Letters to the Editor

Guardian Weekly, March 23-29 2007

Your review of Illan Pappe's history, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, continues the cleansing. Pappe shows that the destruction of Palestinian communities was planned prior to the Holocaust and cannot be historically or morally justified by the Holocaust. Peaceful and generally defenceless Palestinian communities were systematically targeted for terrorism, purged of people and then physically erased from the face of the earth.

Pappe quotes Ben-Gurion's diary: >We need to harm them without mercy, women and children included.<

Pappe has not >airbrushed< the Holocaust from the story and thus done a >disservice<, as you say; he has documented the historical reality of the premeditated destruction of a people.

Pappe also shows the role of the British in training the Hagena in the 1930s: for example, >how to use bayonets in attacking defenceless villagers<. Britain had 100,000 troops in Palestine and was legally obligated to protect the Palestinians. But it did not. For example, on February 14, 1948, Hagana forces entered Sa'sa unopposed at midnight, attached TNT to 35 houses and blasted the village into the air, killing 60-80 Palestinians in their sleep, including children.

Two of the Jewish terrorist were hurt by flying debris; the British army was commended for transporting them to the Safad hopital. the Palestinians fled Sa'sa in terror and that became a model operation of ethnic  cleansing.

Denial of the Holocaust is a crime in many nations, as is the denial of the Armenian genocide in some nations. Nations now need to make KAKBA denial crime.