Ilan Pappé on Zionism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

The Nakba is a bit of a misleading term because it means in Arabic "a catastrophe."  It really, what the Palestinians suffered, was not a natural catastrophe, rather ethnic cleansing, which is a clear policy motivated by clear ideology.  And that policy was part - and a total part - of the Zionist program for Palestine from the very inception of the movement in the late 19th century.

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

Yoseph Haddad on how Arab leaders contributed to the 1948 Nakba

My grandfather got an order to evacuate and get out of his village.  Not by the Jews, by the Arab leaders from Syria and Lebanon.  My grandfather rejected this request, or demand, back then.  And he stayed and he said, "I'm staying in my land."  And when the IDF came, no one took his land.  I'm speaking specifically about my grandfather.  I'm not saying there weren't events like this.  Just giving you my grandfather's story.  And he said, "I stayed in my village," which is Ishish.  It's a village in the north of Israel.  So he stayed there and that's exactly how I become who I am today, which is an Arab Israeli.  And you know what?  I'm very glad about that.

[...]

The majority of the Arabs who left the land of Israel were getting the orders to leave the land by Arab leaders, whether it's from Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or Egypt.  They're the ones who actually went on and just evacuated based on those orders.  Again, saying that, we still have to understand that in a war, there are terrible things that happen to both sides and we should acknowledge that.  By acknowledging that, we can actually move forward.  That's my message.

~ Yoseph Haddad, "Stolen Palestinian Land? An Arab Israeli Responds," Indigenous Coalition for Israel, 1:00 mark, April 26, 2023

Anonymous Arab Israeli on the Nakba

Q: Why did you surrender to the Jews in 1948?

A: Well, I wasn't there.  I was born in 1996.  But according to what my grandfather and grandmother told me... we were simply a minority and we didn't have enough forces and we weren't ready for a war.  The Arabs who lived here, and especially the Bedouins...

Q: Where did your family live then?

A: My family then lived in the northern Negev [desert in Israel]...  And my answer is we weren't ready for war and we simply wanted to live.

Q: You lived in tents then.

A: Yes, we lived in tents then.

Q: Did they evict you?  

A: Yes.

Q: So where did you live then after you left?

A: After the war, there were only 11,000 Bedouins and originally there were 100,000 Bedouins in all the Negev.  The government concentrated the Bedouins which was called the reservation area.

Q: Where was that?

A: The reservation area was in the northern Negev.  I think it was a triangle.  Arad, Dimona...

Q: But was it a city?  What was it?

A: It was a military administration.  It was the army that was the authority and there was no police, and we were a type of outcasts.  We were under military administration until almost 1966... then the government decided that we didn't pose a threat to the existence of the state of Israel even though the Israeli intelligence in the 1950s defined the Arabs of Israel as a non-risk factor to the state of Israel.  But it took them many years to start to think of development plans and the existence of the Arabs.  

During that time in the Negev there were built more than 200 moshavs, communities, kibbutzes and individual farms for Jews only and only after 1967, the Six-day war, they started to think about Bedouoins and only one thing, to concentrate the Bedouins, to move the Bedouin population, which sadly was not successful.  Only half the Bedouin population is in cities and that population suffers greatly from different problems: problems with education, problems with unofficial education, problems with land, family problems, incompatibility with the land they are on, social incompatibility with the modern life and urban life.  Because Bedouins are not urban peoples.  And the other half are located in unrecognized villages and they don't have basic rights like connection to water and electricity, sewage infrastructure, roads infrastructure, basic infrastructure.  And they fight daily for a piece of bread.

That's it in general.  There is a bigger story to this, but I will stop here.

~ anonymous Arab Israeli, "Arab Israelis: Why did you surrender to the Jews in 1948?," The Ask Project, 13:14 mark, June 4, 2023