Ethnic Cleansing: Past, Present and Future

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http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h123002.html

There is a puzzling paradox about Holocaust denial: those who deny it are precisely the ones who would have supported it. I couldn’t help thinking of this paradox when I heard that American university professors have recently been accused of anti-Semitism (!) for signing a document warning against Israeli intentions to drive out masses of Palestinians, possibly during a American attack on Iraq. It seems that those likely to support such a crime are precisely the ones who so vehemently deny that Israel might be contemplating it.

In Israel itself, however, the idea of "transfer" – the common euphemism for ethnic cleansing or mass deportation – is discussed openly. Several political parties support it; one of them is in Sharon’s cabinet. They may speak of "voluntary transfer", but Minister Benny Elon has been quite explicit about what they mean by "voluntary": It’s like a man who refuses to give his wife a divorce, he said. According to Jewish law, the defiant husband can be jailed and slashed until he – "voluntarily" – complies. (If you wonder why Israel is turning Palestinian life into hell, this – not the futile "war on terrorism" – is the answer.)

Gamla, a group founded by former Israeli military officers and settlers, offers a detailed plan for forcibly expelling all Palestinians, both from the occupied territories and the Palestinian citizens of Israel, within a 3-5 year period. This may be too long for some: there are persistent reports that Ariel Sharon has ordered his forces to prepare to drive hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the border into Jordan, possibly on the day the United States conflict starts against Iraq. Sharon has recently rejected an official Jordanian request that Israel issue a public declaration opposing the "Transfer" of Palestinians (Ha’aretz, 29.11.02).

As recent Jewish history shows, the way from mass-deportation to mass-murder is a dangerously short one. Recall that Hitler’s death camps were his second-best "solution" for the Jewish "problem": at first, the Third Reich intended "just" to deport (or "re-settle") the Jews to wherever possible – Palestine, Eastern Europe, Madagascar.

How come – in a poll conducted last April – 44% of Jewish Israelis, a people that suffered both deportation and extermination, support similar measures against the Palestinians? One possible answer is that people do not learn from History, or learn the wrong lessons. I don’t think it is the answer in this case. The fact is that Israelis and Israel-supporters do not refuse to learn from History: they deny History. The denied historical pattern keeps duplicating itself, and won’t stop until its denial is stopped.

Ethnic Cleansing: The Past

What people fail to recognise is that Israel owes its very existence as a Jewish State to massive ethnic cleansing. The overall picture is undisputed: In 1948, there were about 600.000 Jews in Palestine. The number of Palestinians driven out from the territory taken by Israel in 1947-1949 is estimated at 600.000 to 720.000 (says the nationalistic Israeli historian Benny Morris in his authoritative The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem); about 100.000 Palestinians, a.k.a Israeli Arabs, remained. Without driving most of the Arabs out, then, or without prohibiting their return after the war, no Jewish majority could have been established.

This information is not part of the Israeli collective consciousness. Israelis confronted with it would deny it, often out of true ignorance. Everybody in Israel knows that many Arabs left in 1948. There is some controversy among laymen about whether they fled the war zone spontaneously ("their own fault"), were encouraged to leave by Arab leaders, or were expelled; experts agree that all three factors played a role. Older people still remember "that Arab village down the road, that was erased once the inhabitants left". But the extent of the Palestinian exodus, especially in proportion to the Jewish population, is virtually suppressed.

The Price of Denial

When denial is no longer possible, Israel-supporters faced with this information tend to take refuge in an accusation like "so you deny Israel’s right to exist". This procedure is logically, morally, and practically wrong.

Logically wrong, because what was born in sin does not necessarily lose its right to exist. Some people claim we were all born in sin, yet they do not demand that we all commit suicide. Few people would deny the crimes committed against Native Americans, yet I never heard that the US should be dismantled because of them.

Morally wrong, because recognising historical facts should not depend on their political implications. One cannot deny a fact simply because one does not like its consequences.

And, finally, practically wrong, because if Israelis were aware of the ethnic cleansing of 1948, they would not be so eager to try this abortive "solution" once again. I doubt how many Israelis would think repeating the crime is a good way to peace, if they were aware of the fact that the hundreds of thousands driven out in 1948 have now grown into millions of refugees along Israel’s borders, whose hatred towards Israel and whose desire to return home have been nurtured by decades of humiliation and discrimination in Lebanon, Syria or Jordan.

Just like we demand the Arabs to recognise the Holocaust, recognising the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is a precondition to reconciliation. As long as most (pro-) Israelis deny it, Israel is in danger of repeating it. Since Israel’s political system is run by former generals responsible for the ethnic cleansing of 1948, since the military echelon is run by their devoted disciples, warnings of Israel’s intentions to repeat the crime in the (possibly near) future should be taken very seriously.

The Present

Having said that, one must stress that debating the past and warning of the future should not distract from the present. At this very moment, slowly but steadily, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the occupied territories is taking place. As Ta’ayush activists Gadi Algazi and Azmi Bdeir write,

"Transfer isn’t necessarily a dramatic moment, a moment when people are expelled and flee their towns or villages. It is not necessarily a planned and well-organized move with buses and trucks loaded with people, such as happened in Qalqilyah in 1967. Transfer is a deeper process, a creeping process that is hidden from view. […] The main component of the process is the gradual undermining of the infrastructure of the civilian Palestinian population’s lives in the territories: its continuing strangulation under closures and sieges that prevent people from getting to work or school, from receiving medical services, and from allowing the passage of water trucks and ambulances, which sends the Palestinians back to the age of donkey and cart. Taken together, these measures undermine the hold of the Palestinian population on its land." (Ha’aretz, 15.11.2002)

This "small-scale" ethnic cleansing has its own secret language. You need some initiation to decipher it, but it’s in the paper all the time. It happens when Palestinian neighbourhoods, along the Egyptian border in Rafah for example, are turned into a battle zone: the inhabitants obviously flee; Israel then quickly demolishes their houses. Protest is soothed by Israel’s hypocritical claims that the houses were empty.

Ethnic cleansing happens when Israel connects the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba with that of Hebron by a promenade which cuts the heart of Palestinian Hebron and necessitates the demolition of scores of Palestinian houses along the route, described as "uninhabited", as being "shelter to terrorists" or as "belonging to rich families living elsewhere".

Ethnic cleansing happens when Israel builds a security fence on Palestinian fields, cutting them from their owners; the farmers cannot access their land and are forced to find their living elsewhere.

Ethnic cleansing happens when settlers terrorise the Palestinian village of Khirbet Yanun, break into houses destroying whatever they find; last October, only two old men were left of the whole village, the rest of its population had taken refuge in the neighbouring town of Akrabeh.

Ethnic cleansing is the motivation behind every new acre taken by Jewish settlements, behind "security zones" and "by-pass roads", behind fences and military outposts. It is behind every siege and closure, aimed at reducing Palestinian movement to their immediate surroundings, confining them to their enclave, to their town or village, to their house. The fenced Gaza Strip is already termed "the great prison" by its own inhabitants; last week, Israel once again cut it into three separate zones.

All these things are taking place here and now, some reported, some not. The struggle against "transfer" should therefore involve a concerted effort on all fronts: against plots to drive out Palestinians in the future, against their strangulation in the present, and for making the ethnic cleansing of 1948 (and since) part of our collective consciousness.

– Ran HaCohen

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Ethnic Cleansing: Some Common Reactions

My previous column – "Ethnic Cleansing: Past, Present and Future" – attracted more reactions than any other. Some of them were supportive and encouraging, for which I am grateful. Many were outraged and even offensive, for which I am even more grateful: not just for enriching my English vocabulary in certain semantic fields (I have been called everything from "anti-Semitic renegade" to "stupid dump ass"), but for reassuring me that I am not wasting my time writing for those who agree with me anyway.

Almost all the fire was aimed at my claim regarding the ethnic cleansing carried out by Israel in 1948. These copious reactions reaffirm my argument that this is still a taboo in pro-Israeli discourse. Even when protesting the present "quiet" ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Territories or warning of future Israeli intentions is tolerated, saying that Israel owes its existence as a Jewish State to ethnic cleansing is evidently beyond the pale. As I said, fighting the present strangulation of the Palestinians should be the top priority of any peace activity on the ground; but on the level of consciousness, coming to terms with the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is an inevitable precondition for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

In spite of the heated tone of many reactions, not many of them were seriously argumentative. Several readers want me to stop criticising Israel and to focus on Palestinian terrorism instead. I get this advice regularly, as if Palestinian terrorism were a never-heard-of scoop just waiting for me to discover. Sorry, friends: I am convinced that stopping the occupation, the colonisation and the dispossession of the Palestinians is the only way to end both the justified Palestinian resistance and its unjustifiable terrorist actions. Pointing a finger at the Palestinians may serve the Israeli propaganda, the settlements and the gigantic American aid to Israel; but all these make my life in Tel-Aviv neither safer nor more moral.

One reader claims that I "imply that the Palestinian Arabs who fled or were driven out […] are in the same boat as the Jews of Nazi Germany were". I did not imply that at all. The expulsion of the Palestinians took place within what can be termed a civil war (a war crime), whereas Hitler’s war on the Jews was an unprovoked genocide of defenceless civil populations (a crime against humanity). I used the Nazi case just to show that the way from mass-deportation to mass-murder is a dangerously short one, and that every Jew, including those calling for "transfer", should be aware of that.

Another reader claimed that Palestinian nationalism was quite young, and that there was no Palestinian people prior to the twentieth century. Though this is true – Palestinian nationalism is even younger than the relatively young Jewish nationalism (a.k.a. Zionism), and is to some extent a reaction to it – I fail to see why this justifies an ethnic cleansing. Are human rights applicable to nationalists only?

Pavlovian Reaction

One issue, however, was repeated in many reactions: the so-called ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab countries. This seems to be the Pavlovian pro-Israeli reply whenever the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is mentioned. It can be traced back to official Israeli State propaganda as early as the 1950s. I say Pavlovian, because it is invoked instinctively and irrationally, just like the saliva of Pavlov’s dog.

The argument of my article was that Israel carried out an ethnic cleansing in 1948, and that it may be prone to repeat it. As a reply, I am told that the Arab countries carried out an ethnic cleansing. What does this have to do with my argument? The assertion that Arab countries may be guilty of a similar crime does not make Israel’s crime any better; it definitely does not disprove that Israel is prone to repeat it. Again, the rhetorical trick here is the same as asking me to talk about Palestinian terrorism: whenever Israel is criticised, simply change the subject and talk about Arab or Palestinian faults instead (luckily for Israel, there are always enough of them). This is demagoguery, not a fair debate.

However, irrelevant as it is to the argument of my previous column, the analogy between the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and the exodus of Jews from Arab countries is worth relating to in its own right.

'Arab Ethnic Cleansing'?

First let us recall the chronology. The ethnic cleansing of 600.000 to 720.000 Palestinians from Israel preceded the Jewish exodus from Arab countries. The exodus of some 125.000 Iraqi Jews to Israel started in 1949; that of about 165.000 North-African Jews took place as late as 1955-1957. It is therefore somewhat awkward to claim that Israel had deported its Arabs because of the exodus of Arab Jews that occurred years later. There is no doubt, however, that the establishment of the State of Israel played a major role in the deplorable deterioration of living conditions for Jews in many Arab countries.

Whereas Jews had been living in the Arab and Muslim world for more than a millennium, for better and for worse but under generally more favourable terms than under Christianity (and with nothing even slightly comparable to the atrocities of the Crusaders or the Holocaust), Israel’s ethnic cleansing coincided with the Jewish State’s birth. And not by chance: the 600.000 Jews living in Palestine in 1948 could not have achieved a solid majority in the areas they occupied without getting rid of a similar number of Arabs. Unlike the Arab countries, that can show a long tradition of coexistence with Jews (notwithstanding discrimination though), and for which getting rid of the Jews had no demographic significance whatsoever, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was both historically and demographically the constitutive event of the Jewish State.

Moreover: even though Jews were indeed harassed (by the people and/or regimes) in Arab countries following the 1948 war, blaming the Arabs of ethnic cleansing is shamefully cynical when it is imputed by the very Zionists who demanded "let my people go", or by the same Israel that did all it could to force those very countries to let their Jews leave. The global Zionist pressure on each and every country, from the Soviet Union to Syria, to let its Jewish citizens go, was part of Israel’s efforts to consolidate its Jewish majority; that is why Israel always urged Western countries not to let those Jewish immigrants in, lest they fail to make Aliya.

So oriental Jews were pushed out of Arab countries as a result of the conflict with Israel, and at the same time pulled by Israel, to consolidate its Jewish majority, and by Zionism, that regarded the Jewish state as the only proper place for Jews to live in. It is a major case of hypocrisy to compare those Jewish immigrants to Palestinians who fled or were driven out of Israel to other countries during a war, people for whom Palestine was their only homeland and who found themselves against their will as refugees in foreign and hostile Arab states, people who were willing but not allowed to return home, and whose property was dispossessed by Israel.

Furthermore, this hypocrisy is symptomatic of the way the Israeli establishment treated the oriental Jewish immigrants. They were lured to come to Israel by promises of equality and welfare. They were zionistically indoctrinated to see Israel as their new homeland, in spite of their systematic discrimination compared to Jewish immigrants from European countries. Those who refused this zionisation were outcasts; those who did become Zionist and consider themselves as people returning home from a long exile, now have to take the insult of being described as foreign refugees, just like Palestinians in Kuwait.

The cynicism of the Israeli establishment reached its highest peak when Israel raised the claim that the property of the Palestinian refugees, confiscated by Israel after 1948, was "balanced" by Jewish property left behind in Arab countries. This is a further development of the same manipulative analogy, in which the oriental immigrants are assigned the role of wretched pawns. The masses of oriental Jews, who lost their home and property as a direct result of the establishment of Israel, and then came to Israel and were housed here in poor slums hired to them by the State, never got any compensation for their lost property; Now they hear that the State that they see as their homeland considers them to be mere refugees, and that their lost property is bargained off by this State against some Palestinian property it confiscated, of which they themselves have not seen a cent.

The State of Israel produces a lot of propaganda which is refuted by the slightest critical analysis. The analogy drawn between the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and the Jews from Arab countries is an especially repulsive example of this. It reveals not only how absurd Israel’s propaganda can be, but how humiliating, scornful and dangerous it is for many Israelis. A State that has been unable to grant its own citizens a day of peace in more than 50 years cannot be expected to treat them any better in its propaganda. Supporting Israel’s propaganda and war machines is definitely not the right way to help both peoples of Israel/Palestine to peaceful coexistence.

– Ran HaCohen