Ilan Pappé

My mother is the only member of my maternal family, besides myself, who isn't a zionist. I've been anti-zionist since the first time I read anything about what's happening in Palestine, in the late '90s or early 2000s. It struck me as one of the most obvious cases settler colonialism imaginable, before I even knew what those words meant. In 2024 it feels like you have to be intentionally blind not to see it, but still, I figured I'd read a book so I could learn more about the history of the show more area.

This book was published in 2017, six years before the most blatant genocide since the holocaust. Zionists have weird memories these days: they remember biblical times (which may or may not have even happened), the holocaust, and October 7th; but seemingly nothing in between. The reality is a lot different though, and Pappe does a good job of explaining history while dismantling a few commonly believed myths. He admits in the introduction that it isn't a balanced book, but instead it's “yet another attempt to redress the balance of power on behalf of the colonized, occupied, and oppressed Palestinians,” and I appreciate that.

I'd love to write a long review, complete with a breakdown of each of the chapters, but who has time for that? I'll tell you my favorite myth-busting chapters though: “Palestine was an empty land,” “Zionism is Judaism,” and “the Oslo mythologies.” Of all the books I've read about that area of the world, this one has perhaps given me the most things to hold on to.

I would recommend this book for everyone, but I'm afraid the zionists have completely lost their minds. So many liberal zionists have been ruthless to Trump supporters over the past eight years for their inability to comprehend facts that go against their belief system, for their racism and xenophobia, and for their hate-backed anger. Now they are becoming the same people. If facts in their faces every day don't do anything to get them to be against genocide, then reading a book won't either. show less

I thought when I picked up this book it would take about a week to read. It took most of my summer because I had to put it down for days at a time to come to grips with the subject matter. Beyond the killings, beatings, rapes and cultural destruction of the Palestinian people hard to stomach, but the 'whitewashing' of the facts for so many years is yet another dishonor to the innocent people who suffered during the Nakba. Ilan Pappe has done a masterful job of research with details and show more accounts that have to be told for peace to ever transpire in the Middle East. As we witness this genocide now in 2023-24 in Gaza, nearly all the history that has led up to this point can be traced back to the ethic cleansing and crimes against humanity in Palestine from late 1947 to the early 1950s. show less

The book came recommended to me by a friend. It is short but also shocking. We have become very much aware in recent days of the disproportionate violence inflicted by Israel on its Palestinian neighbours ans subjects within Israel and the west bank. The sight of the total destruction of Gaza in response to the attack by Hamas in November 2023 with something like 70,000 people killed is truly shocking and we see the same sort of destruction now in Southern Lebanon and Beirut. One has to ask show more Why? And Pappe gives the answers in the history of the establishment of Israel and its approach as a settler colonial movement which is intent on getting rid of the previous inhabitants. Much of this was familiar to me and I recall talking to one of my staff in Abu Dhabi who was Palestinian, asking him why he was in Abu Dhabi. He explaned that his family had been living in Palestine "forever"......they had a house and farm but in 1948 Jewish settlers had come through the neighbourhood banging on doors and telling the inhabitants they had 24 hours to get out. And within 24 hours, bulldozers came and destroyed their home and farm: gone in minutes. They fled with what they could carry to a refugee camp. It might have been Gaza...I don't know. But this story was repeated across the whole of what is now Israel and the West Bank. And more recently in the Golan heights and Gaza.
Pappe doesn't really make the point but all this agressive and illegal (under international Law) activity by Israel, has been supported and underwritten by the USA. The reasons are complex but it's about time that the USA stopped supplying bombs and armaments to Israel that they are using to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Most of the problems in the Middle East seem to have their source in the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. This is a hard hitting book by Pappe...though he makes the point that right from the beginning, Israel has never concerned itself with legalities or human rights. They have been more interested in establishing presence and control on the ground, secure in the knowledge that nobody is going to step in and oppose them. I've extracted some of the text below, to help me recall the main points and lines of argument.
Well written and a rapid, if disturbing read. Five stars from me.
It is estimated that by the end of the nineteenth century, around half a million people lived there, within three districts of the Ottoman Empire: Nablus, Acre and Jerusalem. The three districts stretched more or less over the area that today is Israel and the occupied territories. About 70% of the people were Muslims, while there were sizeable Christian and Jewish minorities.......Palestine has never been separate from the Arab world; it is an integral part of it. It has also clearly never been ‘a land without a people’ as Zionists took to saying–ripe for the taking.
At the same time as Palestine stood on the cusp of a new era, Zionism appeared in Palestine......Zionism came as a foreign import. In the sixteenth century, it got its start as an evangelical Christian project in Europe. A significant number of Protestant Christians believed that the return of Jewish people to ‘Zion’ would fulfil God’s promises to the Jews in the Old Testament. This would be a harbinger of the Second Coming of Christ, marking the beginning of the end of the world–a process many evangelicals wanted to speed up.
it was also politically convenient, especially for those who were part of the governing elites. Jews, in their eyes, could be mobilised on religious grounds, to take the ‘Holy Land’, as they described Palestine, from the hands of the ‘Muslims’, i.e. the Ottoman Empire,
we should be careful to differentiate Christian Zionism from Jewish Zionism.
After the death of over six million Jews, and years where concentration camp survivors languished in ‘displaced persons’ camps, with no European country willing to take them in, safety in formerly Nazi-occupied Europe no longer seemed possible. Only then did Zionism as a movement win genuine widespread support across the Jewish world.
Unlike Orthodox Jews, the secular Zionists, like evangelical Christians, began to interpret the Old Testament as a historical document that showed that Palestine belonged to the Jewish people. Orthodox Jews regarded the Old Testament as a religious and moral tract compelling them to obey God’s laws for humanity.
After a particularly vicious wave of pogroms in 1881 across the south-west of the Russian Empire, a group of young Jews made plans to settle in Palestine, hoping their zeal and purpose would inspire others to follow their example. They arrived in Palestine in 1882. They were able to buy land in Palestine with money provided by Jewish philanthropists and businessmen such as the Rothschilds.
The land they bought was mostly owned by absentee landlords
By the end of Ottoman rule in 1918, Jewish settlers were about 5 to 6% of the population. They were still a minority, but an organised one.
Theodor Herzl, an Austrian Jew, a journalist and a playwright, who has gone down in history as one of the founding fathers and driving forces of the modern Zionist project.
the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, which adopted a programme of establishing ‘a home in Palestine for the Jewish people’. The programme made no mention of what would happen to the Palestinians
In 1905, the Zionist Congress definitively rejected the Uganda scheme.
Other leading Zionist ideologues, such as David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Ussishkin, had little concern for governmental approval,
In their diaries, it becomes apparent that even in the first phase of Zionist colonisation of Palestine (1882–1918), they were already imagining a Palestine without the Palestinians,
For them, the priority was establishing facts on the ground. Everything else would follow from that.
Weizmann built a pro-Zionist lobby in Britain, made up of pious Christians who believed in the ‘return of the Jews’ to Palestine as fulfilment of God’s will, antisemites who wanted Jews out of Britain, and Anglo-Jewish aristocrats, who would have been loath to immigrate to Palestine themselves, but saw it as a suitable destination for working-class East European Jews, whom they thought of as being communist troublemakers.
It took two years–between 1915 and 1917–for the Zionist lobby to persuade the British government that a Jewish Palestine would be a strategic asset for the Empire.
To survive the new epoch, they thought, Jewishness had to be a nationality, not a religion.
On 2 November 1917, the British government made the Balfour Declaration, promising to make Palestine a ‘national home for the Jewish people’, while protecting the civil and religious rights of ‘existing non-Jewish communities’ in Palestine,
By the end of 1918, Britain had completed its occupation of historical Palestine, what we now know as Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In 1922, the League of Nations granted Palestine official status as a British mandate,
At the start of the British Mandate, Jews constituted roughly 11% of the population.
2 The Quiet Years, 1918–26
By 1919, these organisations had grouped together under the banner of the Palestine Arab Congress.
since November 2022, the Israeli government has included two political parties that are committed to building the Third Temple on the Holy Mount.
The Mandatory authorities hence allowed the Jewish settlers to build their own educational system, their own industries and even military capacities, and all other services that one would think were the purview of the state.
While the Jewish community was left to its own devices to effectively form its own proto-state, the Palestinian majority were treated as colonial subjects. The British administration imposed their own educational system upon the mainly rural Muslim population, and provided patchy state healthcare.
3 Why Did the Zionist Movement Begin Ethnic Cleansing?
By 1926, the Zionist movement upturned many decades of convention in land ownership since the Ottoman reforms of the mid-nineteenth century.
there was never any question that the villagers were there to stay. That is, until the British administration changed the rules.
in practice it meant that the Zionist movement could buy as much as it could afford. It also reclassified Palestinian villagers, many of whom had been cultivating the same land for generations, as tenant farmers, and hence their presence became contingent on the landowner’s will.
Driven by the ideal of Jews working on the land for themselves, Zionists sought, and were granted, eviction orders by the British authorities. And so the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began. It continues to this day.
In classical colonialism, the colonies are ruled from the metropoles
The aim is to turn the native population into loyal colonial subjects;
In settler colonialism, the coloniser aims to wholly replace native society with the society of the coloniser.
The trouble is that the lands are never empty.
The process is not simply one of brute force, however. Settlers erase the history of native societies–dating it from when they themselves first arrived.
Before these acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and during them, settlers build an ideological justification; they create a consensus.
How did Zionists justify their attitude to the native population? Like other settler colonialists, they depended on dehumanising the native population, who were portrayed as ‘savages’ or ‘primitive’. A particularly potent trope in Palestine was that of ‘nomads’, people without any attachment to the land. This was in spite of many villages having existed for thousands of years.
Settler colonialists saw themselves as modernising the land, not the people. The people were inconveniences to be brushed aside
Even today, many Israelis repeat the myth that Palestine was essentially one vast desert until Zionists arrived and ‘made the desert bloom’.
The massive land purchases in the 1920s, and the ethnic cleansing operations that came with them, helped bring an end to the quiet years. As the decade drew to a close, a far more fraught relationship between Jewish settlers and Palestinians would emerge, with violent clashes becoming more and more frequent in the 1930s.
The signs of a disaster in the making were already evident as newly landless Palestinians, evicted from the farms they had made fruitful, were forced to move to the towns.
4 The Events of 1929
The Jews of Hebron were part of the small Jewish minority that existed in Palestine many centuries before the arrival of Zionism.
As news from Jerusalem took hold, Muslims from villages just outside Hebron descended upon the town. Sixty-seven Jews were massacred,
Now the Hebron massacre, a horrific atrocity, is weaponised by the official Israeli narrative
Although the immediate trigger for the events of 1929 was a religious one, the disturbances spread quickly and devastatingly as Palestinians witnessed the social order breaking down before their eyes.
in the north of Palestine, a new form of Palestinian resistance took shape against Zionism and its British accomplices: guerrilla warfare.
Al-Qassam, with his background in anticolonial struggle, was able to enthuse young Muslims, living in the shantytowns around Haifa, to start their own paramilitary groups.
In the hills near Jenin, he and eleven others fought off a much larger British force for several hours in November 1935,
His death inspired increasing numbers of young Palestinians to take up arms and to prepare to fight a war against Britain to force it to abandon its Zionist policies.
5 The Great Arab Revolt, 1936–9
After 1929, the British recognised that what they were trying to address was a conflict between two peoples
The Shaw Commission concluded that the violence was the result of the Zionist project of dispossessing the Palestinian farmers, and Palestinians’ fundamental rejection of Zionism.
Between 1930 and 1936, Palestinians attempted to alter British policy through petitions, demonstrations and conferences in London–all in vain.
In 1936,
An umbrella grouping of all Palestinian political organisations, the Arab Higher Committee, called for a six-month national strike in April 1936, demanding an end to Jewish immigration and land purchases and the establishment of a Palestinian national government.
Britain used brute force to suppress the revolt,
it deployed models of collective punishment
in June 1936, the British army blew up over two hundred buildings in Jaffa’s old city, making over six thousand Palestinians homeless. Thousands of Palestinians were killed, many arrested and wounded.
The British government published a White Paper in May 1939
It recommended that Palestine become an independent state in ten years, to be governed jointly by Palestinians and Jews.
Jewish immigration and land purchases would be limited for at least the next five years. Predictably, this made no one happy.
At the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942, the Zionist leadership declared its intention to turn all of historical Palestine into a Jewish state. The New York location is significant.
Palestinians had no equivalent to the Zionist lobby in Britain or the US in 1942.
With Haj Amin in exile, and the remainder of the Palestinian leadership mainly criminalised, the Zionist movement was free to agitate for a de-Arabised Palestine with Anglo-American blessing.
6 On the Road to the Nakba, 1945–7
By the beginning of 1947, Britain had had enough of Palestine. It was at last starting to dawn on the British that they could not obtain Palestinian consent for the promise they made to Jewish people in the Balfour Declaration,
The British postwar economy creaked under the weight of a bitter winter and the huge reconstruction effort needed to provide homes after the Blitz.
Moreover, the Labour government under Clement Attlee had determined that the British Empire was now an expensive liability, and much of it just had to go.
Militant Zionist groups perpetrated terrorist attacks to push the British along. In July 1946, the Zionist underground organisation Irgun had
blown up the British Mandate’s central offices at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one people. Zionist insurgents frequently targeted British soldiers for kidnapping and murder.
In
May 1947, the UN appointed two delegates each from eleven ‘neutral’ member states to find a solution to what it termed the ‘Palestine Question’.
The Arab world supported Palestine’s rejection of UNSCOP, vocalising its solidarity through the position of the Arab League, a new organisation founded in 1945.
In the Arabian Peninsula the British had also supported the arch-rivals of the Hashemites, the House of Saud. So Britain did not intervene when the Saudis waged a war against the Hashemites, occupying Hejaz in 1924
and making it an integral part of Saudi Arabia.
the British reshuffled the parts of the Arab world that were under their control at a conference in Cairo in May 1921.
The conference was led by the then British secretary of state for the colonies, Winston Churchill. He proposed that Abdullah would be given Transjordan as his new kingdom. Transjordan became Jordan and was now its own state, separate from Mandatory Palestine.
Let’s return to 1947.
It seems that both sides agreed that Transjordan could expand into parts of Mandatory Palestine in return for its tacit consent for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This is why Abdullah was the only Arab leader willing to meet with UNSCOP.
The Zionist leaders believed that actions speak louder than words.
So they planned to conquer all key strategic posts as soon as British troops vacated them: radio, postal services, telecommunications, railways, air space, public transport, banking and, of course, land.
Over two years, they intensified the build-up of military forces, obtaining arms from abroad and devising a system of conscription for all young Jewish men and women in Palestine.
On 29 November, the UN General Assembly voted for Resolution 181, now infamous in international law. It declared itself in favour of the partition of Palestine.
7 The Partition Resolution and Its Aftermath
Ultimately thirty-three states voted in favour of partition, with thirteen votes against and ten abstentions.
The Zionist lobby in the US urged the US government to pressure recalcitrant states into voting for partition–a key milestone, as it entailed international recognition of a Jewish state.
The US government, which was already pro-Zionist by default by this point, was only too happy to comply, and promised hesitant states funding for developing their countries, or threatening to withdraw such funding.
Stalin saw Zionism as a way of weakening Britain’s influence in the region, and facilitated mass emigration of Jews from the USSR and Poland into the Displaced Persons Camps–the ultimate destination being Palestine.
The fundamental point was that the highest international body had recommended creating a Jewish state. Meanwhile Palestinians heard the message loud and clear: self-determination
didn’t apply to them. Palestinians took to the streets to protest
The Zionist paramilitary organisation Irgun, as well as targeting the British, attacked Arab villages to induce fear and encourage Palestinian Arabs to leave.
The array of forces on the Palestinian side was no match for the three Zionist paramilitary groups: the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. These groups were better equipped, had served in the British army, and, crucially, had at least ten times as many members.
8 The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
When Palestinians attacked Jewish settlements, Zionists responded by collective punishment. They used Palestinian violence as an excuse to begin to clear Palestinian Arab areas of what would be the Jewish state; in other words, ethnic cleansing. In February 1948, the most brazen example of this kind of operation took place: in three villages around the ancient Roman city of Caesarea. These three villages were subject to such violent and forcible cleansing that hardly any of the buildings were left standing.
Arab villagers were forced to leave en masse if they wanted to live.
The intensification of Zionist activity drew the attention of the US State Department, a long-time sceptic of Zionist colonisation. The UN partition plan did not seem plausible as a path towards peace anymore; it had proved to be a recipe for more violence.
Zionist leadership in Palestine was moving forward with strengthening their position on the ground. They made the assessment that if they went ahead and built a Jewish state, any international objections would become immaterial.
On 10 March 1948, David Ben-Gurion and a small group of military generals in the Haganah’s intelligence unit produced what would go down in history as Plan Dalet, or Plan
Its aim was simple: to remove as many Palestinians as possible from Palestine, so a Jewish majority state could be forged. Here’s the method: each village and neighbourhood was to be surrounded from three sides, leaving the fourth side free for residents to leave as they were expelled or fled in terror.
Then the village was to be reduced to rubble, and explosives planted
in the rubble, so no one could return.
In the orders sent to troops, we find more harrowing details about the methods deployed. There was a reference to men, sometimes defined as being as young as ten years old, but usually between eighteen and forty-eight, who should be either killed or arrested.
In the months of March, April and early May, the Zionist forces targeted the urban centres of Palestine. At the end of the day, they were all completely destroyed, in what we can only describe now as urbicide.
In many cases a massacre in a village preceded the military operation in the city; Zionist forces hoped it would accelerate flight and weaken resistance.
The most notorious instance of such a tactic was in the cleansing of West Jerusalem and its thirty-nine neighbouring villages in April 1948. On 9 April 1948, right-wing paramilitary groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, stormed into the village of Deir Yassin and killed residents house by house, not even sparing women and children. Over one hundred villagers perished.......By the end of 1948, half of Palestine’s Arab population had been expelled, more than five hundred villages were destroyed and most of its towns and cities had been demolished.
As early as May 1948, the UN appointed a mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat.....On 17 September 1948, he was assassinated by the Stern Gang; it was passed off as an act of terror by militants. But some historians suspect the official Zionist leadership was complicit, although the extent of this has never been established.
In 1950, one more body was founded: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). This agency was meant to provide for nearly one million Palestinian refugees while they waited to return home........Given the UN commitment to the right of return for refugees, refugees did not accept citizenship elsewhere, nor did they build new homes in their host countries. They did not want to imply that they were reconciled to their dispossession. In any case, many Arab countries like Lebanon did not offer the option of claiming citizenship. Jordan did, but only half of the refugee community there took it up.
In the new state of Israel, there were also large numbers of refugees, usually near the destroyed villages upon which Jewish settlements were built. Israel refuses to deal with them as refugees, instead referring to them as internally displaced persons. Within Israeli borders they now number over 300,000.
This is a significant point. The Nakba was not simply a land grab on the part of Zionist forces, but an attempt to make it impossible to reconstruct a Palestinian nation.
9 After the Nakba: Israel and Palestine, 1948–67
Israel understood the silence and inaction during the Nakba as carte blanche to continue to use ethnic cleansing as a means of establishing and fortifying the Israeli state and its national security.......One example, A curfew was imposed at 4.30 p.m. on Monday 29 October 1956. According to its terms, anyone–man, woman or child–outside after 5 p.m. would be shot. Of course, many villagers were at work in the fields in the afternoon, and had no way of knowing about the curfew. As they returned home after a day’s work, the Israeli border police shot them, killing forty-nine people. The massacre is still an open wound in the history and memory of Israel’s Palestinian minority.
10 On the Road to the Six-Day War, 1967
Israel exploited this brinkmanship to implement a vision many of its leaders wanted to push forward: Greater Israel. Greater Israel was equivalent to all of historical Palestine, namely Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of today.......Israel launched its co-ordinated attack on 5 June 1967, beginning with the destruction of the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Within six days the Israeli army created a mini-empire, occupying the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights..... we should note that when Israel took the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War, it ethnically cleansed nearly one hundred villages in the area, expelling their inhabitants to Syria.......Israel hence continued to colonise these areas using the same methods it had honed in 1948.
As becomes clear from Israel's actions from 1948 to 1967, the Zionist movement is an ongoing settler-colonial project, seeking as much land as possible, with as few native inhabitants as possible....... In practice, we have learned that you can only deprive millions of people of citizenship, i.e. the right to have a say in the decisions that shape their lives, by systemic oppression.
Allon was also responsible for the first attempt to expel the Palestinians from the south Hebron mountains, an area called Masafer Yatta, for the sake of establishing Jewish territorial integrity from the Negev to the River Jordan. The Palestinians there resisted, and they still resist ethnic cleansing in this region today.........After 7th October, 2023, Jewish settlers in that area, with the full collaboration of the Israeli army, succeeded in expelling thousands of Palestinians from their villages there.
A new messianic movement of Jews, who would become Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) in 1974, would bring thousands of Jews into the West Bank.... Gush Emunim settled precisely in the places the Allon plan would have ceded to Jordan..... All these settlements were and are illegal according to the conventions of international law, most importantly the Geneva Convention.
The US refused to help Israel to build nuclear capacity; Israel had to turn to France for this favour.
However, in 1963, AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), a formidable pro-Israel lobby group, was incorporated. It built an extensive political machine that made sure the huge majority of American politicians would lend Israel unconditional support. So even if the administration was uncomfortable with Israel's policies, this would never be translated into any meaningful action.
The new minister of defence, Ariel Sharon, replaced military rule with a civil administration, imposed on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1981. The civil administration was run by Israel as a quasi-government of the occupied territories;.......As a Palestinian in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, you could not move about, have a job, go to university or attend a hospital without obtaining the necessary permits from the civil administration.........These permits would be examined at checkpoints. Soldiers bullied, abused and persecuted Palestinians as a matter of course.
Whether it was Likud or Labour in power, the Israeli government had no inclination whatsoever to give up the territory won in the 1948 and 1967 wars. Israel had effectively taken over all of historical Palestine, and removed millions of Palestinians from their homes. For successive Israeli administrations, this was the prime achievement of the Jewish state.
Fafo's past record and philosophy (Swedish negotiators) suited the Israelis very well...... The mediator's role is to get the best offer from the stronger party and then pressure the weaker side to accept it..... In essence, this was the framework guiding the Oslo I Accord signed on 13 September 1993...... The duplicity of the PLO, going behind the backs of most of the resistance, hindered the development of a clear, united Palestinian strategy.
.... For Israel, Hamas was still a useful counterbalance against the secular and left-wing forces in the resistance movement. Israel's history of covert support stands in stark contrast to its histrionic declarations today......Palestinian Islamic Jihad was also born out of the Muslim Brotherhood movement but was founded earlier - in 1981..... but despite the West's condemnations, they remain part of the anti-colonialist Palestinian liberation movement.
.... At the end of the day, Oslo II produced a reality in the occupied territories that was far worse than what came before it.
The unresolved questions about the settlements led to unprecedented violence by Jewish settlers....... Moreover, right-wingers in Israel fervently opposed the Oslo Accords and wanted no concessions made at all to Palestinians.
.... Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Now the entirety of Israeli politics moved rapidly to the right......And so Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud, won his first election as Israel's prime minister. ....... in practice his government implemented ever more oppressive measures against the Palestinians. Hundreds of checkpoints were built and, as we've seen, these checkpoints were the site of routine degradation for Palestinians....... In 1996, Netanyahu's administration built a barbed wire fence around the Gaza Strip. It now resembled a prison more than anything else........ Any resistance was met with brutal collective punishment.
..... In the old city of Hebron, a messianic group settled. With the help of zealots from Kiryat Arba, they expanded their presence into the very heart of Hebron. They moved into new neighbourhoods through an open policy of naked aggression and violence while the army turned a blind eye. It led to the almost total de-Arabisation of the old city.
After seven years of failing to translate the Oslo Accords into actual peace, Clinton and Barak tried to do it in two weeks. They wanted to win some kudos at home.
Only a few weeks after Arafat returned to Palestine, the leader of the Israeli opposition, Ariel Sharon, paid a provocative visit to Haram al-Sharif, the holy place for Muslims, knowing full well it would incite unrest...... Unlike the First Intifada, this was a far more militarised uprising, spilling over into Israel itself..... Israel responded with Operation Defensive Shield, in which it effectively reoccupied the West Bank and parts of the Gaza Strip..... Israel deployed its air force to bomb cities, massacred people in the Jenin refugee camps and imposed a siege on Arafat..... They sustained this campaign of repression for years.
.....This raft of legislation would culminate in the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law in 2018, which downgraded Arabic from a language of the state to one merely protected with 'special status', claimed Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and promoted the expansion of settlements........ Other laws enshrined the right of Jewish towns and resident areas not to permit the entry of Palestinian citizens of Israel. By the end of the twentieth century, 97% of the land was owned directly or indirectly by Jewish institutions such as the Jewish National Fund (which owns 13% of the land by itself)..... Palestinians, who constitute more than 20% of the population of the state of Israel, are hence generally barred from buying land..... In the Naqab, a desert area in the south of Israel, the Bedouins, historically a nomadic population, faced similarly aggressive Judaisation...... Throughout the twentieth century, they were forced into towns, and the Israeli government refused to recognise any of their claims to the land.
In 2000, Palestinians made up approximately half of the population between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Over the decades they have been expelled, ghettoised and purposefully deprived of basic rights.
We need to understand the present evolution of Hamas in this context: when they participated in democratic elections and clearly won, supposedly democratic states simply rejected the outcome. This only prompted further radicalisation. In response, Israel placed the entirety of the Gaza Strip under siege - depriving its inhabitants of many essentials, and frequently limiting their access to water and electricity.
A new conflict erupted on the Israel-Lebanon border. The Shia militant group Hezbollah abducted three Israeli soldiers it claimed were in Lebanese territory. Israel responded by a second invasion of Lebanon - a new war had started. Israel virtually obliterated south Beirut, bombing thousands of buildings. Hezbollah managed to breach Israel's defences and cause damage with rocket attacks in the north of Israel.
.... One of the first moves of this new government was an attempt to politicise what was left of the relatively independent Israeli judicial system...... But for the secular Jews of Israel, it was the last line of defence against the theocratisation of the state..... when the new government announced the initiation of a legal reform to make the judicial system beholden to the government, secular Israelis took to the streets in their hundreds of thousands to demonstrate against it..... Secular Israel was not protesting against apartheid Israel, but theocratic Israel...... The leaders of the protest movement belonged to the economic elites of Israel and served as reserves in the special forces and the air force.
They threatened to withdraw their capital from Israel and refuse to serve in the army, and some of them started making good on their threats...... There is little common ground between these two camps, which we might call the State of Israel and the State of Judea. The State of Judea is the settler state that grew up in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It is now an important political force inside Israel, aiming to turn Israel into a more ra-cist, fascist and theocratic state.
Against them is the State of Israel. This was the old Israel, which prided itself on being the 'only democracy in the Middle East', a secular and pluralist society...... What is clear is that there is no real Left in Israel or even a genuine peace camp anymore.
UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, speaking about 7 October 2023, had made only the mildest reproach of Israel's policies, simply pointing to the reality of a people who have lived for fifty-six years under occupation........ Israel's reaction to such a senior international figure stating a blatant matter of fact suggests that it is escalating its efforts to censor any questioning of the state and its policies, frequently weaponising the allegation of antisemitism to do so.
The 7 October attack is used by Israel as a pretext to implement genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. It is also a pretext for the United States to try and reassert its presence in the Middle East..... For there to be any hope of peace and justice in Israel-Pales-
tine, we need to remember the key historical context.
We should start at 1948. Most of the people living in Gaza are refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing: first, second and now third generation of refugees. Israel created the Gaza Strip as a holding pen so it could ethnically cleanse other areas of historical Palestine. There was no Gaza Strip before 1948. Gaza was a cosmopolitan town on the Via Maris between Egypt and Turkey.
This strip of land, only 2% of historical Palestine, became the largest refugee camp in the world.
Since 1967, the inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank have been under occupation........ The occupation, whether carried out in the name of the military or a civil administration, made detention without trial, killings, home demolition, expropriation of land and abuse by the army into features of everyday life for Palestinians....... And most recently of all, the Gaza Strip has been subject to an unforgiving siege for seventeen years. Within these seventeen years, Israeli forces have directly attacked Gaza four times, from the land, the sea and the air.
........ The Hamas fighters who stormed into Israel on 7 October were largely young people who learned the language of violence from the bombs that Israel dropped on them.
Let me summarise:
First, we have refuted the myth that Palestine was an empty land..... No less important is the refutation of the idea that the people who lived two thousand years ago in Roman Palestine were the ancestors of the Zionist settlers who arrived for the first time in1882.
The second conclusion is that a Jewish state was built on historical Palestine because it served British imperial interests
The third conclusion is that from the moment the Zionist movement resolved to focus on Palestine as the site of a new Jewish nation, it became a settler-colonial movement...... The native people in those places were viewed by the settler-colonial movements as an obstacle to be removed
The fourth conclusion is that although many in the West have been willing to extend a hand to other anti-colonial struggle..... this was never extended to the Palestinians. It is time to recognise the Palestinian national movement as an anti-colonialist movement.
The fifth conclusion is that the so-called peace efforts were dominated by the USA from 1967, and failed because the US, and its allies in Europe, were dishonest brokers.
The sixth conclusion is that the two-state solution, i.e. the main concept informing the so-called peace process, has dismally failed. It has failed because it is not practicable anymore given the presence of 700,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
The seventh conclusion is that we need to change how we talk about Israel and Palestine. There is no point in talking about peace, as if both sides are equally at fault, when the process we're really talking about is decolonisation. Historical Palestine has been subject to settler colonialism for over a century.
I do not pretend to have a road map as to how these noble aims can be achieved.
....Any solution in the future will have to take into account that in the last hundred years the Jewish community has grown into a substantial population composed of eight million people. It is a community that has built up a modern state and one of the strongest armies in the world to preserve itself as a Jewish state. And yet it cannot survive, or thinks it can't, without oppressing Palestinians.
It becomes clear that Israel as a Jewish project is not working.
There seems to be very little common ground shared by secular and religious Jews in Israel......Israeli leaders in our time do not offer any vision for peace and normalcy for Israelis in an Arab world. Israel still sees itself as a Western outpost in a hostile Arab world. show less

a comprehensive and painstaking examination of the history of israel, which was predicated on the eradication of the palestinian peoples and nation. making use of first-hand accounts, archival israeli documents (most of which have been heavily censored), and juxtaposing them with past and existing propaganda, pappe does his part to highlight the cruel and selfish foundation upon which israel exists. major points of blame lie on balfour of britain for claiming ownership on behalf of britain show more and later bestowing palestinian land to an abstract jewish population; the jordanian agreement which prioritized the king's claim to land over indigenous people's right to their land (thus betraying the ummah); the apathy the british troops stationed in palestine had regarding the ongoing nakba for as long as they were stationed there and their lack of retroactive protest upon pulling out of the region; the lack of action on behalf of the surrounding so-called muslim arab nations, which arguably were too weak at the time to intervene but certainly grew enough manpower and influence to step in (to this day, they remain immobile); the american and ussr armament of the israeli military forces, and the continued political support america shields israel with to this day. while there are first-hand palestianian accounts in this book, it mostly rigorously covers each and every systemic atrocity israeli military forces enacted in their seizure of palestinian lands. with detailed accounts of specific propaganda employed, this book dispels the myths israel still uses to justify their supposed ancient connection to the land at the expense of the palestinians who had been peacefully co-existing with other religious and ethnic groups in the region for centuries. while it doesn't comprehensively speak for the palestinian perspective, this book is a robust rebuttal against the israeli narrative used to continue justify ethnic cleansing. show less