Palestine’s Ethnic Cleansing and Dispossession

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• More than two thirds of the Palestinian population, about 750,000 was ethnically cleansed because of military actions directed for that objective by Zionist / Israeli forces between 1947 – 1949.

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• All urban centers were depopulated, and more than 400 villages were destroyed as part of this endeavor.

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• A concentrated effort to capture the property of those who were forced to leave amounting to willful embezzlement characterized the Israeli state and its society.  

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• Despite minor tensions between Zionist factions and the British mandate in Palestine (1922 – 1948), the British colonial rule was dedicated to Zionism and the 1917 Balfour declaration. Furthermore, colonial Britain played a significant role in forming and training Zionist military forces that later became Israel’s army who committed the ethnic cleansing atrocities.  

 

Sources:

Walid Khalidi, Palestine's Partition: From the Great Revolt 1937 - 1939 to the Nakba 1947 - 1949 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 2021).

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Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 (Metropolitan Books, 2020).

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Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2007).

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Michael Fischbach, Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab – Israeli Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2003).

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Meron Benvenisti, “The Hebrew Map”, 11 Theory and Critique, pp.7-29 (1997).

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Forman, G., & Kedar, A. (Sandy). (2004). From Arab Land to ‘Israel Lands’: The Legal Dispossession of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(6), 809–830.

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Edwin Samuel, “The Man Who Invented the Commandos: Wingate of Palestine”, Commentary, March 1952.

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Hillel Kuttler, “75 years after his death, why Orde Wingate remains a hero in Israel”, Times of Israel, 23 March 2019.

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