The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian, and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is his sustained argument that what happened in 1948 to the Palestinian Arab population was a deliberate, planned removal rather than an unintended consequence of war. He draws on Israeli military archives, much of which was declassified in recent decades, to make the case in detail.

Pappe is one of the historians known as the New Historians, a group of mostly Israeli scholars who have argued for revisions to the standard Israeli historical narrative of the founding of the state. His position is contested, including by other historians within and outside Israel.

The book is academic in approach but written for a wider audience. The chapters proceed through the months of 1948, document by document.

Readers entering this subject will find sharp disagreements across the available literature. Pappe represents one influential position. Benny Morris’s earlier work covers similar ground from a different angle. Worth reading critically.