Ilan Pappe is one of the few Israelis to have the courage to look at Israel's original sin, and he has paid for that courage. This book details the planning and execution of the theft of the Palestinians' land by the Zionists. Well written and documented, by an author who can hardly be called "anti-semitic".

It is laughable to read such a good book, and then come here and see how the ignorance fills the review-o-sphere with the diatribe. Israel is committing the same atrocities against the Palestinians as the Germans committed against them. The only difference is that they have a powerful lobby and sympathy of the United States. If it wasn't for the U.S. Israel would have been wiped out already, begging for scraps of another land. This isn't the bible, the land is not the divine right of Jews in Israel, and they should stop being so hypocritical. I am not an anti-Semite, as my mother is Jewish and my sister-in-law is an Israeli born Jew, and they both agree that the modern day Zionist movement is the antithesis of real Jewry. This is a 5 star book, but I chose to list it as 1 star, so people can read the truth on these reviews.

This book and many others like it can be classified as hate fiction. It is not based on historical accuracy or merit any real consideration as an academic source. The book is trash. It is a book of hatred and lies.
Buying this book is contributing to more hatred and violence. I am not pro-Israel but find this book insulting. I had hoped to learn something but realize it is only a propaganda too for Islamic extremist.

Pappe is an anachronistic stalinist who has made a career out of his sensationalist anti-Zionist viewpoint. His opinion is so one-sided and obvious in its bias, it serves no purpose at all for serious study of the issues - just warms the hearts of Israel's sworn enemies...as if peace can be achieved by rooting for the destruction of one side...pure rubbish ...

Ilan Pappe has produced an amazing and concise summary of the events of 1947-1949, and has shown how badly we've all been taken in by the Israeli propaganda machine. What had once seemed heroic is now despicable.

The ethnic cleansing actions described are horrendous. I understand now the basis for what the Palestinian leadership has been saying for years. I have no sympathy for terrorists, but that now includes the Founders of Israel.

The inner circle of founders (Ben-Gurion, Dayan, Rabin, among others) are plainly portrayed by Pappe as central figures in the systematic uprooting of the Palestinian people, and the destruction of their homeland. Others not mentioned, such as Menachem Begin, are implicated in the atrocities by their known membership in the Haganah, Irgun, or Stern Gang. Non-military activists such as Golda Meir were aware of the cleansing and did nothing to stop it.

Pappe has meticulously documented his sources, searching the national archives to put together an impressive array of incriminating documentation. Perhaps the most surprising source for much of the material on the inner circle is Ben-Gurion's personal diary. Is it, and the other documents - still available for scholarly study?

Based on reading this one book, I've come to believe we need a world-wide re-thinking of how to deal with the Middle East.

This is an excellent description, though not a blow-by-blow account, of the 1948 ethnic cleansing or Nakba. The author uses Zionist materials to show how the plan to expel the Palestinians was developed and carried out. I would have liked a more detailed description of the line from Plan Aleph to Plan Daleth, the final solution used by the Haganah.

At its birth, the official narrative goes, the State of Israel was confronted with unfriendly neighbors, and a hostile indigenous people (the Palestinians) who sought to destroy it. Faced with such overwhelming odds, we are told, the 'little state that could' fought on to independence and established the first "liberal democracy" in the Middle East.

There is no doubt this story is compelling: a scrappy underdog cast in our own image, a feckless foreign foe, and an 'against all odds victory' . Yet for the serious student of history this version of events falls woefully short and conspicuously fails to answer why a war of independence resulted in the displacement of almost 700,000 Palestinian civilians?

This critical question is the focus of Illan Pappe's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine", a remarkably well researched book that draws mainly on Israeli military and government archives to put the old historical canards to rest. Pappe focuses on the Israeli war plan for 1948, Plan Dalet, and uncovers a chilling trail of memorandums and letters full of the official language used to plan and carry out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

One sees first hand the meticulous care that Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his closest advisers used to ensure that the nascent state had the minimum number of Palestinians possible. Military operations named "Broom" and "Scissors" often carried instructions to "purify" captured territories, which commanders on the ground dutifully did by forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and destroying their villages.

Yet despite the litany of atrocities and expulsions that the book chronicles, one can't help but come away from reading it hopeful that by uncovering the past we come one step closer to reconciling the seemingly intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Great Israeli historian speaks the truth with much detail! Tis' about the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population during the creation of the modern Israeli state. Check it!

To gain an idea of the dilemma in Palestine/Israel and the behavior of the both parties over the past 60 years, this is a great starting point.
It give a clear and precise detail of the Nakbar, (the catastrophe).
References are made in many volumes of the Nakbar but here in this book is a is a detailed history of events that happened in 1948 and they go a long way in explaining current day attitudes and behavior of both parties.
I would suggest that it is a must read for any one wishing to gain a reasonable understanding of the situation in Palestine/Israel today and how it came to be so.

A real eye opener.

This book may be a little difficult for some to come to terms with and for others even more difficult to accept. It is something that has been placed in the psyche of us in Europe after the horrors of the holocaust that any criticism of the state of Israel or Zionism is equal to anti semitism. That the state of Israel was created out of the ashes of the second world war in order to provide a safe and free land for Jews the world over and a place of return for the Jews to their historical homeland.

This book dispels the myth. Pappe rather presents the establishment of the state of Israel as being not only created by men whose ideology was every equal of the extreme nationalism that European Jews had suffered under but also created out of the ethnic cleansing of the native population of that land, the Palestinians.

Pappe begins his book by providing us with with definitions of ethnic cleansing quoting from the United Nations amongst others. unfortunately his use of wikipedia, an 'encyclopedia' by his own admissions is edited by anyone in order to further his argument greatly diminishes his own introduction. While he may choose to use this in his own words to gauge public opinion on how genocide and ethnic cleansing is defined the fact that wikipedia is more of a soap box for anyone with a grudge makes the website frankly worthless.

According to Pappe, ethnic cleansing is something that requires planning and pre-thought before execution and in the first few chapters Pappe documents how Zionist leaders wrote up maps of Palestinian areas, their populations and numbers. Pappe is also quick to point out however, how some Palestinian leaders were only too happy to sell off land to Zionist settlers believing that the greater threat to their land was the colonialism of the British. For some, the Zionists were the poor of Europe and offered little threat, little were they to know that these people would be one and the same who orchestrated their own extinction from their own lands.

Pappe goes on to examine the execution of the Zionist plans of forced expulsion of Palestinians under threats of murder, how the response of Arab militias resulted in further excuses for Zionist outrages on civilian populations. Pappe gives examples of Palestinian villages of both Christian and Muslim who were wiped from the map. Further examples of man (Defined as aged between 10 and 50) being separated from their women folk and executed. Examples of mass rape, destruction of Churches, Mosques, orchards are also given.

Another interesting point is the Arab-Israeli war which Pappe defines as a 'phony war' Pointing out that Jordan had no intention of defending Palestinians rather in protecting its agreed annexation of the West Bank. How the poorly armed and trained Arab armies were no match for the Zionist forces due to the Egyptians while large in numbers (Swelled by the Muslim brotherhood whose lack of any military training made them more a liability than help) The Syrians lack of modern arms, the Lebanese whose numbers were so small they were more concerned with holding onto their own land and Iraqis. Most of these forces were tied down by their own political leaders who had no intentions of seeing them defend the Palestinian people.

I believe it was Robert Fisk in his book 'Pity the nation' who once pointed out the irony of the victims of genocide often being the most enthusiastic perpetrators of it. It is interesting that most of the criticism of this book is that it is 'anti semitic' (Strange considering the author is Jewish!) and reminds me of how Serbs would point out the massacres that were committed against their people in World War 2 by Croatian militias as though that somehow justifies the slaughter of thousands in Bosnia and Kosovo. Similarly Zionists use the holocaust to deflect war crimes in Lebanon and the ethnic cleansing of an entire people in Palestine.

Thankfully Pappe has brought this to the worlds attention in a book that while filled with information that will be shocking and disturbing is also clear and easy to read.

Ilan Pappe's ground-breaking investigation into the origins of the Middle East conflict details the full horror of the crimes committed against the Palestinian people in 1948/9, victims of `ethnic cleansing' by any meaningful definition of the term. In the 1990s both the US State Department and the United Nations, faced with the situation in former Yugoslavia, acknowledged that expulsion of communities by force and the eradication of a nation's history so as to impose ethnic rule on a subject population was unacceptable behaviour in international law. The relevance of this to the foundation of the State of Israel is made clear at the outset, and Pappe's masterly demolition of the official myths deals appropriately with the architect of the cleansing, David Ben-Gurion, hitherto exonerated by selective and incomplete history, the propaganda saturation whereby thug metamorphoses into national hero. Israeli author Amos Oz, for example, has described him as `a modern day King David' and `a mercurial man, almost violently vivacious'.

Almost? Under his stewardship a group of confreres known as the `Consultancy' came together in 1947 to plot the dispossession of the Palestinians. This was against the background of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 which so disproportionately partitioned Palestine in favour of the Jewish minority that it was bound to court Arab rejection. This same group went on to plan all aspects of the ethnic cleansing, Plan Dalet being the clearest outlining of the procedure to be followed once the British had left at the end of the Mandate period. Ben-Gurion's 1947 utterance to the effect that it would be better to expel the Arab population because `only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state' showed a gravely impaired sensitivity which would be more chillingly highlighted once the terror got under way.

Deir Yassin was not the period's only atrocity, and the main body of Pappe's investigation describes how the terrorist Stern Gang, Haganah and Irgun forces had their work cut out. Early attempts at eviction of the native population include that inflicted on the village of Khisas which left 15 dead, `a successful operation' according to Ben-Gurion, while prior to an attack on Balad al-Shayk one local Israeli commander was ordered to kill as many of the male inhabitants as possible but spare the women and children. At subsequent meetings of the Consultancy it was decided that this scrupulous distinction be abandoned lest it compromise the effectiveness of future operations, and Ben-Gurion approved a series of planned attacks on Arab villages absolving his forces of any need `to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty'. Besides Deir Yassin other towns and villages subject to invasion and massacre are dwelt upon in suitably harrowing detail but there are many which, presumably for reasons of space, are mentioned in name only. They are less likely to stick in the memory, but we may reflect on what further human tragedies these mere passing mentions encapsulate and wonder how Israel's obscene `purity of arms' oxymoron ever gained credibility.

For intruder to masquerade as victim obviously the true victim had to be demonised. Far from being the deadly menace of Zionist propaganda which had to be nipped in the bud to avert a `Second Holocaust', the native Palestinian population in the villages was easy prey to the marauding Israeli forces. Indeed, Ben-Gurion admitted privately that `the decisive majority of them (the Palestinians) do not want to fight us'. At no time did the Arab volunteers from outside Palestine or the ill-equipped and inexperienced paramilitary outfits within seriously threaten the Jewish community, and the ineffective and uncoordinated policies of the Arab countries gave the lie to Zionist claims of encirclement by a hostile league poised to launch a concerted attack. In an early chapter Pappe discusses Jordan's agreement not to take any military action against the Jewish state in return for being granted control over what is now the West Bank.

All of the above is circumscribed by chapters which place the Catastrophe in the context of the region's history over the past century. The Palestinians' sense of betrayal following the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the establishment of the British Mandate in 1923 led to uprisings of which the known participants would be singled out in 1948 for bloody reprisal, and more recently the false hopes raised by the Oslo Accords and the Camp David summit again pointed up Israel's refusal to acknowledge the scale of the 1948 tragedy. As part of the state-sanctioned cover-up - the `memoricide' - of that year's key events the Jewish National Fund's cosmetic `greening' of the sites of devastated Palestinian villages is described in some detail. Pappe also emphasises the Palestinians' right of return, specified by UN Resolution 194 of the same year, as the sine qua non of any lasting solution.

Given the author's recourse to certain highly revealing sources `The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' will surely rank as a cornerstone in the field of Palestinian studies. In his endnotes Pappe includes references to Ben-Gurion's diary and the more inclusive Ben-Gurion Archives which house correspondence relating to the meetings of the Consultancy. Various other Israeli archives are consulted including those of the Haganah and Israeli Defence Forces. The evidence so amassed is damning but, of course, unlikely to impact on the stunted flat-earther mentality that would rather take comfort in sanitised historical rewrites than face uncomfortable facts. Though not quoted by Pappe the following words of the affectionately titled (by his Consultancy minions) `Old Man' may be cited here as they at least show honest insight into the true nature and consequences of the Zionist endeavour;

`If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country, It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?'

The Ethnic Cleansing was incredibly well written and researched. Often, books of this kind are hastily thrown together; this is the exception. Ilan Pappe is a master at gluing together half-truths and non-truths. This is a work that will give anti-Semites worldwide cause to foam at the mouth. A casual review of historical facts shows this screed for what it is. For example, the only ethnic cleansing in the past century occurred in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Gaza, and Syria. Not only in most cases were Jews forcibly expelled, their land confiscated, but laws were enacted making it a crime - sometimes death - to sell property to a jew. If only Mr. Pappe had done more research in Gaza or tried to buy a house in Jordan. He wouldn't have written anything different; but he might not have survived to write it.

The Ethnic Cleansing was incredibly well written and researched. Often, books of this kind are hastily thrown together; this is the exception. Ilan Pappe is a master at gluing together half-truths and non-truths. This is a work that will give anti-Semites worldwide cause to foam at the mouth. A casual review of historical facts shows this screed for what it is. For example, the only ethnic cleansing in the past century occurred in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Gaza, and Syria. Not only in most cases were Jews forcibly expelled, their land confiscated, but laws were enacted making it a crime - sometimes death - to sell property to a jew. If only Mr. Pappe had done more research in Gaza or tried to buy a house in Jordan. He wouldn't have written anything different; but he might not have survived to write it.

Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is a book that should have been written 60 years ago. How is it that history can be so Stalinized that to speak the truth about it is a radical act? In the case of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the disparity between the lie and the truth is so vast that many refuse to accept even the possibility that their opinions, values, and thoughts on the matter are founded on a complete and utter lie. In 1948 the Zionist leadership of Israel expelled and massacred the native Palestinian population. For 60 years the growing millions of refugees have been denied access to their land, homes, and of course the loved ones murdered by Zionist troops, and refused compensation for their losses.

Pappe's book is an account of the "war" of 1948 from the perspective of Israeli military archives and oral testimony. It is a history of what really happened in 1948 and 1949, and the reason the "peace process" in the Middle East has nothing to do with real peace. Pappe recounts the atrocities committed by the Zionists in their zeal to establish a Jewish-only state: the terror, intimidation, murder, and rape that accompanied such a 'high' cause. It is a disturbing account of the genesis of evil (ponerogenesis) in social movements; of corruption in high places; of ruthless and inhuman behavior and a stunning lack of collective conscience.

Where did the Zionist movement go wrong? Pappe identifies the root cause briefly in a description of the callous nature of some of the IDF leaders and soldiers. He is describing psychopaths (as defined by Robert Hare, who wrote Without Conscience). When social movements fail to identify pathological behavior as such, the moral content of the group's ideology is twisted and corrupted to achieve goals the complete opposite of original intent. And the result is given perfect expression in the legacy the Zionists have left in their wake.

Ilan Pappe wrote this book because no one else did. His voice of conscience is a testament to the voice of truth and good that refuses to be trammeled by the callous and power-hungry.

Ilan Pappe is (or rather was) a senior lecturer of political science at Haifa University. (He has now taken up a position in exile at Exeter University.) He has written what may prove to be the definitive record of the Caesarean operation by which the State of Israel was born. His book is a celebration of moral courage in that his history of the catastrophe (the "nakba") that befell the Palestinian Arabs, runs entirely counter to the officially propagated mythology most generally embraced by his compatriots.

The British Mandate in Palestine ended in May 1948. Simultaneously, the state of Israel formally declared its independence - but not its borders (a declaration, for which the Palestinians are still waiting.) In fact, Israel had been operating as a state, in all but name, from November 1947, when UN Resolution No 181 declared the intention to partition the country into two states. The UN Resolution that doomed their society, had been passed without any participation being invited from the Palestinian Arabs and in the face of their unanimous rejection.

As the British forces withdrew, the Arab League nations reluctantly decided to send units of their military to the assistance of their Palestinian neighbours. One of the central tenets of Zionist mythology is that this invasion posed a dire threat to the existence of Israel. The myth goes on to maintain that the Palestinians became refugees as a result of their treasonable welcome to these invaders and their obedience to instructions from the Arab High Command to leave their homes in order to provide a clear battlefield on which the Jews could all be slain.

In his first chapters, Pappe reviews the history of the long-proclaimed intention of the Zionist leadership to cleanse Palestine of its Arab population. The central portion of the book describes, in painstaking and painful detail, almost village by village, how, under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, the Zionists grasped the opportunity presented by the end of WWII to plan and execute that intent.

At the time of the UN Resolution, which gave 55% of the Mandated territory to Israel, the one third of the population who were Jewish (the vast majority of whom were city-based, recent immigrants) owned less than 6% of the land. A year later, the state of Israel held 78% of the land and the vast majority of Palestinians had been uprooted from their homes and dispossessed of their lands.

Pappe documents how, from the time of the November 1947, UN resolution to partition Palestine, until the end of their Mandate in May 1948, the British had stood by while the Jewish terrorist gangs and the official Jewish army, the Hagana (later to merge to become the IDF) cleansed scores of Arab townships, including such major centers as Haifa and Jaffa. During this process, 175,000 to 250,000 Palestinians were evicted from their homes, which were razed by bulldozer and high explosive (not unusually, with their inhabitants still in them.).

The Arab League's intervention, finally decided on at the end of April 1948 and which was designed to strengthen the paltry defences of the remaining Palestinian villages against the Israeli assault, was doomed from the outset. Four months earlier, unbeknown to his Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese and Saudi allies, King Abdullah of Jordan, whose army, they placed in overall command of their rag-tag, under-equipped and half-hearted rescue mission, had concluded a secret agreement with Ben-Gurion to partition the whole of the mandated territory - Jordan to have the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Israel the remainder. Aside from the hopeless inadequacy of the men, materiel and prior preparation of the Arab League forces, on this basis alone, it could never be argued that the Zionist leaders believed that the Arab League intervention posed an existential threat to their fledgling state.

Though the cleansing ("tihur," meaning "cleansing" or "purifying" was the Hebrew word used in the planning documents) had started informally and almost experimentally, by the time "Plan Dalet" was adopted by the Israeli leadership in March 1948, it had been worked up into a careful and systematised routine of terror and destruction. By the end of 1948, this plan was to result in the obliteration of more than five hundred Palestinian villages and townships, many of them centuries old, and the creation, out of a population of just over one million, of more than 750,000 Palestinian refugees. Pappe does not spare his readers the callously efficient brutality of the inducements to flight offered by the Zionist colonists.

Another central pillar of the Zionist myth is that the land was empty and a desert ("a land without people for a people without land"), which was turned by the zealous Israeli settlers into an ecological wonder of blooming desert. Pappe, in his chapter on "The Memoricide of the Nakba," relentlessly details the manner in which the gardens and orchards of the obliterated villages, created and cultivated over generations, were bulldozed and over-planted with pine trees to form the Jewish National Fund's parks and forests. Those historic Arab place names were effaced from all maps and, in cases where the land was resettled by Jewish Israelis, renamed as "historic Talmudic settlements."

In his final two chapters, Pappe, explains the hopelessness of any attempt at a peace process which ignores the events of 1948. He argues that until the Israeli leadership can face up to and openly acknowledge the crimes detailed in his book, and on which their state was founded, the problem of the refugees will never be resolved. There will be no peace for the garrison of what Pappe terms the "white" Fortress that represents "the last postcolonial enclave in the Arab world."

In the meantime, as Pappe points out in his epilogue, the expansionist ambitions and contempt for international law displayed by the State of Israel, remain unchanged and the Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent and the Palestinians under occupation on the West Bank, have reason to fear yet another overt round of ethnic cleansing from their Jewish overlords.

For those to whose cherished beliefs this review run counter, and, indeed, for any one who wishes to see the implementation of policies that will lead to a peaceful and internationally acceptable Middle Eastern home for Jewish people, Pappe's book is essential reading.

In the 1980s, Israel's "new historians" challenged a Zionist narrative that had been publicly unquestioned in Israel and the United States. Among these historians and those of us who have followed their work, Israel could never again be viewed as an underdog David challenged by an Arab Goliath. Since then, much of the debate among those who are increasingly critical of Israel's actions has instead addressed the problem of whether this biblical metaphor should in fact be turned on its head. Although there has for decades been much evidence to support this argument, three recent, well-researched books have made it virtually uncontroversial to assert that the post-World War I Zionist movement, sponsored by superpowers Britain and the U.S. (and indeed by the Soviet Union immediately after World War II), should no more be seen as the underdog than we now see British or Spanish colonialists in relation to Native Americans. In turn, Palestinians can no more be sensibly called anti-Semitic than indigenous Americans can be called "anti-European."

These three books evoke the essence of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict with metaphors of confinement, separation, and exclusion: the "iron cage," the "iron wall," and the "glass wall." In The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Palestinian-American Professor Rashid Khalidi documents British support for a Jewish national movement in Palestine since World War I, and opposition to a Palestinian national movement, most violently during the revolt of 1936-39. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, by which the British ruled from 1923-1948, endorsed a "national home" for the Jewish people while never citing the Palestinians by name. Thus, "the (90%) Arab majority was effectively ignored as a national and political entity."

This favoritism was reflected in the brutal suppression of the Palestinian revolt, which effectively decimated Palestinian leadership and resistance thereafter. It was also reflected in the passivity with which Britain responded after World War II both to Zionist terrorism against the British administration, and to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians which began well before the end of the mandate in May 1948. It has long been conventional Israeli wisdom that the Zionist movement had to confront both a British Goliath and an Arab Goliath, all in the wake of the Holocaust. It is clear that the Zionist David allied itself with the British Goliath, not only overwhelming a Palestinian national movement with profound internal problems, but violently "transferring" over 700,000 Palestinians with relatively little resistance.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has documented the violent expulsion of the Palestinians from the end of 1947 into 1949. It has long been established that the Palestinians fled not in response to "Arab broadcasts," but to violent intimidation by Jewish forces, including unprovoked massacres. Based on Pappé's meticulous research, it is now clear that this ethnic cleansing was premeditated, not retaliatory, and half completed before the feeble intervention of Arab armies in May of 1948. "Official Israeli historiography describes April 1948 as a turning point. . . . If there was a turning point in April, it was the shift from sporadic attacks and counter-attacks on the Palestinian civilian population toward the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing that now followed." This ethnic cleansing was based on a belief among Israeli leaders that an "iron wall" would be required to separate a Jews from Palestinians, who were understood then as now to pose not a military but demographic threat to a Jewish state.

This demographic threat is addressed by Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in the Arab Israeli city of Nazareth, in Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State. The 150,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 are now over 1 million, over 20% of the population, a percentage that increases due to their high birthrate. This presents a problem for a Jewish state that has used a harshly and "legal" discriminatory "glass wall" between its Arab and Jewish citizens that is "needed to cloak the contradictions inherent in the concept of Israel as a `Jewish and democratic' state." These contradictions have been exposed recently by Israeli attacks on unarmed Palestinian civilians during the outbreak of the intifada in 2000, by increasing and unwarranted suspicion of the loyalty of historically quiescent Arab Israelis who demand social equality, and by increasing calls for expulsion by popular right-wing politicians. All of this has resulted in plans to re-draw borders in order to transfer as many as a quarter of Israel's Palestinian citizens to a future Palestinian state, an outcome in no way supported by those effected.

Metaphors of separation, confinement, and exclusion are made literally concrete by the separation wall that has been built inside the occupied West Bank. While largely invisible to Israelis, in areas where visible to Israelis it has been, according to Cook, "painted with murals on the Israeli side, reimagining the view that was now missing while making sure that it was empty of the Palestinian villages that could be seen before its construction." Pappé adds that also eliminated are "the people who live in them."

Pappe's book is one of the finest historical accounts of the Palestinian plight since 1948. For anyone who wishes to truly understand the Israeli/Palestinian conflict today, this is a must read to understand the factual context of this painful situation. I especially appreciated the fact Pappe is a Jewish academic teaching in Israel. His perspective is a riveting and comprehensive view currently censored in all mainstream US media.

What a fantastic historical record of long passed events in the Middle East. Well worth the read for anyone interested in knowing this part of the world and why we have the current troubles 60 years later. This dark secret has barely been touched by the media and other so-called experts but is fully worthy of being brought forward to the world. So the Palestinians are NOT terrorists, they just want their land back-quite simple. Therefore the solution is quite simple. Maybe gw should read this book-he can claim that this is the first book he has ever read-a notable achievement. The Palestinians cause is noble, real and must be satisfactorily resolved otherwise war will continue in the ME forever. So when you hear the pundits talk about the "road map to peace", it will dead end unless the Palestinian situation is cleared up. They were there first, this is their land, so lets solve it. The Zionists have alot of nerve yelling racism at every step of the way, when they themselves have taken racism to the highest levels. Thanks for reading this.

Western Europe and the united states of america have implanted this monster(Zionism) in the midlleast to safeguard it's strategic ambitions in the area.
The very existence of zionism is hostile and is brutal, thus it cannot prevail in the area. A different Israel free of zionism can prevail. The nonproblematic and at times harmonious relationship of arabs and jews through history has been jeoperdized by zionism. Ilan Pappe's book is a document on the basics of zionism.