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.
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