Book casts new light on Palestine's ethnic cleansing

Maureen Clare Murphy, The Electronic Intifada, 28 September 2009

In recent years, a growing number of accounts of the 1948 war have corrected and exposed the founding myths of Israel, including claims by its leaders that the Palestinian people did not exist or were invented. The latest addition to this genre is independent scholar Rosemarie M. Esber's meticulously documented history Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians. While other recent books on the subject have relied on Israeli and Zionist archival sources, Esber uses British archives and oral testimonies from Palestinian survivors as well as previously used sources to demonstrate that there was a purposeful, systematic pattern by which Zionist forces depopulated Palestinian cities and villages before the end of the British mandate on 15 May 1948 and the subsequent intervention of Arab armies.