A tempest that could ruin us all

Mohammed Al-Urdin reviews Ilan Pappe's exposé of Isreal's systematic destruction of Arab communities

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
By Ilan Pappe
Oneworld Publications
£16.99 (hardback)

IN 1949 Israeli soldiers kidnapped a 12 year-old Palestinian girl. Over several days they tortured, gang-raped and finally executed her. But when the story emerged four years ago the 22 soldiers received only minor rebukes, the severest of which was two years prison for the man who slew the child.
Such violence was so commonplace between 1948 and '49 that Israel's iconic leader David Ben-Gurion noted the girl's rape and murder in his diary in the same matter-of-fact style used to record thousands of other atrocities committed as the Arabs were driven from Palestine.
He would have made the entry after a meeting with the other key architects of Plan Dalet, the codename for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs coordinated from the Red House in Tel Aviv. It's not clear whether the house was so named for once being the HQ of a workers' organisation or because of its pink tinge at sunset. Either way Palestinians have cause to reflect on its bloody past.
Under Plan Dalet around 800,000 Palestinians - more than half the population - were driven from their country; thousands were tortured, executed or died fleeing; 531 towns and villages were destroyed, 11 city quarters emptied, and countless mosques and churches defiled. It is an event referred to by the Palestinians simply as the Nakba - the Catastrophe. It is the mother-of-all crimes in the Middle East and the causus belli of conflicts raging today.
But for almost 50 years the brutal truth behind the Nakba has been buried. Israel still claims Palestine was almost empty when settlers arrived, the few Arabs willingly left and resisters were justly overcome. Architects of Plan Dalet have been lionised and raised to the highest office: The list of presidents, prime ministers, ministers, generals and high officials with blood on their hands is legion. Even Hollywood got in on the act with Steve McQueen playing an heroic Ben-Gurion in a 1960s film.
Internationally acclaimed Israeli historian Ilan Pappe proves Plan Dalet was an illegal ethnic cleansing orchestrated from the top. And of particular interest to British readers is proof which emerges in the book of London's pivotal role.
It's well known that Britain had been a cruel colonial master in Palestine, nurtured the early Zionists, signed Palestine over to them under the Balfour Declaration and organised a massive migration of European Jews. But after the 1936 Palestinian rebellion it disarmed the Arabs, leaving them weakened against Zionist settler militias it helped arm and train. Then in the '40s British officer Orde Charles Wingate organised the Zionists military wing, convincing them to employ a steel fist against the Arabs. When this evolved into a blitzkrieg British forces were ordered to stand by. Sometimes they even gave Zionists medical and logistical help or duped the Palestinians into disarming on the false promise of guaranteeing their safety.
A typical incident was the sacking of Haifa in April 1948. When Zionist forces surrounded the city Palestinians turned to British Major General Hugh Stockwell, responsible for law and order, but he refused to help.
Zionist loudspeakers warning Palestinians to flee caused pandemonium and families dropped everything, running to the port while behind them Zionist troops looted their homes. Zionist commanders then ordered mortar bombs onto crowds trapped in the port, and snipers to pick off stragglers. Amid the bloody chaos a witness remembers how, "Men stepped on friends and women on their children. The boats were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers."
While British imperial policy backed the Zionist state there were dissenters. Labour's Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevan tried to sack Stockwell but was blocked by military chief Field-Marshall Montgomery. British Zionist groups, armed and supported from Europe and America, used letter bombs and assassinations, attacked the Foreign Office, British embassies and generals. Audacious plots to assassinate Bevan and blow up the House of Commons were uncovered, while special measures had to be taken to protect the royals. There was resentment among British troops in Palestine, numbering tens of thousands, who had lost more than 500 to Zionist attacks including the infamous King David Hotel bombing that killed 91.
Nevertheless Britain used its position as the leading colonial power in the Middle East to block Arab countries from military intervention against the Zionists. It persuaded the satraps in Egypt, Iraq and Syria to resist public pressure to save the Palestinians for months before finally sent a half-hearted force that was easily defeated by the new Israeli army. Most perfidious was King Abdullah of Jordan, also placed on the thrown by Britain, who signed a pact with the Zionists to divide Palestinian territory rather than throw his powerful Arab Legion into the fight.
But Pappe's most important focus is on the deadliest part of the Nakba - the culturicide of Arab history. Israel has literally buried the evidence of Arab towns, farms and mosques. Forests of pine and cypress have been planted over ancient Arab settlements, shopping centres have been built over grand mosques, cemeteries turned into zoos, a vast wall built to separate Palestinian cantons, and Israeli schoolchildren are taught a version of history in which evidence of Arab civilisation is erased.
The purpose, Pappe bravely asserts, is to uphold an Apartheid state that refuses to negotiate the Palestinians right of return while wielding a huge, nuclear powered military. Israel, he warns, has become the "white fortress" in the Middle East posing the inevitable danger of finally unleashing an Arab backlash like a "tempest that threatens to ruin us all".