[Salon] Ilan Pappé looks ahead ... in 2006

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

FM: John Whitbeck

I have just finished re-reading Ilan Pappé's groundbreaking 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which makes brutally clear that Israel's current effort to exterminate or expel a major portion of the indigenous population of Palestine is not a new horror but simply an uptick in the continuum of a long-term objective, unavoidably inherent in the Zionist project, whose violent and frequently savage phase is now almost 80 years long.

Transmitted below are the last two paragraphs of this book, which, like so much which has been written about Palestine/Israel by others (myself included) long ago, could be written in virtually the same words today:

"Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is not correctly identified. The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness -- Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is its ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for the Palestinians. They can never be part of the Zionist state and space and will continue to fight -- and hopefully their struggle will be peaceful and successful. If not, it will be desperate and vengeful and, like a whirlwind, will suck all up in a huge perpetual sandstorm that will rage not only through the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also within Britain and the United States, the powers which, each in their turn, feed the tempest that threatens to ruin us all.

"The Israeli attacks on Gaza and Lebanon in the summer of 2006 indicate that the storm is already raging. Organizations such as Hizbullah and Hamas, which dare to question Israel's right to impose its unilateral will on Palestine, have faced Israel's might and, so far (at the time of writing) are managing to withstand the assault. But it is far from over. The regional patrons of these resistance movements, Iran and Syria, could be targeted in the future; the risk of even more devastating conflict and bloodshed has never been so acute."