1937 – Peel Commission Recommends Partition

Examining the Causes of the Arab Revolt, the Peel Commission Proposes Dividing Palestine into Separate Arab and Jewish States. The Arabs Reject the Partition, and The Zionists Want All of Palestine, So the Plan is Abandoned.

The Peel Commission, formally known as the Palestine Royal Commission, was established in 1937 to investigate the causes of the Arab unrest and general strike of 1936. Their official finding, issued on July 7, 1937, was that the League of Nations Mandate had become unworkable, and recommended partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. […]

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Resources

  1. Peel Commission - wikipedia
  2. Palumbo, Michael. The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from Their Homeland. London: Faber and Faber, 1987, pp 1 - 5

1956 – Kafr Qasim Massacre

Massacre Perpetrator: Israel

On the eve of the Suez War, Israeli Border Patrol orders a curfew without notifying Arab villagers and then opens fire on all curfew violators.

Kafr Qasim was an Arab village near the Jordanian border. From 1949 until 1966, Arab citizens were regarded by Israel as a hostile population and Arab populations were governed by the Israeli military. The Israeli government believed that Jordan would enter the Suez War on the side of Egypt, and on Octover 29, the first day of the Suez War, the Israeli military declared a curfew from 5pm until 6am, that would go into effect that very same day. Anyone violating the curfew was to be shot on sight.

The orders were alleged to have come from David Ben-Gurion himself.

“I don’t want sentimentality and I don’t want arrests, there will be no arrests,” declared IDF Colonel Yissachar Shadmi. Between 5 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., in nine separate shooting incidents, Israeli troops killed nineteen men, six women, ten teenage boys (age 14–17), six girls (age 12–15), and seven young boys (age 8–13), who did not make it home before curfew. […]

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Plan Dalet

Plan Dalet was a strategic military blueprint devised by the Haganah in 1948, explicitly incorporating the forced expulsion of Palestinian communities to secure territorial control for the emerging state of Israel. “On a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the […]

Click to Read from Plan Dalet

Resources

  1. Full text of Plan Dalet - Jerusalem Media & Communications Center
  2. Plan Dalet - wikipedia
  3. Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies
  4. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), xii
  5. Bloxham, Donald, and A. Dirk Moses, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2010, 56.