BY ROHAN PEARCE
"It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples. No 'development' will bring us to our goal of independent nationhood in this small country. Without the Arabs, the land will become wide and spacious for us; with the Arabs, the land will remain sparse and cramped."
These were the words that Joseph Weitz, director of the Zionist Jewish National Fund, wrote in his diary in 1940. Weitz added: "The only solution is Palestine, at least western Palestine, without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises!... The way is to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, all of them, except perhaps those from Bethlehem, Nazareth and the Old City of Jerusalem."
The post-March 29 rampage by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in the West Bank, most notably in Jenin, is the latest chapter in the history of "transfer" — the attempt to force out Palestinians out of their national homeland.
During the attacks on Palestinian towns, the IDF carried out the systematic destruction of Palestinian governmental infrastructure. In the West Bank city of Ramallah, for example, IDF armoured personnel carriers and tanks smashed down the gates of the Palestinian Ministry of Education and about 150 Israeli soldiers systematically destroyed computer equipment and removed records, money and cheque books.
Similar deliberate destruction was carried out at the Palestinian Legislative Council, the finance, health and civil affairs ministries, the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics and the El-Bireh Municipal Library.
Israeli soldiers also vandalised the offices of the human rights organisations such as al Haq, the MATTIN Group and the Mandela Institute; the Health Development Information Policy Unit; the Union of Medical Relief Committees and the al Nahda Women's Society for the Hearing Impaired. The al Quds University Educational Television station and other Palestinian media outlets were also vandalised.
Although Israeli government spokespersons have previously said that the plan of "transfer" openly advocated by the right-wing members of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet is "unfeasible", in practice Sharon's government is destroying the ability of Palestinians to live and work in Palestine.
Israel's blocking of a United Nations "fact-finding" mission to Jenin was motivated not just by the need to cover up the massacre of Palestinian civilians committed there by the IDF, but to prevent interference in its current effort to force Palestinians out of the Occupied Territories.
Zionist ethnic cleansing
The Zionist policy of attempting to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants has a long history.
In May 1948 the Zionists proclaimed the State of Israel as the homeland for the world's Jews. In 1947 Jews had formed less than a third of Palestine's population. Even within the portion of Palestine allocated by the 1947 UN partition plan to the "Jewish state", Arabs were the majority. Zionists claim that the Arabs' rejection of the partition plan means that the Palestinian Arabs have only themselves to blame for the further seizure of land by Israel between 1948 and 1949 (and, additionally in 1967).
At the time the UN approved the partition plan, Ireland's President Eamon De Valera told a person soliciting his support for the plan: "I read the Old Testament many years ago. I am afraid I have forgotten many things I read; but one passage I recall clearly. It is the story of Solomon's judgement of the two women who desired the same baby. I remember how when Solomon ruled that the baby be divided the real mother screamed, 'No! No! Give the baby to the other woman!' That is my answer to partition. The rightful owners of a country will never agree to partition."
Zionists also claim that Palestinians would not have been evicted from their homes in the 1948-49 "war on independence" had neighbouring Arab states not fought with Israel (in fact, these states, which were backed by Britain, attempted to seize Palestine for themselves). But already by 1948, there were 300,000 Palestinian refugees from Israel.
Dozens of Arab villages were destroyed by the time of Israel's formal establishment on May 14, 1948. In April 1948, 254 Palestinian civilians were massacred in the village of Deir Yassin (29 kilometres beyond the borders allocated by the UN to Israel) with the authorisation of the Zionist military organisation, the Haganah.
Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, made it clear that the remaining Palestinians were not wanted in Israel, writing in his autobiography that he wanted Israel to be as "Jewish as England is English". Ha'aretz reported in 1958 that Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, "refused an identity card issued to him because it was written in Arabic as well as Hebrew".
Immediately after the 1948 war, almost 400,000 hectares of Palestinian land was confiscated by the Israeli state. Between 1948 and 1976, an additional 110,000 hectares were taken.
The early confiscations of land were "legal" for "security reasons", because a state of emergency was declared on May 21, 1948. These measures were allowed by the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, enacted in 1945 by the British colonial authorities. The Israeli government's powers were increased by the Law and Administration Ordinance, which allowed "defence areas" to be arbitrarily declared by the defence minister.
Ya'acov Shimshon Shapiro, who later became Israel's attorney-general and "justice" minister, said of these regulations in 1946: "The system established in Palestine since the issue of the defence laws is unparalleled in any civilised society; there are no such laws even in Nazi Germany."
The manner in which these laws were used to expel Palestinians from their homes is illustrated by the case of Kafr Birim, a village in northern Galilee. David Gilmour writes in Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians, that in 1948: "After the fighting in Galilee was over, Kafr Birim was occupied by the Israeli army. A few days later the inhabitants were informed that they would have to leave their homes temporarily as military operations were expected in their area. They were reluctant to do this and only moved to some nearby caves after a promise from an official at the Ministry of Police and Minorities that they would soon be allowed to return home. This promise was repeated a few months later by the Arab affairs."
After three years, the villagers took their case to Israel's Supreme Court and received a ruling in their favour. The army ignored the ruling and, in September 1953, the army "mined the village and ordered the Israeli air force to drop incendiary bombs".
"Every building was destroyed except the church. Most of the land was given to the recently established Kibbutz Birim, the rest to a moshav settlement of Iranian Jews."
Israel's June 1967 war against Syria, Egypt and Jordan allowed the Zionist state to push its borders outward dramatically, taking over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians who had already been turned into refugees were forced to flee once more. Paul Gauthier cites the example of Kalkiliya in Jerusalem et le Sang des Pauvres 5-8 juin 1967: "A large proportion of the 16,000 inhabitants of Kalkiliya were refugees from 1948. With the aid of UNWRA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] they had built their own homes and started a new life. Having driven the inhabitants out of their town by 16.00 hours on 7 July 1967, the Israeli army used tanks and bulldozers to destroy two-thirds of the town. Foreign correspondents were not allowed to visit the town. After the destruction, an Israeli officer said: 'That was Kalkiliya; now it is Kfar Saba'."
Following Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, an investigation into atrocities committed was undertaken by an international commission of six jurists, led by co-founder of Amnesty International Sean MacBride. The findings, supported by the majority of the jurists, found that Israel was guilty of attempted "ethnocide" and "genocide" of the Palestinian people and that there were no valid reasons "under international law for its invasion of Lebanon, for the manner in which it conducted hostilities, or for its actions as an occupying force".
The invasion was an attempt to crush the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Sustained international pressure on Israel led to September 1993 Oslo declaration of principles, which included mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO (which was then transformed into the Palestinian Authority, headed by PLO leader Yasser Arafat).
While the Oslo "peace process" was deeply flawed, legitimising Israel's settlements in the Occupied Territories, failing to create a mechanism to redress human rights abuses by Zionist settlers and the IDF and leaving Israel in control of movement between PA controlled areas and access to resources in these areas, it nevertheless reflected the increased international recognition of the Palestinians' right to self-determination.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's chief negotiator at the Camp David summit in 2000, described the Oslo process as "in practice ... founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever".
The rejection by Arafat of a proposal made by Barak at the 2000 Camp David summit that would have given the Palestinians only nominal self-rule, and did not allow Palestinian refugees to be repatriated to the areas they were forced from in 1947-49 and 1967, led to the collapse of the Oslo process.
The determination of the Palestinian people to continue the struggle for their national rights has led Israel's ruling class to swing its support back to the traditional Zionist policy of using military force to ethnically cleanse all of Palestine of Palestinians.
The most recent Israeli assault on Palestinian towns in the Occupied Territories represents an acceleration of this policy of ethnic cleansing — trying to wipe out any Palestinian resistance and destroying the limited social infrastructure. In the case of the Jenin refugee camp, the IDF almost completely levelled Palestinian residential areas — a clear signal from Sharon for Palestinians to leave and seek refuge outside the borders of pre-Israel Palestine.
Sharon made clear his view on a Palestinian state in 1982, in an interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. He said that Palestinians "have a homeland — it is the Palestine that is called Jordan".
This week Sharon will present US President George Bush with a "peace plan". On May 3, Sharon said: "I'll be presenting a plan, a serious plan, maybe the most serious that has presented by now, how to reach peace in the Middle East, how to reach peace between us and the Palestinians."
Sharon's "serious plan" is to permanently station Israeli troops within the borders of the West Bank to create a "buffer zone", and thus to ethnically cleanse more Palestinians from Palestinian land.
From Green Left Weekly, May 8, 2002.
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