Summary
Pappe’s term, as the title of Chapter 12 of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, for the Zionist project as the construction and defence of a ‘white’ (Western) fortress in a ‘black’ (Arab) world: an enclave maintained by an overwhelming Jewish majority at all costs, by walls, fences, demographic law and the refusal of the refugees’ return.
Details
- The aim of the Zionist project, Pappe argues, has always been to construct and then defend a ‘white’ (Western) fortress in a ‘black’ (Arab) world; at the heart of the refusal to allow the Right of Return is the fear of being outnumbered (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.291).
- Pappe compares the siege mentality to the medieval Crusaders’ Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, a fortified isolated island for nearly a century, and to the white settlers in South Africa during the heyday of Apartheid, whose racially pure enclave held out only for a brief historical moment before collapsing (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.291).
- The enclave was constructed around 1922 by Jewish colonialists from Eastern Europe with British Empire help; after the Holocaust reduced European Jewish numbers, Israel’s Ashkenazi leadership reluctantly prompted one million Arab Jews to join it, putting the Mizrahim through de-Arabisation (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.291-292).
- The withdrawals from southern Lebanon in May 2000 and Gaza in August 2005 show, for Pappe, a shift to keeping the Fortress impenetrable by nuclear capability, unconditional American support and a strong army; the consensus is for borders including about ninety per cent of Palestine, surrounded by electric fences and visible and invisible walls (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.292).
- Rejecting the refugees’ Right of Return is, in Pappe’s words, tantamount to an unconditional pledge to the continuing defence of the ‘white’ enclave and to upholding the Fortress (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.293-294).
- The Geneva Accord’s Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state endorses, for Pappe, Fortress Israel, which he calls the most significant obstacle on the road to peace (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.284).
- The solution Pappe proposes is that, as the last postcolonial European enclave in the Arab world, Israel transform itself willingly into a civic and democratic state (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.294).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Right of Return, Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Apartheid