The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

According to Pappé, the reason that the Nakba and The Experiences of the Palestinian Diaspora have remained largely unknown to the general public is due to Israel’s nation-state and identity-building program. Pappé explains how the Zionists tailored an official historical narrative about the establishment of the State of Israel that denies the war crimes and ethnic cleansing carried out against the Indigenous Palestinian population that had been living in Palestine. The official historical narrative hinges on the claim that the Palestinians who left the country in 1948 left voluntarily to make way for the invading Arab armies whose goal was to prevent the Zionists from establishing a Jewish state. Pappé argues that this claim is a myth. Through archival research, Pappé demonstrates that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was a foundational tenet of Zionist ideology dating to their arrival in the country and that the Zionist leadership under David Ben-Gurion was already putting their ethnic cleansing program into effect by December 1947, before any Arab armies had entered the country, with the final blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine finalized as