Just finished reading #IlanPappé's 'the ethnic cleansing of Palestine'. It is a sickening read. It has two great merits and a couple of minor faults. The faults: the book is not written for professional historians, but it sometimes slips into that mode; it has a bit of a tendency to romanticise the Palestinians and Palestinian life. They are all brave and live in picturesque villages. The later is a very understandable response to the dehumanisation and erasure that Zionist historiography indulged in.
Much more importantly it forces the reader to confront what those maps showing the dispossession of the Palestinians mean: a planned, systematic, brutally violent programme of destruction and expulsion with a fair number of massacres. It gives the lie to the idea that the conflict is complicated. It isn't. One group of people violently destroyed and then erased another to create their new state.
It also is optimistic in a way. It beliefs that sharing that space has always been possible, but it requires the Israelis to give up their dreams of a Jewish state built over the ruins of Palestinian life. That doesn't seem impossible.
