Divided loyalties

Emphasis apart, it is hard to say what is new in his account. The scheme discussed at the Tel Aviv meeting, Plan Dalet, has been known about for years. It has long been clear that the Palestinians were not, as used to be claimed, encouraged to leave their homes "temporarily" by Arab leaders. The fledgling Israeli state was not invaded, as the old David and Goliath narrative goes, by five Arab armies. Egypt attacked in the south and Jordanian and Iraqi troops entered the territory allotted to the Palestinians by the UN. Ethnic cleansing in Palestine is Israel's "original sin" laid bare - but without any mitigating circumstances. Rare exceptions in a catalogue of intimidation, expulsion and atrocity include the Jewish mayor of Haifa appealing to the city's Arabs to stay, despite attacks by Haganah forces. Nazareth's Christian Arabs were spared because Ben-Gurion realised that the outside world would not tolerate their removal.

Pappe follows writers such as Meron Benvenisti who have documented the post-war cover-up: the rubble of Palestinian villages buried under parks and nature reserves, their fields and olive groves taken over by kibbutzim and immigrant housing projects, their Arab names Hebraized - or restored to their pre-Islamic biblical Hebrew ones.

He fights the "power of deletion" over the fate of the Palestinians. But he does historical understanding a disservice by all but ignoring the mood and motives of the Jews, so soon after the end of a war in which six million had been exterminated by the Nazis. Ben-Gurion's public rhetoric about the dangers of annihilation or a second Holocaust, Pappe argues, was matched by private confidence about the outcome of an unequal fight. That does not mean the shadow of the Holocaust can be airbrushed out of the story. The Jews were fighting, as they saw it, with their backs to the wall, for survival. To ignore that perception - a huge factor in western sympathy for Israel in 1948 and for so long afterwards - is to misrepresent reality.

Pappe's Israel is the "last post-colonial European enclave in the Arab world". It is true that Zionist settlers did act in many ways like French pieds noirs in Algeria or Brits in Rhodesia. But most wanted to replace rather than exploit the natives. The immigrants who began arriving in the late 1880s, their numbers peaking in 1935 with 60,000 mostly German Jews, were invariably fleeing discrimination, pogroms or, after 1945, worse. Few were leaving good lives or moving to a classic colony.

Emphasis apart, it is hard to say what is new in his account. The scheme discussed at the Tel Aviv meeting, Plan Dalet, has been known about for years. It has long been clear that the Palestinians were not, as used to be claimed, encouraged to leave their homes "temporarily" by Arab leaders. The fledgling Israeli state was not invaded, as the old David and Goliath narrative goes, by five Arab armies. Egypt attacked in the south and Jordanian and Iraqi troops entered the territory allotted to the Palestinians by the UN. Ethnic cleansing in Palestine is Israel's "original sin" laid bare - but without any mitigating circumstances. Rare exceptions in a catalogue of intimidation, expulsion and atrocity include the Jewish mayor of Haifa appealing to the city's Arabs to stay, despite attacks by Haganah forces. Nazareth's Christian Arabs were spared because Ben-Gurion realised that the outside world would not tolerate their removal.

Pappe follows writers such as Meron Benvenisti who have documented the post-war cover-up: the rubble of Palestinian villages buried under parks and nature reserves, their fields and olive groves taken over by kibbutzim and immigrant housing projects, their Arab names Hebraized - or restored to their pre-Islamic biblical Hebrew ones.

He fights the "power of deletion" over the fate of the Palestinians. But he does historical understanding a disservice by all but ignoring the mood and motives of the Jews, so soon after the end of a war in which six million had been exterminated by the Nazis. Ben-Gurion's public rhetoric about the dangers of annihilation or a second Holocaust, Pappe argues, was matched by private confidence about the outcome of an unequal fight. That does not mean the shadow of the Holocaust can be airbrushed out of the story. The Jews were fighting, as they saw it, with their backs to the wall, for survival. To ignore that perception - a huge factor in western sympathy for Israel in 1948 and for so long afterwards - is to misrepresent reality.

Pappe's Israel is the "last post-colonial European enclave in the Arab world". It is true that Zionist settlers did act in many ways like French pieds noirs in Algeria or Brits in Rhodesia. But most wanted to replace rather than exploit the natives. The immigrants who began arriving in the late 1880s, their numbers peaking in 1935 with 60,000 mostly German Jews, were invariably fleeing discrimination, pogroms or, after 1945, worse. Few were leaving good lives or moving to a classic colony.

It is not sufficient, in other words, to subsume Zionism into the wider narrative of colonialism, though that specificity made no difference to the final outcome - the near-eradication of Arab Palestine. Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian historian, lingers perceptively on this absolutely vital point: Zionism simultaneously oppressed the Palestinians and represented a movement of national liberation for the Jews - and has produced a new people speaking their own language, living in a country called Israel. It is not a question of whether Arabs or anyone else find that paradox palatable or just. It is that this important story, then as now, doesn't make any sense without grasping it.

Khalidi, tackling "historical amnesia", brilliantly analyses the structural handicap which hobbled the Palestinians throughout 30 years of British rule so that by the time the last high commissioner sailed away in 1948 they could neither accommodate nor successfully resist the Jews. His image of an iron cage represents the limits placed on them by the Balfour declaration in 1917, when the Jews were promised a "national home" as long as it was built without prejudice to the rights of what were absurdly called "non-Jewish communities" (then 90% of Palestine's population). This inbalance was constant: the UN partition decision of November 1947 gave the Jews, by then 33% of the population, half of the territory when they owned just 6% of the land. By 1949 they controlled 78% of it.