Built on blood
Israel, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

The Palestinian Nakba, or Catastrophe, was no accident, nor was it the sad but inevitable result of the so-called War of Independence. In truth, the expulsion of over 1 million Palestinians from their homeland in 1948, never to return, was the result of a skilfully executed Zionist blueprint for a racially pure state.
For decades, Israel has lived in denial of the fact that it was founded on a programme of ethnic cleansing. Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, tells Roz Paterson that the time has come for Israel to face this truth, that it is the only hope for peace and reconciliation in the Middle East, and the end to a conflict that has brought ruin to the Palestinians, moral bankruptcy to the Israelis and endless cycles of violence to the wider Middle East.
“They took us out one after another; shot an old man and when one of my daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him - carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her - they shot her too.”
Fahim Zaydan, aged 12 years, in Deir Yassin, 9 April 1948.
It could come from an eyewitness report of Nazi atrocities perpetrated against Jews in Europe just three years previously. Only the Muslim names give you the clue that this happened in Palestine, and that the perpetrators were Jewish, some of them, incredibly, survivors of the ghettoes and concentration camps themselves.
Between 1947 and 1950, the fledgling Israeli army, an unholy alliance of terrorist cells and guerilla fighters, armed to the teeth by the USSR thanks to connections forged by the Israeli Communist Party, drove the Palestinians from their villages and towns and into the crowded corridors of the West Bank and Gaza, stripping them of their money, possessions, dignity and history as they went.
Today, these villages and towns are as if they never were. Generations of cultivation, architecture, history and custom are obliterated. In their place stand motorways and national parks, kibbutzim and moshavs (Israeli farm collectives), all with fictitious ‘historic’ names and blank memories.
Palestine, like its people, has been erased. As it has been from the collective memory of Israel.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, from the University of Haifa, lived in denial too. Like other ‘new’ historians, for a long time he failed to face the issue head on.
“(W)e never contributed significantly to the struggle against the Nakba denial as we sidestepped the question of ethnic cleansing and, typically of diplomatic historians, focused on details.”
But in his new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan finally squares up to the past, viewing 1948 through the prism of ethnic cleansing, a curiously new word for a war crime as old as time.
Doing so, he maintains, “is an absolute pre-requisite for resolution. These are the roots of the conflict and if people won’t face it boldly, they won’t be able to deal with the problems. If we can rid ourselves of this denial, we can start genuine negotiations.”
Israeli denial is reinforced by the militarised nature of the state, but is primarily perpetuated through the institutions of the state, “the education system, the media, discourse.”
In other words, the version of 1948 in which armed, aggressive Palestinians threatened the Jews with a second Holocaust and were pushed back by a brave defensive force is all around, beamed back at you from schoolbooks, newspapers, TV, the collective memory. It’s the only narrative that’s acceptable to most Israelis, the only one that makes their history a justifiable one, and their government’s continued policy of aggression towards their neighbours, and ongoing annihilation of Palestinians, in any way supportable.
Ilan’s narrative reaches to the roots of Zionism.
Founded in the late 19th century by Theodor Herzl, the original idea had been to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine through a gradual process of immigration and colonisation. But even with the establishment of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to provide the monies for land purchases, and mass influxes such as the 40,000 Zionists who arrived in Palestine between 1904 and 1914, Jews comprised only six per cent of the population by 1920.
It wasn’t enough for the Zionists and the call for the ‘removal’ of Palestinians became louder and more militant, especially when the post-WWII British government, which still controlled Palestine, proved to be less pro-Zionist than Lloyd George’s administration.
This led to the formation of the Jewish underground, which was soon to include terrorist groups such as the Hagana and Irgun, which perhaps makes it sound sporadic and hot-headed. It wasn’t. A cool and calculated plan was being hatched by the Consultancy, the hardcore of Zionist strategists at the underground’s heart, and which included David Ben-Gurion, the ‘founder’ of modern Israel.
They drew up a registry of Palestine, pinpointing where the villages were, who lived there, how they lived, and establishing a network of informants and a list of Palestinians who were ‘hostile’ to the Zionists.
It was quickly apparent to anyone who cared to look that this was more than an exercise in geography; this was the groundwork for a forced evacuation, scheduled to take place when the British Mandate ended in 1947.
The Brits were leaving because the Empire was finished, the Welfare State was being built at home, and they had no time or inclination to stem this growing crisis in the Middle East. So hands-off were they, they basically stood aside and let the Jewish forces murder and expel the indigenous population. To this day, Palestinians lay much of the blame at the feet of the British, and rightly so.
With the British withdrawal came Partition, as proposed by a United Nations which was both in its infancy and in dread of doing anything other than kid-glove the Zionists given what had just happened in Europe.
By rights, given the size of their population, the Jews should have got 10 per cent of Palestine. Instead, they got 56 per cent. The Palestinians boycotted the whole process, knowing they were about to be shafted. Had they accepted it, for the sake of peace, the Zionists planned to reject it, for the sake of war. It was their only means of bumping that 56 per cent up to 100 per cent.
The Consultancy wanted all of Palestine, plus a ‘buffer zone’; the same language being used today, in Israel’s demand for a ‘buffer zone’ in south Lebanon.
The Palestinians’ reaction to the Partition proposal was perhaps surprising.
They seemed to accept it as “another dismal chapter” in their long history, and cleaved to normality, working, farming, bearing children.
For the Zionists, this was no good. They needed a war, and in the end they sort of got one - in the guise of a reluctant intervention of Arab armies late in the day - but only through the extreme provocation of routing defenceless Palestinian villages.
One of the first was Khisas, a small village near the Hasbani River. Jewish troops descended, without warning, on the night of 18 December 1947, and began blowing up houses at random, killing 15 sleeping villagers, including five children.
A correspondent from the New York Times was on the scene, and demanded an explanation from the Hagana, who at first denied the operation. In the end, they owned up, and Ben-Gurion issued a grovelling apology. But at a meeting of the Consultancy, he described this operation as ‘very successful’.
But this was just a limbering up exercise. The real cleansing got underway following the implementation of Partition in November 1947.
The first village cleansings were abhorrent enough, with shootings, rapes, lootings. In the village of Sa’sa’, four women and one girl were raped in front of their fathers and brothers. One pregnant woman was publicly bayonetted in the belly.
Men, that is male persons aged between ten and 50, were rounded up and caged in pens, later transferred to prison camps where they were worked nearly to death and fed barely enough to keep them alive.
And hundreds were forced onto the road to God knows where, their homes set on fire, their every possession confiscated.
But it wasn’t happening fast enough for the Zionist project and, like the Nazis before them, they drew up a blueprint for the destruction of a race.
In March 1948 came Plan Dalet, in which village cleansings were named and dated. In the end, 531 villages and 11 urban neighbourhoods, including in Haifa and Jerusalem, were cleansed in an operation with the mantra occupation, expulsion, destruction.
If it had been sporadic before, by April 1948, it really kicked into gear as terrorist cells of Hagana and Irgun began to work together, thus laying the foundations for the Israeli Defence Force.
The killings were merciless, and the humiliations endless. Babies, able-bodied men, collaborators and rebels, were all targets. The Jewish forces even got Palestinians to dig the mass graves to house the corpses of their brothers and mothers. Then shot them too.
For those lucky enough to escape, there were checkpoints set up, where Palestinian women were stopped and searched - sometimes strip-searched, which often led to rape - their every last piece of jewellery taken from them.
How, we ask now, could Jews who bore witness to the European Holocaust behave in such a way? The answer is in the systematic dehumanisation of the Palestinians, a central plank of Zionist strategy. Palestinians were ‘pus’, they were ‘vermin’, they were sub-human. Therefore killing them was not the same as killing human beings.
We see the same psychological process happening in Iraq today, where American soldiers in particular are indoctrinated with the idea that Iraqis are less than human. And it continues in Israel too. It must, or the state of Israel cannot function.
“One of the tasks of Israeli peace activists is to humanise, re-humanise, the Palestinians in the eyes of Israelis,” says Ilan.
“They do this through education, through providing an alternative education system. There are, for example, three or four bi-lingual (Hebrew and Arabic) and bi-national (Israeli Jewish and Israeli Arab) schools in Israel, providing equality and an alternative to segregation.”
Alternative media is also struggling to its feet.
“But this is just a beginning, and there are tiny results so far. If we can extend it, and we can with the help of outside pressure, including from academics, we can make a long-term difference.”
He is talking about a generational change.
“Activists tend to like tangible results very quickly, but this will take time. This will affect the people who are young children now, toddlers. They are the ones who will reap this change.”
Back in 1948, the process of dehumanisation led to horror in Haifa.
On 21 April came an operation called Cleansing the Leaven. The name relates to the Jewish Passover, when every trace of bread and flour must be removed from the house. You can surely imagine how this was intended to translate to the Palestinians, and it occurred on Passover Eve.
The Brits were still there, their last outpost before the final departure. They could have protected the Palestinians - in fact, it was their duty to do so - yet they stood aside and let the chaos and carnage unfold.
The Jewish orders were thus: “Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.” Snipers fired into the Palestinian neighbourhoods, rivers of ignited oil ran through the streets, loudspeakers bawled at the residents to leave, now.
Dreadful panic ensued. People literally ran from their homes and headed for the only obvious escape route, the port.
As they fled, Jewish forces broke into their homes, where food still stood on the tables and children’s toys lay scattered where they dropped them, and looted freely, taking the Palestinians’ worldly possessions for souvenirs.
The Palestinian leadership, such as it was - it had been gutted, pretty much, through the British expulsion following a rebellion in 1936 - urged people to gather in the marketplace. Jewish marksmen set up in the hillsides above and began firing down, causing a desperate stampede to the port, where every boat was stormed.
One eyewitness recalls:
“Men stepped on their friends, women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers.”
There were other horrors. In Acre, the water supply was contaminated with typhoid germs, sparking an epidemic amongst the Palestinians.
In Deir Hana, at the northern end of the Gaza strip, a 12 year old Palestinian girl was captured by Jewish soldiers. They shaved her head, gang-raped her repeatedly for days, then murdered her.
This slaughter didn’t even slow down until the Zionists had what they wanted: Palestine.
The Arab nations did little to stop them, partly through lack of armaments compared to the ferocious firepower of the Israelis, even then, partly because they were in a fragile state themselves, just emerging from struggles of their own.
There was massive support for the Palestinians from ordinary people, but this didn’t translate into government policy. Arab armies did intervene, but in effect only provided the smokescreen for the Israeli purge of Palestine, in the guise of the war of independence which Israel claimed led to Palestinians’ leaving of their own free will.
The British, as we have seen, did nothing. Neither did the UN, who ‘observed’ events.
Except, that is, Count Folk Bernadotte, the UN emissary who had been instrumental in saving Jews during World War II and who sought to do the same for the Palestinians. He urged the UN to re-divide the country and allow Palestinians to return.
He was assassinated in September 1948 by Jewish terrorists though the UN posthumously endorsed his recommendation. That UN resolution has been ignored by Israel ever since.
The Israeli response to Ilan’s revelations has been muted, to say the least. “For most people, it’s still irrelevant. They either don’t know what you’re talking about or have the attitude that you shouldn’t expose this, even if it’s true, as it helps the enemy. There are very few Israelis willing to understand the connection between the past and present.”
Israelis are, he says, indoctrinated, as noted above, by the false narrative and the ongoing tenet that this is a state “under constant, existential threat. Israel is an army with a state, not a state with an army.”
The ethnic cleansing is not over. Palestinians are still being purged, from Jerusalem and through the construction of the apartheid wall that seeks to dissect the West Bank, annexing great swathes of it to Israel and herding Palestinians into ever more densely populated ghettoes.
Modern Israel, like newborn Israel, is fighting demographics. Immigration is not enough, colonisation is not enough; sweeping away the Palestinians like so much rubbish is their only, and continual, solution.
The history of the Israel/Palestine conflict is not complex at all; it is simple and abominable. And it lies at the dead centre of the conflicts consuming our world today.
All roads lead to Jerusalem and facing up to the past, owning the truth of 1948 is, says Ilan, the first and unavoidable step towards reconciliation and even peace, and the only hope we have of cooling the “tempest that threatens to ruin us all”.

The Hungarian revolution of 1956

This month sees the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution, one of the most inspiring yet tragic episodes in the history of the international working class. Liam Young looks back at the events leading up to and after the uprising.
IN 1956, thousands of Hungarians rose up against a Stalinist dictatorship in an attempt to win democratic control over their country and its institutions. The Soviet leaders in Moscow portrayed these events as a counter-revolution but nothing could have been further from the truth.
At the end of the Second World War Hungary was one of many East European countries forced to establish a ‘socialist’ state in the image of the Soviet Union. Intervention from the Kremlin in all aspects of Hungarian politics helped the Communist Party take over the levers of power. Crucial to this was the party’s control of Hungary’s secret police, the AVO. This organisation included many of the old fascist security services and employed many of the same methods.
The Soviet Union exploited the newly formed ‘socialist’ states.
If the Hungarian government did not comply with the wishes of the Kremlin they quickly received threats from Moscow. Any dissent was met with repression and persecution. Over 400,000 Hungarian Communist Party members were expelled and hundreds executed.

Death of Stalin
When Stalin died in March 1953 hope began to rise amongst the workers of Eastern Europe that things would change for the better. The political upheaval that followed had repercussions across the whole of the region. In East Germany a strike against production quotas led to 100,000 people demonstrating. In Poland workers and students in Poznan rioted against Soviet control and even in the Soviet Union itself there were strikes. The pressure from below could be felt in the Kremlin and the Soviet leaders realised the need to at least give the impression of reform.
In Hungary the Communist Party was led by Carl Rakosi whose regime was one of the most Stalinist. In 1953 the Hungarian Communist leaders were summoned to Moscow where Rakosi’s hard-line approach was denounced.
The Soviets instructed the Hungarians to replace him as Premier with Imre Nagy who was seen as more soft-line. Once in charge, Nagy introduced his ‘New Course’ which stopped the enforced collectivisation of farms and a re-direction in industry towards the production of consumer goods. There was also an amnesty for political prisoners, the closure of internment camps and a relaxation on censorship.
This led to many people openly expressing a desire for more democracy. This was too much for the Kremlin and within 18 months a clampdown was ordered. Nagy was ousted and Rakosi was returned. The ‘New Course’ was denounced and Nagy was expelled from the party.
In early 1956 Khrushchev made a ‘secret speech’ to the congress of the Soviet Communist Party denouncing Stalin and his crimes. It marked a retreat from the ‘cult of personality’ for the USSR leadership and included the statement: “It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god.”
This caused an explosion of political debate in Hungary.
In April 1956 a group of communist youths formed the Petofi Circle. This discussion group began to organise open debates. Soon thousands were attending these meetings to discuss living conditions and in particular the activities of the hated AVO.

Strikes
In June a wave of strikes broke out in protest at the brutal suppression of striking workers in Poland. In a bid to calm the growing storm Rakosi was again replaced, this time with Erno Gero who was different in name only.
On 6 October the people got a true feeling of their power. The government had been forced into conceding that many victims of the purges had been convicted on fabricated charges. Over 200,000 people turned up to the reburial of the executed communist Lazlo Rajk. The ceremony soon turned into an anti-government demo with 200-300 students marching and chanting anti-Stalinist slogans.
On 22 October, a number of student meetings took place, most notably in Budapest Technological University where a set of 16 demands were worked out. A demonstration was called for the next day in support of the demands and to show solidarity with the striking workers in Poland. It was unprecedented for a demonstration to be organised without the Communist Party’s involvement and anticipation swept through Budapest.
The demonstration marched peacefully through Budapest with the students carrying placards and handing out their demands. Among them was the call for the withdrawal of Russian troops, free and open elections, amnesty for political prisoners, and a free and independent student organisation. As the day progressed factory workers and Budapest residents joined the demonstration swelling the numbers to tens of thousands.
In the early evening the demonstration marched to the parliament building. A section of the march broke off and headed to the city park where they pulled down a statue of Stalin. The Communist leader Gero then made a radio speech denouncing the demonstrators as enemies of the people and threatening arrests unless they dispersed. This only enraged the demonstrators who called for the deposed premier Nagy to come and address them at the parliament building.
Meanwhile another section of the crowd marched to the radio station calling for their demands to be broadcast. At the radio station a delegation was admitted but arrested, in the ensuing struggle the demonstrators gained control of the building but only after the AVO had killed dozens of people.

Battleground
That night as Budapest developed into a battleground between the AVO and demonstrators, armament factory workers distributed weapons to the crowd. Within hours hundreds of thousands were on the streets. Panic-stricken Gero called in Soviet troops in an effort to quell the uprising. By the next day the workers and students were organising resistance against Russian tanks. The battles raged until the end of October. Many Hungarian army units sided with the uprising and there were even instances of Russian troops fraternising with workers and students.
When the fighting receded Imre Nagy once again found himself Premier alongside Janos Kadar who had taken over as secretary of the Communist Party.
After negotiations with Moscow, Nagy declared the formation of a new government, the end of the one-party state and the withdrawal of Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. As the revolution spread, workers’ councils and revolutionary committees were being set up all over Hungary.
On 2 November fresh Soviet forces arrived and a second assault began two days’ later. This time it was across the whole country.
In the face of overwhelming odds, the workers answered with courage and determination. Fighting alongside them were children and students, even soldiers and police. Barricades were built and tanks were attacked from all sides. Although the Soviets were met with stern opposition in central Budapest it was in the outlying workers’ districts that fighting was fiercest. Eventually though even these areas fell and armed resistance ceased. Backed by the Red Army, a Janos Kadar-led puppet regime was installed in an attempt to re-establish totalitarian rule.
Meantime the workers councils that had been formed in Budapest and in many other working class towns called for strike action. With the onset of winter the Kadar government became desperate to get the factories and mines back to work. However despite arrests, torture and executions the workers held firm to their demands and strikes continued. Although many of the demands were for national independence and increased democracy, there was also demands for free trade unions and more power for the workers councils.

Workers councils
By mid-November, workers’ councils had become the only organs of decision-making that Hungarians recognised. It was the councils that negotiated with the Red Army and Kadar on behalf of the workers. As the strikes continued and the influence and power of the workers’ organisations grew, negotiation was replaced with repression.
On 2 November, Russian tanks had prevented a national meeting of the workers’ councils. On 11 December, the leadership of the Greater Budapest workers’ council was arrested, resulting in further protests in support of the council’s demands. By mid- December, the leading figures from the councils were in jail and most of Hungary was back under government control.
As the revolution receded, tens of thousands of refugees left Hungary while thousands ended up in Soviet prison camps. In February 1958, it was announced that Imre Nagy, who had been under arrest for over a year, had been tried and executed for counter-revolutionary crimes.
In Europe, the Hungarian revolution had a devastating effect on the Communist Parties. The pro-workers’ facade was damaged forever and a flood of members left the parties of France, Italy and Britain. In Hungary, the Soviet system may have been saved by the tanks, but the suppression of the uprising revealed the true nature of Stalinism to a whole generation of workers, and in the long run helped seal its fate.