Of course very early on they didn't have the capacity to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland. But already in the mid 1920s, when the Zionist community in Palestine was still very small, it was able, through purchase of land on which there were many Palestinian villages, to convince the British Mandatory power to evict thirteen Palestinian villages, and that was between 1925 and 1926. And then slowly this process of buying land and evicting the people who lived on this for hundreds of years brought the Zionist movement where it purchased at least 6% of the land of Palestine, which was of course not enough.
And then they went to the big ethnic cleansing of 1948. But as we know, it didn't stop in 1948. Israel continued to expel Palestinian villages between '48 and '67 [which formed to move] the Palestinian minority in Israel which were allegedly citizens of Israel. Israel expelled 300,000 Palestinians during the Six-Days War in June 1967. And since June 1967 until today about 600,000 Palestinians, in one way or another, were dislocated and uprooted by Israel.
And of course now we have a case of ethnic cleansing that even overtakes the magnitude of the ethnic cleansing during 1948. So there is not one moment in the history of the Palestinians in Palestine since the arrival of Zionism in Palestine in which Palestinians are [not] potentially under danger of losing their home, their fields, their businesses and their homeland.
~ Ilan Pappé, "Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé on Interrogation at U.S. Airport and 'Collapse of the Zionist Project'," Democracy Now!, 6:25 mark, May 22, 2024
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