A History of Modern Palestine

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This is a history of Palestine and its inhabitants from Ottoman rule to the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000. It complements, but does not replace, Avi Shlaim's superlative, and presciently titled, book `The Iron Wall'. Palestine's British rulers tried from 1918 to get the two peoples to build a British protectorate, but failed. After the British allowed a division of the unitary economic system in 1929, Jewish leaders built up an independent, privileged Zionist enclave. They mobilised the Jews by intensifying enlistment, imposing coercive taxes, preventing emigration and encouraging immigration.In the 1948 war, the Zionist leaders, under the cover of a war of national liberation against the British Empire and its puppet Arab royals, expelled most Palestinians from their homes. Pappe writes of the Zionists' military Plan D's two aims: "the first being to take swiftly and systematically any installation, military or civilian, evacuated by the British. ... The second, and far more important objective, of the plan was to cleanse the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible." Atrocities carried out by Zionist forces, including the massacres at Dir Yassin and Balad al-Shaykh, forced 690,000 Palestinians to flee under threat of death.Decades of partition and occupation followed. Now Israel is building yet more illegal settlements, blockading the Palestinians (causing 50% unemployment), manning an electric fence around the Gaza Strip, abusing people at checkpoints, demolishing houses, assassinating at will, conducting mass arrests, torturing detainees, and building a wall dividing the West Bank from Israel. In the last three years, Israeli forces have killed 2,750 Palestinian civilians, and Palestinian suicide bombers have killed 892 Israeli civilians. The US state massively subsidises the Israeli state. Bush fully backs Sharon the career terrorist: ten days after assuming the Presidency, Bush told the National Security Council, "We're going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the Mideast conflict. We're going to tilt it back towards Israel." US and EU interference have inflamed, not resolved, the conflict. Outside attempts to achieve a solution by backing one people against another will always fail.

This is a history of Palestine, and of Palestinians, since 1840 up to the beginning of the second Intifada. It only gives a few hints on Jewish colonization - as if this was not the most important subject. Even if the book is written by an Israeli Jew, it recounts not the history of Israel, but of Palestine, not of Zionism but of ordinary Palestinians.The author is very sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative. In a way, this gives the idea that very much of the debate for and against Zionism is quite an intra-Jewish question (as if it were a sort of a family-problem).Ilan Pappe succeeded in his job. His work is based on the knowledge of anthropological, social-religious questions, such as: How do groups build their own identities using national or religious narratives? His diagnoses of how groups invent themselves thanks to religions, and of what Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism mean, are careful and precise.All the relevant facts are expounded, but this is not the principal interest of the book. I do not believe this is going to be the first text someone reads on the Israel/Palestine question - this means that who reads already knows the principal facts and the most important dates. The most interesting facts are expounded with an eye on what they meant for the most deprived strata of society (for example: how were Sephardi Jews "accepted" in Israel? Who bore the brunt of racism, in Israel and in the Occupied Territories?).The book ends with an eye of the future: will the war between Israel and Palestine end, without an end to Israeli colonization? Will it end, before Israel recognizes what 1948 meant, for Palestine and Palestinian refugees?

Ilan Pappe is often referred to as a "revisionist" historian from Israel. His work published in 2004, "A History of Modern Palestine," shows him instead to be "an historian." As nearly every likely reader of the book appreciates, at the point of its publication there were at best only one or two other histories of modern Palestine deserving of the name, all but lost among a torrent of mythology and polemic. Pappe's work is supported by background sources in Arabic, Hebrew, English and at least two other languages.That said, "A History of Modern Palestine" is best understood as a work in progress. Its 268 pages of main text in the paperback edition are far too few for such a ambitious topic. Its research apparatus includes endnotes, bibliography, glossary and chronology, but their lack of coordination makes them difficult to use in a paper format. Endnotes and glossary should have been running footnotes.The content of "A History of Modern Palestine" relating to periods before 1940 is based largely on tertiary sources; it is cool and disappointing. Pappe apparently knows more than he says, but what he says often leaves out people and culture. No person becomes any more than a cardboard character or a point in time. Periods after 1940 become warmer in detail, but they too are usually reduced to summaries lacking context and associations. A reader who does not already know most of what Pappe knows will find it difficult to learn what Pappe knows.

Pappe, the intellectually courageous Israeli "New Historian," has written a superb history for general readers. What's unusual about this book is (1) its attempt to present the histories of both peoples, (2) its effort to get outside the potted nationalist narratives of both peoples, and (3) its profound solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggles against expulsion and occupation. As Pappe says, "This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized, not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied and not the occupiers; and sides with the workers not the bosses. He feels for women in distress, and has little admiration for men in command."Pappe locates the struggle for land at the very center of this narrative, and he does not hesitate to call the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 an act of "ethnic cleansing," proceeding under the aegis of the Zionist "Plan D," which systematically drove 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their villages. At the same time, he notes the chronically ineffective Palestinian leadership, from the clan rivalries of Palestinian "notables" that made any unified resistance to British and Zionist encroachments impossible, to the top-down rule of the Palestinian Authority, which cooperated in the disaster of Oslo and sidelined average, suffering Palestinians in Israel, under occupation, and in exile. He notes the complexities of opinion and experience among Jews in Palestine and Israel, including those early Zionists who hoped from the beginning for a binational secular state, and the Mizrahi or Arab Jews, who faced considerable discrimination at the hands of Ashkenazi or European Jews. And with a realistic but hopeful eye on Palestine's future, he highlights what "The Urge for Co-habitation" in Mandate Palestine, and even in Israel. He finds resources for hope in the history of his own Haifa during the 1920s, when it "became the site of the most exciting experience of class solidarity and bi-national, or even a-national cooperation." For instance, Jewish workers and Arab workers (Palestinian, Syrian, and Egyptian) came together in the first Palestinian trade union, which united workers in the railway, telegraphic, and postal services against their British employers. Pappe's keen, historians' eye for the complexities of lived experience on both sides is particularly welcome today, when reductive scholar-warriors like Benny Morris are willing to present Palestine's past and future as a conflict between Zionist "civilization" and Arab-Islamic "barbarism," and when Ariel Sharon seems to see a wall of concrete tombstones festooned with guard towers as Israel's last best hope.