ZIONIST EFFORTS AND PLANS FOR ETHNIC CLEANSING

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In response to my article on the Ethnic Cleansing operations of 1948, a "liberal Zionist" complained about what he called, "rehashing again and again the well known narratives of the events of 60 years ago. Might it not be more worthwhile to search for a just and practical solution to put an end to this madness?"
Unfortunately, "Ethnic Cleansing" is not part of the past. Zionist efforts and plans for ethnic cleansing never stopped:

1. Maintaining a "Jewish Majority" is a corner stone of Herzl's Der Judenstaat. Accordingly, Ethnic Cleansing is part and parcel of the Zionist strategy for maintaining the required "Jewish Majority".

2. Official discussions related with Ethnic Cleansing were made in a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive following the Peel Commission Partition Plan of 1937. (Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their Homeland, London/Boston: 1987, p. 4, citing CZA, Minutes of the Population Transfer Committee, 22 Nov., 1937)

3. On the eve of WW II, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy signed an agreement that provided for the transfer of thousands of German-speaking residents from the Italian South Tyrol to the Reich. Vladimir Jabotinsky was impressed by the accord and alluded that it could serve as a model for the transfer of the Arabs out of Palestine. Jabotinsky stated, "This precedent may perhaps be fated to play an important role in Jewish history." (Ibid, p. 21, citing Schechtman, p. 324)

4. Ethnic Cleansing operations were carried out in 1948.

5. Ethnic Cleansing operations were also exercised again in 1967 as well, although at a lesser scale.

6. Other Israeli efforts and brutality succeeded in the expulsion of more Palestinians but failed to provoke a stampede on the line of what happened in 1948. These efforts included massacres designed to intimidate the Palestinians into fleeing similar to the aftermath of the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948. The massacres of Kafr Qassim on 29 October, Khan Yunis on 3 November, and Rafah on 12 November 1956 were part of these efforts. Other plans and proposals based on inducing voluntary exodus were also tried. (For a detailed and fully documented account, using Israeli archives and documents, on the concept of transfer, the different plans and proposals,and actual expulsions carried out by Israel, see Nur Masalha, A Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians 1949 - 96, London: Faber and Faber ltd., 1997, Chapter 2, pp. 60 - 109)

 

7. With the Likud assumption of power in 1977, the most far-reaching proposals entered mainstream Zionist thinking and official circles. Such proposals, including Arab population removal, were outlined in an article entitled "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980's", which appeared in the WZO's periodical Kivunim in February 1982. Oded Yinon, a journalist and analyst of Middle Eastern affairs and former senior Foreign Ministry official wrote the article, which called for Israel to bring about the dissolution and fragmentation of the Arab states into a mosaic of ethnic groupings. According to Yinon, the policy of Israel must be "to bring about the
dissolution of Jordan; the termination of the problem of the [occupied] territories densely populated with Arabs west of the [River] Jordan; and emigration from the territories, and economic-demographic freeze in them." He added, "We have to be active in order to encourage this change speedily, in the nearest time."
Yinon believed that "Israel has made a strategic mistake in not taking measures [of mass expulsion] towards the Arab population in the new territories during and shortly after the [1967] war.... Such a line would have saved us the bitter and dangerous conflict ever since which we could have already then terminated by giving Jordan to the Palestinians."

Moreover, Yinon suggested encompassing the whole Arab world, including the imposition of a Pax Israela on the Arabs by re-invading Sinai and "breaking Egypt territorially into separate geographical districts." As for the Arab East: "...the total disintegration of Lebanon into five regional, localized governments as the precedent for the entire Arab world...the dissolution of Syria, and later Iraq, into districts of ethnic and religious minorities.... [This is exactly what's going on right now]" (Ibid, pp. 196 - 198, citing Oded Yinon, A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, [Hebrew], Kivunim, Jerusalem, No. 14, February 1982, pp. 53 - 58. (Oded's article is available online at:http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0005345.html )

8. Israel Eldad wrote, "Had it not been for Deir Yassin, half a million Arabs would be living in the State of Israel. The State of Israel would not have existed. This country will be Eretz Israel with an absolute Jewish majority and a small Arab minority, or Eretz Ishmael.if we do not expel the Arabs one way or another." (The Uprising and Beyond, pp. 262 - 263, citing Davis and Mezvinsky (eds.) Documents from Israel, p. 187, and Yoram Peri, Davar, 3 August 1984, in Israeli Press Briefs, no. 28)

9. On 16 November 1989, Benjamin Netanyahu told Bar-Ilan University students that the government had failed to exploit internationally favorable situations, to carry out "large-scale" expulsions at a time when "the damage [to Israel's public relations] would have been relatively small..." Netanyahu was referring to the Tianamen Square massacre in June 1989 when world attention and the media were focused on China. He added, "I still believe that there are opportunities to expel many people." Netanyahu later denied making the remarks but the Jerusalem Post presented a tape recording of his speech. (Nur Masalha, op. cit., p. 190, citing The Jerusalem Post, 19 November, 1989)
10. In an interview with Ari Shavit published in Ha'aretz on 12 April 2001 Sharon stated, "The War of Independence has not ended. No. 1948 was just one chapter. And therefore it is impossible to say that we have completed the work and that now we can rest on our laurels..."