We are washing our hands of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

My column last week, urging Ireland to stand with the Palestinians, drew such a huge and often angry response that I re-read my history.

The conviction only deepened that there has been a mass global refusal to admit that the Palestinians were expelled from their own land and that Benjamin Netanyahu’s war will indeed be “protracted” and will threaten peace in our time until the wider world accepts the past. In Ilan Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), for instance, I read about the campaign to ethnically cleanse the city of Haifa of Palestinians.

That campaign was called Operation Cleansing the Leaven. This refers to the Jewish religious practice of eliminating all traces of bread or flour from people’s homes on the eve of the Passover, and, in Haifa in 1948, the Palestinians were the bread and flour. The British forces washed their hands of what happened, as Mordechai Maklef, of the proto-Israeli Carmeli Brigade, gave his orders: “Klll any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.” He later became Israeli chief of staff.