Ethnic cleansing in the Golan Heights

By Taysir Mari’I, Golan for Development

In light of its colonial, racial and anti-Semitic characteristics that serve its aims of occupation and geographical domination, the Zionist movement ideologically denies Arab nationalism in the Middle East. This denial has been practically implemented through fragmenting the Arab Middle East into countries and "nations", executed by British and French colonialisms, and later carried out by the Zionist project. The Zionist enterprise depicts the Arab nation as a collection of distinct religious groups and ethnicities, seeking to break up this single nationality and form multiple independent nationalities in its place. Furthermore, in its attempt to normalize the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East, the Zionist movement turned to transplant narrow and exclusive identities, an effort that was not limited to Palestine alone, but also stretched even to Iraq and Lebanon.

For such a goal to be fulfilled in Palestine there needed to be a massive ethnic purification, which still takes place until this day: it was first materialized during the 1948 Nakba, which included the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from its indigenous population, ensued in importing Jews from Europe and the Arab countries in the 1950s and 1960s; this project continued through the displacement of the population of the Golan Heights, the Gaza strip and the West Bank in the aftermath of the 1967 war; later, Israel attempted to deport the population of south Lebanon during the occupation starting in 1982. Today, it is embodied in the forcible displacement of Palestinian Bedouins from the Naqab (Negev), building the Annexation Wall in the West Bank, the policy of home demolition in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the deportation efforts on the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

In the Golan Heights, the scattered basalt stones are definitely not omissible, and when one observes them, one notices their semi-alliance that remained for their original function: to separate the unique properties that once belonged to the original population in this region. In addition to the basalt, one notices the scattered concrete structures that once formed churches, mosques and homes. Dotted with cacti or vine trees, these remains embrace the earth that witnessed an unspoken tragedy of massive displacement. Masking this tragedy is highly modern and securely fenced Israeli settlements, colonies, that divert the observer’s attention from the history of the place. In his famous book,Ethnic cleansing in Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe writes:

After the holocaust, it has become almost impossible to hide horrifying crimes against humanity: currently, in our modern world that is witnessing a revolution in the field of communication specifically by the spread of electronic media, any aim to hide crimes against humanity from the public has become unattainable. Nevertheless, the crime against Palestine via which the population was deported was successfully erased from the world’s memory: this crime was and is politically and morally denied, and remains unacknowledged despite of its significance in the history of Palestine.

This success facilitated the displacement of the population of the Golan Heights in 1967. On the one hand, the experience obtained from committing the first crime enhanced the perfection of the later. On the other hand, the later came to confirm the same aim of ethnic cleansing adopted by the same oppressor in a variety of times and locations. "Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity", Pappe proceeds, "and its executers are criminals that need to be faced with their crimes in special judicial bodies. Although determining the castigation against the 1948 oppression is judicially a hard task, at least a story delivering the true historical plot can be presented". However, was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 a single act of cleansing in the history of the Zionist movement?

The ethnic cleansing that took place in the Golan Heights and Lebanon, and is still ongoing against Palestinians in the Naqab (Negev), the Galilee and the West Bank, prove the persistence of the Zionist policy of cleansing and its gradual growth, development and professionalization. Ironically, we observe the executers of this ideology receive Nobel Prizes for peace.

Before it was occupied in 1967, the Golan Heights consisted of 130,000 Syrians distributed between the city of Qunitra and more than 200 villages and farms. Two months after the occupation, in August 1967, a survey conducted by the Israeli military stated that 6,396 Syrian citizens remained in the Golan Heights, out of whom 206 lived in Qunitra, while the rest were distributed between seven villages in the north. Today, there are approximately 400,000 Syrian citizens who fled the Golan Heights and their descendants. They live in Damascus and other Syrian districts, while 21,000 remained in five villages.

For the past 41 years since the occupation, the Israeli narrative consistently omits the fact that what took place in the Golan Heights is forcible displacement, claiming that the region was an unpopulated area, except for a small number of Syrian soldiers who lived there due to their military service and a few Bedouin tribes. This narrative is identical to the story relating to the Palestinian Nakba, merely two decades prior to 1967. According to Nathan Shor, the population of the Golan Heights was ordered by the Syrian military to leave their villages and properties and move into Syria. Other Israeli claims state that this order was broadcasted on the Damascus radio, or that the population migrated voluntarily without any Israeli pressure.

Studying and understanding the coercive deportation of the Palestinians in 1948 is essential to approaching the depopulation of the Golan Heights in 1967. This is so because displacements that followed the Nakba – in the Golan Heights and Lebanon – were improved and complementary policies of deportation, completing a single project. There is a lot of evidence that shows that what took place in the Golan Heights in 1967 is ethnic cleansing:

Although it is true that some of the population of the Golan Heights moved to Syria, escaping the battles inside or beside their villages, most of the population lived in villages far from the front, a fact that challenges the claim that the population has moved completely voluntarily.

Rahaba’am Zie’vi said[iii] that David El-Azer has deported the population from the Golan after receiving permission form both Yitzhak Rabin, Military Chief Commander, and Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defense.

In a conversation with Israeli author David Grossman, Arnon Soffer (an Israeli historian) said that approximately 70,000 citizens were barbarically deported from the Golan Heights within two days only (Grossman 153).

In his book Victims, Israeli Historian Benny Morris mentioned the deportation of 80-90 thousand Syrian civilians as a result of the pressure generated by the Israeli military officers during the bombardments between 5 and 8 June 1967, and the military invasion between the 9^th and the 10^th of the same month. During a meeting of Israeli military commanders in the morning of 9 June, Rahba’am Zivi declared that when the Golan Heights is taken over, it should be unpopulated. Although the conclusion of the meeting was against the evacuation of the Golan Heights, the Israeli military commander in the north, David El-Azer, applied the evacuation policy nonetheless (Morris 309-310).

According to the pronouncements of ES-V 2252, 237-A/6797, and S/8158 (Gussing report):7, published in a report by the UN, the majority of the population in the Golan Heights fled to Syria before the occupation was fully accomplished. However, the report adds that those who remained in the occupied Golan Heights were indirectly forcibly displaced by the "war" atmosphere created by the Israeli army.

The number of Syrians who remained in the town of Qunitra decreased gradually. In July, 90 civilians crossed the Israeli-Syrian temporary borders after they were forced to sign a declaration stating that it is their own will to leave their homes (Ha’aretz (1) 16 August, 1967; (4) 12 September, 1967).

Despite the displacement resulting from the collective state of panic among the population in the Golan Heights, a great deal of the people remained in their villages after the war. However, they were triggered to leave their homes by both physical and psychological pressure generated by the Israeli military forces.

According to an argument introduced by Bashar Tarabeih during the 40^thcommemoration events of occupation, the Syrian radio never urged the population of the Golan Heights to move into Syria and leave their homes.[iv] He went on to say that Muhammad Harfoosh stated in a meeting with the Syrian media authorities that the Israeli army killed about 50 people form his village, Skoofia, after gathering them in the center of the village. Additionally, in an interview held with Suleiman Ashtiwi, from the village of Isha in the centre region of the Golan Heights, Ashtiwi said that was shot by the Israeli army and lost his consciousness, waking up in a Syrian hospital, as far as he remembers.

Patrick Seal, a British journalist, wrote that the Israeli forces deported Qunitra and evacuated all the surrounding villages. In addition to the 30,000 Syrians who were deported during the war, additional 90,000 Syrians were also forced to migrate in the six months after the war.

In Yahuda Rut’s documentation of the southern villages in the Golan Heights – published by the Israeli National Museum in 1984 – post-destruction pictures of the southern villages in the Golan Heights are presented. Those pictures were taken a few months after the war, and they included a photo of an aged woman from Mitsar village preparing mud in order to make domestic tools (76), while the caption said that the woman still lived in that village.

In Military Order number 39, pronounced in 22 August 1967, the Israeli chief commander announced the existence of 101 villages in the Golan Heights:

By the power invested in me as a chief commander of the Israeli forces in the region, I declare that:

1 (a) - the area mapped in a scale of 1:50000 and containing the villages numbered from 1 to 101 is a closed area. The formulation of this order and borders of the closed area are attached to this declaration, which was exposed to civilians and is open for future exposure at the military unit in the Golan Heights to those of interest.

7 – This order shall be named "the deserted villages order" (the Golan Heights).

In the northern part of the Golan Heights, the mountaintop village of Majdal Shams formed a shelter for refugees from the neighboring villages such as Z’oora, E’in Feet and Jibatha Elzeit. According to Salman Fakhr Eldin and Mahmoud Milli – residents of Majdal Shams who witnessed these events – the refugees from the neighboring villages used the dwellings of their friends as well as the school for residence. They stayed in Majdal Shams for two weeks under the constant threats from the Israeli forces until finally they were allowed to go back to their original villages. However, their journey back was not undisturbed. Rather, the refugees were under constant danger of Israeli shootings, which forced them to escape onto south Lebanon and later to Syria, i.e. outside the Golan Heights.

Relying on the little information available, Tom Saggy built a scenario describing the first war at the Golan Heights, which can be summarized as follows:

When the Israeli army entered the Golan Heights in the margining of on 9 June 1967, its forces were attempting to expand the Israeli borders eastward, which resulted in the evacuation of the villages either near the battlefield or those standing in the path of the Israeli forces – which suffered from bombardment, as previously happened in Palestine. Furthermore, the process of occupying the Golan Heights took place rapidly in two days, a fact that did not allow the planning of an ethnic cleansing operation: thus, this explains the fact that the great majority of the evacuation happened in the few months following the war. This explanation is supported by statistics conducted by the Israeli authorities in August of the same year, and by annunciation of Area 101 as a closed area in 22 August 1967, which aimed to prevent the civilians from getting back to their homes.

Conclusion:

The above stated facts are drawn from a great volume of evidence on what happened in the Golan Heights in 1967. The history of the Golan Heights is integral to the implementation of the Zionist ideology, serving its aim of forming a Jewish country in Palestine, through implementing the concept of ethnic purification. Nonetheless, more extensive work needs to be done in two main aspects: first, we urgently need a deep study of historical documents on the displaced population of the Golan Heights. Second, we need to closely analyze the documents regarding the conducts of the Israeli authorities, access to which is not guaranteed. To conclude, the 1967 events in the Golan Heights are definitely a crime against humanity for which Israel should be held responsible. This study is but an initiation for those of interest to study the 1967 events, and to uncover the Israeli record of crimes in the Golan Heights.

Source 

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Israel’s New Ethnic Cleansing Laws

Sixty Thousand African Refugees and 100,000 Bedouin Affected

…by  Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

Israel‘s obsession with Jewish ethnic purity has led to the enactment of open ethnic cleansing by the current Netanyahu government.

Aside from Israel’s genocidal policies towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, new legislation affects 60,000 African refugees and 100,000 Bedouin living within Israel proper. The latter are, by law, Israeli citizens and many have served in the Israeli Defense Force.

Officials in the Netanyahu government justify their racial purity laws as essential to prevent “demographic” problems.

Ensuring that Israel remains both a Jewish state and a democracy requires that non-Jewish populations must be strictly controlled. Allowing non-Jewish Israelites, either singly or jointly, to acquire a sizable voting block would pose a major threat to maintaining Judaism as the official state religion.

In 1948, this resulted in nearly a million Palestinians being driven from their homes and farms by force, to take up residence in refugee camps in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. Following the 1967 war, Israel seized the areas of Gaza (in Egypt) and the West Bank (in Jordan) that housed the Palestinian refugee camps.

Since then, they have made no secret of their intention to drive the Palestinians from these areas, as well, and repopulate them with Jewish settlers.

Africans Called Cancer on Jewish State

Receiving less attention are Netanyahu’s brutal policies towards 60,000 African refugees, who fled ethnic cleansing in Eritrea and Sudan to resettle in Israel. As journalist David Sheen describes in Journalists Blistering Indictment, leaders in Netanyahu’s government describe them as a “cancer” on the Jewish state.

It has become official government policy to deny them work permits and health care, and a state sponsored rabbi group has called on landlords not to rent to Africans.

In 2012, the Netanyahu government amended the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law. The original law was intended to bar Palestinians from returning to family property Israel confiscated in 1948. The new amendment allowed the Israeli government to criminalize and detain African refugees for up to three years prior to deporting them.

Knesset Circumvents Israeli Supreme Court

Israel’s supreme court unanimously struck down amendment. Under international law, it’s illegal for any country’ to deport asylum seekers back to countries where they will experience persecution. The Knesset responded by passing a new law ordering the indefinite imprisonment and the detainment of any foreign person caught trying to cross into Israel.

Under the new legislation, hundreds of African refugees are required to live in the “open” Holot detention center in the Negev Desert. Refugees are permitted to leave the detention center briefly during daytime hours. However they must return three times a day for roll call and must sleep there at night. Human rights groups have also appealed the new law to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, as shown in the video below, the government is organizing state sponsored protests in which Israel’s Jewish citizens are encouraged to trash African refugees’ homes and assault them. If Israel can’t legally deport them, they hope to pressure them to leave voluntarily by making their lives as miserable as possible.

Ethnically Cleansing 100,000 Bedouin

Israel’s genocidal policies aren’t limited to Palestinians and Africans. Israel is also determined to ethnically cleanse 100,000 Bedouins through the Begin-Prawer law enacted in 2013.

If fully implemented, the Prawer-Begin Plan will result in the destruction of 35 “unrecognized” Arab Bedouin villages, the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel, and the dispossession of their historical lands in the Naqab.

Palestine Applies to join International Criminal Court

Genocide and ethnic cleansing are crimes against humanity under international law. Serbian and African leaders suspected of ethnic cleansing have faced prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands.

Three days ago, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN announced that the Palestinian Authority had sought membership in the ICC and 12 other UN conventions, due to continuing Israeli obstruction in current peace talks. When the UN General Assembly recognized a state of Palestine in October 2012, Palestinians gained the right to seek membership in UN institutions and treaty bodies and possibly take their complaints over Israeli settlement-building on occupied land (also illegal under international law) to the ICC.

The UN legal department is expected to renew the application and determine within 30 days whether Palestine can be a state party to the 13 conventions.

Read More

Israel’s New Ethnic Cleansing Laws

Sixty Thousand African Refugees and 100,000 Bedouin Affected

…by  Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

Israel‘s obsession with Jewish ethnic purity has led to the enactment of open ethnic cleansing by the current Netanyahu government.

Aside from Israel’s genocidal policies towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, new legislation affects 60,000 African refugees and 100,000 Bedouin living within Israel proper. The latter are, by law, Israeli citizens and many have served in the Israeli Defense Force.

Officials in the Netanyahu government justify their racial purity laws as essential to prevent “demographic” problems.

stuartbramhall@yahoo.co.nz both a Jewish state and a democracy requires that non-Jewish populations must be strictly controlled. Allowing non-Jewish Israelites, either singly or jointly, to acquire a sizable voting block would pose a major threat to maintaining Judaism as the official state religion.

In 1948, this resulted in millions of Palestinians being driven from their homes and farms by force, to take up residence in refugee camps in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. Following the 1967 war, Israel seized the areas of Gaza (in Egypt) and the West Bank (in Jordan) that housed the Palestinian refugee camps.

Since then, they have made no secret of their intention to drive the Palestinians from these areas, as well, and repopulate them with Jewish settlers.

Africans Called Cancer on Jewish State

Receiving less attention are Netanyahu’s brutal policies towards 60,000 African refugees, who fled ethnic cleansing in Eritrea and Sudan to resettle in Israel. As journalist David Sheen describes in Journalists Blistering Indictment, leaders in Netanyahu’s government describe them as a “cancer” on the Jewish state.

It has become official government policy to deny them work permits and health care, and astate sponsored rabbi group has called on landlords not to rent to Africans.

In 2012, the Netanyahu government amended the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law. The original law was intended to bar Palestinians from returning to family property Israel confiscated in 1948. The new amendment allowed the Israeli government to criminalize and detain African refugees for up to three years prior to deporting them.

Knesset Circumvents Israeli Supreme Court

Israel’s supreme court unanimously struck down amendment. Under international law, it’s illegal for any country’ to deport asylum seekers back to countries where they will experience persecution. The Knesset responded by passing a new law ordering the indefinite imprisonment and the detainment of any foreign person caught trying to cross into Israel.

Under the new legislation, hundreds of African refugees are required to live in the “open” Holot detention center in the Negev Desert. Refugees are permitted to leave the detention center briefly during daytime hours. However they must return three times a day for roll call and must sleep there at night. Human rights groups have also appealed the new law to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, as shown in the video below, the government is organizing state sponsored protests in which Israel’s Jewish citizens are encouraged to trash African refugees’ homes and assault them. If Israel can’t legally deport them, they hope to pressure them to leave voluntarily by making their lives as miserable as possible.

Ethnically Cleansing 100,000 Bedouin

Israel’s genocidal policies aren’t limited to Palestinians and Africans. Israel is also determined to ethnically cleanse 100,000 Bedouins through the Begin-Prawer law enacted in 2013.

If fully implemented, the Prawer-Begin Plan will result in the destruction of 35 “unrecognized” Arab Bedouin villages, the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel, and the dispossession of their historical lands in the Naqab.

Palestine Applies to join International Criminal Court

Genocide and ethnic cleansing are crimes against humanity under international law. Serbian and African leaders suspected of ethnic cleansing have faced prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands.

Three days ago, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN announced that the Palestinian Authority had soughtmembership in the ICC and 12 other UN conventions, due to continuing Israeli obstruction in current peace talks. When the UN General Assembly recognized a state of Palestine in October 2012, Palestinians gained the right to seek membership in UN institutions and treaty bodies and possibly take their complaints over Israeli settlement-building on occupied land (also illegal under international law) to the ICC.

The UN legal department is expected to renew the application and determine within 30 days whether Palestine can be a state party to the 13 conventions.

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"Ethnic Cleansing" Ads Greet JNF Meeting in Denver

There are few Zionist organizations more dedicated to ethnic cleansing for so long as the Jewish National Fund.  From its beginnings more than a century ago, its declared purpose was to acquire land for the Zionist project in Palestine and to displace the indigenous Palestinian non-Jewish (Christian and Muslim) population.

It is therefore appropriate that exposure of JNF ethnic cleansing schemes – including encroachment into remaining Palestinian lands in throughout historic Palestine – should be on display just a five-minute walk from the Denver Grand Hyatt, where the JNF delegates are celebrating Palestinian expulsion and plotting to finish the job.

The bus ad appears on two of the 39 buses that are the only motor vehicles permitted on the 16th Steet Mall, which is less than two blocks from the hotel and the natural destination for guests that want to venture outside the hotel.  Of course, they are also present for all of Denver to see, and for those that don't make it to the mall, our partners, the Colorado BDS Campaign have placed ten ads in the Denver light rail system.  In both cases, interested persons are directed to the websites, notaxdollarstoisrael.com and ColoradoBDSCampaign.org for more information.

Colorado BDS is also having a very busy weekend of events, following the JNF to its meeting with Governor Hickenlooper and to their hotel in order to remind the delegates of the price paid by the people of Palestine so that Zionists can create and expand an apartheid Jewish state in place of the Palestinian homeland.

The Free Palestine Movement is proud to use the funds you donated in order to make this statement.  We have used the funds to set up and finance No Tax Dollars To Israel, and we will continue to provide these funds for this purpose for as long as you are willing to send them.

For more information, see A Tacit Admission that Israel is Ethnically Cleansing Palestinians

If you wish to donate to the general fund of the Free Palestine Movement, please go to 

https://freepalestinemovement.org/donate-2/

If you wish to donate specifically to the advertising efforts of No Tax Dollars To Israel, please go to

http://www.notaxdollarstoisrael.com/donate/

Donations are US tax deductible in either case.

Thank you.

The FPM Team

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A Tacit Admission that Israel is Ethnically Cleansing Palestinians

On April 8, 2009, ten billboards went up in the Albuquerque area saying “Tell Congress: Stop Killing Children. No More Military Aid to Israel.” On April 28, Lamar Advertising, with whom the ads had been placed by the Coalition to stop $30 Billion, tore down the ads due to pressure, presumably from other clients with larger accounts.

In June, 2012, twenty-three billboards went up in the Los Angeles area, also calling for an end to US aid to Israel. One week later, the billboard company, CBS Outdoor, also took down the ads.

We have come a long way since then. Ads that are critical of giving billions of US tax dollars to Israel, of Israeli human rights violations and of the creation of the Jewish state at Palestinian expense have appeared in Detroit, Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Sacramento, Albuquerque, and other locations.

In Denver, another free speech struggle has achieved its objective. A partnership of NoTaxDollarsToIsrael.com and ColoradoBDSCampaign.cominitially failed twice to get approval for a billboard. First, CBS Outdoor placed the restriction that the ad must not use the words Jew and Israel, so the coalition offered the wording “Want peace? Stop ethnic cleansing in Palestine.” CBS Outdoor rejected it without explanation.

The groups then tried Lamar Advertising, with the same result. Finally, they borrowed a technique tried and tested by an anti-Muslim group, the Freedom Defense Institute. FDI chose public transit advertising space to place anti-Muslim ads in New York and San Francisco. After initial rejection in New York, FDI’s Pamela Geller sued and won a court order to permit her ads, based on the fact that the ad space was publicly owned and therefore subject to constitutional free speech principles. While the use of privately owned ad space is largely at the discretion of the owner, publicly owned space is not, and must conform to First Amendment principles. The court also decided that in the absence of clear evidence that the ad used hate speech, it could also not be restricted by such criteria.

The Denver groups pursued the same strategy. They resubmitted the ad to Lamar, but this time for space on the public transit system (inside the Denver light rail vehicles and outside the 16th street mall buses). After a long delay, the ads were approved, with no change at all in the message or graphics. As of this writing, the ads are available for all to see, both Denver residents and visitors to the city, like the hundreds of delegates to the convention of the Jewish National Fund, 1½ blocks from the 16th street mall.

What was going on during the delay? One may speculate that much deliberation was taking place, possibly in consultation with lawyers from the ADL (Anti-Discrimination League) and AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). The only possible challenge would be that the ad constituted hate speech or was libelous. In both cases, however, the challenge would depend upon proving the falsity of the “ethnic cleansing” label.

Apparently, these august jurists decided that a discussion of “ethnic cleansing” as a description of Israel’s actions was potentially far more dangerous to Israel than the placement of an ad to that effect. After all, there was no assurance that the court would rule in their favor, in which case a terrible precedent would be set. Better to allow a bit of uncomfortable truth to appear in public than a legal ruling certifying such a truth. How Palestinians disappeared from much of Palestine is a question that the Israel lobby would prefer to leave unanswered.

Paul Larudee and Beth Daoud who wrote the above are organizers with No Tax Dollars to Israel and Colorado BDS Campaign, respectively. Read other articles by Paul Larudee and Beth Daoud.

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The green light for Zionism’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine

by Alan Hart

I find myself wondering how many of our present day leaders, President Obama in particular, are aware of what happened in Palestine that became Israel on 10 March 65 years ago today.

On that day in 1948, two months before Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence in defiance of the will of the organized international community as it then was at the UN, Zionism’s in-Palestine political and military leaders met in Tel Aviv to formally adopt PLAN DALET, the blueprint with operational military orders for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

They did not and never would refer to the crime they authorised as ethnic cleansing. Their euphemism for it was “transfer”.

As noted in an excellent anniversary briefing paper by IMEU (the American-founded Institute for Middle East Understanding), from the earliest days of modern political Zionism its advocates grappled with the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part of the world where Palestinian Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the population.

The earliest insider information we have on Zionism’s thinking is from the diary of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism’s colonial-like enterprise. He wrote:

“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country… expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

Those words were committed to paper by Herzl in 1895 but they were not published (in other words they were suppressed) until 1962.

By August 1937 “transfer” was a discreet but hot topic for discussion at the 20^th Zionist Congress in Zurich, Switzerland. All in attendance were aware that the process of dispossessing the Palestinian peasants (thefellahin) mainly by purchasing land from absentee owners had been underway for years. Referring to this David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, said:

“You are no doubt aware of the (Jewish National Fund’s) activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin… Jewish power (in Palestine), which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale.”

A year later Ben-Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency that he supported compulsory transfer. He added:

“I don’t see anything immoral in it.”

In my view that’s a most revealing statement. It tells us – does it not? – that Ben-Gurion, the Zionist state’s founding father, was a man with no sense of what was morally right and wrong.

Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Fund’s Lands Department which was responsible for acquiring the land for Zionism’s enterprise in Palestine. One of his diary entries for December 1940 reads as follows:

“There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for (the Arabs of) Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one (Bedouin) tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.”

Plan Dalet called for:

“Mounting operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

“Destruction of villages – setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris – especially those population centres 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.”

Before the Zionist state declared itself to be in existence on 14 May 1948, more than 200 Palestinian villages had already been emptied and about 175,000 Palestinians were already refugees. Some had fled in fear; others were expelled by Zionist forces.

The prime fear factor was the slaughter by Zionist terrorists of more than 100 Palestinian men, women and children at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem. As Arthur Koestler was to write, the “bloodbath” at Deir Yassin was “the psychologically decisive factor in the spectacular exodus of the Arabs from the Holy Land and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.”

It was, however, Menachem Begin, Zionism’s terror master and subsequently prime minister, who provided the most vivid description of how well the slaughter at Deir Yassin served Zionism’s cause. In his book The Revolt, he wrote:

“Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel. Kolonia village, which had previously repulsed every attack of the Haganah (the underground Jewish military organization that became the Israeli Army), was evacuated overnight and fell without further fighting. Beit-Iksa was also evacuated. These two places overlooked the road and their fall, together with the capture of Kastel by the Haganah, made it possible to keep open the road to Jerusalem. In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces… The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa… All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yassin!’”

Three decades later, in an article for The American Zionist, Mordechai Nisan of the Truman Research Centre of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem expressed his concern about the failure to understand the major significance of terrorism in the struggle for Jewish sovereignty. He wrote: “Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was.”

After the Zionist state declared itself to be in existence, its government set up an unofficial body known as the “Transfer Committee”. Its job was to oversee the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages and/or their repopulation with Jews. The purpose of this Zionist strategy was to prevent dispossessed Palestinians returning to their homes.

By 1949 more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages had been systematically destroyed or taken over by Israeli Jews; and at least 750,000 Palestinians were refugees, dispossessed of their land, their homes and their rights.

In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe, Israel’s leading “revisionist” (meaning honest) historian, documents in detail Zionism’s systematic reign of terror which, from December 1947 to January 1949, included 31 massacres. (Deir Yassin was only the first). In a videoed conversation with me in 2008, which can be viewed in the Hart of the Matter series on my site (www.alanhart.net), Ilan said this:

“Probably more surprising than anything else was not the silence of the world as Zionist ethnic cleansing was taking place in Palestine, but the silence of the Jews in Palestine. They knew what had happened to Jews in Nazi Europe, and some might even have seen it for themselves, yet they had no scruples in doing almost the same thing to the Palestinians.”

On this 65^th anniversary of the authorization of the ethnic cleaning of Palestine, the questions I would like to see put to our leaders today, President Obama in particular, are the following:

Are you aware of Plan Dalet?

If not, why not?

If you are aware of it, could it not said be said that your refusal to call and hold Zionism to account for its crimes makes you (and your predecessors) complicit in those crimes by default?

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Eyewitness to Israel's ethnic cleansing

Purdue University professor Bill Mullen traveled to Palestine with a delegation of academics to find out about the obstacles facing Palestinian students and educators.

COMMENT: BILL MULLEN

In Hebron, graffiti artists have renamed Shuhana Street “Apartheid Street” (Bill Mullen | SW)

AT 4:45 a.m. on the morning of August 2, 2009, the family of Miraym Al-Ghawi was awakened by pounding on the door of their home in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. A small bomb was detonated, throwing open the door. Through it walked masked and armed Israeli commandoes, who dragged the Al-Ghawis, including the six Al-Ghawi children, into the night.

They collected the family's belongings in trucks and dumped them outside the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, where they were ransacked. The Al-Ghawi's youngest child, age 4, stood and watched as commandoes set fire to her bed and her playthings. The daughter still cannot sleep without her mother. Medical experts have diagnosed her ailment as "settler trauma."

Miraym Al-Ghawi told us this story as we visited Palestine as part of a delegation sponsored by the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel(USACBI). Five U.S. professors from the delegation, myself included, talked with the Al-Ghawis in Sheikh Jarrah, once one of the liveliest Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

Since 1967, however, nearly 9,000 Palestinians have lost their residency rights in East Jerusalem, 15 Israeli settlements have been built, and Palestinians now have access to less than 15 percent of the available land. The Al-Ghawi family is one of four families in East Jerusalem evicted since 2008 as part of Israel's annexation, settlement and "de-Arabization" plan for Palestine.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

For more information about the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, or to pledge your support, go to the USACBI website.

Find more information about the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University at its website.

Contact the Civic Coalition for Defending Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem to learn more about organizing efforts to defend Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

The plan has been effective: unemployment among Palestinians in East Jerusalem is now nearly 35 percent, while the poverty rate is nearly 50 percent. Palestinians in East Jerusalem make up about 35 percent of the population and pay 33 percent of all municipal taxes, while the Israeli municipality spends less than 5 percent on services for East Jerusalem.

A 163-kilometer "separation wall" in Jerusalem denies more than 22,000 residents easy access to their work and markets. There are currently more than 270 Palestinian prisoners from East Jerusalem and 197 detainees. Eight of the prisoners are children.

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ISRAEL'S COLONIZATION of Palestine is a de facto totalitarianism meant to strangle decades of resistance by an entire people. But it has not succeeded.

After her eviction, for example, Miraym Al-Ghawi set up a tent near a fig tree outside their former residence and in defiance stayed there for six months. On 17 occasions, the municipality forced her to tear down the tent; 17 times, she rebuilt. She has repeatedly paid out fines levied against her private "occupation" of her own former home.

Today, she rents an apartment in a neighborhood near Sheikh Jarrah, but comes every day to sit near her old residence in order to demonstrate her refusal to be displaced. She remains engaged in a court battle for her house even as parking lots and playgrounds are built in Sheikh Jarrah for newly arrived settlers on confiscated Palestinian land.

And this is just one story of the terror and violence of the Israeli police state that saturates daily life under occupation.

On a Sunday morning in Hebron, for example, we walked through a Palestinian open market along Shuhada Street. The street sits beside the Ibrahim Mosque, where in 1994 American-born Zionist settler Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Arab worshippers and wounded 125 others. The massacre set off Palestinian riots and protests in which Israeli soldiers murdered 19 more Palestinians.

The street, known as Apartheid Street by locals, has now been closed off at numerous access points by Israeli security forces in order to stop or monitor Palestinian movement, protect newly arrived settlers and restrict commerce. Checkpoints, concrete blocks and impromptu walls appear at nearly every turn.

The market itself is under constant siege by settlers who live above street level and throw trash, feces and even acid onto merchants and shoppers below. Numerous storefronts along the street are closed. Israeli police sealed one of them shut because a demonstration was held at the site.

As we walked through the marketplace, Israeli soldiers perched overhead on street corners and at one point marched two abreast in three rows straight through the market center. No detail escapes the attention of Israeli authorities--even a 100-meter stretch of sidewalk is divided by a three-foot wall, Palestinians on one side, settlers on the other. Children as young as 2 peddled "Palestine" bracelets on the streets as they tried to help their families scratch out an existence in a strangulated economy.

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THE USACBI campaign began in 2009 in response to the call by Palestinian civil society to join the boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) movement against Israel. It supports and models the mission statement created in 2004 by PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. The original PACBI statement read in part:

Inspired by the struggle of South Africans against apartheid and in the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression, we, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.

These nonviolent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;

2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and

3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

USACBI supports each of the above principles and calls for a number of measures to demonstrate support for them. For example, the campaign asks signatories to:

1. Refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions;

2. Advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions;

3. Promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by academic institutions, and place pressure on your own institution to suspend all ties with Israeli universities, including collaborative projects, study abroad, funding and exchanges.

The USACBI call has thus far been signed by nearly 600 U.S. professors, 200 cultural workers, 200 international supporters and 44 organizations. It seeks to point out that the Israeli occupation has damaged or destroyed academic or intellectual freedom, especially for Palestinians living under occupation.

For example, Israel routinely restricts the movement of Palestinian students, forcing them to attend apartheid schools, making them pass through walls and checkpoints on a daily basis, and severely limiting their ability to choose a university within Israel/Palestine or to study abroad.

Israel has severely restricted the number of students from Gaza who may attend Birzeit University, the most prestigious research university in the West Bank. Palestinian students who do travel abroad to study or seek re-entry to Palestine are often labeled "security risks" or denied entry.

Palestinian universities like Birzeit in Ramallah consistently face a "crisis of funding," according to university president Khalil Hindi, with whom we met on our delegation visit. Though the universities operate under Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority is the sole source of funds for the university, and Israel provides nothing.

Israeli academics, meanwhile, often produce research that colludes with the occupation regime, while the state heavily monitors what Palestinian scholars can produce. We met with a group of scholars at the Mada al-Carmel Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa. The center's advisory board chair Dr. Nadim Rouhana told us that the activities of the Mada Center are heavily monitored by Israel, while Palestinian scholars attached to Mada often work or study in Israeli universities that reproduce intellectual and social apartheid.

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IN ADDITION to attacking the absence of academic freedom in Palestine, USACBI seeks to illuminate the structural relationship between Israeli apartheid and higher education as it impacts Palestinians. As Palestinian scholar George Bisharat has written:

Many Israeli academic institutions either benefit from, or participate in, Israeli government actions that violate Palestinian rights. For example, Tel Aviv University sits in part on land belonging to Sheikh Muwannis, a Palestinian village whose residents were expelled by Jewish militias or fled in fear in March 1948. Hebrew University in Jerusalem uses over 800 acres of land illegally expropriated from Palestinian private owners in the West Bank after the 1967 war. Bar Ilan University has established a branch in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank...

Finally, discrimination against students who are Palestinian citizens of Israel in admission policies is widespread as revealed by the decision of the heads of Israeli universities in 2003 to reverse experimental admission policies that had increased the number of Arab students.

On our delegation visit, we met with Anan Quzmar from the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University in the West Bank. The campaign supports the BDS and USACBI campaigns as part of a larger international strategy to destroy apartheid/colonial education in Palestine. According to the campaign:

-- Eight of the 11 universities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been shelled or broken into by the Israeli Army since September 2000.

-- Hebron University and the Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron were closed down by Israeli military order for much of 2003, and students had to physically break down the gates to their universities, in defiance of the Israeli Army, to reconvene classes and demand their right to an education.

-- Birzeit University has been closed down by Israeli military order 15 times in its history and all Palestinian universities and the majority of Palestinian schools, including kindergartens, were closed down by military order between 1987-1992, denying a whole generation their right to education.

-- More than 700 children, 200 university students and 39 teachers have been killed by the Israeli military since September 2000.

-- More than 3,000 Palestinian children have been arrested by the Israeli military since September 2000, and some 300 children are currently held in Israeli prisons and detention centers.

-- Two presidents of Birzeit University student council were imprisoned in 2004, and four of the 11 members of the student council were imprisoned in the same year. Currently, some 80 students from Birzeit University are held in Israeli prisons and detention centers, 10 of whom are being held without charge or trial, including human rights worker and sociology student, Ziyad Hmeidan.

The Right to Education mission statement calls for "trade unions, education institutions, social and political movements and concerned individuals around the world to support the right to education in Palestine." The campaign is founded on principles established in UN resolutions that declare education a human right. It calls for scholars, students and activists to "establish connections with Palestinian universities, students and faculty, through solidarity or academic exchange."

This strategy is meant to counteract the deadly and ongoing collaboration between American and Israeli universities, such as the new partnership between Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Technion is Israel's leader in "applied science" research and the development of killing machines like the unmanned armored tanks used in Israel's 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead that massacred more than 1,400 Gazans.

In December, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans for a $2 billion research campus in New York in partnership with Cornell and Technion. USACBI's mission seeks to shut down forever such deadly collaborations.

Perhaps the most fitting symbol of the need for educators to play a role in the liberation of Palestine was graffiti on the wall of a Palestinian school in Hebron: "To learn or not to learn--that is the question." The words beckon not just to the education of future generations of Palestinians, but to the education of people everywhere about the urgency of ending Israel's colonial regime.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

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