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Israel's latest attempt to erase Palestine

Pappe, Ilan
http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-latest-attempt-erase-palestine/27941

Publisher:  Electronic Intifada
Date Written:  25/07/2019
Year Published:  2019  
Resource Type:  Article

Efforts by teams from the Israeli defense ministry to remove sensitive documents from Israeli archives must be understood in a new political climate and are not simply an attempt to spare Israeli governments embarrassment, as some have suggested.

Abstract: 

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Excerpt:

Efforts by teams from the Israeli defense ministry to remove sensitive documents from Israeli archives – as reported by the Haaretz newspaper recently – must be understood in a new political climate and are not simply an attempt to spare Israeli governments embarrassment, as some have suggested.

Those of us working with Nakba documents – Nakba means "catastrophe" and is the term Palestinians use for the expulsion in 1948 of some 800,000 people from their lands and homes in what became Israel – were already aware of the removal of these documents. For many years, for instance, historians were unable to revisit "the village files," which formed an important proof in my argument that the 1948 war was an act of ethnic cleansing....

Israeli and American intentions combined with the vulnerability of the Palestinians bring us to a dangerous historical juncture. Israel is now in a position to attempt once more to act according to the logic of the "elimination of the native" (the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe's characterization of the motives behind setter colonial movements such as Zionism).

Israel succeeded only partly in implementing this aim in 1948. The Palestinian national movement and people struggled succesfully then, and continue to struggle now, against the completion of the ethnic cleansing of 1948.

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