When Israeli denial of Palestinian existence becomes genocidal

The early Zionists denied the existence of Palestinians in 1882 when they arrived; it is even more shocking to find out that they deny their existence — beyond sporadic ghettoized communities — in 2013.

By Ilan Pappe

University of Exeter | Electronic Intifada

In a regal interview he gave in April to the Israeli press, on the eve of the state’s  "Independence Day,” Shimon Peres, the current president of Israel, said the following:

“I remember how it all began. The whole state of Israel is a millimeter of the whole Middle East. A statistical error, barren and disappointing land, swamps in the north, desert in the south, two lakes, one dead and an overrated river. No natural resource apart from malaria. There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world? This is a miracle: a land built by people” (Maariv, 14 April 2013).

This fabricated narrative, voiced by Israel’s number one citizen and spokesman, highlights how much the historical narrative is part of the present reality. This presidential impunity sums up the reality on the eve of the 65th commemoration of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine. The disturbing fact of life, 65 years on, is not that the figurative head of the so-called Jewish state, and for that matter almost everyone in the newly-elected Israeli government and parliament, subscribe to such views. The worrying and challenging reality is the global immunity given to such impunity.

Peres’ denial of the native Palestinians and his reselling in 2013 of the landless people mythology exposes the cognitive dissonance in which he dwells: he denies the existence of approximately twelve million Palestinian people living in and near to the land to which they belong. History shows that the human consequences are horrific and catastrophic when powerful people, heading powerful outfits such as a modern state, deny the existence of a people who are very much present and have been present for centuries.

This denial was there at the beginning of Zionism and led to the ethnic cleansing in 1948. And it is there today, which may lead to similar disasters in the future — unless stopped immediately.

Cognitive dissonance

The perpetrators of the 1948 ethnic cleansing were the Zionist settlers who came to Palestine before the Second World War, like Polish-born Shimon Peres. They denied the existence of the native people they encountered, who had lived there for hundreds of years, if not more. The Zionists did not possess the power at the time to settle the cognitive dissonance they experienced: their conviction that the land was people-less despite the presence of so many native Palestinians living there.

They almost solved the dissonance when they expelled as many Palestinians as they could in 1948 — and were left with only a minority of Palestinians within "the Jewish state."

But the Zionist greed for territory and ideological conviction that much more of Palestine had to be annexed in order to have a viable Jewish state, led to constant conspiring, and eventually military operations to enlarge the state.

With the creation of “Greater Israel” following the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the dissonance returned. The solution however could not easily be resolved this time by the force of ethnic cleansing. The number of Palestinians in the territories was larger, their assertiveness and liberation movement were forcefully present on the ground, and even the most cynical and traditionally pro-Israeli actors on the international scene recognized their existence.

The dissonance was resolved in a different way. The land without people was any part of the "greater Israel” ("eretz Israel”) which the state was determined to Judaize in the pre-1967 boundaries, or annex from the territories occupied in 1967. The land with people is in the Gaza Strip and some enclaves in the West Bank as well as inside Israel. The myth of the land without people is destined to expand incrementally in the future, causing the number of people to shrink as a direct consequence of this encroachment.

This incremental ethnic cleansing is hard to notice unless one contextualizes it as a historical process. The noble attempt by the more conscientious individuals and groups in the West and inside Israel to focus on the here and now — when it comes to Israeli policies — is doomed to be weakened by the contemporary contextualization, not the historical one.

Comparing Palestine to other places was always a problem. But with the murderous wars in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, it becomes an even more serious challenge. The latest Israeli closure, political arrest, or murder of a Palestinian youth are horrific crimes, but in the realm of contemporary contextualization, they pale in comparison to nearby or far-away killing fields and areas of colossal atrocities.

Criminal narrative

The comparison is very different when it is viewed historically however, and it is in this context that we should realize the criminality of Peres’ narrative which is as horrific as the occupation — and potentially far worse. For the president of Israel, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, there were never Palestinians before he initiated in 1993 the Oslo process — and when he did, they were only the ones living — in a small part of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In his discourse, the Israeli president already eliminated most of the Palestinians. If you did not exist when Peres came to Palestine, you definitely do not exist while he is the president in 2013. This elimination is the point where ethnic cleansing becomes genocidal. When you are eliminated from the history books and the discourse of the top Israeli leaders and Nobel laureates, there is always the potential for your physical elimination. Invisible people are much easier to kill.

It happened before. The early Zionists, including the current president, talked about the transfer of the Palestinians long before they actually extruded many of them in 1948. The Israeli vision of a de-Arabized Palestine appeared in every Zionist diary, journal and inner conversation since the beginning of the 20th century. If one talks about nothingness in a place where there is plenty, it can be a case of willful ignorance. But if one talks about nothingness as an undeniable reality, it is only a matter of power and opportunity before the vision becomes reality.

Denial continues
Peres’ interview on the eve of the 65th commemoration of the Nakba is chilling not because it condones any violent act against the Palestinians, but because the Palestinians have entirely disappeared from his self-congratulatory admiration for the Zionist achievement in Palestine.

It is bewildering to learn that the early Zionists denied the existence of Palestinians in 1882 when they arrived; it is even more shocking to find out that they deny their existence — beyond sporadic ghettoized communities — in 2013.

In the past, this denial preceded the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians — a crime that only partially succeeded, but for which the perpetrators were never brought to justice. This is probably why the denial continues. But this time, it is not the existence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians which is at stake, but that of almost six million who live inside historic Palestine and another five and half million living outside Palestine.

One would think only a madman could ignore millions and millions of people, many of them under his military or apartheid rule, while he actively and ruthlessly disallows the return of the rest to their homeland. But when the madman receives the best weapons from the US, Nobel Peace Prizes from Oslo and preferential treatment from the European Union, one wonders how seriously we should take the Western references to the leaders of Iran and North Korea as dangerous and lunatic?

Lunacy is associated these days, it seems, with possession of nuclear arms in Korean and Iranian hands. Well, even on that score, Israel, the local madman in the Middle East passes the test. Who knows, maybe in 2014 it would not be the Israeli cognitive dissonance that would be solved, but the Western one: how to reconcile a universal position of human and civil rights with the favored position Israel in general and Shimon Peres in particular receives in the West?

Ilan Pappe is professor of history at the University of Exeter in Britain, and the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. 

***