Dear Editor,
Ilan Pappe, Israel’s bravest, most principled and most incisive historian and former senior lecturer of Political Science at Haifa University and Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace, with access to the Israeli military archives gives in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine a completely different account to the one summarised by Mr Williams in his letter ‘Recognising Palestine as a sovereign state is an act of folly’ SN, January 15). Alongside the creation of the State of Israel, the end of the 1948 Palestine-Israel War led to a large forced migrations of Palestinians.
On March 10, 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, (some still alive) put the final touches to a Codename Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew) for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The aim of the plan was the destruction of both the rural and urban areas of Palestine. It took six months to complete the mission. More than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants. The plan was executed by brutal terrorist organizations like Hagana, Lehi and the Stern Gang, all today integrated into the Israeli Defence Force. The truth about the mass expulsion, a crime against humanity, has been systematically distorted and suppressed by the Israelis, and pro-Israeli media.
The Zionist movement emerged late 1880s in central and eastern Europe as a national revival movement (founder Theodor Herzl), prompted by the growing pressure on Jews in those regions either to assimilate totally or risk continuing persecution – not by Arabs or Palestinians, who never have accepted the allocation of Palestinian lands to create the State of Israel.
Ben Gurion did not see anything immoral in the compulsory transfer of Palestinians to create Jewish settlements and the British tried to solve one injustice with another. It would be as if Mr Williams were to say, the Boers and the British made the best decision in South Africa, or the European migrants in America, both leading to the massacre of thousands of Blacks and near extinction of indigenous peoples. The Palestinians have resisted.
The systematic destruction and apartheid continues today. Israel has not honoured a single UN resolution regarding the return of the Palestinians and their descendants to Israel or an end to its occupation. How Mr Williams arrives at the conclusion, that Israel’s position is unassailable under international law is bizarre. Mr Williams should add Mr Pappe’s book to his list of required reading.
No country should accept Israel’s actions. Guyana has done well in recognising Palestine as a state.
Yours faithfully
R Karim
