Excellent article well worth reading all the way through. Gives a good summary of the forgetting of the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the founding of Israel as well as a discussion of how the US inspired peace process has been used to continue the oppression of the Palestinians.
http://www.between-lines.org/archives/2002/oct/Ilan_Pappe.htm<edit>
For Israelis, 1948 is a year in which two things happened which contradict each other: On the one hand, it was the climax of Jewish aspirations to have a state or to fulfill a long dream of returning to a homeland after what they regarded as 2000 years of exile. In other words, it was considered a miraculous event that only positive adjectives could be attached to, and that you could only talk about and remember as a very elated kind of event. On the other hand, it was the worst chapter in Jewish history. Jews did in 1948 in Palestine what Jews had not done anywhere for 2000 years prior. The most evil and most glorious moment converged into one. What Israeli collective memory did was to erase one side of the story in order to co-exist or to live with only the glorious chapter. It was a mechanism for solving an impossible tension between two collective memories.
Because so many of the people who live in Israel lived through 1948, this is not a distant memory. It is not the genocide of the Native Americans in the United States. People know exactly what they did, and they know what others did. Yet they still succeed in erasing it totally from their own memory while struggling rigorously against anyone trying to present the other, unpleasant, story of 1948, in and outside Israel. If you look at Israeli textbooks, curricula, media, and political discourse you see how this chapter in Jewish history - the chapter of expulsion, colonization, massacres, rape, and the burning of villages - is totally absent. It is not there. It is replaced by a chapter of heroism, glorious campaigns and amazing stories of moral courage and superiority unheard of in any other histories of people's liberation in the 20th century. So whenever I speak of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, we must remember that not just the very terms of "ethnic cleansing" and "expulsion" are totally alien to the community and society from which I come and from where I grew up; the very history of that chapter is either distorted in the recollection of people, or totally absent.
Zionist Leaders' Strategy: Settlement and Expulsion
Now, when you start reading the diaries of the leaders of Zionism, and researching their ideologies and ideological trends since the movement's conception in the late 19th century, you see that from the very beginning there had been the realization that the aspiration for a Jewish state in Palestine contradicts the fact that an indigenous people had been living on the land of Palestine for centuries and that their aspirations contradicted the Zionist schema for the country and its people. The presence of a local society and culture had been known to the founding fathers of Zionism even before the first settlers set foot on the land.
Two means were used in order to change the reality in Palestine, and impose the Zionist interpretation on the local reality: the dispossession of the indigenous population from the land and its re-populating with newcomers - i.e. settlement and expulsion. The colonization effort was pushed forward by a movement that had not yet won regional or international legitimacy and therefore had to buy land, and create enclaves within the indigenous population. The British Empire was very helpful in bringing this scheme into reality. Yet from the very beginning of Zionist strategy, the leaders of Zionism knew that settlement is a very long and measured process, which may not be sufficient if you want to revolutionize the reality on the ground and impose your own interpretation. For that, you needed something more powerful. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community in the 1930s and later the first Prime Minister of Israel, mentioned more than once, that for that
you need what he called "revolutionary conditions". He meant a situation of war - a situation of change of government, a twilight zone between an old era and the beginning of a new one. It is not surprising to read in the Israeli press today that Ariel Sharon thinks that he is the new Ben Gurion who is about to lead his people into yet another revolutionary moment - the war with Iraq - in which expulsion, and not a political settlement, can be used to further, indeed, to complete the process of de-Arabizing Palestine and Judaizing it, which had begun in 1882.
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