Cleansing the Galilee

David Gilmour

  • The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities by Simha Flapan
    Croom Helm, 277 pp, £25.00, October 1987, ISBN 0 7099 4911 1
  • Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine by Avi Shlaim
    Oxford, 676 pp, £35.00, May 1988, ISBN 0 19 827831 4
  • The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 by Benny Morris
    Cambridge, 380 pp, £30.00, March 1988, ISBN 0 521 33028 9

The Palestinian refugee problem was created forty years ago and seems no nearer a solution as it enters its fifth decade. The 750,000 people who left their towns and villages in 1948 have multiplied to three million, many of them still concentrated in refugee camps in or close to their former homeland, the rest dispersed throughout the Arab world and beyond. Their problem remains unsolved today for the simple reason that both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict have always denied responsibility for its creation. Their views, expressed interminably and without variation over the years, are incompatible and indeed opposite.

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[*] A couple of these revelations are discussal by Peretz Kidron in Blaming the victims (Verso, 1988), edited by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, a valuable collection of essays on Zionist propaganda about the Palestinians.

[†] These events are corroborated in Michael Palumbo’s book, The Palestinian Catastrophe (Faber, 1987). The author makes effective use of UN files and other documents to write a vivid account of the Palestinian exodus.