Arab Israeli Palestinian Tragedy Blog

A sound basis for a realistic peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians must include recognition of the brutal ethnic cleansing that the Palestinians endured during 1948 and 1949. Two hundred Palestinian villages were occupied and their inhabitants violently expelled during the five months prior to the end of the British Mandate, and creation of the State of Israel, on May 15th 1948. “. . . there is no denying that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 [of the Palestinians by the Israelis] has been eradicated almost totally from the collective global memory and erased from the world’s conscience.” See The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe, 2006, page 9. Only through truth and reconciliation, between the Palestinians and the Israelis, can this elusive peace process begin. Once this process is seen in the Middle East to begin, it will become much easier to begin to resolve the Iraq quagmire.

References to the European Holocaust are illogical, and fraught with danger, when used in a Middle East setting. Primo Levi (an Italian-Jewish Holocaust survivor) said it best when he called the Palestinians “The Jews of the Middle East.” The Palestinians had no responsibility for the Holocaust; however, they have been made to pay for it.

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