UC Berkeley

Ilan Pappé is the author of many books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in which he documents that ethnic cleansing was a long-standing Zionist goal that was planned in detail by David Ben-Gurion in the Red House headquarters outside Tel Aviv. It included a much greater number of atrocities against Palestinians in the establishment of Israel in the late 1940s than Western establishments acknowledge. Pappé says it was the start of a process of ethnic cleansing that continues until today, especially in what what is happening today in Gaza. (Israel expelled 36 villages between 1948 and 1967 inside Israel, Pappé says.) He says that some of the kibbutzim that Hamas occupied on Oct. 7 were built over the ruins of former Palestinian villages, many of whose inhabitants were expelled to Gaza.