Ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine. - [8] The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict
“Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund… On December 19, 1940, he wrote: ‘It must be clear that there is no room for
both peoples in this country… The Zionist enterprise so
far… has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with ‘land
buying’—but this will not bring
about the State of Israel; that
must come all at once, in the manner of a Salva-tion (this is the secret of the
Messianic idea); and there is no way besides
transferring the Arabs from here
to the neighbouring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe’…There were literally
hundreds of such statements made by Zionists. ”
Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”
Ethnic cleansing - continued
“Following the outbreak of 1936, no mainstream [Zionist] leader was able to conceive of future coexistence and peace without a clear physical
separation between the two peoples—achievable only by way of
transfer and expulsion. Publicly they all continued to speak of coexistence
and to attribute the violence to a small minority of zealots and
agitators. But this was merely a
public pose. . .Ben-Gurion
summed up: ‘With compulsory transfer we (would) have a vast area (for settlement). . . I support compulsory transfer. I
don’t see anything immoral in it.’ ” Israeli historian, Benny Morris, “Righteous Victims”
Ethnic cleansing - continued
“Ben-Gurion clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible to remain in the
Jewish state. He hoped to see them flee. He said as much
to his colleagues and aides in meetings in August, September and October
[1948]. But no [general] expulsion policy was ever enunciated and Ben-Gurion
always refrained from issuing clear or written expulsion orders; he
preferred that his generals ‘understand’
what he wanted done. He wished
to avoid going down in history as the
‘great expeller’ and he did not
want the Israeli government to be implicated in a morally questionable policy… But while there was no ‘expulsion
policy’, the July and October [1948] offensives were
characterized by far more expulsions
and, indeed, brutality towards
Arab civilians than the first half of the war.”
Benny Morris, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.
Didn’t the Palestinians leave their homes voluntarily during the 1948
war? “Israeli propaganda has largely relinquished the
claim that the Palestinian exodus of 1948 was ‘self-inspired’. Official
circles implicitly concede that the
Arab population fled as a result
of Israeli action—whether directly, as in the
case of Lydda and Ramleh, or
indirectly, due to the panic that and similar
actions (the Deir Yassin
massacre) inspired in Arab population centres throughout
Palestine. However, even though the historical record has been
grudgingly set straight, the Israeli establishment still
refuses to accept moral or political
responsibility for the refugee
problem it—or its predecessors—actively created.”
Peretz Kidron, quoted in “Blaming The Victims,” ed. Said and Hitchens.
Comments
Post a Comment