Palestinian Ethnic Cleansing

'Israelis want Palestinian ethnic cleansing'

Ahmed Bahar: Deep sorrow over Arab and Islamic silence

30 August 2006

By Motasem A Dalloul in Gaza

Israel has stepped up its policy of forcibly detaining members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

On August 20, Israeli forces seized Mahmoud al-Ramhi, Hamas secretary and the fourth-highest ranking official in the Palestinian legislature.

Two days later, an Israeli court charged Abd al-Aziz Dweik, the speaker of parliament, with membership in an outlawed organisation - the Islamist movement and governing party, Hamas.

To date, Israel has detained 30 Hamas politicians and five cabinet ministers, including Nasser Shaer, the deputy prime minister.

Thirty other senior and mid-level members of Hamas were also seized on June 29 as part of an Israeli campaign against the Islamist movement following the capture of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit by fighters on the border of the Gaza Strip on June 25.

Ahmed Bahar, the former deputy and acting speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), considers the kidnapping of the parliamentarians as well as an alleged assassination attempt against Ismail Haniya, the prime minister, part of a conspiracy to undermine the Hamas-led Palestinian government (PG).

Aljazeera.net: In pursuing its policy of detaining Hamas and government officials, what message is the Israeli government sending the Palestinian people?

Ahmed Bahar: The main message is that they want to undermine the Palestinian political regime at both levels: The government and the PLC.

They also want to humiliate Dweik, who they have put in a small dirty cell, as well as the Arabs and Muslims and all those who sympathise with them.

Despite strong condemnations and continuous contact with a lot of parliaments and parliamentarians, they are pursuing their policy as they clearly don't want a PG or a PLC.

The coincidence of the imprisonment of Dweik with the assassination attempt on Prime Minister Ismail Haniya shows that there is a previously manipulated plan to undermine the Palestinian regime.

What is the Palestinian government doing to secure the release of its officials in Israel jails?

We've conducted many demonstrations inside the country and abroad. We've called for demonstrations in Gaza and Ramallah, invited consuls and ambassadors, called human rights and Red Cross activists and so on.

We've sent more than 80 letters to Arab, Asian and European parliaments in order to keep them abreast of the crimes of the Zionist state. We've organised a sit-in last week and many Arab speakers of parliaments spoke with us by telephone as well as some European parliamentarians.

We've sent letters to Arab foreign ministers but regrettably, they have discussed neither the letter nor any other Palestinian issue.

We really feel deep sorrow for the Arab and Islamic silence toward the Palestinian issues.

Do you fear being seized by Israeli forces?

Yes, of course. The occupation troops may imprison or assassinate me because they want to disrupt the work of the PLC completely. If they take me away from the scene and remove second deputy speaker Hasan Khoraisha [not a member of Hamas] as well, the PLC will be formed by the second majority party and they can do whatsoever they want in the PLC and the government also.

Does the absence of about one-third of the PLC members affect it?

Of course. The absence of about 40 members from the Change and Reform bloc, a Hamas bloc in the PLC, affects the work of the parliament. But I assert that the performance of the parliament will continue regularly despite the absence of those members.

We are sure that the Israelis are implementing a well-constructed plan in order to undermine the work of the PLC as well as toppling the PG.

But I want to tell them that if they want to undermine stability in the Palestinian political arena this time, they themselves will bear the responsibility for the instability and disorder that will surely follow and affect all the Middle East.

A big part of this plot is implemented by local Palestinian hands beside the Israeli and the American hands. In addition, Arab silence is considered a supportive factor for this conspiracy.

But I am sure that the national and international position against Hamas's victory in the PLC proves that Hamas is on the right way. Hamas has adopted real democracy; however, they adopt the false democracy. Hamas will continue in its path.

How has Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, reacted to these developments?

In fact, Mr Abbas sometimes adopts ambiguous positions. He issues decrees that hinder the work of the PG. For example, he has the ability to help alleviate the financial siege on the PA as he has the authority on the Palestinian Investment Fund and the Monetary Palestinian Fund which have billions of US dollars in their coffers.

He can facilitate the transfer of funds collected by the PG or the Arab League as the US and EU currently refuse to transfer monies except under his control. He doesn't act positively.

We should all be united against the Israeli siege on Palestine, but sometimes and unfortunately, we feel that his positions harm that national goal.

Israel has maintained a siege and crackdown on Palestinian territories after fighters in the Gaza Strip infiltrated southern Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Are you working towards getting this siege lifted?

We have two bitter choices ahead of us: Either patience and vigilance, or submission.

But I think that we won't submit or make any change in our stance as this will be considered betraying the Palestinian voters who elected us and our political platform of national resistance to Israeli occupation.

Our people who live in Palestine and practised resistance by their hands and lived long years under the Israeli occupation recognise clearly what such a programme means. We are determined to follow this path.

Why won't you return Gilad Shalit to the Israelis?

Our key demands - the freeing of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails – have not been met.

Some Palestinian observers believe Israel will exchange the PLC officials for the safe return of Shalit. Do you see this as likely?

At first, I want to say that the Palestinian fighters captured the Israeli soldier from a tank; however, the Palestinian PLC members and ministers were kidnapped from their homes.

Their issue isn't related to Shalit at all, but it is a kind of pressure on the Palestinian people to abdicate their principles.

Secondly, different mediators – such as our Egyptian brothers - spoke about the release of the soldier. I hope to reach a satisfactory deal. But, I say that any satisfactory and acceptable deal for Palestinians is to release a reasonable number of the prisoners in return of the Israeli soldier. I myself suggest the release of all the prisoners in the Israeli jails. Then, there will be no need for kidnappings of any Israelis.

Ismail Haniya has proposed dissolving the Palestinian Authority. Will this help in lifting the siege?

The PM asked only for discussing the gains of the existence of the PA in its current form, not for the dissolution of it. He has put the issue up for debate: How can we face this siege and whether this step would be a successful solution to the crisis or not.

We believe the only solution is to form a national unity government; and we have started the discussion with other political parties in that regard.

But Abbas has said that George Bush, the US president, will not deal with any Palestinian government which contains members of Hamas.

I want to say to those who support the removal of Hamas from the government that Israel will one day want them out as well. If the Israelis want Hamas out today and place Fatah in power, tomorrow they will turn around and fight Fatah.

They themselves nominated Arafat for the Noble Prize, and then at the end they killed him.

I want all sides to know clearly that the Israelis want ethnic cleansing for all Palestinians.

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Israeli official proposes 'ethnic cleansing'

04 January 2004

A member of the Likud party has proposed "massive ethnic cleansing" of non-Jews in Palestine-Israel as a "final solution" of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Uzi Cohen, a member of Ariel Sharon's right-wing party and a deputy mayor of the town of Raanana, told Israeli public radio on Sunday there was widespread support in Israel for "the idea of ethnic cleansing".

"Many people support the idea but few are willing to speak about it publicly," he said.
Cohen, an influential figure in Likud, proposed that Israel, the United States, the European Union as well as oil-rich Arab states make concerted efforts to create a Palestinian state in northern Jordan.

He suggested the Hashimi royal family in Amman "might view favorably this idea".

Cohen said Palestinians should be given 20 years to "leave voluntarily".

"In case they don't leave, plans would have to be drawn up to expel them by force."

'Israel's ugly face'

Cohen's racist ideas have drawn strong reactions from Palestinian leaders in Israel. Israeli Arab Knesset member Ahmad Taibi described Cohen as representing "Israel's ugly face".

This man espouses Jewish fascism and he is trying to foster his venomous ideas, and I must say he is achieving remarkable success," Taibi told Aljazeera.net.

"The idea of ethnic cleansing is no longer confined to the far-right parties in Israel; many in the Likud support ethnic cleansing."

Taibi said tabling a racist proposal for discussion is in itself a grave development.
"It is not important what the result will be. The important thing is that they are going to dignify a fascist proposal like this by discussing it in a formal meeting."

Demographic threat

Israeli leaders have lately been warning of an "encroaching Palestinian demographic threat".
On Friday, a leading Jewish demographer warned Jews were on the verge of becoming a minority in mandatory Palestine, the historic region administered by Britain until late 1947 from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has so far been circumspect about the idea of banishing the Palestinians from their ancestral land.

Last year, when members of his Likud party approached him with the idea, Sharon reportedly told them: "The international situation wouldn't be conducive to expelling the Palestinians.

In 1948, the newly-born Jewish state expelled the bulk of the Palestinian population from what is now Israel and destroyed more than 460 Arab towns and villages.

Israel has consistently refused to allow the repatriation of the refugees, arguing that allowing some or all of them back to their homes, many of which no longer exist, would undermine the "Jewish identity" of Israel.

Links:

Israeli MP proposes 'ethnic cleansing'

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Israel: Ethnic cleansing is now official government policy

By Jean Shaoul
3 December 2002

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his ministers have openly declared that Palestinians must be driven out to make way for Jewish settlements in land occupied illegally since the 1967 war.

Sharon and his cabinet utilised the November 15 ambush of Israeli security forces in Hebron by Islamic Jihad and the ensuing gun battle that killed 12 members of the Israeli armed forces and injured 15, as well as three of the Palestinian attackers, to make their announcements.

Sharon himself called for “territorial contiguity” between Kiryat Arba, a settlement overlooking Hebron, the tiny Zionist enclaves and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a religious site venerated by both Moslems and Jews, inside the city. Palestinians living between the settlement, the enclaves and the Tomb would be forced to leave their homes to make way for the settlers—a policy known throughout the world as ethnic cleansing. He told army commanders in Hebron that Israel had to “take advantage of the opportunity” to “minimise the number of Palestinians living among Jewish settlers” and establish “Jewish points of presence”. He described this as “an appropriate Zionist response” to such attacks.

Sharon’s newly appointed foreign affairs minister and main leadership rival, Benyamin Netanyahu, was even more explicit. “We are going to cleanse the whole area and do the work ourselves.” he declared.

Israeli security forces immediately imposed a curfew, arrested and blindfolded at least 40 Palestinians, bulldozed the homes of Palestinian families and uprooted their olive groves.

This gave the ultra-nationalist settlers the green light to establish an “outpost”—the basis for a new settlement—on the vacant land and daub it with the racist slogan “Death to Arabs.” The settlers own language echoed the government’s calls for ethnic cleansing. The leader of the Hebron settlement, Zvi Katsover, said, “We have to cleanse the ground to ensure an Israeli territorial continuity between Kiryat Arba and Hebron.” A thousand new homes are to be built in the area. “I trust Sharon to implement the project,” he added.

At a rally in Hebron, Benny Elon, leader of the ultra-right wing Moledet (Homeland) party, declared, “There won’t be just a Jewish neighbourhood here. There will be a Jewish town here.”

According to the New York Times, “In a turbulent crowd, they [the settlers] pounded on the doors of nearby Palestinian houses and then smeared the pale stone with blue graffiti: ‘Every Arab killed for me it’s a holiday,’ and, over and over, ‘Vengeance’.”

Later the government issued an order for the demolition of a further 15 Palestinian homes on the route from Kiryat Arba to the Jewish enclave in Hebron.

Silence from Western leaders

The expulsion of communities from their homeland, like genocide, is recognised as a crime against humanity. The 1948 International Declaration of Human Rights and other international covenants, including the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, outlaw expulsions, population transfers, resettlement and forced relocation of any kind.

But the statements by Sharon and Netanyahu elicited no response from Israel’s main backer, the United States, or any other Western power. And even the liberal media did little more than report the words of Sharon and Netanyahu. Not one of the editorial writers of the New York Times or Britain’s Guardian has seen fit to comment on Israel’s explicit advocacy of ethnic cleansing.

The deafening silence on Sharon’s gross abuse of human rights is particularly marked, given that it takes place against the backdrop of the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. The central purpose of The Hague tribunal is to find Milosevic guilty of having politically sanctioned the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from the Yugoslav province of Kosovo—to confirm the existence of a “chain of command” between the Serb irregular forces in Kosovo and Belgrade, and so justify the US-led bombardment of Yugoslavia.

That trial has cost millions of dollars, lasted more than nine months and taken evidence from more than 100 witnesses. Despite this, to date the prosecution has failed to demonstrate that Milosevic himself either masterminded the ethnic cleansing or ever explicitly ordered the expulsion of the Albanian population of Kosovo.

There would be no such difficulty were Sharon to be brought to trial for his treatment of the Palestinians, or if Netanyahu joined him in the dock. The Israeli government has explicitly issued instructions to the armed forces and publicly announced policies that are universally recognised as constituting ethnic cleansing. Yet the world’s statesmen, the United Nations, the press and mainstream political commentators keep silent.

The West’s political blind spot serves to underline the hypocrisy of their claim to have gone to war against Milosevic based on moral considerations. The break-up of Yugoslavia was desired by the Western powers in order to secure control of the strategically vital Balkan region.

As the World Socialist Web Site explained in its statement of May 24, 1999, “Why is NATO at war with Yugoslavia? World power, oil and gold”:

“The immediate material gains that might be plundered from Kosovo are dwarfed by the far greater potential for enrichment that beckons in regions further to the east where the NATO powers have developed immense interests over the past five years.... [T]he dismantling of the USSR has created a power vacuum in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia that makes a new division of the world inevitable. The principal significance of Yugoslavia, at this critical juncture, is that it lies on the Western periphery of a massive swathe of territory into which the major world powers aim to expand.”

The statement continued, “Involved in the reintegration of the territory of the former USSR into world capitalism is the absorption, by massive Western transnational companies, of trillions of dollars in valuable raw materials that are vital to the imperialist powers. The greatest untapped oil reserves in the world are located in the former Soviet republics bordering the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan). These resources are now being divided among the major capitalist countries. This is the fuel that is feeding renewed militarism and must lead to new wars of conquest by the imperialist powers against local opponents, as well as ever-greater conflicts among the imperialists themselves.”

The same base economic and political considerations that in reality shaped the hostility of the Western powers towards Milosevic’s regime now determine their acquiescence in face of Sharon’s criminal actions. In short, nothing must be allowed to get in the way of the drive by the US and the major imperialist powers to secure control of the oil riches of the Middle East. On occasion Sharon’s actions against the Palestinians have been criticised because they have been considered counterproductive by Washington at a time when it is seeking to secure the support of the Arab regimes for war against Iraq. But fundamentally the US views Israel as the dominant military power in the region and its main and most reliable proxy.

Israel’s record of ethnic cleansing

Israel was founded in 1948 on the basis of the forcible expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians as the precondition for establishing a religious state with a Jewish majority population. Ever since it has repeatedly resorted to expulsion, population transfer, resettlement and forced relocation of the Palestinians.

In the aftermath of World War II and the Nazi holocaust, the United Nations voted in 1947 for the partition of Palestine into separate states for the Jews and the Palestinians. During the 1947-49 war between the Jews and the Arab states that followed, the actions of Zionist terror gangs played a major role in driving the Palestinians from their homes. In all, some 700,000 Palestinians became refugees in other countries and were not allowed to return to Israel. According to the UN, the original refugees and their descendants now number some four million. Many of those who remained were expelled from their homes and resettled elsewhere within Israel. The Law of Return, passed in 1950, and the Citizenship Law of 1952 granted every Jew the right to immediate citizenship upon arrival in Israel.

In 1967, after the defeat of the Arab states in the June war, there was another population transfer. About 250,000 of the 1948 refugees who had lived in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza for 20 years fled.

Afterwards, there were attempts by successive governments to implement a forced transfer. The Israeli forces expelled Palestinians living near the cease-fire lines and destroyed their villages and towns. Kalkilya was only the most well-known example. The Israeli authorities offered financial incentives and free transportation to Palestinians who were willing to leave, but there were few takers. Some of the refugees in the Gaza Strip were transferred to camps in the Jordan valley. The security forces demolished the homes of suspected militants and those of their families and neighbours and deported them to Lebanon.

In 1982, following the invasion of Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese moved north to the suburbs of Beirut to avoid the war and Israeli control of southern Lebanon. An international investigation by six jurists, including the cofounder of Amnesty International, found Israel guilty of attempted “ethnocide” and “genocide” against the Palestinian people. The report stated that there were no valid reasons “under international law for its invasion of Lebanon, for the manner in which it conducted hostilities, or its actions as an occupying force.”

Ever since 1967, Israel has illegally built settlements in the territories captured in the June war. More than 200,000 settlers now live in 200 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, while a further 180,000 live in what was once East Jerusalem and its environs. The settlement policy, which escalated after the 1993 Oslo Accords, involved demolishing Palestinian homes, seizing their land by military or legal means, and driving the Palestinians from the towns and villages.

Sharon’s government incorporates or rests on ultra-orthodox and settler-based political movements that explicitly advocate ethnic cleansing under the guise of “population transfer”. The Moledet (Homeland) party is the ideological successor to the proscribed far-right Kach movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. Its leader Rehavam Ze’evi was, until his assassination in October 2001, a minister in Sharon’s government. More recently, Gamla, a group founded by former Israeli military officers and settlers and funded by American Jews, published detailed plans for the “complete elimination of the Arab demographic threat to Israel” by forcibly expelling all Palestinians, including Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and Palestinian citizens of Israel within a three- to five-year period.

It is these extreme right-wing elements who now determine official government policy.

To the extent that the policies of ethnic cleansing have now become acceptable to the Israeli government, then the same applies to the US and its allies.

Washington’s support for Sharon signals that no crimes against humanity are too gross for the US to contemplate in the name of “the war on terrorism”. It is a warning of the kinds of methods that the Bush administration will employ to subjugate the Middle East region and so gain control of its oil riches.

See Also:
Israel to expand Jewish settlements in Hebron
[26 November 2002]

Chronology of a pogrom: How Sharon, US prepared assault on Palestinians
[4 April 2002]

Israeli Official Proposes Palestinian 'Ethnic Cleansing'
[10 January 2004]

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Further Reading:

Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem, Israeli Style

Ethnic cleansing in Silwan

Israel's approved ethnic cleansing (very long)

Israel: Poll Shows 64% of Israeli Jews Favor Ethnic Cleansing