Western silence needs to be confronted: Ilan Pappe on the Nakba, Gaza and inclusive solidarity

Shehdeh Taha, 85, who experienced the Nakba in 1948, was displaced again when Israel destroyed his family house on 14 May 2023

Ilan Pappé writes in The Palestine Chronicle:

Once more the Gaza Strip is bombarded from the air, land, and sea, and, once more, Israeli inhumanity and cruelty are met with Western silence. We have written countless times about it. And imagine how many times a generation older than ours cried out against this injustice dating back to the days of the Nakba, if not even before it.

Recent scholarship has shown that since the end of the first world war and up to the Nakba, the various inquiry commissions sent by either the League of Nations or the British government warned their senders that the continued colonization of Palestine would prove to be disastrous to its native people; in the words of the 1930 Shaw inquiry commission, “the Jewish land purchase constitute a present danger to the Arabs’ national survival”.

The British believed that the limitation they posed on the entry of Zionist immigrants into the country and severely restricting the purchase of land by the Zionist institutions would save the Palestinians. However, by the time they began to implement that policy, it was too little too late. More importantly, the British government in Palestine was aware of the intention of the Zionist movement to take as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible; and yet provided that movement economic, military, and political power to carry out the dispossession of the Palestinian when the Mandate ended.

During the Nakba, when the Zionist forces began their ethnic cleansing operation in February 1948 with the forceful eviction of three villages around Qaysariya, the British officials and army were still there, bound to protect the lives and property of the Palestinians according to the Mandate charter and the United Nations partition resolution.

But the local British representatives stood by when the ethnic cleansing escalated with the urbicide (the systematic destruction of towns and neighborhoods) that raged in April 1948. In some cases, they even assisted the Zionist forces in implementing the ethnic cleansing. This stage in the dispossession turned more than a quarter of a million Palestinians into refugees which forced a reluctant Arab world to send its troops to save the rest. But it did so only when Britain left Palestine on 15 May 1948. By then, such intervention was useless.

Before and after the end of the Mandate, Western journalists and emissaries of organizations such as the UN and the International Red Cross were present on the ground. American journalists embedded with the Zionist forces reported massacres in al-Lid and other places and yet the war crimes were not condemned; neither did the International Red Cross publicize what it knew was unfolding on the ground. Its internal report shows that it was appalled by the way Israelis treated Palestinians, as young as 14 years old, who were incarcerated in forced labor camps. These reports also registered the intentional poisoning of Acre’s water with typhus. All this information was shelved until historians such as Salman Abu Sitta found them in the archives.

This silence sent an important message to the new state of Israel: crimes such as ethnic cleansing – which were condemned in the very same year by the 1948 famous Declaration of Human Rights – are allowed in the case of the Jewish state. The absence of any Western or UN response continued when Israel erased any trace of Palestinian culture and life in the wake of the cleansing operations, by building Jewish settlements and planting recreational parks on the ruins of Palestinian villages.

The history of Western silence continued into the 1950s – in the face of the killings of Palestinians who tried to retrieve their possessions in the early 1950, the harsh military rule imposed on the Palestinian minority inside Israel, and the massacres of Qibyah and Kafr Qassem.

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