The HyperTexts
Why Israel is Wrong: Evidence for and the Case against Israel’s
Racism, Apartheid and Ethnic
Cleansing
by Michael R. Burch, an editor and publisher of Holocaust and Nakba
poetry
The vanishing Palestinian state: In the maps above, we can see how much land
Palestinians (the dark regions) have lost to Israel (the white regions). The
first map shows Palestine demographically before Israeli Jews began acquiring
Palestinian land by force, hook and crook. The second map shows how the West Bank is
quickly dissolving and turning into "Swiss cheese" due to the expansion of
segregated Jewish-only settlements. (The term "settlement expansion" is a
euphemism for ethnic cleansing.) The third map predicts a Palestinian "state"
that consists only of the walled ghetto of Gaza. The fourth map predicts no
Palestinian state at all, which could be the result of ethnic cleansing carried
out to its conclusion.
Is there any conclusive evidence that Israel is guilty of planned and
carefully managed ethnic cleansing? Yes, there is irrefutable evidence: hundreds
of Palestinian villages and tens of thousands of individual homes that have been
destroyed by Israel over the last 60-plus years, beginning with the Nakba
("Catastrophe") of 1948. Hundreds of villages do not vanish from the earth by
accident: it takes lots of money, manpower, machinery and management to wreak
such massive destruction. And Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians
continues to this day, with more than 20,000 home demolitions tracked and
reported by ICAHD since 1967.
Israel claims that its military and covert operations against Palestinians
are "defensive" in nature. But what, exactly, is Israel defending? Increasingly
to the rest of the world it seems that what Israel is defending racism,
apartheid and ethnic cleaning. And the majority of Israeli Jews now agree that
apartheid is a reality. In a recent Haaretz poll, 58% of Israelis said
that there is apartheid in Israel in some ways, or in most ways. Only 31% said
that there was no apartheid in Israel. And when the poll touched on one of the
major facets of Israeli apartheid, separate roads for Jews and Palestinians in
the West Bank, 74% were in favor of racially segregated roads, while only 17%
opposed them. When asked whether Palestinians should be allowed to vote if the
West Bank were annexed, only 19% voted in favor. To anyone who believes in
equality, justice and representative government for everyone,
those are astonishingly bad numbers.
Gideon Levy interpreted the poll results as: "Nice to make your acquaintance,
we're racist and pro-apartheid. The poll … proved what we always knew."
Are Israel's actions defensive, or is ethnic cleansing highly offensive in both
senses of the word? And which came first, Zionist aggression, or Palestinian resistance to that
aggression? The desire to purge Palestine of Palestinians has a long history in
the annals of Zionism:
"[We will] spirit the penniless population across the border [of the Jewish
state] by denying it employment ...
Both the process of expropriation [theft of land] and the
removal [ethnic cleansing] of the poor must be carried
out discreetly and circumspectly."—Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist
Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, in his diary, June 12, 1895
Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, had written a recipe for ethnic cleansing
in 1895, long before the Holocaust or any major act of Palestinian resistance.
In 1901, in an article published in the New Liberal Review, Israel
Zangwill wrote that "Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a
people without a country." The first part was, of course, patently false.
Zangwill later recanted, admitting that Palestine was, indeed, inhabited by
another people. But unfortunately the die had already been cast.
In 1929, Berl Katznelson admitted that "the Zionist enterprise is an enterprise
of conquest."
When in 1937 the British Peel Commission recommended the forced transfer of
225,000 Arabs from the proposed Jewish state, David ben-Gurion enthusiastically
hailed ethnic cleansing as an "unparalleled achievement." Ethnic cleansing was
"the best of all solutions" according to Katznelson.
In 1938, ben-Gurion admitted that the Zionists were the aggressors and the
Palestinians the defenders; by this time he had essentially endorsed the "Iron
Wall" dogma of Ze'ev Jabotinsky. Like Jabotinsky, ben-Gurion despised Arabs and
their culture. By this time the Zionist leaders had the same attitude toward
Arabs that Hitler had had toward Jews. Even Chaim Weizmann, in so many ways the
founder of the modern state of Israel and its first president, grew disenchanted
with the Zionists' fascination with militarism and their "flirtation with
terror." When Weizmann retired the presidency of Israel was offered to Albert
Einstein, who turned it down, writing sadly to his stepdaughter that Israeli
Jews did not want to hear what he would have to tell them. Einstein, a great
humanitarian, believed in equality and justice for all human beings and knew
that was the last thing the Zionists had planned for Palestinians, since they
had long intended to get rid of as many Arabs as possible.
As Jewish historian Shlomo ben-Ami explained, transfer (ethnic cleansing) was a
"magic formula" that "had a long pedigree in Zionist thought." A self-avowed
"ardent" Zionist, ben-Ami described the movement as follows: "Zionism was a
movement of conquest, colonisation and settlement ... An enterprise of national
liberation and human emancipation that was forced to use the tools of colonial
penetration, it was a schizophrenic movement, which suffered from an
irreconcilable incongruity between its liberating message and the offensive
practices it used to advance it. The cultivation of a righteous self-image and
the ethos of the few against the many, the heroic David facing the brutal,
bestial Arab Goliath, was one way Zionism pretended to reconcile its
contradictions."
Long before there was any major military action by Arabs, the future
leaders of Israel created three
Transfer Committees
(i.e., ethnic cleansing committees) to study and oversee the transfer
(ethnically cleansing) of Palestinian Arabs from the proposed Jewish state that
came to be known as Israel. The first
Transfer Committee was created in 1937, more than ten years before
the war of 1948. If you click the hyperlink, you can
find a detailed history of the three Transfer Committees, including quotations
from the diaries of leading Zionists such as David Ben-Gurion (Israel's George
Washington and the first Prime Minister of Israel), Chaim Weizmann (Israel's
first president), Moshe Sharett (Israel's second Prime Minister) and Yosef
(Joseph) Weitz, who was a member of all three Transfer Committees and headed the
third, hugely destructive one. All the major Zionist leaders became enthusiastic
supporters of compulsory population transfer (ethnic cleansing), even though
they rightfully opposed the ethnic cleansing of Jews by the Nazis, and even
though some of them had said that compulsory population transfer was
wrong in their younger days. What happened with the founding of Israel was very
similar to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson founding the United States on
the principle of the equality of all human beings, then forcing Native Americans
to walk a Trail of Tears while denying African Americans the most basic of
human rights.
Robbers armed
with machine guns may "defend" themselves from being arrested, but that doesn’t
change the fact that they are criminals. Nazi Germany ostensibly "defended" itself by
attacking Poland, but its real goal was offensive—to obtain more "living space"
from "inferior" people. I intend to demonstrate that, like
Nazi Germany, Israel has engaged in acts of naked aggression that are highly
offensive, in both senses of the word.
Like the Confederacy, Nazi Germany and apartheidist South Africa, the nation
of Israel is using superior firepower to defend and extend a system of apartheid
and ethnic cleansing. The evidence is not only obvious, but overwhelming:
The creation of three Transfer Committees to determine the best way to
ethnically cleanse Palestinians
Hundreds of Palestinian villages that were destroyed, beginning with
the Nakba
("Catastrophe") of 1948
More than 27,000 Palestinian homes that have been demolished since 1967, as
reported by ICAHD, in blatant acts of ethnic
cleansing that still continue today
The written findings of Israeli historians like Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris,
using declassified Israeli military archives
The diaries and public statements of the Zionist leaders themselves
Millions of Palestinian exiles now living in Gaza and other
refugee centers
As with the Confederacy, Nazi Germany and
apartheidist South Africa, when the rulers are racist and unjust, they cannot
claim to be acting in "defense." In the American Declaration of Independence,
the founding fathers of the United States pointed out that when human beings are
denied equality, justice and representative government, they have the right to
resist their oppressors with all due force. The American founding fathers
declared that they had the right to go on the offensive, in order to secure
their rights.
Some defenders of the Palestinians try to prove that in certain incidents
Israel fired the first shots, but I think such defenses are not necessary. Some of
the best-known American founding fathers were wealthy men who lived in mansions and
had freedom to travel as they pleased. But they said
it was their right to use all due force to secure their
inalienable rights to equality and representative government. When Patrick Henry
said, "Give me liberty or give me death," he meant that he had the right to go
to war with Englishmen and kill or be killed, in order to have the chance to
live as a free, equal citizen of a just nation. If rich American colonists had
such a right, then surely much poorer Palestinians, who don’t live in mansions
and don’t have freedom to travel as they please, do also.
And so, as long as Israel denies Palestinians freedom, equality and justice,
according to the American Declaration of Independence, Israel is an unjust
tyrant like the British monarchy, and the Palestinians are freedom fighters with
the right to use force to secure their god-given, inalienable rights. However, I
am not advocating acts of violence and war. I am simply pointing out that if
Israel wants peace rather than war, Israel must either grant the
Palestinians independence as a separate nation, or make them fully equal
citizens of a single state, or create some sort of just and equitable
bi-national state or federation. But Israel make peace impossible when it insists on defining
itself as a Jewish state, in which Jews have vastly superior rights, including
the "right" to rob Palestinians of their land, water and most basic human
rights. Again, the evidence is utterly clear and overwhelming:
Apartheid walls twice as high as the Berlin Wall
Racially segregated roads and settlements in the West Bank
A brutal military occupation of the West Bank, with IDF soldiers protecting the robber
barons rather than their victims
A land, sea and air blockade of Gaza
The continual theft of Palestinian land via home demolitions and other war
crimes
Although there are many other charges that can be brought against Israel, no
other charges than apartheid and ethnic cleansing are necessary. No other nation
in the free world targets millions of people for home demolitions and theft of
the underlying land, based on their race or ethnicity. These are crimes that
create incomprehensible suffering for millions of people — most of them completely
innocent women and children.
And it is beyond hypocritical for Americans, in particular, to deny Palestinians
the right to use force to secure their rights. If Israel denied millions of
American women and children any hope of life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, American men would be firing missiles at Tel Aviv, until the leaders
of Israel came to their senses.
The rest of this document will provide further evidence of the extent of
Israel’s crimes against peace and humanity.
The Testimony of the Architect of TRANSFER, Yosef (Joseph) Weitz
The following is an illuminating article written by Joseph Weitz, the man in
charge of acquiring land for the Jewish National Fund and the head of Israel’s
third Transfer Committee, which in 1948 was tasked with the issue of
population transfer [i.e., ethnic cleansing] of Palestinians. Weitz was writing
for a Davar
newspaper on September 29, 1967, just three months into Israel’s now 44-year
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza:
The first problem is understood by all and needs no explanations ... the
need to sustain the character of a state which will henceforth be Jewish, and
obviously in the near future, by the majority of its inhabitants, with a
non-Jewish minority limited to fifteen percent. I reached this fundamental
conclusion already as early as 1940, concerning which it is entered in my diary
as follows:
Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in the country for
both people’s together ... With the Arabs we shall not achieve our aim of
being an independent people in this country. The only solution is Eretz Israel,
at least the west part of Eretz Israel without Arabs ... and there is no other
way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, transfer
all of them, not one village or tribe should remain, and the transfer must aim
at Iraq, Syria, and even Transjordan ... There is no other alternative.
From this perspective a solution of transfer was then suggested which was
advocated by B. Katznelson, Y. Vulkani, and M. Ussishkin, all of them now
deceased; initial investigations were undertaken to help neutralise this concept
concretely. After (some) years, consequent to the UN decision to partition the
country, the War of Independence broke out to our great happiness,
and in its course a double miracle took place: a regional victory and the escape
[i.e., expulsion] of the Arabs [who fled the fighting but were not allowed to
return]. In the Six Day War only one great miracle took place: a tremendous
territorial victory but the majority of the population of the liberated
territories remained ‘fixed’ to their places, which can cause the destruction of
the foundations of our state.
In other words, for Israel to acquire land and not ethnically cleanse it of
non-Jews is a disaster, but to acquire land and purify it of non-Jews is a
"miracle."
Weitz kept detailed diaries, which are now part of the public record; they
reveal a man with a compulsion for compulsory population transfer (ethnic
cleansing).
Motivation: the confessions of the leading Zionists themselves
The leading Zionists have clearly revealed the motivation for Israel's crimes of
apartheid and ethnic cleaning. When people who commit crimes against humanity
speak so clearly, and the evidence confirms that they did what they said they
intended to do, how can there be any doubt that the crimes were deliberate and
premeditated? In the quotes below, the terms "eviction" and "transfer" mean
"ethnic cleansing" and the term "expropriation" means "theft."
"[We will] spirit the penniless population across the border [of the Jewish
state] by denying it employment ...
Both the process of expropriation [theft of land] and the
removal [ethnic cleansing] of the poor must be carried
out discreetly and circumspectly."—Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist
Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, in his diary, June 12, 1895
Please note the date on the quotation above. Herzl hatched his plan for the
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the theft of their land long before the
Holocaust. Adolph Hitler was only six years old when Herzl decided to ethnically
cleanse Palestinians and steal their land. Here are other pertinent confessions
of the racist ringleaders of Zionism:
"There is no Zionism, colonization, or Jewish state without the
EVICTION of the
Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."—Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
"Zionism is a TRANSFER of the Jews."—David Ben-Gurion, Israel's
first Prime Minister
Regarding the
TRANSFER of the Arabs, this is much easier than any other
TRANSFER."—Ben-Gurion
"The compulsory
TRANSFER of the Arabs ... could give us
something which we never had [even in Biblical times]."—Ben-Gurion
"Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to
carry out the
TRANSFER on a large scale."—Ben-Gurion
"With compulsory
TRANSFER we have a vast area
... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything
immoral in it."—Ben-Gurion
"It is impossible to imagine general
EVACUATION without compulsion, and brutal compulsion."—Ben-Gurion
"There are two issues here: sovereignty and the REMOVAL of a certain number of
Arabs, and we must insist
on both of them."—Ben-Gurion
"Let us not ignore the truth ... politically we are the aggressors and they
defend themselves ... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it ..."—Ben-Gurion
"Before the founding of the state ... our main interest was self-defense ... But now the issue at hand is conquest,
not self-defense."—Ben-Gurion
"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon,
Trans-Jordan, and Syria."—Ben-Gurion
"We must do everything to ensure they [ethnically cleansed Palestinian
refugees] never return."—Ben-Gurion
"Ben-Gurion ... was prepared to accept the [partition] ... on two
conditions: [Jewish] sovereignty and compulsory
TRANSFER."—Yosef Bankover
"I believed and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic
right to this entire land."—Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
"All of the land of Israel is ours."—Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir
UN investigator: Israel engaged in ethnic cleansing with settlement expansion
by Reuters on March 21, 2011
Israel's expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem and eviction of
Palestinians from their homes there is a form of ethnic cleansing, a United
Nations investigator said on Monday.
United States academic Richard Falk was speaking to the UN Human Rights
Council as it prepared to pass resolutions condemning settlement building in the
West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The "continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined
with the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians are creating an
intolerable situation" in the part of the city previously controlled by Jordan,
he said.
This situation "can only be described in its cumulative impact as a form of
ethnic cleansing," Falk declared.
Israel declines to deal with Falk or even allow him into the country,
accusing him of being biased.
In his speech, Falk said he would like the Human Rights Council to ask the
International Court of Justice to look at Israeli behavior in the occupied
territories.
This should focus on whether the prolonged occupation of the West Bank and
East Jerusalem had elements of "colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing
inconsistent with international humanitarian law," the investigator declared.
Israel Guilty of Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians: UN
Rapporteur
by César Chelala
Mar. 27, 2014
Richard Falk, United Nations rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian
territories accused Israel last week of “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians.
Speaking at a press conference, he said that Israeli policies bore “unacceptable
characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.”
“Every increment of enlarging the settlements or every incident of house
demolition is a way of worsening the situation confronting the Palestinian
people and reducing what prospects they might have as the outcome of supposed
peace negotiations,” he added. Falk is an American who is Jewish, is an
international law expert and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University in the
US.
According to Falk, more than 11,000 Palestinians had lost their right to live in
Jerusalem since 1966 due to Israel imposing residence laws favoring Jews. At the
same time, the Israeli government was revoking Palestinian residence permits.
“The 11,000 is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said, “because many more are
faced with possible challenges to their residence rights.”
Falk’s comments lend support to similar statements done in the past regarding
Israeli actions towards the Palestinians. In 2006, Ilan Pappé, an Israeli
historian and social activist who is a professor with the College of Social
Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United
Kingdom, wrote a book called “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.”
In that book, Pappé states that the 1948 Palestinian exodus was a planned
cleansing of Palestine that was carried out by the Zionist movement leaders,
mainly David Ben-Gurion and his associates. The process was carried out through
the systematic expulsion of Arabs from about 500 villages, complemented by
terrorist attacks executed mainly by members of the Irgun and the Haganah troops
acting against the civilian population.
Pappé based his assumptions on the Plan Dalet and on village files as a proof of
the planned expulsions. Although the purpose of the plan has been amply debated,
it seems that the plan was a set of guidelines whose purpose was to take control
of the territory of the Jewish state and to defend its borders and its people,
including the Jewish population outside its borders as a precaution against an
expected invasion by Arab armies.
Predictably, the book caused an uproar. Benny Morris, an Israeli professor of
History in the Middle East Studies department of Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev, wrote, “At best, Ilan Pappé must be one of the world’s sloppiest
historians: at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a
place somewhere between the two.”
Morris himself stated, however, “In retrospect, it is clear that what occurred
in 1948 in Palestine was a variety of ethnic cleansing of Arab areas by Jews. It
is impossible to say how many of the 700,000 or so Palestinians who became
refugees in 1948 were physically expelled, as distinct from simply fleeing a
combat zone.”
Not everybody was equally critical of Pappé, though. Stephen Howe, professor of
the history of colonialism at Bristol University, said that Pappé’s book was an
often compelling mixture of historical argument and politico-moral tract.
According to Howe, although Pappé’s book might not be the last word on the
events of 1948, it still is “a major intervention in an argument that will, and
must, continue.”
And it does continue. In November 2013, more than 50 public figures in Britain
wrote a letter opposing an Israeli plan to forcibly remove up to 70,000
Palestinian Bedouins from their historic desert land –an act that critics
considered ethnic cleansing. The eviction and destruction of approximately 35
villages in the Negev desert, claims the letter, “will mean the forced
displacement of Palestinians from their homes and land, and systematic
discrimination and separation.”
Writing in Save Canada Post in 2010, Suzanne Weiss, a Holocaust survivor stated,
“I am a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, the Nazis' mass murder of Europe's
Jews. The tragic experience of my family and community under Hitler makes me
alert to the suffering of other peoples denied their human rights today —
including the Palestinians. True, Hitler's Holocaust was unique. The
Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Hitler started with
that, but went on to extermination. In my family's city in Poland, Piotrkow, 99
per cent of the Jews perished. Yet for me, the Israeli government's actions
toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family's experiences
under Hitlerism: the inhuman walls, the checkpoints, the daily humiliations,
killings, diseases, the systematic deprivation. There's no escaping the fact
that Israel has occupied the entire country of Palestine, and taken most of the
land, while the Palestinians have been expelled, walled off, and deprived of
human rights and human dignity.” . . .
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
License.
Mirrored from Commondreams.org
Hybrid States:
Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the burden of proof among
"liberal Zionists"
by Yaniv Reich on December 2, 2011
The following is an excerpt from Hybrid States, in which the author shows how
even the more "liberal" Zionists can be in complete or near-complete denial of
basic historical facts. One of the first things Israel did as a nation was
establish a
Transfer Committee (i.e., Ethnic Cleansing Committee) to oversee the
process of transferring (ethnically cleansing) Palestinian Arabs out of the
Jewish state. This was accomplished by destroying hundreds of villages and
thousands of individual homes, a task that took many months and required lots of
money, manpower, machinery and management.
Although many of the most sensitive records remain classified, we do know
that the Haganah had conducted detailed cartographic work on Palestinian
villages and had precise estimates of the Palestinian population across regions,
as well as where there were real or imagined pockets of "resistance" to Zionist
plans. We also know of the infamous Plan Dalet, which instructed military
commanders to preemptively destroy (via "setting fire to, blowing up, and
planting mines in the debris") population centers "difficult to control
continuously". Plan Dalet specifically targets not only sites that might field "regular and semi-regular forces", but even those that might be used by
irregular, "small forces", which can mean just about anything, as the liberal
interpretation [i.e., actual destruction] by military commanders demonstrates.
The most shocking omission from [Gershom] Gorenberg’s account of 1948, given
that his entire argument rests on the existence of the Situation Committee, is
his non-discussion of the
Transfer Committee. I asked Gorenberg via Twitter
whether his book discusses the Transfer Committee, but he failed to respond.
This group, established days after Israel was founded, was comprised of leading
Zionists such as Yosef Weitz (of the JNF), and was tasked with overseeing the
permanent removal of Palestinians from their former villages. And as we know,
they were extraordinarily successful in eliminating more than 400 Palestinian
villages from the Zionist map, either through outright destruction or by
renaming them and passing them and their material possessions on to Jews. What
on earth could be considered ethnic cleansing if not this?
If Gorenberg hadn’t relied on such a puny measure of "strong evidence", he
could have found ample evidence that Zionists perpetrated an ethnic cleansing
that was imagined and fantasized about for 50 years, implemented under
remarkably clear military orders (even based on the limited evidence we
currently know), institutionalized through an ethnic cleansing committee by
another (euphemistic) name, and which created the foundational legal framework
for excluding one ethnic group from civic and political life (i.e. established
Israeli apartheid).
That he failed to do so says much about the ability of Gorenberg, and
so-called "liberal Zionists" more generally, to confront the essential crimes of
Zionism.
The testimony of the architect of transfer himself, Yosef (Joseph) Weitz
September 29, 1967
The following is an illuminating article written by Joseph Weitz, the man in
charge of acquiring land for the Jewish National Fund and the head of Israel’s
third Transfer Committee, which in 1948 was tasked with the issue of
population transfer [i.e., ethnic cleansing] of Palestinians. Weitz was writing
for a Davar
newspaper on September 29, 1967, just three months into Israel’s now 44-year
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza:
The first problem is understood by all and needs no explanations ... the
need to sustain the character of a state which will henceforth be Jewish, and
obviously in the near future, by the majority of its inhabitants, with a
non-Jewish minority limited to fifteen percent. I reached this fundamental
conclusion already as early as 1940, concerning which it is entered in my diary
as follows:
Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in the country for
both people’s together ... With the Arabs we shall not achieve our aim of
being an independent people in this country. The only solution is Eretz Israel,
at least the west part of Eretz Israel without Arabs ... and there is no other
way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, transfer
all of them, not one village or tribe should remain, and the transfer must aim
at Iraq, Syria, and even Transjordan ... There is no other alternative.
From this perspective a solution of transfer was then suggested which was
advocated by B. Katznelson, Y. Vulkani, and M. Ussishkin, all of them now
deceased; initial investigations were undertaken to help neutralise this concept
concretely. After (some) years, consequent to the UN decision to partition the
country, the War of Independence broke out to our great happiness,
and in its course a double miracle took place: a regional victory and the escape
[i.e., expulsion] of the Arabs [who fled the fighting but were not allowed to
return]. In the Six Day War only one great miracle took place: a tremendous
territorial victory but the majority of the population of the liberated
territories remained ‘fixed’ to their places, which can cause the destruction of
the foundations of our state. [In other words, for Israel to acquire land and
not ethnically cleanse it of non-Jews is a disaster, but to acquire land and
purify it of non-Jews is a "miracle."]
Analysis
Here is an analysis of the article above by Yaniv Reich in "Obsessive
demography, racism, and a history of apartheid thought":
This passage is filled with remarkable content that reflects an
all-encompassing vision of establishing an ethnic-based rather than race-based
apartheid regime in British Mandate Palestine. But I want to focus on just a few
points:
Extremely influential Zionists from Ben-Gurion to Weitz to Allon to Livni to
Lieberman have always seen the Palestinians as a group that needed to be
minimized vis-a-vis the Jewish population. This has been true from the earliest
years of Zionism.
Transfer (ethnic cleansing) featured prominently in Zionist thought, as
above, and action, as Benny Morris, Nur Masalha, Ilan Pappé, and others have
documented. Moreover, the Zionist leadership was well aware of the
rights-oriented sensitivity of this matter and sought since before Israel was
established to "neutralise the concept concretely."
Among important segments of the Jewish leadership, the War of Independence
"broke out to our great happiness" and accomplished both a "regional victory"
over additional, non-UN-sanctioned territory but also the "double miracle" of
Arab flight, much of which was at the hands of Jewish paramilitary groups.
Unfortunately, for these thinkers, "only one great miracle took place" in
1967 and the Palestinians refused to leave their land after Israel’s "tremendous
territorial victory" [Another editor’s question: hasn’t this war always been
sold as one of necessary self-defense? How quickly does existential self-defense
morph into "tremendous territorial victory"? About three months in Weitz’s
case—at most.].
This passage shows very clearly how the Zionist relationship to Palestinians
has been conceived, through various wars and periods, as one of maintaining
Jewish privilege and life over and against a Palestinian underclass. This
conception of Palestinian personhood and rights does not vary across Palestinian
subgroups, even if the specific rights they have differ, and it links the Jewish
treatment of Palestinians during 1948 through to 1967 and today into one
apartheid structure with more complexity (and militarized brutality) than we saw
in South Africa.
On this last point, I want to buttress the argument with a powerful image I
saw today, which captures better than anything I’ve seen how rights are
distributed on the basis of ethnicity and it’s intersection with a history of
ethnic conflict. These maps were produced by Arena of Speculation, an
interesting new initiative by a group of spatial thinkers:
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
by Ilan Pappé
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is a book about the 1948 Palestinian exodus
authored by Ilan Pappé and published in 2006 by Oneworld Publications. Here are
some of the book’s highlights (or, more properly, lowlights, from a standpoint of
equality and justice):
According to Pappé, the 1948 Palestinian exodus consisted of the forced
relocation of close to 800,000 Palestinians. This was more than half the
Palestinian population at that time. It also involved the destruction of 531
Palestinian villages, and the emptying of 11 entire Palestinian urban
neighborhoods. Palestinians call this event the Nakba (Catastrophe). Pappé says the Nakba was a calculated and intentionally executed
ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Zionist Israelis. He states, with emphasis, that
there is no room for ambivalence in this matter. His references include Zionist
quotations and writings, military and political archives, and the diaries of
David Ben-Gurion. His intent is also to explore how the denial of the Nakba has
been so successful for so long. His views are in direct opposition to mainstream
Israeli versions of the relocation, which claim it was "voluntary".
Pappé states that the ethnic cleansing idea was first expressed in early
Zionist writings. For example, in 1917, Leo Motzkin stated "the colonization of
Palestine has to go in two directions, Jewish settlement … and the resettlement of
the Arabs." In 1938 David Ben-Gurion stated, "I am for compulsory transfer; I do
not see anything immoral in it." Ben-Gurion also said, "The Arabs will have to
go."
Then in 1948, according to Pappé, the long-planned ethnic cleansing was implemented by
David Ben-Gurion, Yigael Yadin, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Sadeh, Moshe
Kalman, Moshe Camel, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Avidan, Rehavam Zeevi, Yitzhak Pundak,
and others. The ideological drivers of the campaign were Ben-Gurion's close
advisers, whom Pappé calls the "Consultancy group". The implementers were
officers who led attacks executed by the Haganah (an Israeli militia) and the
Irgun (another Israeli militia), the Stern Gang (another Israeli militia), and
the Israeli Defense Force. The details of the "ethnic cleansing strategy" are
fully described in an Israeli military/government document entitled Plan Dalet,
which spells out, in writing, the clear directives of
the operation. It included "bombarding villages … setting fire to homes,
properties and goods, expulsion, demolition and planting mines among the rubble
to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning." Pappé also catalogues
other terrorist
actions such as poisoning of the water supply of Acre with typhoid, numerous
cases of rape, various other atrocities, and dozens of massacres.
Palestinians made up 80 to 90 percent of the population of Palestine in the
1920s. As a result of the Balfour Declaration, Yosef Weitz began a remarkably
thorough demographic study of the Palestinian villages. His study is called the
Village Files. According to Pappé , it was later used for key strategic
information needed to implement the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Ben-Gurion's strategy for the creation of the Israeli State included very
specific offensive military steps. They are described in Plans A, B, C, and D.
"The purpose of such actions would be to deter the Palestinian population from
attacking Jewish settlements, and to retaliate for assaults on Jewish houses,
roads, and traffic." Plan C spelled out clearly what punitive actions would
entail, such as:
Killing the Palestinian leadership
Killing Palestinian inciters and their financial supporters
Killing Palestinians who acted against Jews
Killing senior Palestinian officers and officials
Damaging Palestinian transportation
Damaging the sources of Palestinian livelihoods: water wells, mills etc.
Attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks
Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffeehouses, meeting places, etc.
Plan Dalet (Plan D) called for the systematic and total expulsion of
Palestinians from their homeland. Plan Dalet was adopted on March 10, 1948.
It called for, among other things, the initial uprooting of 250,000
Palestinians. Key negotiations between Israel and Jordan had led to
the Jordanian promise to not join any all-Arab military operations against the
Jewish state. The agreement "neutralized the strongest army in the Arab
world." The British departed Palestine on 15 May 1948 and the implementation of Plan Dalet continued in earnest.
The Deir Yassin massacre occurred, with 93 Palestinians killed. Soon
after, four more villages were taken: Qalunya, Saris, Beit Surik,
and Biddu. The United States offered a plan to stop the bloodshed by first
establishing a three-month cease-fire and then developing a trusteeship plan in
five years. Both ideas were rejected by the Israelis. Ben-Gurion had said that
"Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state" and that
Palestinians "can either be mass arrested or expelled; it is better to expel
them."
Weitz had declared that 'The only solution is to transfer the Arabs from here to
neighboring countries. Not a single village or a single tribe must be left off."
The only major disagreement between Ben-Gurion and Weitz was the Ben-Gurion
would allow a population that was 20% Arab, while Weitz wanted no more than 15%
Arabs.
Operation Naschon was the first operation of Plan Dalet. It specifically
called for the destruction of Palestinian villages in April 1948. This
was the
first time that the various Israeli militias would operate together as a unit
and become the Israeli Defense Force. Pappé says "the Arab governments did
little beyond airing their inflammatory war rhetoric in all directions so as to
hide their inaction and unwillingness to intervene on behalf of the
Palestinians." The United Nations plan had allocated Haifa, the only port of
the country, to be granted Jewish control. The De-Arabization of Haifa
involved the expulsion of 75,000 Palestinians from Haifa. The 2000 members of
the Israeli Carmeli Brigade quickly defeated the 500 members of a poorly
equipped Lebanese force. Mordechai Maklef as the operation officer of the
Carmeli Brigade, issued orders to "Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all
inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives". Crowds of
defenseless Palestinians ran down the streets of Haifa to the port to escape on
any boat they could find. "Many [boats] turned over and sank with all their
passengers". The next cities to fall were Acre, Nazareth and Safad.
Pappé states that the Arab Liberation Army was never a match against the well-organized Israeli forces. According to Pappé, there was never serious Arab
Liberation Army strength, so "the falsity of the myth of a Jewish David facing
an Arab Goliath" was very clear. As Jerusalem was cleansed, "British
inaction was the rule." In April 1948 the cleansing of Jerusalem began."All in all, eight Palestinian and
39 villages were ethnically cleansed
in the Greater Jerusalem area."On 13 May, Jaffa was the last city to be
taken, after a two-week battle between 5000 members of the Haganah
militia and 1500 members of the Arab Liberation Army. This was the largest
effort of the Arab Liberation Army. After the battle was won by the Israeli
Haganah, 50,000 Palestinians were forced to leave Jaffa. Pappé states that
ethnic cleansing occurred before any Arab Liberation Army soldiers arrived in
Palestine. By 15 May 1948, 200 Palestinian villages were occupied and their
people expelled. Another 90 villages were destroyed by 11 June 1948. At
the time, Egypt and Iraq were embroiled in the final stages of the own wars of
liberation, while Syria and Lebanon were young countries that had just won
independence.
In a letter that David Ben-Gurion sent to
the commanders of the Haganah brigades he stated, "the cleansing of Palestine
remained the prime objective of Plan Dalet." Pappé states that the Arab war
efforts were "ineffective" and "pathetic". This was true for Egypt, Syria,
Lebanon, and Iraq. And Jordan had agreed to not attack Israel. The Arab weapons
were scarce and their supply lines were ineffective. The most intensive Arab
efforts occurred in the first three weeks of the war. Ethnic cleansing was
conducted in at least 64 villages by the Israeli Alexandria brigade according to
Pappé. They were also part of the massacre at Tantura, per Ilan Pappé, on May
2, 1948. He quotes from various witnesses that as many as 230 were massacred
there. Various other brigades such as the Golani Brigade, Carmeli Brigade,
Kiryati Brigade, Harel Brigade, Bulgarian Brigade, Yiftach Brigade, and Givati
Brigade also conducted cleansing operations.
The ethnic cleansing continued despite the passage of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights through the United Nations General Assembly
Resolution 217A(III).
David Ben-Gurion's diary entry of June 5, 1948 states, "the cleansing operation
continues." Eliezer Kaplan, the minister of finance authorized the
confiscation of all Palestinian properties already taken. The First Truce
was declared on June 8, 1948. But according to Pappé the Israelis continued the
destruction of villages that had already been taken. The truce ended on July 8,
1948. Fighting continued with the Israelis showing the upper hand against the
various Arab forces. The Israelis took Itarun, Amqa, Tel-Qisan, Saffuriyya, Kfar
Yassif, Abu Sinan, Judeida, and Tabash. On July 18, 1948 another truce was organized by
the U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte. Pappé states, "In less than two
weeks, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled from their
villages, towns, and cities." Count Folke Bernadotte was murdered in
September, "for having dared to put forward a proposal to re-divide the country
in half, and to demand the unconditional return of all the refugees." Pappé
mentions various Israeli operations such as Operation Palm
Tree, Operation Kippa, Operation Broom, Operation Scissors, Operation Cyprus,
Operation Policeman, Operation Autumn and Operation Dani. Pappé quotes from
Keith Wheeler of the Chicago Sun Times that in one operation "Practically
everything in their (Israeli Forces) path died." He also quotes from the London
Economist that, village "inhabitants were forced to start marching after their
houses had been looted, their family members murdered and their city
wrecked."
According to Pappé, "Over 700,000 olive
and orange trees have been destroyed by the Israelis. This is an act of sheer
vandalism from a state that claims to practice conservation of the
environment." Pappé says
that "the Israeli Land Authority, the army, the government and the Jewish
National Fund" have all been "involved in establishing new Jewish settlements on
the lands of the destroyed Palestinian villages." He also
says that "The dispossession was
accompanied by the renaming of the places it had seized, destroyed and now
recreated." Furthermore, "This mission was accomplished with the help of archaeologists and
biblical experts who volunteered to serve on an official Naming Committee whose
job it was to Hebraize Palestine's geography."He goes on to state, "The
true mission of the J.N.F., in other words, has been to conceal these visible
remnants of Palestine not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also
by the narratives it has created to deny their existence." As an example, Pappé
refers to the Forest of Birya, which is the largest man made forest in
Israel. It conceals the land of six Palestinian villages; Dishon,
Alma, Israel, Qaddita, Amqa, Ayn al-Zaytun, and Biryya. Also the Ramat Menashe Park covers the ruins of Lajjun, Mansi, Kafrayan, Al-Butaymat, Hubeza,
Daliyat al-Rawha, Sabbarin, Burayka, Al-Sindiyana, and Umm al-Zinat. The
Jerusalem forest is another example.
Pappé says the creation of the United Nations Relief and Work Agency
was not committed to the return of the refugees as resolution 194 was. There
were one million Palestinian refugees and U.N.R.W.A. was created to meet their
daily needs as refugees. He says that international peace brokers
consistently sidelined the Palestinian cause and there "was the categorical
refusal of the Israelis to acknowledge the Nakba and their absolute
unwillingness to be held accountable, legally, and morally, for the ethnic
cleansing they committed in 1948." In the first attempts at peace, the U.N.
held a peace conference in Switzerland. There, the U.S., the U.N., the Arab
world, the Palestinians, and the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Sharett,
accepted a plan for a two-state solution in which a right of return was
guaranteed. But, according to Pappé, David Ben-Gurion along with King Abdullah
of Jordan, defeated those efforts. For the following two decades there was a
lull in international interest. Then, "The June War (1967) ended with total
Israeli control over all of ex-Mandatory Palestine." Israel then established
three important axioms/guidelines for defining the debate over the Palestinian
issue. One, the conflict had its origin in 1967 and the solution would be
defined by an agreement on what to do with the West Bank and Gaza. (Pappé points
out that the West Bank and Gaza make up only 22% of Palestine.) Two, the West
Bank and Gaza could be further divided. Three, nothing that occurred prior to
1967 could ever be negotiated. As a response, for four decades, Yassar Arafat
conducted a campaign to get the world to recognize that an ethnic cleansing had
occurred in 1948. And according to Pappé, this task for the
Palestinians continues to today. Pappé mentions that the Knesset had even
gone to the extent of passing a law that prohibited Israeli negotiators from
discussing the right of return. He also speculates that if Israelis were to
acknowledge the Nakba that it would be akin to recognizing "that they have
become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare [i.e., the Nazis]."
Pappé describes a law the Knesset passed on 31
July 2003. This law states that any Palestinian who marries an Israeli will not
be granted Israeli citizenship, permanent residency, or temporary residency.
He also discusses the advent of the Israeli West Bank barrier. He states, "None
of this is new" because Theodore Herzl wrote in 1895, "We shall endeavor to
expel the poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for
it in the transit countries, but denying it any employment in our own
country." In 2003 Benyamin Netanyahu said, "If the Arabs in Israel form 40%
of the population, this is the end of the Jewish State. But 20% is also a
problem. If the relationship with these 20% becomes problematic, the state is
entitled to employ extreme measures." The "demographic problem" remains serious
today in the minds of many Israelis: "There are 2.5 million Palestinians
sharing the state with six million Jews. There are also another 2.5 million
Palestinians in the Gaza strip and in the areas Israel does not want in the West
Bank."
In his Epilogue, Pappé points out that the Faculty Club of Tel Aviv University is called the
Green House. It is built upon the remains of the Palestinian village, Shaykh Muwannis. It is the epitome of the denial of ethnic cleansing according to Pappé
because there is no mention of its true history. Pappé goes on to say that the university does not have a record of looking into the
Zionist history of ethnic cleansing whatsoever in any of its disciplines. He
concludes by saying "We end this book as we began: with the bewilderment that
this crime [ethnic cleansing, the Nakba] was so utterly forgotten and erased
from our minds and memories. But we now know the price: the ideology that
enabled the depopulation of half of Palestine's native people in 1948 is still
alive and continues to drive inexorable, sometimes indiscernible, cleansing of
those Palestinians who live there today."Ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians, or, democratic Israel at work
by Gideon Levy
May 12, 2011
It happened on the day after Independence Day, when Israel was immersed in
praise of itself and its democracy almost ad nauseam, and on the eve of
(virtually outlawed ) Nakba Day, when the Palestinian people mark the
"catastrophe" - the anniversary of the creation of Israel. My colleague Akiva
Eldar published what we have always known but for which we lacked the shocking
figures he revealed: By the time of the Oslo Accords, Israel had revoked the
residency of 140,000 Palestinians from the West Bank. In other words, 14 percent
of West Bank residents who dared to go abroad had their right to return to
Israel and live here denied forever. In other words, they were expelled from
their land and their homes. In other words: ethnic cleansing.
While we are still desperately concealing, denying and repressing our major
ethnic cleansing of 1948 - over 600,000 refugees, some who fled for fear of the
Israel Defense Forces and its predecessors, some who were expelled by force - it
turns out that 1948 never ended, that its spirit is still with us. Also with us
is the goal of trying to cleanse this land of its Arab inhabitants as much as
possible, and even a bit more. After all, that's the most covert and desired
solution: the Land of Israel for the Jews, for them alone. A few people dared to
say it outright - Rabbi Meir Kahane, Minister Rehavam Ze'evi and their
disciples, who deserve a certain amount of praise for their integrity. Many
aspire to do the same thing without admitting it.
The revelation of the policy of denying residency has proved that this secret
dream is in effect the establishment's secret dream. There one doesn't talk
about transfer, heaven forfend; nobody would think of calling it cleansing. They
don't load Arabs onto trucks as they once did, including after the Six-Day War,
and they don't shoot at them to chase them away - all politically incorrect
methods in the new world. But in effect that's the goal.
Some people think it's enough if we make the lives of the Palestinians in the
territories miserable to get them to leave, and many have in fact left. An
Israeli success: According to the Civil Administration, about a quarter of a
million Palestinians voluntarily left the West Bank in the bloody years
2000-2007. But that's not enough, so various and sundry administrative means
were added to make the dream come true.
Anyone who says "it's not apartheid" is invited to reply: Why is an Israeli
allowed to leave his country for the rest of his life, and nobody suggests that
his citizenship be revoked, while a Palestinian, a native son, is not allowed to
do so? Why is an Israeli allowed to marry a foreigner and receive a residency
permit for her, while a Palestinian is not allowed to marry his former neighbor
who lives in Jordan? Isn't that apartheid? Over the years I have documented
endless pitiful tragedies of families that were torn apart, whose sons and
daughters were not permitted to live in the West Bank or Gaza due to draconian
rules - for Palestinians only.
Take Dalal Rasras, for example, a toddler with cerebral palsy from Beit Omar,
who was recently separated from her mother for months only because her mother
was born in Rafah. Only after her case was publicized did Israel let the mother
return to her daughter "beyond the letter of the law" - the cruel letter of the
law that does not permit residents of Gaza to live in the West Bank, even if
they have made their homes there.
The cry of the dispossessed has now been translated into numbers: 140,000, only
until the Oslo Accords. Students who went to study at foreign universities,
businessmen who tried their luck abroad, scientists who went abroad for
professional training, native Jerusalemites who dared to move to the West Bank
temporarily - they all met the same fate. All of them were taken by the wind and
expelled by Israel. They couldn't return.
Most amazing of all is the reaction of those responsible for the policy of
ethnic cleansing. They didn't know. Maj. Gen. (res. ) Danny Rothschild, formerly
the chief military governor with the euphemistic title "coordinator of
government activities in the territories," said he heard about the procedure for
the first time from Haaretz. It turns out that not only is the cleansing
continuing, so is the denial. Every Palestinian child knows, and only the
general doesn't. Even today there are still 130,000 Palestinians registered as
"NLR," a heartwarming IDF acronym for "no longer a resident," as though
voluntarily, another euphemism for "expelled." And the general who is considered
relatively enlightened was unaware.
This is an absolute refusal to allow the return of the refugees - something that
would "destroy the State of Israel." It's also an absolute refusal to allow the
return of the people recently expelled. By next Independence Day we'll probably
invent more expulsion regulations, and on the next holiday we'll talk about "the
only democracy."
My Lunch with Yonatan Shapira
by Rabbi Brant Rosen
May 5, 2010
Yonatan Shapira, 38, is an Israel Air Force pilot and captain who authored
the "pilots' letter" of 2003, signed by 27 IAF pilots who said they would refuse
to fly over the occupied territories. When he was asked by the BBC for his
assessment of the situation in Gaza, and who was responsible, he blamed Israel,
saying that his assessment was that Israel is responsible for war crimes. He
continued: "It is not just a war crime against the Palestinians; it is a crime
against the Israeli people ... We are locking 1.5 million people in a ghetto, we
treat them as animals and this is the result ... As Jewish people, we know you
can not kill the desire for people to be free ... I want to ask all the Jewish
community, please join our force and stop this massive killing, for the sake of
Israel, for the sake of Palestine, and for the sake of the world ... I want to
cry and shout ..."
I had the pleasure of meeting Yonatan Shapira for lunch in Evanston yesterday.
If you’ve never heard of him, Yonatan was an officer in the Israeli Air Force
and flew hundreds of missions over the territories in a Blackhawk helicopter
squadron during the course of his eleven year career. Following a targeted bomb
assassination of a Hamas leader that killed fourteen civilians in Gaza, he
became a prominent Israeli "refusenik," authoring the Pilot’s Letter – a 2003
statement signed by 27 Israeli pilots who publicly refused to fly missions over
the Occupied Territories.
Since that time, Yonatan has gone on to co-found "Combatants for Peace " a
prominent organization in the growing Israeli Refusenik movement . A few years
ago he gained some more notoriety for writing and performing "Numu, Numu," a
powerful protest song written in the form of an ironic "Lullaby to Pilots."
(More recently, he’s become the object of a pop love song that’s currently
making the rounds on Israeli radio – Richard Silverstein has the story on that
in Tikun Olam ).
I had known of Yonatan’s refusenik activism, but during our lunch
conversation I was surprised to learn that he is also very active in supporting
non-violent Palestinian actions in Sheikh Jarrah, Bi’ilin and throughout the
Occupied Territories. (He was, in fact, arrested last January at a demonstration
in Sheikh Jarrah.) He told me that this work has been transformative for him,
explaining that as an IDF officer and even as a leader in the Israeli peace
movement he has always been socialized to step forward and lead the way. He said
he’s come to realize that the most important way he can serve now is to "stand
behind" Palestinians in their non-violent campaign for liberation.
He told me numerous stories about his experiences at demonstrations. He
mentioned that the IDF is increasing their crackdown on protesters, that they
hire infiltrators to throw stones at the army to given soldiers the a pretext to
open fire. None of it succeeds, of course: quite the opposite. The Palestinian
non-violence movement is growing steadily – a "White Intifada " that Yonatan
believes has already begun. As a IDF officer himself, he explained the Israeli
military mentality – that army commanders truly believe they have the power to
"outlaw" these protests through the sheer force of their military might.
Yonatan also mentioned that as part of his support of non-violent Palestinian
activism, he has also signed on to the internal Israeli movement for Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) known as "Boycott from Within ." Now that is the
new definition of bravery: a high ranking Israeli Air Force veteran who comes
from a military family (his father was a fighter pilot during the Six Day War)
has now firmly put himself on the front lines of a global non-violence campaign
initiated by the very people he himself had once been trained to attack.
I assumed that Yonatan would be made a virtual pariah for his public stands.
He replied that as a military man he understands how soldiers think and
generally knows how to engage them in dialogue even when they strongly disagree
with him. He also mentioned that his family is supportive of his work – his
father "is not quite there yet" but respects his activism and his mother is "the
most active of them all."
Related pages:
Christians may want to consider the ethical question
What would Jesus do?
If you are unfamiliar with the real history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,
or have been told that Israel is "only defending itself," please read
Albert Einstein's 1948
letter to the New York Times and
Einstein on Palestine:
the Prophet of Peace.
If you want to understand how the maps below relate to Israel's new offensive
against Gaza, known as Operation "Pillar of Defense" or the biblical "Pillar of Clouds," please click here
Amud Annan "Pillar of Fire." If you want to hear the
opinion of the former U.S. president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who
negotiated peace talks between Israel and Palestinians, please click here
Jimmy Carter:
"Israeli policy is to confiscate Palestinian territory." You may
also want to read and consider
Israeli Prime
Ministers who were Terrorists; they include Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir,
Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon and David Ben-Gurion.
Map 1 of 1946 Palestine shows more than 90% of the land belonging to Palestinians; at this point Jewish settlers had paid for most of
the land they occupied
Map 2 of 1947 U.N. partition plan of Israel and Palestine; the land in the white areas was not "given" to Israel; Israeli Jews
took the additional land
Map 3 of 1967 borders of Israel and Palestine; these are the "1967 lines" aka as the "1949 armistice lines"; once again Israeli Jews
took the additional land
Map 4 of 2000 borders shows how Israel keeps taking land outside its legal borders, creating discontiguous Palestinian
bantustans
Israel keeps evidence of ethnic cleansing locked away
by
Jonathan Cook
18 August 2010
History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have
observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much
as the unearthing of mass graves.
That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Netanyahu,
the Israeli prime minister, to extend by an additional twenty years the
country’s fifty-year rule for the release of sensitive documents.
The new seventy-year disclosure rule is the government’s response to Israeli
journalists who have been seeking through Israel’s courts to gain access to
documents that should already be declassified, especially those concerning the
1948 war, which established Israel, and the 1956 Suez crisis.
The state’s chief archivist says many of the documents "are not fit for public
viewing" and raise doubts about Israel’s "adherence to international law," while
the government warns that greater transparency will "damage foreign relations."
Quite what such phrases mean was illustrated by the findings of a recent
investigation by an Israeli newspaper. Haaretz revisited the "Six Day War" of
1967, in which Israel seized not only the Palestinian territories of the West
Bank and Gaza, but also a significant corner of Syria known as the Golan
Heights, which Israel still refuses to relinquish.
The consensus in Israel is that the country’s right to hold on to the Golan is
even stronger than its right to the West Bank. According to polls, an
overwhelming majority of Israelis refuse to concede their little bit of annexed
Syria, even if doing so would secure peace with Damascus.
This intransigence is not surprising. For decades, Israelis have been taught a
grand narrative in which, having repelled an attack by Syrian forces, Israel
then magnanimously allowed the civilian population of the Golan to live under
its rule. That, say Israelis, is why the inhabitants of four Druze villages are
still present there. The rest chose to leave on the instructions of Damascus.
One influential journalist writing at the time even insinuated anti-Semitism on
the part of the civilians who departed: "Everyone fled, to the last man, before
the IDF [Israeli army] arrived, out of fear of the ‘savage conqueror’ … Fools,
why did they have to flee?"
However, a very different picture emerges from Haaretz’s interviews with the
participants. These insiders say that all but 6,000 of the Golan’s 130,000
civilians were either terrorized or physically forced out, some of them long
after the fighting finished. An army document reveals a plan to clear the area
of the Syrian population, with only the exception of the Golan Druze, so as not
to upset relations with the loyal Druze community inside Israel.
The army’s post-war tasks included flushing out thousands of farmers hiding in
caves and woods to send them over the new border. Homes were looted before the
army set about destroying all traces of 200 villages so that there would be
nowhere left for the former inhabitants to return to. The first Jewish settlers
sent to till the fields recalled seeing the dispossessed owners watching
from afar.
The Haaretz investigation offers an account of methodical and wholesale ethnic
cleansing that sits uncomfortably not only with the traditional Israeli story of
1967 but with the Israeli public’s idea that their army is the "most moral in
the world." That may explain why several prominent, though unnamed, Israeli
historians admitted to Haaretz that they had learned of this "alternative
narrative" but did nothing to investigate or publicize it.
What is so intriguing about the newspaper’s version of the Golan’s capture is
the degree to which it echoes the revised accounts of the 1948 war that have
been written by later generations of Israeli historians. Three decades ago — in
a more complacent era — Israel made available less sensitive documents from
that period.
The new material was explosive enough. It undermined Israel’s traditional
narrative of 1948, in which the Palestinians were said to have left voluntarily
on the orders of the Arab leaders and in the expectation that the combined Arab
armies would snuff out the fledging Jewish state in a bloodbath.
Instead, the documents suggested that heavily armed Jewish forces had expelled
and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians before the Jewish state
had even been declared and a single Arab soldier had entered Palestine.
One document in particular, Plan Dalet, demonstrated the army’s intention to
expel the Palestinians from their homeland. Its existence explains the ethnic
cleansing of more than 80 percent of Palestinians in the war, followed by a
military campaign to destroy hundreds of villages to ensure the refugees
never returned.
Ethnic cleansing is the common theme of both these Israeli conquests. A deeper
probe of the archives will almost certainly reveal in greater detail how and why
these "cleansing" campaigns were carried out — which is precisely why Netanyahu
and others want the archives to remain locked. But full disclosure of these
myth-shattering documents may be the precondition for peace. Certainly, more of
these revelations offer the best hope of shocking Israeli public opinion out of
its self-righteous opposition to meaningful concessions, either to Syria or
the Palestinians.
It is also a necessary first step in challenging Israel’s continuing attempts to
ethnically cleanse Palestinians, as has occurred in the last few weeks against
the Bedouin in both the Jordan Valley and the Negev, where villages are being
razed and families forced to leave again. Genuine peacemakers should be
demanding that the doors to the archives be thrown open immediately. The motives
of those who wish to keep them locked should be clear to all.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East(Pluto Press) and Disappearing
Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His
website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The
National, published in Abu Dhabi.
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