The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (review)

In 2004, New Left Review published an interview under the title "On Ethnic Cleansing" with the prominent Israeli "new" historian, Benny Morris, in which he made the point that Israel's mistake was not to have expelled all the Palestinians when the Jewish state was formed in 1948. The 150,000 or so Palestinians who remained after the war of 1948 increased naturally, sustaining themselves to this day at around 15-20% of the population, representing a ticking "time bomb" in the heart of the Jewish state, according to Morris. Affected by the events surrounding the second Intifada of 2000 and the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Morris had had some sort of an epiphany and had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to do political business with the Palestinians — or, indeed, Arabs in general. Leaving to one side the uncomfortable moral issue of what Morris was suggesting — unless, that is, one is committed to ethnic cleansing, which some are — his argument has historical weight. When a dominant, more powerful, colonial culture, more especially one driven by settlers, has collided with a weaker indigenous community, the result has usually been the absorption, destruction, or expulsion of the local peoples. Whether settler-led or not, colonial control has, at best, meant exploitation and domination in some form; at worst, the result has been genocide and extinction.

Looked at this way, Israeli rule of its Palestinian population outside the Occupied Territories is rather benign, indeed laudable. The Palestinians of Israel have not disappeared; far from it, they have increased in number and are vocal and articulate, representing for hard-line Zionists a fifth column inside Israel. Why didn't the Israelis just get rid of a group of people who, in a Jewish state, were never likely to fit in, more especially when the neighboring Arab states sustained an alternative cultural image? The Israelis were rather poor settler-colonists it seems, especially when one considers that, having not expelled all the Arabs in 1948, the Israelis then occupied more land and absorbed many more Palestinians in 1967 when they took Gaza and the West Bank. This conundrum is worth bearing in mind when reading Ilan Pappe's highly critical history of Israel's rule of its Palestinians who hold Israeli passports.

Pappe concludes that the country has become a militarized police state — akin to the Mukhabarat regimes so familiar from the Arab world. Thus, while every state has an army, in Israel the army has a state. Moreover, Israel presents to the outside world a democratic façade while its security establishment has worked internally to deny Palestinians their rights in a racist ethnocracy dominated by extreme neo-Zionism bent on expulsion of all its Palestinians. For Pappe, the solution is not expulsions but, rather, a post-Zionist, "third-space" strategy (pp. 144, 154): "Jews willing to forsake all of part of the Zionist interpretation of reality — and Palestinians prepared to put their civic agenda above the national one." Pappe points to political parallels: the French in Canada or the Swedes in Finland.

Pappe's detractors will, of course, present the usual Orientalist arguments about it being impossible to do business (except by force) with Arabs and the Palestinians, bewildered, for sure, at Pappe's naivety in his assessment of the Palestinians and at his conviction that Israel is a failed experiment. And readers will surely in some fashion judge the validity of Pappe's attack on Israel's treatment of its Arabs based on their assessment of whether the danger in the Middle East comes from eliminationist, intransigent Arab (Islamic) extremism or from the instability caused by aggressive US-backed Israeli militarism. The book under review is more than a history of events for Israel's Arabs from 1948 to the present; rather, it is an examination of Israel's body politic from one of the country's harshest critics.

Pappe examines the thread of...