The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

“Incremental” means that there is no dramatic, massive killing of people of a certain race or nation. You have described Israeli actions in Gaza as “incremental genocide.” What is the meaning of this term?

This time, the means were apartheid, military occupation and cutting the land into enclaves and Bantustans. The space was not enough and the opportunity to enlarge it came in 1967, but then the demographic problem emerged again. The means included the imposition of military rule over the Palestinians in Israel and refusing to allow the refugees to return. The vision of a purely de-Arabized Palestine was still there, though the means differed. There was still 20 percent of the land that Israel did not have and there was a Palestinian minority within Israel. However, the ethnic cleansing of 1948 was not a complete project. This is the background for the Israeli ethnic cleansing operation in 1948 an operation that ended with expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians and a Jewish takeover of 80 percent of the land. The desire of the Zionist movement to create both a Jewish state and a democratic one means that there is always a wish to take over as much of Palestine as possible and leave in as few Palestinians as possible. In the period after the second World War, elimination is more complex and maybe less inhuman, but still drastic. Can you elaborate?Īs any settler colonial movement, the Zionist movement is motivated by the logic of elimination of the native.

In your book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, you suggest that the objectives of Israel have remained the same since 1948. In two cases, the solution was different: apartheid in South Africa and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. In most cases, their solution was the genocide of indigenous people. The only problem was that the lands they coveted were already inhabited by other people.

Namely, they had no wish or plan to come back to Europe. These people were not only seeking a new home, but also a new homeland. The context is the phenomenon of settler colonialism: the movement of Europeans, because they felt unsafe or endangered, into non-European areas in the Americas, Africa, Australia and Palestine. What is the meaning of this concept and what are some examples of its use in other places? In what sense is applied differently in Palestine than in other countries? You’ve talked and written about the concept of homeland as justification for destroying the native population. Of Israeli origin, he is a world-renowned scholar on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and has written numerous books on the subject, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge. Ilan Pappé is a historian, socialist activist, professor at the University of Exeter, and supporter of the Campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé