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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Murder, expulsion -- and silence
By Abdel-Azim HammadAfter the Wye River Memorandum was signed, I asked the US ambassador about its possible long-term political implications. Does an agreement signed by a Likud premier, which promises to hand over territory to the Palestinian Authority, mean the renunciation by the Likud of its policy of "transfer" (emptying the West Bank of its Palestinian population to remove the final hurdle to the establishment of Greater Israel)? Surprised by the question, the ambassador assured me that he had never heard anyone in the Likud -- or, for that matter, in Israel -- mention a plan for the "transfer" of Palestinians, except the extremist Rabbi Meir Kahan (assassinated some years ago in New York) and his followers, who are isolated from mainstream political life in Israel.
I was just as surprised by his answer. True, none of the Zionist and Israeli leaders has ever mentioned plans to "transfer" the Palestinian population or to purge it through ethnic cleansing. But their actions have been far more eloquent than any statements could ever have been.
Certainly, the US ambassador was not trying to deceive me, nor was he out to defend the policies of the Likud. He was only trying to abide strictly by the official policies of his own country, which is not greatly troubled by the Palestinian refugees or their right to repatriation. Furthermore, his country is not keen on becoming involved in a debate over whether or not the early Zionist leaders and later the leaders of Israel carried out ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Palestinians. Silence is usually the best strategy in such situations.
What Israel feared most came to pass, however: the wall of silence came crumbling down at the joint press conference held at the White House by President Clinton and President Mubarak, the head of the most influential country in the Arab world. Israel lashed out at the president's spontaneous response to a question posed to him by Abdel-Moneim Said, who commended the US's efforts to repatriate the Albanian refugees, and inquired whether similar standards for repatriation would be applied to the Palestinians.
The argument regarding Zionist and, later, Israeli ethnic cleansing practices had thus moved from the realm of academia to formal diplomatic confrontation within the context of the peace process. Israel immediately refused any grounds for comparison between the Palestinian refugees and the Kosovar Albanians, anxious to avoid any suggestion that the same approach should be adopted regarding the Palestinian refugees. Israel has always maintained that the Palestinian refugees left their country voluntarily, and therefore relinquished their right to repatriation. As "proof", it trundled out the moth-eaten myth of Palestine as a land without a people. In a statement published in the Sunday Times on 15 May 1969, Golda Meir denied the very existence of the Palestinian people, concluding that Israel could not have expelled or expropriated them, since "they do not exist!"
Now the wall of silence surrounding the rights of the Palestinian refugees and the ethnic cleansing campaigns carried out by all Israeli governments came tumbling down. We need to collect all the information we can about the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Any mention of the practice inside and outside Israel will help Arab diplomats counter the American and Israeli propaganda war and win over public opinion, especially in the West. Israeli propaganda must be revealed for what it is, once and for all. Israel claims that the Palestinians left their villages voluntarily or were told to do so by the Arab leaders. But when global attention questions these claims, Israel claims that the Palestinians never existed in the first place.
Israel Shahak has given a detailed account of Israel's repressive practices, writing that "Israeli bulldozers crushed villages, fields and cemeteries". Benny Morris, one of the most prominent Israeli new historians, confirms that, out of a total of 475 villages inside Israel, 418 were wiped out for good. The Arabs have long known it, and the new historians admit it willingly: Palestine was never "a land without a people for a people without a land". Its people did not leave it willingly: they were massacred and expelled. Morris, too, writes that, as early as the '30s, members of the Jewish Agency, among them Ben Gurion, planned to establish a Jewish state with the smallest Arab minority possible. According to the same historian, Ben Gurion, who was particularly deft at political manoeuvres, struggled relentlessly to abrogate a clause in the Liberal Party programme (which was not his party) demanding ethnic cleansing. At the same time, he showed no compunction in carrying out the same policy. While his followers understood his message, there were no explicit statements to enrage world opinion, for Israel needed the support of the UN, which was about to confer legitimacy upon the establishment of Israel.
On 2 November 1947, only days before the General Assembly adopted the resolution for the partition of Palestine, Ben Gurion warned his followers that the major problem facing the Jewish state was its population. The Jews, he said, constitute 60 per cent of the area to be assigned by the United Nations to Israel. There would be no guarantee, therefore, for the establishment of a Jewish regime, or a strong, stable Jewish government. He urged them to adopt a new position, revise all their ideas and think in terms of statehood. This meant the displacement, transfer and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.
The Jewish Agency immediately set up a committee for this purpose. Its records have allowed Morris to demonstrate that some 460,000 Palestinians were evicted by the threat or actual use of force. The massacres in Deir Yassin and other villages are instances of a consistent policy, with a clear goal: to decimate the Palestinian population. The Israeli claim that Ben Gurion's statement meant encouraging new waves of Jewish immigrants to Israel is untenable. Immigration to Israel in the '30s was already an ongoing process, which had begun at the end of the 19th century. No revision of policies was required in this respect.
Even the records of the Israeli transfer committee present us with half-truths, however. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East (UNRWA) has placed the number of Palestinian refugees forced to leave their homeland in accordance with Ben Gurion's plans at 900,000 in 1948 -- in other words, nearly double the number of refugees declared by the Israeli committee. The truth is that since 1937, the concept of eviction or ethnic cleansing was part of the policy of the Zionist movement, as revealed by the documents of the committee established by the British to inquire into the causes for the Great Arab Revolt of 1936 and to suggest solutions for the problems in Palestine. Official Israeli historians claim that the idea of eviction was imposed on the Zionist agenda through its deliberate insertion into the recommendations of this committee. But the new school of historiography in Israel has discovered that the Zionist movement in fact imposed the recommendation on the British. This is of little consequence, however. What matters is that eviction and displacement constituted an established Israeli strategy, recognised and implemented, regardless of its certificate of ownership.
Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign created the refugee problem. While the UN has recognised the right of Palestinian refugees to repatriation, Israel will not implement the resolution. President Clinton found himself cornered on this matter. He was forced into recognising their right to return, since the right had been already recognised for the Kosovo Albanian refugees. NATO went to war against Yugoslavia to ensure that the right of repatriation was fully implemented. The world must not allow silence to shroud this human tragedy any longer.
