Summary
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, ethnic cleansing is a well-defined concept and a crime against humanity: an effort to render an ethnically mixed country homogeneous by expelling a particular group, turning them into refugees and demolishing the homes they were driven out from, after which the expelled are erased from the country’s official and popular history. Pappe concludes that what occurred in Palestine in 1948 forms, from planning stage to final execution, a clear-cut case of it.
Details
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Drazen Petrovic’s definition, quoted as Chapter One’s epigraph: ethnic cleansing is “a well-defined policy of a particular group of persons to systematically eliminate another group from a given territory on the basis of religious, ethnic or national origin”, to be achieved “by all possible means, from discrimination to extermination”, whose methods are mostly “grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.23).
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The Hutchinson encyclopedia definition Pappe adopts: expulsion by force in order to homogenise the ethnically mixed population of a particular region or territory, causing the evacuation of as many residences as possible by all means at the expeller’s disposal, including non-violent ones (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.24).
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The US State Department’s experts add the eradication, by all means available, of a region’s history; the most common method is depopulation within an atmosphere that legitimises acts of retribution and revenge, and the end result is a refugee problem; their case is Peck in Western Kosovo, depopulated within twenty-four hours around May 1999 through advance planning and systematic execution, with sporadic massacres to speed the operation, which Pappe says happened in almost the same manner in hundreds of Palestinian villages in 1948 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.24).
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The UN, in its 1993 discussion as Pappe reports it, links a state’s desire to impose ethnic rule on a mixed area with expulsion and violent means including separation of men from women, detention of men, explosion of houses and repopulating the remaining houses with another ethnic group; Israel’s 1948 Plan D “contains a repertoire of cleansing methods that one by one fit the means the UN describes” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.24).
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Petrovic’s account of the mechanism: the political leadership delegates implementation to the military level without necessarily furnishing systematic plans or explicit instructions, but with no doubt as to the overall objective; at one point the leadership ceases to take an active part as the machinery of expulsion rolls on, and massacres that are a direct result of whipped-up hatred and vengeance are distinguished from the premeditated massacres of genocide (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.24-25).
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Pappe’s synthesis: there may be a master plan, but most troops engaged do not need direct orders, since they know beforehand what is expected of them; massacres accompany the operations but are not part of a genocidal plan, being “a key tactic to accelerate the flight of the population earmarked for expulsion”; later the expelled are erased from the country’s official and popular history and excised from its collective memory (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.25).
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As a crime: ethnic cleansing is designated a crime against humanity in international treaties such as that which created the International Criminal Court, with special tribunals at The Hague for the former Yugoslavia and at Arusha, Tanzania, for Rwanda, and was defined as a war crime in the case of the Sudanese government in Darfur even without legal process (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.27).
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The term’s history as Pappe gives it: associated almost exclusively with the former Yugoslavia, used in the Second World War by the Nazis and their allies such as the Croat militias, with roots in foreign invaders’ practice against indigenous populations “from Biblical times to the height of colonialism” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.23).
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UN General Assembly Resolution 47/80 of 16 December 1992, quoted as Chapter Two’s epigraph, “strongly rejects policies and ideologies aimed at promoting ethnic cleansing in any form” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.34).
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Manna argues the policy of ethnic cleansing during the 1948 war was more complex and expansive than a specific plan such as Plan Dalet: the prohibition of return, the expulsion of thousands who had remained, and village destruction under military rule, particularly from 1948 to 1956, were other links in the same chain (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.26-27).
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In Manna’s account the exceptions are themselves evidence: cases of Non-expulsion in northern Palestine were not arbitrary but the result of high-level orders and policy, differentiated for the Druze and, more leniently, for Christians (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.25, 27, 33).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Nakba, Transfer, Dalet Plan, Consultancy, Zionism