The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (45 page)

As in 1948, when Ben-Gurion led the Consultancy to ‘reconcile’ themselves with a future state over seventy-eight per cent of Palestine, the problem is no longer how much land to grab, but rather what the future of the
indigenous Palestinians who live there will be. In 2006, in the ninety per cent Israel covets there are about 2.5 million Palestinians sharing the state with six million Jews. There are also another 2.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and in the areas Israel does not want in the West Bank. For most mainstream Israeli politicians and the Jewish public this demographic balance is already a nightmare.

However, Israel’s adamant refusal even to contemplate the possibility of negotiating the right of the Palestinians to come back to their homes, for the sake of maintaining a predominantly Jewish majority – even if this would bring about an end to the conflict – rests on very shaky ground. For almost two decades, the State of Israel has been unable to claim an over-whelming Jewish majority, thanks to the influx in the 1980s of Christians from former Soviet Union countries, the increasing number of foreign guest workers and the fact that secular Jews find it more and more difficult to define what their Jewishness amounts to in the ‘Jewish’ state. These realities are known to the captains of the ship of state, and yet none of this alarms them: their primary goal is to keep the population of the state ‘white’, that is, non-Arab.
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Israeli governments have failed in their attempts both to encourage further Jewish immigration and to increase Jewish birth rates within the state. And they have not found a solution to the conflict in Palestine that would entail a reduction in the number of Arabs in Israel. On the contrary, all the solutions Israel contemplates lead to an increase in the Arab population since they include the Greater Jerusalem area, the Golan Heights and the large settlement blocs in the West Bank. And while Israeli proposals after 1993 for ending the conflict may have met with the approval of some Arab regimes in the region – such as those of Egypt and Jordan, both securely located in the US sphere of influence – they never convinced the civil societies in those countries. Neither does the way the Americans go about ‘democratising’ the Middle East, as currently pursued by US troops in Iraq, make life inside the ‘white’ Fortress any less anxious, as the invasion of Iraq is so closely identified with Israel by the Muslim world. Levels of social violence inside the Fortress are high, and the standard of living of the majority is constantly dropping. None of these concerns is dealt with: they are almost as low on the national agenda as the environment and women’s rights.

Rejecting the Palestinian refugees’ Right of Return is tantamount to making an unconditional pledge to the continuing defence of the ‘white’
enclave and to upholding the Fortress. Apartheid is particularly popular among Mizrahi Jews, who today are the Fortress’ most vociferous supporters, although few of them, especially since they come from North African countries, will find themselves leading the comfortable lives their Ashkenazi counterparts enjoy. And they know this – betraying their Arabic heritage and culture has not brought the reward of full acceptance.

Still, the solution would appear simple: as the last postcolonial European enclave in the Arab world, Israel has no choice but willingly to transform itself one day into a civic and democratic state.

That this is possible we see from the close social relationships that Palestinians and Jews have created between themselves over these long and troubled years and against all odds, both inside and outside Israel. That we can put an end to the conflict in the torn land of Palestine also becomes obvious if we look at those sections of Jewish society in Israel that have chosen to let themselves be shaped by human considerations rather than Zionist social engineering. That peace is within reach we know, above all, from the majority of the Palestinians who have refused to let themselves be de-humanised by decades of brutal Israeli occupation and who, despite years of expulsion and oppression, still hope for reconciliation.

But the window of opportunity will not stay open forever. Israel may still be doomed to remain a country full of anger, its actions and behaviour dictated by racism and religious fanaticism, the features of its people permanently distorted by the quest for retribution. How long can we go on asking, let alone expecting, our Palestinian brothers and sisters to keep the faith with us, and not to succumb totally to the despair and sorrow into which their lives were transformed the year Israel erected its Fortress over their destroyed villages and towns?

Tel-Aviv University, as are all Israel’s universities, is dedicated to upholding the freedom of academic research. The Faculty Club of Tel-Aviv University is called the Green House. Originally this was the house of the mukhtar of the village of Shaykh Muwannis, but you would never be able to tell that if you were ever invited there to have dinner, or to take part in a workshop on the history of the country or even on the city of Tel-Aviv itself. The menu card of the Faculty Club’s restaurant mentions that the place was built in the nineteenth century and used to belong to a rich man called ‘Shaykh Munis’ – a fictitious and faceless person imagined in a fictitious, placeless location, as are all the other ‘faceless’ people who once lived in the destroyed village of Shaykh Muwannis, on whose ruins Tel-Aviv University built its campus. In other words, the Green House is the epitome of the denial of the Zionists’ master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that was finalised not far away along the beach, in Yarkon Street, on the third floor of the Red House.

Had the campus of Tel-Aviv University been dedicated to proper academic research, you would have thought that its economists, for example, would have assessed by now the extent of the Palestinian properties lost in the 1948 destruction, providing an inventory that could enable future negotiators to start working towards peace and reconciliation. The private businesses, banks, pharmacies, hotels and bus companies Palestinians owned, the coffee houses, restaurants and workshops they ran, and the official positions in government, health and education they held – all confiscated,
vanished into thin air, destroyed or transferred to Jewish ‘ownership’ when the Zionists took over Palestine.

The tenured geographers walking around Tel-Aviv’s campus might have given us an objective chart of the amount of refugee land Israel confiscated: millions of dunams of cultivated land and almost another ten million of the territory international law and UN resolutions had set aside for a Palestinian state. And to this they would have added the additional four million dunam the State of Israel has expropriated over the years from its Palestinian citizens.

Campus philosophy professors would by now have contemplated the moral implications of the massacres Jewish troops perpetrated during the Nakba. Palestinian sources, combining Israeli military archives with oral histories, list thirty-one confirmed massacres – beginning with the massacre in Tirat Haifa on 11 December 1947 and ending with Khirbat Ilin in the Hebron area on 19 January 1949 – and there may have been at least another six. We still do not have a systematic Nakba memorial archive that would allow one to trace the names of all those who died in the massacres – an act of painful commemoration that is gradually getting underway as this book goes to press.

Fifteen minutes by car from Tel-Aviv University lies the village of Kfar Qassim where, on 29 October 1956, Israeli troops massacred forty-nine villagers returning from their fields. Then there was Qibya in the 1950s, Samoa in the 1960s, the villages of the Galilee in 1976, Sabra and Shatila in 1982, Kfar Qana in 1999, Wadi Ara in 2000 and the Jenin Refugee Camp in 2002. And in addition there are the numerous killings Betselem, Israel’s leading human rights organisation, keeps track of. There has never been an end to Israel’s killing of Palestinians.

Historians working at Tel-Aviv University might have supplied us with the fullest picture of the war and the ethnic cleansing: they have privileged access to all the official military and governmental documentation and archival material required. Most of them, however, are more comfortable serving as the mouthpiece for the hegemonic ideology instead: their works describe 1948 as a ‘war of independence’, glorify the Jewish soldiers and officers who took part in it, conceal their crimes and vilify the victims.

Not all the Jews in Israel are blind to the scenes of carnage that their army left behind in 1948, nor are they deaf to the cries of the expelled, the wounded, the tortured and the raped as they keep reaching us through those who
survived, and through their children and grandchildren. In fact, growing numbers of Israelis are aware of the truth of what happened in 1948, and fully comprehend the moral implications of the ethnic cleansing that raged in the country. They also recognise the risk of Israel re-activating the cleansing programme in a desperate attempt to maintain its absolute Jewish majority.

It is among these people that we find the political wisdom that all past and present peace-brokers of the conflict appear to lack so totally: they are fully aware that the refugee problem stands at the heart of the conflict and that the fate of the refugees is pivotal for any solution to have a chance of succeeding.

True, these Israeli Jews who go against the grain are few and far between, but they are there, and given the overall desire of the Palestinians to seek restitution and not demand retribution, together they hold the key to reconciliation and peace in the torn land of Palestine. They are found standing alongside the ‘internal’ Palestinian refugees today, almost half a million people, in joint annual pilgrimages to the destroyed villages, a journey of Nakba commemoration that takes place each year on the day official Israel celebrates (according to the Jewish calendar) its ‘Independence Day’. You can see them in action as members of NGOs such as Zochrot – ‘remembering’ in Hebrew – who stubbornly make it their mission to put up signs with the names of destroyed Palestinian villages in places where today there are Jewish settlements or a JNF forest. You can hear them speak at the Conferences for the Right of Return and Just Peace that began in 2004, where together with their Palestinian friends, from within and outside the country, they reaffirm their commitment to the refugees’ Right of Return, and where they, like this writer, vow to continue the struggle to protect the memory of the Nakba against all attempts to dwarf the horror of its crimes or deny they ever happened, for the sake of a lasting and comprehensive peace to emerge one day in the land of Palestine.

But before these committed few will make a difference, the land of Palestine and its people, Jews and Arabs, will have to face the consequences of the 1948 ethnic cleansing. We end this book as we began: with the bewilderment that this crime was so utterly forgotten and erased from our minds and memories. But we now know the price: the ideology that enabled the depopulation of half of Palestine’s native people in 1948 is still alive and continues to drive the inexorable, sometimes indiscernible, cleansing of those Palestinians who live there today.

It has remained a powerful ideology today, not only because the previous stages in Palestine’s ethnic cleansing went unnoticed, but mainly because, with time, the Zionist whitewash of words proved so successful in inventing a new language to camouflage the devastating impact of its practices. It begins with obvious euphemisms such as ‘pullouts’ and ‘redeployment’ to mask the massive dislocations of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank that have been going on since 2000. It continues with less obvious misnomers such as ‘occupation’ to describe the direct Israeli military rule on areas within historical Palestine, more or less fifteen per cent of it today, while presenting the rest of the land as ‘liberated’, ‘free’ or ‘independent’. True, most of Palestine is not under military occupation – some of it is under much worse conditions. Consider the Gaza Strip after the pullout where even human rights lawyers cannot protect its inhabitants because they are not guarded by the international conventions that relate to military occupation. Many of its people enjoy ostensibly superior conditions within the State of Israel; much better if they are Jewish citizens, somewhat better if they are Palestinian citizens of Israel. So much better for the latter if they do not reside in the Greater Jerusalem area where the Israeli policy has been, for the last six years, aimed at transferring them to the occupied part or to the lawless and authority-less areas in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank created by the disastrous Oslo accord in the 1990s.

So there are many Palestinians who are not under occupation, but none of them, and this includes those in the refugee camps, are free from the potential danger of future ethnic cleansing. It seems more a matter of Israeli priority rather than a hierarchy of ‘fortunate’ and ‘less fortunate’ Palestinians. Those today in the Greater Jerusalem area are undergoing ethnic cleansing as this book goes to print. Those who live in the vicinity of the apartheid wall Israel is constructing, half completed as this book is written, are likely to be next. Those who live under the greatest illusion of safety, the Palestinians of Israel, may also be targeted in the future. Sixty-eight per cent of the Israeli Jews expressed their wish, in a recent poll, to see them ‘transferred’.
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Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is not correctly identified. The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness – Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is its ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not
for the Palestinians. They can never be part of the Zionist state and space, and will continue to fight-and hopefully their struggle will be peaceful and successful. If not, it will be desperate and vengeful and, like a whirlwind, will suck all up in a huge perpetual sandstorm that will rage not only through the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also within Britain and the United States, the powers which, each in their turn, feed the tempest that threatens to ruin us all.