palestine.

  Israel drafted new guidelines after 1967, taking advantage of the new geopolitical reality its June war had created, but also mirroring the internal political debate that emerged inside Israel itself, following what Israeli PR quickly dubbed the ‘6-Day War’ (purposely invoking biblical overtones), between the right wing, the ‘Greater Israel’ people, and the left wing, the ‘Peace Now’ movement. The former were the so-called ‘redeemers’, people for whom the Palestinian areas Israel had occupied in 1967 were the ‘regained heartland’ of the Jewish state. The latter were dubbed ‘custodians’, Israelis who wanted to hold on to the Occupied Palestinian Territories so as to use them as bargaining chips in future peace negotiations. When the Greater Israel camp began establishing Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, the ‘custodian’ peace camp appeared to have no problem with the building of settlements in particular areas that immediately became non-negotiable for peace: the Greater Jerusalem area and certain settlement blocks near the 1967 border. The areas the peace camp initially offered to negotiate over have shrunk gradually since 1967 as Israeli settlement construction progressed incrementally over the years in the consensual areas of ‘redemption’.

  The moment the American apparatus responsible for shaping US policy in Palestine adopted these guidelines, they were paraded as ‘concessions’, ‘reasonable moves’ and ‘flexible positions’ on the part of Israel. This is the first part of the pincer movement Israel now executed to completely eliminate the Palestinian point of view – of whatever nature and inclination. The second part was to portray that point of view in the West as ‘terrorist, unreasonable and inflexible’.

  THE EXCLUSION OF 1948 FROM THE PEACE PROCESS

  The first of Israel’s three guidelines – or rather, axioms – was that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict had its origin in 1967: to solve it, all one needed was an agreement that would determine the future status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In other words, as these areas constitute only twenty-two per cent of Palestine, Israel at one stroke reduced any peace solution to only a small part of the original Palestinian homeland. Not only that, it demanded – and continues to demand today – further territorial compromises, either consonant with the business-like approach the US favoured or as dictated by the map agreed upon by the two political camps in Israel.

  Israel’s second axiom is that everything visible in these areas, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, can again be further divided and that this divisibility forms one of the keys to peace. For Israel this division of the visible includes not just the territory, but also people and natural resources.

  The third Israeli axiom is that nothing that occurred prior to 1967, including the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing, will ever be negotiable. The implications here are clear: it totally removes the refugee issue from the peace agenda and sidelines the Palestinian Right of Return as a ‘non-starter’. This last axiom totally equates the end of Israeli occupation with the end of the conflict, and it follows naturally from the previous two. For the Palestinians, of course, 1948 is the heart of the matter and only addressing the wrongs perpetrated then can bring an end to the conflict in the region.

  To activate these axiomatic guidelines that so clearly meant to push the Palestinians out of the picture, Israel needed to find a potential partner. Proposals put forward to that end to King
Hussein of Jordan, through the mediation skills of the American secretary of state at the time, Henry Kissinger, read: ‘The Israeli peace camp, led by the Labour party, regards the Palestinians as non-existent and prefers to divide the territories Israel occupied in 1967 with the Jordanians.’ But Jordan’s king deemed the share he was allotted insufficient. Like his grandfather, King Hussein coveted the area as a whole, including East Jerusalem and its Muslim sanctuaries.

  This so-called Jordanian option was endorsed by the Americans up to 1987, when the first Intifada, the popular Palestinian uprising, erupted in December of that year against Israel’s oppression and occupation. That nothing came of the Jordanian path in the earlier years was due to lack of Israeli generosity, while in later years King Hussein’s ambivalence was at fault as well as his inability to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians, as the PLO enjoyed pan-Arab and global legitimacy.

  Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat suggested a similar path in his 1977 peace initiative to Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Menachem Begin (in power between 1977 and 1982). The idea was to allow Israel to maintain control over the Palestinian territories it held under occupation while granting the Palestinians in them internal autonomy. In essence this was another version of partition as it left Israel in direct possession of eighty per cent of Palestine and in indirect control over the remaining twenty per cent.