Feature by Ilan Pappe, May 2008

Sixty years ago half of Palestine's population was expelled when the state of Israel was created. Acclaimed anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe looks at the legacy of the Nazi persecution of Jews, and the complicity of world leaders, past and present, in maintaining the occupation in Palestine.

Very few matrixes can be as sensitive as that of the Holocaust, Israel and the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 (known as the Nakba). It is no wonder that very few people in the past have attempted to comment on the nexus between the Holocaust, the Nakba and a solution for the Palestine question. To all intents and purposes, researchers, journalists and essayists who were, and still are, interested in the Palestine question preferred to deal with each of the subject matters separately - as if there is no connection whatsoever between them. But the connection is there and is highly important both for students of the Israel/Palestine question and for the future of this torn country. Sixty years after the dispossession of the Palestinians, the event that shaped the present Middle Eastern political crisis, it is high time also to involve the Holocaust and its memory in our overall attempt to understand the "conflict" and contribute towards its solution.

Various factors contributed to the demise of the Palestinians in 1948. The most important of them was Zionist ideology and later on Israeli policy. The Zionist movement wished ever since its appearance on Palestine's soil in the late 19th century to take over as much of the country as possible and create on it a Jewish state. The effort to achieve it began in earnest with the onset of British rule in Palestine in 1917. Judaising Palestine meant de-Arabising it. So an important part of the vision was an effort to have as few Palestinians as possible within the future Jewish state.

The vision became a plan and reality when Britain, after 30 years of rule, decided to leave Palestine in February 1947. About a year later, at the beginning of 1948, the Zionist leaders decided that the best means of making the vision of a Jewish Palestine possible was by forcefully dispossessing the Palestinians from their homeland. Within less than a year, between February and October 1948, the Israeli army systematically uprooted and destroyed more than 500 villages and 11 towns. Half of Palestine's native population was ethnically cleansed in those months. Their material and cultural possessions were taken over by the Israelis and their presence on the land was nearly wiped out.

British legacy

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