Ethnic Cleansing Comes to Palestine Yet Again

War on Iraq Double Disaster for Palestinians
by Ramzy Baroud
Published on Wednesday, February 5, 2003 by
CommonDreams.org

"The world will awake with another million
Palestinians carrying their belongings and seeking
tents and water at some Arab country's border." 

In the case of an American war on Iraq, Palestinians
will not be watching for a "smart bomb" heading their
way, but for the Israeli army forcing them out of
their homes. This possibility is of greater danger
than one might think.

It is seldom that the international community has
stood in the face of Israel and halted its plans,
whether invading Arab land, "transferring" civilian
populations, destroying a refugee camp or ending a
siege imposed on a church. These violations have been
repeated time and again, and were almost entirely
cloned during the ongoing Palestinian uprising: the
reoccupation of the West Bank, the "transfer" of many
Palestinian residents in the northern West Bank
villages, destroying much of the Jenin refugee camp
and the siege on the church of the Nativity (one ought
to mention that many mosques were destroyed or burnt
to the ground by Israeli troops in the last two years.
Such news seems to be of lesser significance in the
Western media).

"Transfer", an euphemism of ethnic cleansing is one of
these terms with a non-threatening sounding and
catastrophic results. There is no need to examine the
sounding of the word however, since history has
clearly detailed the meaning of the expulsion of
Palestinians from their ancestral homeland, and the
massacres that often accompany it. To ease the process
of expelling Palestinians in 1948 so that the Jewish
state might obtain a "demographic" advantage, many
massacres took place, in Tantura, Deir Yassin, Beit
Daras and many more. Innocent Palestinians were
slaughtered in the streets and in their homes. 418
villages were destroyed, and over 750,000 Palestinians
were driven out of their land, some at gunpoint while
others fled for their lives as Zionist gangs bombarded
every Arab population center.

But the expulsion of Palestinians was hardly the clean
sweep Israel had hoped for. Israel's outright Jewish
majority was still threatened by the mere existence of
Arabs, whether those remaining inside the borders of
the newly established Jewish state, or by the refugees
and the original inhabitants of the West Bank and
Gaza. On the eve of the 1956 Sinai war campaign,
Israel was busily finalizing a plan to expel
Palestinians who remained, from northern Israel, an
area known as the Little Triangle. Now Israel's Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon was then a colonel. The
celebrated warrior reportedly ordered his subordinates
to investigate how many buses it would take to
transfer 300,000 Palestinians out of northern Israel.
The plan didn't go through, not until 1967, when once
again Israel took advantage of war to transfer up to
300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank.

Slower, but real expulsion has continued to take place
since 1967. Day after day, Palestinians find
themselves without land or shelters as Israeli Jewish
settlements illegally expand in the Occupied
Territories. The process is painful to watch and
becomes more painful when one realizes that the
international community seems not to care. According
to a recent study by the Israeli group "Peace Now",
the United States is the main source of funds
to these settlements, in defiance of United Nations
resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Israel uses every chance to expand the settlements and
to drive Palestinians out. The number of Palestinian
homes demolished is on the rise, this time no longer a
scattered demolition here and there, but concentrated
attempts where entire neighborhoods and villages are
razed forever. Just in the last month a lone, scores
of homes and shops were destroyed in Nazlit Issa,
Tulkarm, Hebron and Nablus. With such wanton
destruction and the expulsion of the inhabitants of
the lands, Jewish settlements expand. Thousands of
acres of fertile Palestinian land in Nablus and Hebron
and elsewhere had to be destroyed so that Itmar and
Kyriat Arba might grow, along with their fancy villas
and swimming pools.

The resurfacing fear of "Transfer" is not an illusion
created by Israel's dreadful habit of expelling
Palestinians at times of wars, wars created precisely
for that purpose. But the expulsion of Palestinians is
no longer a far off possibility championed by the
infamous Meir Kahane and Rehevam Zeevi. In an opinion
poll on March 2002, administered by the University of
Tel Aviv, 46 percent of Israeli Jews support the
"Transfer" of Palestinians, while 60 percent favored
"encouraging" Palestinians to leave on their own. The
"encouraging" of Palestinians to leave might have been
taken by heart by Jewish settlers near the Yanoun
village in the West Bank. The settlers would
raid the village every night and open fire at
Palestinian homes, they'd chase them out of their
lands and let there vicious dogs loose throughout
the villages. It was indeed encouraging enough, as the
villagers packed their belongings and left Yanoun on
October 18, 2002, in a scene that was almost an
identical depiction of the black and white photos of
Palestinians being driven out of their towns and
villages in 1948.

While the fear of expulsion continues to haunt entire
communities in the West Bank, in particular
Palestinians in the Yatta area where 750 families
are threatened to be removed from their villages, the
building of the enormous "security wall" to separate
the West Bank and Israel, was constructed precisely to
alienate dozens of villages and to trap the residents
between the "green line" and the West Bank, in the
midst of giant walls of concrete and barbered wire. 

It's only a matter of time before thousands of
Palestinians find themselves "transferred" from these
areas, for their existence would soon be sited as a
"security threat" for Israel. Sharon's own cabinet now
includes some of the most vibrant pro "transfer"
politicians in Israel, and the subject has become so
popular that some of the so-called new historians are
offering it as a "solution" to the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Benny Morris is one. It's Ilan Pappe, one of
Israel's most respected academics that found the most
suitable description for this: The "demons of the
Nakba (the Arabic word referring to the Palestinians
Diaspora of 1948) have returned to haunt Israel." I am
afraid that these "demons" have never abandoned Israel
in the first place. Despite the urgency of protesting
the war on Iraq, the international community, human
rights organizations, activists from all over the
world must pressure Israel and its main backer, the
United States government to halt any plans to expel
Palestinians out of their land in the Occupied
Territories whether in the case of war or not. Israel
must be held accountable for its own actions and
cannot be left to ravage Palestinians' lives whenever
a chance arises as a form of experimentation to
resolve its "demographic problems".

If attention continues to be diverted from the
Palestinian question, the world will awake one day
with another million Palestinians carrying their
belongings and seeking tents and water at some Arab
country's border. It's our moral responsibility to
stop this ghastly ethnic cleansing, before it
starts, although as far as the residents of many
Palestinian villages in northern the West Bank are
concerned, "transfer" has already begun.

Baroud is a Palestinian Journalist, editor-in-chief of
PalestineChronicle.com 




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