This book doesn't need a review. It's a piece of living history, it should be school material instead of the lies and rubbish TV churns out on a daily basis. So well documented, so much empathy. So much respect for this man having the courage to write the truth. ( )

Pappe starts with a definition of "ethnic cleansing:"

... At the most general level ethnic cleansing can be understood as the
... force expulsion of an "undesirable" population from a given territory
... as a result of religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic,
... or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.

So by this definition, Stalin and the Soviets ethnically cleansed Germans from the territory around Leningrad some 70 years ago.

What's that? You think my example is absurd? There was a war going on. Everybody knows that.

Well, surely the Muslims in Serbia were being "ethnically cleansed" by that cad Milosevic. Pappe cites this example.

Well, there was a war going on there too. The NYT reported on 1Nov1987: As Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981 - an 'ethnically pure' Albanian region, a 'Republic of Kosovo' in all but name.

And there was a war going on in Palestine in 1948 when nearly all of Pappe's "ethnic cleansing" occurred there. Go to any decent library and look in the NYT Index for 1948 under "Palestine." (Did author Pappe "forget" to do this?)

So Pappe is apparently shocked, shocked, that the Jews might have had, and executed, plans to eliminate Arabs that they viewed as a military threat to them.

But after the war was over, and the Jews prevailed, no Arabs were forced from property they owned, until the Arabs resumed hostilities. The proof of this is that they are still there in Israel. One sixth of Israel's population is Arab. Meanwhile most of the Arab countries are Judenrein. Gaza is Judenrein. One state in Pappe et al's dreamy "Two-state solution" will be Judenrein. This is what real ethnic cleansing is about. Pappe completely misses the mark.

There is a bloc of humanity that will never read this book based on the title alone, and there is another bloc, that if they did read it, would immediately find great fault with it, assuming they didn't just write it all off as pure fictional propaganda. I read a lot of non-fiction and histories in particular, and this did not come across to me at any level as inflated hype, but rather as extremely well-researched journalism based on documents from "both sides" of the issues discussed, including the personal diaries of the main architect of what occurred. In short, I find it much easier to believe the bulk of what it reports than to discount it. Is the author biased at some level about his subject? Perhaps, but a ton of facts often lead to bias toward what those facts reveal. The premise of this book is really quite simple. The nation of Israel did not come to being around 1948, because a bunch of Palestinians in the territory decided to just nicely move out of the area. The author reports how the Jews in the area systemically "cleansed" hundreds of villages and hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish residents often in deadly and almost always ruthless fashion. In fact, I had to knock a point off my rating because the author insisted on somewhat tediously reporting nearly each and every "cleansing" drip by drip to avoid any criticisms of cherry-picking a couple "mistakes" in an attempt to obscure how peacefully the Israelis claim this massive vacating of Arabs in what is now Israel and the occupied territories. Perhaps more importantly, the book provides a solid basis for understanding why the Israeli-Palestinian issue may never become peaceful because of Israel's actions rather than that of any Arabs. Is there more that could have been reported in the book. Yes, how did the Israelis, not yet even a nation, obtain and get trained in advanced military weaponry that allowed them to so easily achieve this cleansing, including the blocking of any significant outside Arab intervention. Why were the united "nations" so specific about being "fair" to the Palestinians with UN resolutions and the like, but did so very little to make sure their wishes were followed? Or perhaps, an entirely different book: why is the Jewish holocaust regarded as so much more terrible than the genocide in Rwanda or the massive deaths from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or any other despicable crime against humanity...such as those mentioned in this book? Finally, it should be noted that the purpose of this book was not to be balanced in what it reported but to use what it reported to balance what others have reported. ( )

A powerful book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine challenges the narrative of Israel as a democratic refuge of a persecuted people and suggests, instead, the birth of the nation was the death of a homeland for Palestinians eternally exiled. I was most moved reading his accounts of Arab villages destroyed in the Nakba, the "catastrophe" Palestinians refer to as the 1948 birth of Israel. Read this book and you will see the world through a different prism.

Och als de stichter van Israël al zo'n misdadiger is wat dan te denken van zijn inwoners ?
Ik onthou veel van dit boek, doch wat zeker niet mag vergeten worden is dat Isräel de Palestijnen hun meest basale rechten negeren zoals het recht op vrijheid van beweging, vrijheid van meningsuiting en het recht op gelijkheid voor de wet.
Daarnaast is het in Palestina zo dat de immigrantenbevolking beslist over de toekomst van de autochtone bevolking en niet andersom.
Ik herinner me de woorden van George Habasj die tegen zijn ondervrager het volgende zegt :
"Ik was arts, kinderarts en een orthodoxe christen. Ik vond dat ik het mooiste werk van de wereld had. Maar toen kwam 1948 en zaten zij (Israëlieten) in Lydda (een stad volgens de VN toegewezen aan de Palestijnen)
en ... ik (George Habasj) weet niet hoe ik het moet uitleggen ... wat dit voor ons betekent ... geen thuis meer te hebben, geen natie meer, niemand meer voor wie je iets betekent ...Ze dwongen ons te vluchten. Dit is een visioen dat mij nog steeds achtervolgt en dat ik nooit zal vergeten ... Nooit ! Drieduizend wezens die te voet wegtrokken, huilend ... luid schreeuwend van ontzetting..De vrouwen met hun kinderen op hun arm of aan hun rokken hangend...Terwijl de Israëlische soldaten hen met hun geweren voor zich uit dreven. Ze vielen op straat neer ...vaak stonden ze niet meer op... Vreselijk ! Je ziet bepaalde dingen en denkt : maar dit is geen leven, dit is geen humaniteit. Wat voor zin heeft het om een ziek lichaam te behandelen als daarna dit
gebeurt ?
We moeten deze wereld veranderen, we moeten iets doen, zo nodig doden, doden op het gevaar af dat we zelf onmenselijk zijn en op onze beurt sterven... Wanneer je dit hebt gezien, veranderen je geest en hart... Dan merk je dat er iets is dat meer gewicht heeft dan het leven. Jullie begrijpen ons niet, misschien minachten jullie ons : maar later zullen jullie ons begrijpen."
En wat er in Lydda gebeurd is, is één van de zovele dorpen en steden die bezet zijn door de Israëlieten.
Zolang er dus geen begin van erkenning is van deze gruwel en akkoord tot terugkeer van alle vluchtelingen, geloof ik nu nog meer dat er zonder dat, er geen begin van vrede zal zijn in die regio. ( )