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One of the architects of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine “remained unmoved by the sight of tractors destroying whole villages.” To the Israelis public and the world at large they were "making the desert bloom.” (329) “One study has estimated that seventy per cent of the land belonging to the Palestinians in Israel has been either confiscated or made inaccessible to them.” (332) Fear dominated the thinking and policies of the Israelis. The Arabs were always a threat; such as, poisoning the water. (332) Not only did the Jews throw the Palestinians off their land they claimed they had been Hebrew in the past. (333) Ilan Pappe identifies this as “The Reinvention of Palestine”. Israel renames the places it seizes, “destroyed and recreated.” (334) They would “de-Arabize the terrain.” (335) In addition, the goal of Israel wanted to maintain its European roots. (336) While the Israelis boast of having made the desert bloom they, in the words of Miko Peled, took a blooming land and, in my words, made it boom. So called barren land had “been covered with the houses and the  cultivated lands of Palestinian villages bustling with life.” (343) Some of Israel’s attempts to connect areas with the Bible failed. (345) Israel continues to deny this and deny the Nakba. (346) Most survivors of the Holocaust did not settle in Israel but in the United States or they remained in Europe. (372) Israel continually massacred Palestinian civilians: 1956 “villagers returning from their fields” and, others in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, there were the massacres in Lebanon of in Sabra and Shatila in 1982 and the “Jenin refugee camp in 2002.” (378) Israeli historians conveniently ignored these atrocities  because Pappe writes they “are more comfortable serving as the mouthpiece for the hegemonic ideology.” (378-379)

The reason the Zionist forces gave for looting was that they were searching for weapons. (307) They arrested Arabs for no reason. (308) One Zionist commanding officer complained that his troops made fun of him as they ignored his orders not to burn buildings. (308) Although Arabs in one village had the keys to the buildings that they were glad to hand over to the Israelis, the latter preferred to break in. (309) While enduring the expulsion and burning of their homes what mostly hurt the Palestinians was the turning of their mosques into restaurants or shops. (324)

“The entry of the Jordanian Arab Legion into the fighting changed the picture, and the cleansing operations were halted in the middle of May 1948. (162) The International Red Cross suspected the Hagana of injecting typhoid germs into the water supply to an Arab village near Haifa. (163) The Zionists had been working on biological warfare at this time. (164) Palestinians in Jaffa "were literally pushed into the sea” by Zionist forces. (167) Tel Aviv University sits on some of the Arab land taken in the Jaffa and Tel-Aviv area. One of the remaining Arab houses is now the “university’s faculty club.” (168) “Almost half of the Arab villages had already been attacked by the time the Arab governments eventually and, as we know, reluctantly decided to send in their troops.” Those villages were wiped out and their residents killed or expelled. (169) Many Arab villages “had signed non-aggression pacts with the kibbutzim in their vicinity.” However, even a small Arab attack which resulted in the deaths of three civilians caused the Zionists to counter attack and ethnically cleanse villages. (173) War correspondents seemingly did not report Jewish atrocities because it was so soon after the Holocaust. (176) As it became clear that the Jews had won the 1948 war most Arab leaders did not care. (187) Some of the Arab Legion commanders resented the limitations put on them by their leadership and King Abdullah. Interestingly, the Arab Legion, essentially the “Jordanian Army was the best trained in the whole Arab world.” In some ways it was superior to the Zionist forces. (189) “The Palestinian community for all intents and purposes was a leaderless nation.” (193) While the Israelis and the West propagate that a second Holocaust was about to happen with the intervention of the Arab armies in the 1948 war the truth is that they had little effect. It was the Palestinians who were expelled from their homes. (194) President Harry Truman succumbed to the pressure from the Zionist lobby to support Israel. In the process the State Department Arab experts were left out of decision making. This Zionist influence extended to Congress as well. (195) Because they withdrew from Palestine leaving the Palestinians high and dry the British receive the brunt of criticism for the Arab Israeli conflict. (198) One Israeli officer believes that Israel should be honest about what they did at Tantura. (201) It is a lie that the Jews tried to convince the Arabs to stay. (206) “Tantura’s captured villagers were herded at gunpoint down to the beach.” (210) After the villagers surrendered many were slaughtered. Some Israeli soldiers were ashamed, others quite delighted. (210, 212) As soon as the British Mandate ended the Jews destroyed the Arab villages in the Galilee even though these were to be part of the Arab stay. Ben-Gurion viewed this as the liberation of the Galilee. (221) Ben-Gurion delighted by reports of ethnic cleansing. (228) Although the United Nations demanded the return of Arabs to their homes the Israelis in August 1948 decided to “destroy al the evicted villages and transform them into new Jewish settlements or natural forests.” (283) The Israelis prevented Arab refugees from returning to their destroyed homes and villages. They were termed “infiltrators.” (285) “For almost thirty years the UN uncritically adopted the rhetorical obfuscations of Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, who referred to the refugees as constituting a human problem for which no one could be held accountable or responsible.” (287) In October 1948 the Israelis took southern Lebanon and executed eighty villagers in just one village! (290) Although the Israelis would leave Lebanon in 1949 they returned again in 1978 and 1982 continuing ethnic cleansing and creating “a lot of bad blood and . . . feelings of revenge.” (291) In February 1948 the Havana established a process for whether or not to keep prisoners of war or simply kill them. (303) Interestingly, the Arabs treated their Jewish prisoners of war quite well. Reports of this in the Israeli press angered Ben-Gurion.” (305) A UN observed noted that the Israelis “violated frequently the guarantee given several times . . . to respect all buildings belonging to the religious community.” In addition, the Jews had no compunction about stealing from the homes they took over. (307)

Ben-Gurion and the other Zionists portrayed the Palestinians and Nazis in order to motivate their soldiers. (125) The Zionists chose three villages on the Palestine coast to conquer. They produced “a wide range of agricultural” products and had no defenses. “The order came February 5 [1948] to occupy, expel and destroy them.” Although nearby the British did nothing. (130) The village of Atlit demonstrated cooperation between Jews and Arabs. “However, in the 1940s the Havana turned the Jewish part of the village into a training ground for its members, whose intimidating presence soon reduced the number of Palestinians.” (131) In February, 1948 the Zionists coveted the lush village of Daliyat al Radha. So, they attacked it. Again, ironically, this is a place where Jews and Arabs lived in harmony with each other. (131-132) In April 1948 Jewish troops again “entered a village and began attaching TNT to the houses.” An Arab guard was shot dead. “W left behind 35 demolished houses and 60-80 dead bodies (quite a few of them children.” (132-133) Nevertheless, the Palestinians did not fight back and this was noted by Zionist intelligence. (133) Plan D culminated in March 1948. Destruction of Arab villages, “planting mines in the rubble.” (138-139) Throughout Israeli history the military lies “to the politicians as to its real intentions.” (140) “Special political officers” would motivate their “troops by demonizing the Palestinian and invoking the Holocaust as the point of reference for the operations ahead.” Yigal Yadin knew this was hogwash. (141) Standard Israeli historiography cites April 1948 as a dangerous time for their forces. Pappe writes that nothing could be further from the truth. (142) Interesting, at least according to Ben-Gurion’s diary, he ignored military affairs from April to May 1948. And, he did not express a sense of danger. (144) He did say that, “our enemies are the Arab peasants.” (144) Plan Dalet, or D, is ingrained in the Israeli sense of history. There is a plaque honoring the Hagan where a Palestinian village used to be. (148-149) Deir Yasin is the most famous of Zionist massacres of an Arab village. The Zionists entered the village and killed and raped at will. (149-150) All Arabs were the enemy. So, combatants and villagers were the same. (150) Jewish soldiers stole Arab possessions. (151)

Destroyed Arab villages were turned into Jewish sites: schools, parks, housing. Ben-Gurion refused to condemn Irgun terrorist actions. The British made weak complaints but to no avail. (108-109) The British blamed the Zionists for the conflict saying that it was the Arabs who worked for peace. Ben-Gurion did not disagree. (108-109) The Palestinians were about to be destroyed by the Zionists. These same Zionists the Arabs had welcomed and aided in the early nineteenth century. (109-110) Arab attacks in December 1947 did not include settlements. (110) Nevertheless, the Zionist proposed getting rid of the Arabs. (110) They proposed ‘transferring’ the Palestinians to other Arab countries. “Not a single village or single tribe must be left off.” The Jews would thus obtain  already cultivated land. (111) One influential Zionist was Youssef Weitz. He declared “the takeover of all Arab land was a sacred duty.” (111) The Zionists believed that without removing the Arabs “there will be no Jewish state.” (112) Pathetically, one of the leaders of the terrorism against the Arabs in 1948 admitted in the 1960s that, “if it had not been for the open [Zionist military] preparations which had a provocative nature, the drift into war [in 1948] could have been averted.” (113) Nevertheless, in 1948, Ben-Gurion approved the policy to “kill as many villagers as possible.” He no longer cared about distinguishing between innocents and, as he put it, the guilty. (113) Yigal Yadin believed that it was time to instill in the Hagana “aggression.” (114) Yigal Allon argued that “We have to go for a series of collective punishments even if there are children in the [attacked] houses.” Allon said that “a call for peace will be weakness.” Moshe Dayan and Ben-Gurion agreed. (114) The Hagana spread false accusations of assaults by Arabs. (117) Ben-Gurion ordered the eviction of Arabs from a village and that Jews settle in that village. He later bragged to a Jewish council that Jerusalem a Jewish city; you don’t see Arabs. (119) He also did not care that some military activity was not authorized, as long as the Arabs were evicted. (120) “There happened to be thirty settlements in the UN-designated Arab state. One of the most effective ways to incorporate them into the Jewish state was to build new settlement belts between them and the Jewish designated areas. These were the same tactics Israel would us again in the occupied West Bank during the years of the Oslo accord and again in the early years of the twenty-first century.” (120-121) January 9, 1948, the Arabs sent forces to the Arab sector. Rarely did they attack Jewish settlements. (124) Although the Palestinians never had an equally sized or equipped army Ben-Gurion told his advisors that the war was “aimed at destroying and eliminating the Jewish community.” Any Jews killed in any fighting Ben-Gurion referred to as “victims of a second Holocaust.” (125)

The Palestinians wanted more negotiation with the UN and the Zionists and, did not want to partition Palestine. “The Partition Resolution was adopted 29 November 1947, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in early December 1947 with a series of Jewish attacks on Palestinian villages and neighborhoods in retaliation for the buses and shopping centers that had been vandalized inn the Palestinian protest against the UN resolution.” (80) Further armed “skirmishes” were won by the Jews and they changed their “tactics from retaliation to cleansing operations.” In February 1948 residents of five villages were expelled. (80) Since the 1930s “a handful of Zionists leaders recognized the clear link between the end of British rule and the possibility of the de-Arabization of Palestine, I.e. making Palestine free of Arabs.” (81) Ben-Gurion told one of his top generals that the army “should start preparing for the occupation of the country as a whole.” (83) The 1948 war saw the Jews fielding 30,000 soldiers. They had “a small air force and navy . . . armored cars and heavy artillery.” The Palestinians had a paramilitary for of “no more than 7,000 troops” which were unorganized. Soon, the Jews would have 80,000 solders and the Arabs 50,000. While the Jews received arms from Czechoslovakia the Arabs received arms from the British which soon ended their aid. (86-87) Although the Arab leaders stated that they would go to war against the Zionists over portion the Zionist leaders never felt “their future state was in danger.” Nevertheless in public the “Jewish leaders” spoke of a “second Holocaust.” They knew that the Arabs had not prepared for war. (88) Furthermore, the Arab armies did not intervene until “five and a half months after the UN partition Resolution had been adopted.” At this time many Palestinian villages were vulnerable to Zionist attack. (90) Regardless of the danger they faced the Palestinians just wanted a normal life. (96) After invading villages the Jewish soldiers used informants to identify those who had attacked Jews or who were part of the Palestinian resistance. Those people were shot. (98) Jewish intelligence reported that the Palestinian elite left, as they did in times of crisis. This is not, according to Pappe, voluntary, but done in the face of danger. In addition, they fully intended to return to their homes, which the Israelis would not allow. (99) At the end of 1947 the Irgun and the Hagana terrorized the Arabs of Haifa. Jewish houses were high up on a hill looking down at Haifa. The Jews easily sniped and fired shells at the residents. They “rolled barrels full of explosives, and huge steel balls down into the Arab residential areas, and poured oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited.” As the Palestinians ran out of their homes they machine gunned. Where the Arabs and Jews got along the Hagana “brought cars to Palestinian garages to be repaired, loaded with explosives and detonating devices.” (105-106) The Irgun threw bombs into groups of Arabs in areas where the two peoples worked together. (106) The British did nothing. (107)

The Zionists upset the traditional relationships of people with the land. A new landowner never evicted the farmers working the land. But the Zionists purchased land and then evicted the farmers. (48) In 1937 Ben-Gurion wrote that, “the Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” He was the mastermind of ethnic cleansing. (56) Ben-Gurion wanted all of Palestine and therefore any agreement to two states was only temporary. To the Zionists the Balfour Declaration meant “the country as a whole.” (58) After 1946 the Zionists developed Plan C. This called for attacking and killing any Palestinians even remotely connected acted to attacking the Jewish settlements. In addition, the political leadership of Palestine would be assassinated. Attacks included public places, poisoning water and food supplies. They relied on their “village files” detailed information about every Palestinian, every building, every village. One of the Palestinians who provided this information would be assassinated by other Palestinians for doing this. Later Plan Dalet, Plan D, was created. This called for the “systematic and total expulsion [of the Palestinians] from their homeland.” (63-64) In 1947 the population of Palestine was mixed with Arabs and Jews. The native Palestinians constituted a 2/3 “majority, down from 90% at the start of the Mandate. One third were Jewish newcomers, I.e., Zionist settlers and refugees from war torn Europe, most of whom had arrived in Palestine since the 1920s.” (65) Also, Jews in 1947 owned only 5.8% of the land. Most of the immigrant Jews preferred living in the cities over living on farms. (66) Peace terms in Palestine have alway ignored the Palestinians. The Zionists presented their dream with they controlling all of Palestine except for the West Bank. The UN rejected this but gave the minority population the majority of the land, 56%. (69) The Palestinians boycotted these negotiations which Israel continues to use as “proof” they never wanted peace. However, Pappe cites famed Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi who wrote that like all other peoples the Palestinians “refused to divide their land with a settler community.”(71) The Jews received the “most fertile land . . . as well as almost all the Jewish urban and rural space in Palestine.” (72) Also, Walid Khalidi pointed out that the UN sanctioned “ethnic cleansing” to a group which had always wanted to “de Arabise Palestine.” (72) The Zionists under Ben-Gurion would both “accept and ignore the UN Partition Resolution on November 1947.” (73) That resolution also required Jerusalem to be an “international city.” Ben-Gurion “was determined to make the entire city his Jewish capital.” (74) Because the Palestinians rejected the UN resolution dividing their country Ben-Gurion stated that the creation of the Jewish state would “be determined by force.” (75)

The following is also from Ilan Pappe's, Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine. The Zionists justified their war against the Palestinians. “We had to destroy them, otherwise we would have had Arabs here.” (32) The story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 “has been eradicated almost totally from the collective global memory and erased from the world’s conscience.” (36) “Zionism emerged in the late 1880s in central and eastern Europe as a national revival movement, prompted by the growing pressure on Jews in those regions either to assimilate totally or risk continuing persecution (though, as we know, even complete assimilation was no safeguard against annihilation in the case of Nazi Germany).” It quickly developed into the “colonization of Palestine.” (38) “Egrets Israel, the name for Palestine in the Jewish religion, had been revered throughout the centuries by generations of Jews as a place for holy pilgrimage, never as a future secular state.” Tradition states that the messiah must return in order for the Jews to return to Egrets Israel. “Zionism secularized and nationalized Judaism. . . . Zionists thinkers claimed the biblical territory  and recreated, indeed invented, it as the cradle of their new nationalist movement. As they saw it, Palestine was occupied by strangers and had to be repossessed. Strangers here meant everyone not Jewish who had been living in Palestine since the Roman period. In fact, for many Zionists Palestine was not even an occupied land when they first arrived there in 1882, but rather an empty one: the native Palestinians who lived there were largely invisible.” (39) Despite the desire to escape the horrors of Europe historians now view Zionism as an extension of “nineteenth-century Christian millenarianism and European colonialism.” (41) Early Zionists bought land. (42) The Balfour Declaration promised “in 1927 to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine.” But this conflicted with Palestinian national rights. (42) The consequences would be violence between the two groups claiming hundreds of Palestinian and Jewish lives. (43) The administration of Palestine by the British favored the Zionists. The majority Palestinians bristled at this as they were 80-90% of the Palestine population. (43) The British destroyed Palestinian leadership as they crushed the Arab revolt of 1936. This meant that they were not able to resist the “Jewish forces in 1947.” (44) The Zionists were committed to “an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine.” (44) Under the British Mandate for Palestine the Zionists were able to “carve out the infrastructure for a future state.” To do this they built a military organization and received funding from overseas Jews. British officer Orde Wingate [a guerrilla warfare specialist] taught the Jews that “statehood had to be associated with militarism and an army . . . because acts of armed aggression were an effective deterrent against the possible resistance of the local Palestinians. From there, the road to contemplating the enforced transfer of the entire indigenous population would prove to be very short indeed.” (45-46) In addition, Many Hagana  soldiers served with the British forces during World War II. (47)

Ilan Pappe is one of the "New Historians" of Israel. He and the others challenge the false narrative of Zionism and Israeli history. October 7 changed the view of many, but not enough, people about Israel. With 30,000 Gazans killed in the past few months it is surprising that American politicians continue their support for Israel. But the conflict did not begin on October 7, 2023. It began with Zionism which I have presented on this page; words spoken by the original Zionists themselves. Ilan Pappe. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. On March 10, 1948 Zionist leaders and their young military officers agreed to “a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” They would intimidate, lay siege, bombard civilian areas, burn Palestinian homes, and use mines to prevent any of the Palestinians returning. (15) This was Plan D, “Dalet in Hebrew.” “The Palestinians had to go.” This was and is Zionism. (16) Although conflicts between the indigenous Arabs and the settler colonial Zionists had been ongoing for decades the current conflict began February 1947 with “retaliation against Palestinian attacks. . . . It took six months to complete the mission.” (16) The Nakba, as the Palestinians refer to the events of 1948, had been “denied, and is still today not recognized as an historical fact.” (17) The Zionist decision to expel the native inhabitants of Palestine took place in a building called the Red House. Marxist posters abound in the building. (17) It is absurd to claim “that the Palestinians had left of their own accord.” (19)

“The Quran is the central theophany of Islam, the verbatim Word of God  revealed to the Prophet by the archangel Gabriel and transmitted by him in turn to his companions, who both memorized and recorded it. . . .The verses of the Quran are the very first sounds heard by the newborn child and the last the dying person hears on his or her way to the encounter with God.” (37-38) Daily prayer encompass a Muslim’s life. Islamic Law has its root in the sacred text. (38) The sound of the Quran is sacred and devout Muslims are moved to tears hearing it. (39) The calligraphy of the written Quran is also sacred. Architecture is sacred. (40)

“Most people in the West automatically identify Muslims with Arabs. Today, however, Arabs compose about a fifth of the world Muslim population.” “Islam does not even accept the validity of a domain outside the realm of religion and the sacred and refuses to accord any reality to the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane or secular, or the spiritual and the temporal.” “Religion, then, must embrace the whole of life.” “In contrast to Christianity, which, in its early history, displayed a certain disdain for mercantile activity and in which there are no explicit economic injunctions as far as its revealed sources in the New Testament are concerned, the Quran . . . contain explicit economic teachings. . . . the economic views of St. Thomas Aquinas resemble Islamic teachings in many ways.” There is a Muslim code for military behavior which is “based primarily on the defense of dar al-islam rather than aggression, fair treatment of the enemy including prisoners of war, prohibition of killing innocent civilians  . . . Whatever misuse is made of this term by extremists in the Islamic world or Western commentators of the Islamic scene does not change the meaning of outward jihad in the traditional Islamic context as an exertion to preserve one’s religion or homeland from attack in the traditional Islamic context. . . . Islam is said to be the first civilization to have developed a fully codified international law that takes such matters as war and peace between nations into consideration.” (34) “Islam teaches that religion is the nature of human beings. . . . Islam cannot accept a human world in which religion is irrelevant.” (35-36)

“The Islamic revelation is the third and final revelation of the Abrahamic monotheistic cycle.” “Nearly all Muslims belong to one of three groups: Sunnis, Shiites, and Kharijites.” “One of the key concepts in Islam is that of the ummah, or the totality of the people who are Muslims and constitute the Islamic world.” Islam addresses “the whole of humanity and strongly opposed all forms of racism and tribalism.” “In less than a century after the establishment of the first Islamic society in Medina by the prophet, Arab armies had conquered a land stretching from the Indus River to France and brought with them Islam, which, contrary to popular Western conceptions, was not, however, forced on the people by the sword.”