A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Pappe locates the struggle for land at the very center of this narrative, and he does not hesitate to call the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 an act of "ethnic cleansing," proceeding under the aegis of the Zionist "Plan D," which systematically drove 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their villages. At the same time, he notes the chronically ineffective Palestinian leadership, from the clan rivalries of Palestinian "notables" that made any unified resistance to British and Zionist encroachments impossible, to the top-down rule of the Palestinian Authority, which cooperated in the disaster of Oslo and sidelined average, suffering Palestinians in Israel, under occupation, and in exile. He notes the complexities of opinion and experience among Jews in Palestine and Israel, including those early Zionists who hoped from the beginning for a binational secular state, and the Mizrahi or Arab Jews, who faced considerable discrimination at the hands of Ashkenazi or European Jews. And with a realistic but hopeful eye on Palestine's future, he highlights what "The Urge for Co-habitation" in Mandate Palestine, and even in Israel. He finds resources for hope in the history of his own Haifa during the 1920s, when it "became the site of the most exciting experience of class solidarity and bi-national, or even a-national cooperation." For instance, Jewish workers and Arab workers (Palestinian, Syrian, and Egyptian) came together in the first Palestinian trade union, which united workers in the railway, telegraphic, and postal services against their British employers.

Pappe's keen, historians' eye for the complexities of lived experience on both sides is particularly welcome today, when reductive scholar-warriors like Benny Morris are willing to present Palestine's past and future as a conflict between Zionist "civilization" and Arab-Islamic "barbarism," and when Ariel Sharon seems to see a wall of concrete tombstones festooned with guard towers as Israel's last best hope.

Palestine's British rulers tried from 1918 to get the two peoples to build a British protectorate, but failed. After the British allowed a division of the unitary economic system in 1929, Jewish leaders built up an independent, privileged Zionist enclave. They mobilised the Jews by intensifying enlistment, imposing coercive taxes, preventing emigration and encouraging immigration.

In the 1948 war, the Zionist leaders, under the cover of a war of national liberation against the British Empire and its puppet Arab royals, expelled most Palestinians from their homes. Pappe writes of the Zionists' military Plan D's two aims: "the first being to take swiftly and systematically any installation, military or civilian, evacuated by the British. ... The second, and far more important objective, of the plan was to cleanse the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible." Atrocities carried out by Zionist forces, including the massacres at Dir Yassin and Balad al-Shaykh, forced 690,000 Palestinians to flee under threat of death.

Decades of partition and occupation followed. Now Israel is building yet more illegal settlements, blockading the Palestinians (causing 50% unemployment), manning an electric fence around the Gaza Strip, abusing people at checkpoints, demolishing houses, assassinating at will, conducting mass arrests, torturing detainees, and building a wall dividing the West Bank from Israel. In the last three years, Israeli forces have killed 2,750 Palestinian civilians, and Palestinian suicide bombers have killed 892 Israeli civilians.

The US state massively subsidises the Israeli state. Bush fully backs Sharon the career terrorist: ten days after assuming the Presidency, Bush told the National Security Council, "We're going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the Mideast conflict. We're going to tilt it back towards Israel."

US and EU interference have inflamed, not resolved, the conflict. Outside attempts to achieve a solution by backing one people against another will always fail.