Ilan Pappé’s Latest Lie

Elder of Ziyon has information on Ilan Pappé’s recent conclusion that the 1929 pogrom conducted by Arabs in many parts of Mandatory Palestine was in fact a response to violence that was started by Jews: “Ilan Pappé makes up a new lie to justify Arab massacres of Jews as far back as 1929,” Elder of Ziyon, February 5, 2024:

In a Zoom symposium for intellectuals, most of whom are Palestinians, Pappé said that Zionism, since its inception, has been working to eliminate the Palestinian people and their cause and not to coexist with them.

When the Zionist movement began, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the “Palestinian people” did not exist. They came into existence — as a name, as a notion — in the mid-1960s, as part of a stratagem to convince the world that the Arab opposition to Israel was not a vast gang-up by the Arabs on the tiny Jewish state, but rather, a national liberation struggle of the “Palestinian people” to regain land that supposedly had been stolen from them. Zionism never tried to “eliminate” the Arabs. In the Mandatory period, Jews arrived and bought land, often at grossly inflated prices, from Arab and Turkish absentee landlords living in Amman, Beirut, and Istanbul. In 1940, for example, Jews were buying scarcely arable land in Mandatory Palestine for the same price that was being paid for the richest farmland in the world, in Iowa. Not a single dunam was taken from the Arabs; everything was paid for. The Jews were allowed by the British administrators of the Mandate for Palestine to settle on state and waste lands — not owned by Arabs — as set out in Article 6 of the Mandate. Just before and during the 1948 war, Arab leaders encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave the area, to get out of the way of the fighting; they were assured they would soon be able to return with the triumphant Arab armies, and take over all the property left behnd the Jews. It was not to be. Instead, 700,000 Arabs remained abroad as “Arab refugees.” Jews eventually took over the lands that those Arabs had left behind. What else should they have done — left the fields to lie fallow, the houses to crumble into dust? Some of the 800,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries, leaving behind property worth billions, were placed on those lands. It was a just outcome.

Pappé continued in his lecture: “Zionism has tried to displace and kill the Palestinian people since 1929, during the Nakba in 1948, and after the Nakba and the (1967) Naksa and all the attacks that followed until this day. This was clearly demonstrated in the aggressive war on the Gaza Strip, and they will continue their aggressive approach. But the Palestinian National Movement and the Palestinian people always surprised the Zionists and rose again despite the endless financial, military and political support from Western colonialism for Zionism and the Zionist entity.”

Everything he says is a lie, and an easily proven lie. Indeed, most of what he claims has already been debunked.

First, what he describes as “the aggressive war in the Gaza Strip” was not a war that Israel wanted or expected. The IDF is in Gaza with only one goal: to prevent Hamas from ever again being able to harm Israelis, the way its operatives did on October 7, when 3,000 of them pushed into Israel and proceeded to behead babies, burn children alive, rape, torture, and murder young girls, slice the breasts off women, gouge out the eyes, and cut off he genitalia, from men, murder children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. Has Pappé forgotten what happened that day? Does he think Israel should not have gone to war against Hamas? Is he not moved by how the country has come together, how 360,000 reservists have shown up to do their duty? What would he suggest the Israelis should have done, if not try to dismantle Hamas?

Is Pappé willing to recognize that the IDF makes enormous efforts warn civilians, whenever possible, to leave areas, and buildings, that the IDF is about to target? Is Pappé aware that the average civilian-to-combatant ratio of deaths in wars since World War II has been 9:1; that in the Iraq War, the Americans managed to bring that ratio down to 3:1, and in Afghanistan, to 5:1, but the IDF, even though it is fighting in a densely-populated urban area, has managed to bring that ratio down to 3:2 — that is, three civilian deaths for every two combatants killed? No other army has ever come close to such a low ratio; this testifies to the care Israel takes to warn civilians, through messaging, emailing, telephoning, leafletting, and use of “knock -on-the-roof” technique. Six million leaflets, four million messages, and 72,000 personal phone calls have been used to persuade civilians in Gaza to move out of harm’s way.

In 1929, it was the Arabs who attacked Jews all over Mandatory Palestine, especially in Hebron, Motza, Safed, and Jerusalem. No Jews tried to “displace and kill” the “Palestinian people,” as Pappé claims. A total of 133 Jews were murdered, and several hundred left wounded, in attacks in several dozen cities, towns, and kibbutzim. Almost all the Jews were unarmed, though a handful managed to kill those who had come to kill them. It was the British police, using live fire, who after six days managed to bring the murderous marauders under control.

The largest loss of life in 1929 was in Hebron, where Arabs raped, mutilated, tortured, and killed 67 Jewish men, women, and children. In Safed, like Hebron one of the four holy cities of Judaism, the Arab attacks were equally brutal.