[Salon] REMEMBERING THE “ETHNIC CLEANSING” OF PALESTINE - by Allan brownfeld

REMEMBERING THE “ETHNIC CLEANSING” OF PALESTINE BY ALLAN C. BROWNFELD ————————————————————————————————————————- As Israel responds to the terrorist assault of October 7, which killed more than 1,400 men, women and children, most of them civilians, it is important to review the history of Israel’s relationship with the indigenous population of Palestine. The Zionist movement, which was a minority view among Jews till the rise of Nazism, engaged in an assault against Palestinians and what Israeli historians now call “ethnic cleansing.” Reviewing this history, which few Americans understand, gives us an historical perspective. The terror attack by Hamas was unprecedented and particularly brutal. Sadly, the history of Palestine has seen terrorism before, on both sides of the continuing conflict. Consider what many view as a concerted Israeli campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” to make room in Palestine for Jewish refugees. in April 1948, the Irgun and Lehi launched an attack on the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Situated in the hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Deir Yassin was of no immediate threat to the Zionist forces. Its residents were considered passive, and its leaders had agreed with those of an adjacent Jewish neighborhood, Givat Shaul, that each side would prevent its own people from attacking the other. It was the Muslim Sabbath when the attack by the Irgun and Lehi, with the reluctant acquiescence of the mainstream Jewish defense organization, the Haganah, took place. All the inhabitants of the village were ordered out into a square, where they were lined up against the wall and shot. More than one hundred civilians were killed. News of the massacre spread rapidly and helped prompt a panic flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. Most of the victims of the Deir Yassin massacre were women, children and older people. The men of the village were absent because they worked in Jerusalem. Irgun leader Menachem Begin issued this euphoric message to his troops after the attack: “Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest…As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou hast chosen us for conquest.” David Shipler, Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times from 1979 to 1984, reports that, “The Jewish fighters who planned the attack on Deir Yassin also had a larger purpose, apparently. A Jerusalem woman and her son, who gave some of the men coffee in the pre-dawn hours before their mission, recall the guerrillas’ talking excitedly of the prospect of terrifying Arabs far beyond the village of Deir Yassin so that they would run away. Perhaps this explains why the Jewish guerrillas did not bury the Arabs they had killed, but left their bodies to be seen, and why they paraded surviving prisoners, blindfolded and with hands bound, in the backs of trucks through the streets of Jerusalem, a scene still remembered with a shudder by Jews who saw it.” *There were other massacres of Arabs. One occurred on October 29, 1956, the eve of Israel’s Suez campaign, when the army ordered all Israeli Arab villages near the Jordanian border to be placed under a wartime curfew that was to run from 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. the next day. Any Arab on the streets would be shot. No arrests were to be made. But the order was given to Israeli border police units only at 3:30 p.m., without time to communicate it to the Arabs affected, many of whom were at work in their fields. In Kfar Kassem, Israeli border troops took up positions at various points and slaughtered villagers as they came home, unaware that a curfew had been imposed. The troops fired into one truck carrying fourteen women and four men. Villagers were hauled out of trucks, lined up and shot. In all, forty-seven Arabs, all of them Israeli citizens, were killed during the early hours of the curfew at Kfar Kassem. Lance Corporal Shalom Ofer, deputy squad leader, ordered that all women and children be shot repeatedly until none remained alive. In his book “Ten Myths About Palestine,” Israeli historian Ilan Pappe discusses the myth that, “The Palestinians Voluntarily Left Their Homeland in 1948.” He notes that, “The Zionist leadership and ideologues could not envision a successful implementation of their project without getting rid of the native population, either through agreement or by force. More recently, after years of denial, Zionist historians such as Anita Shapira have accepted that their heroes, the leaders of the Zionist movement, seriously contemplated transferring the Palestinians.” In a letter to his son Amos in October 1937, David Ben-Gurion wrote that it might be necessary to remove the Palestinians “by force.” In 1937, he told the Zionist Assembly: “In many parts of the country it will not be possible to settle without transferring the Arab fellahin,” which he hoped would be done by the British. But with or without the British, Ben-Gurion articulated clearly the place of expulsion in the future of the Zionist project. He wrote: “With compulsory transfer we would have a vast area for settlement…I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” Ilan Pappe notes that, “What is clear is that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians can in no way be justified as a ‘punishment’ for rejecting a U.N.peace plan that was devised without any consultation with the Palestinians themselves…While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable U.N.peace initiative, the Israeli leadership turned a blind eye when in September 1948 Jewish terrorists assassinated the United Nations peace mediator, Count Bernadotte.” The new Israeli government in 1948 adopted Plan D, which included clear reference to the methods to be employed in the process of “cleansing” the population: “Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously…Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.” In Ilan Pappe’s view, “The crime committed by the leadership of the Zionist movement, which became the government of Israel, was that of ethnic cleansing. This is not mere rhetoric but an indictment with far-reaching political, legal, and moral implications. The definition of the crime was clarified in the aftermath of the 1990s civil war in the Balkans: ethnic cleansing is any action by one ethnic group meant to drive out another ethnic group with the purpose of transforming a mixed ethnic region into a pure one. Such an action amounts to ethnic cleansing regardless of the means employed to obtain it—-from persuasion and threats to expulsion and mass killings…Israel is exclusively culpable for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, for which it bears the legal as well as the moral responsibility.” In his book “What Is Modern Israel?,” Professor Yakov Rabkin of the University of Montreal points out that, “From its very beginnings, the Zionist movement sought to colonize with Europeans a territory in Western Asia inhabited by a variety of ethnic and confessional groups. The first Jewish immigrants, at the end of the 19th century, settled on the land in a random and disparate manner, employing Arab workers on their farms. Unlike them, those who migrated to Palestine in the early 20th century practiced a concentrated form of colonization: they set up exclusively Jewish settlements, which entailed the displacement of local populations. The accent placed on the establishment of ethnically homogenous settlements could not but have created resistance. The two slogans adopted by the Zionist pioneers clearly illustrated their intentions: ‘conquest through labor’ and ‘separation.’ In other words, the Zionist movement adopted a policy of separate development that remains in force up to the present, and explains in large measure the perpetuation of the conflict with the Palestinians and the isolation of the state of Israel in the region.” While Israel continues to present itself as a Western-style democracy, the facts are quite different. In his book “Coming To Palestine,” Sheldon Richman points out that, “The first law enacted by the Israeli Knesset was the Law Of Return, part of the Basic Law, the closest thing Israel has to a constitution. Under the Law of Return, a Diaspora Jew, no matter where he was born or where he lives may ‘return’ to Israel as a full Israeli national. But an Arab (or other non-Jew) born in Palestine but who fled or was driven out, may not. The criterion is simple: one is a Jew, the other is not.” Richman shows that, “Unlike other countries, Israel distinguishes nationality from citizenship. Non-Jews can be citizens of Israel. But they cannot be nationals. Only Jews can be nationals. And in Israel, many rights proceed from nationality rather than citizenship…Author Roselle Tekiner has commented, ‘Israel is the only nation in the world to grant privileges to some foreigners that are denied to some native-born citizens.’” Even as Israel came under attack from Hamas, the Netanyahu government was establishing new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which it has occupied in violation of international law for more than fifty years,and which it now speaks of annexing. And the militant Jewish settlers, have been engaging in violent acts against the indigenous Palestinian population in an effort to remove them from their homes and villages. President Biden, who has shown strong support for Israel, sharply criticized the violent acts of settlers against Palestinians. The recent settlers, the Washington Post noted, “are a more aggressive movement under Benjamin Netanyahu.” Since the outbreak of war with Hamas,at least 100 West Bank Palestinians have been killed. The Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din reports that settlers attacked Palestinians in the West Bank on 100 different occasions in at least 62 locations betweeen October 7 and 22. According to the United Nations, 12% of Palestinian herding communities had fled their homes as of September,primarily due to settlers attacking them and preventing them from accessing their land. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that IDF soldiers rarely act to defend Palestinians and sometimes participate in settler attacks. Sadly, the terrorism and ethnic cleansing, which Jewish critics argue is a violation of Jewish moral and ethical values, which has characterized Israeli policy since 1948, seems to be accelerating at the present time. The right-wing Netanyahu government appears to welcome these developments, which even friends of Israel throughout the world believe threaten the country’s future. Prior to Israel’s creation, Jewish critics of Zionism such as Albert Einstein, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt warned that nationalism was a corruption of Judaism’s universal moral and ethical tradition. Current developments make their views appear prophetic. ## ——————————————-——— Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. (www.ACJNA.org).