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Israeli Plans for Ethnic Cleansing
As international support for a war against Iraq crumbles, the Americans continue to receive vigorous support for any military strike, whether authorized by the United Nations or not, from Israel. Given that a war against Iraq will destabilize the entire Middle East, and that Israel and its citizens face the very real possibility of increased suicide attacks in the event of a war, this support is, on the surface, puzzling.
However, journalists and commentators on the Middle East from inside Israel and out have argued the support is based on the Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians living in the occupied territories, and possibly even Israeli Arabs, during a war against Iraq.
Middle East commentator Will Youmans, writing in Counterpunch, also points out that "displacement en masse could happen after Iraq falls. Observers have speculated that western Iraq may provide a place for Israel to expel Palestinians to."
Other writes have predicted that Palestinians will be forcibly moved into Jordan, which since 1948, has absorbed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.
In Israel and in certain circles in North America, this plan for mass expulsion has been called "transfer". The term was chosen so as not to offend world public opinion, as the Serbs did in the early 1990s when they described similar plans for the Bosnians as "ethnic cleansing".
Recently, three of the parties running in the Israeli elections (to be held January 28) issued a statement in defence of "voluntary transfer". The parties, Israel Beytenu, Moledet and Tkuma, called on Palestinians to take "a blessed journey to the Palestinian state which has existed for a while … (Jordan)." "Just as our people emigrated from the Arab states to Israel, you will emigrate to Arab states. This is a population exchange which is one of the customary 20th century ways of resolving disputes among peoples. We wish you successful absorption in your new home," the statement concluded.
It is quite possible that representatives from one or more of these parties will be part of Israel's next coalition government. Irrespective of this, politicians from both of Israel's two largest parties, Likud and Labour, have expressed either open support for the concept of transfer or have refused to give an opinion on the subject.
In July, Jordanian intelligence officers leaked information about plans drawn up by the Sharon government to drive "hundreds of thousands" of Palestinians from the West Bank into Jordan. The plan called for the use of terrorist activities against Israeli civilians during a war against Iraq as a pretext to launch the expulsion. At the time of the leak, the Jordanian government called on Prime Minister Sharon to publicly repudiate transfer as a policy. He refused.
Of course, "transfer" is not a creation of current Israeli politicians. Nor is it, as those who support it claim, a response to suicide bombings.
Israeli historian Benny Morris writes "the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century."
At the turn of the century, Chaim Weizmann, who along with Theodor Herzl is considered one of the fathers of modern Zionism, compared the Palestinians to "the rocks of Judea, obstacles to be cleared on a difficult path."
And in 1938, David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister, told a joint meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive and Zionist Action Committee :"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area. … I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." As Prime Minister, he established a Transfer Committee which reported directly to him and oversaw the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages.
In the midst of the first intifada, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli Prime Minister who remains a powerful political player, told students at Bar-Ilan University that Israel should have moved quickly when the world's attention was focussed on China during the Tianamen Square protests to carry out a "mass expulsion among the Arabs of the territories."