Another email message I just got. It relates to a discussion on this
list a time ago.
Most distressing that the evil of Zionism claims to speak in the name of
jewish people, but why is it so much socialist journalism I read babbles
on repeating itself until it becomes boringly unreadable. Saying it once
should be enough. (I felt inclined to chop two thirds out of this
article... yeahhh, I use to be an editor....)
Chris Jones.
wsws.org/articles/2002/dec2002/isra-d03_prn.shtml
World Socialist Web Site
Israel: Ethnic cleansing is now official government policy
By Jean Shaoul
3 December 2002
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his ministers have openly
declared that Palestinians must be driven out to make way for Jewish
settlements in land occupied illegally since the 1967 war.
Sharon and his cabinet utilised the November 15 ambush of Israeli
security forces in Hebron by Islamic Jihad and the ensuing gun battle
that killed 12 members of the Israeli armed forces and injured 15, as
well as three of the Palestinian attackers, to make their announcements.
Sharon himself called for "territorial contiguity" between Kiryat Arba,
a settlement overlooking Hebron, the tiny Zionist enclaves and the Tomb
of the Patriarchs, a religious site venerated by both Moslems and Jews,
inside the city. Palestinians living between the settlement, the
enclaves and the Tomb would be forced to leave their homes to make way
for the settlers-a policy known throughout the world as ethnic
cleansing.
He told army commanders in Hebron that Israel had to "take advantage of
the opportunity" to "minimise the number of Palestinians living among
Jewish settlers" and establish "Jewish points of presence". He described
this as "an appropriate Zionist response" to such attacks.
Sharon's newly appointed foreign affairs minister and main leadership
rival, Benyamin Netanyahu, was even more explicit. "We are going to
cleanse the whole area and do the work ourselves." he declared.
Israeli security forces immediately imposed a curfew, arrested and
blindfolded at least 40 Palestinians, bulldozed the homes of Palestinian
families and uprooted their olive groves.
This gave the ultra-nationalist settlers the green light to establish an
"outpost"-the basis for a new settlement-on the vacant land and daub
it with the racist slogan "Death to Arabs." The settlers own language
echoed the government's calls for ethnic cleansing.
The leader of the Hebron settlement, Zvi Katsover, said, "We have to
cleanse the ground to ensure an Israeli territorial continuity between
Kiryat Arba and Hebron." A thousand new homes are to be built in the
area. "I trust Sharon to implement the project," he added.
At a rally in Hebron, Benny Elon, leader of the ultra-right wing Moledet
(Homeland) party, declared, "There won't be just a Jewish neighbourhood
here. There will be a Jewish town here."
According to the New York Times, "In a turbulent crowd, they [the
settlers] pounded on the doors of nearby Palestinian houses and then
smeared the pale stone with blue graffiti: 'Every Arab killed for me
it's a holiday,' and, over and over, 'Vengeance'."
Later the government issued an order for the demolition of a further 15
Palestinian homes on the route from Kiryat Arba to the Jewish enclave in
Hebron.
Silence from Western leaders
The expulsion of communities from their homeland, like genocide, is
recognised as a crime against humanity. The 1948 International
Declaration of Human Rights and other international covenants, including
the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, outlaw expulsions, population
transfers, resettlement and forced relocation of any kind.
But the statements by Sharon and Netanyahu elicited no response from
Israel's main backer, the United States, or any other Western power. And
even the liberal media did little more than report the words of Sharon
and Netanyahu. Not one of the editorial writers of the New York Times or
Britain's Guardian has seen fit to comment on Israel's explicit advocacy
of ethnic cleansing.
The deafening silence on Sharon's gross abuse of human rights is
particularly marked, given that it takes place against the backdrop of
the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic before the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The
Hague. The central purpose of The Hague tribunal is to find Milosevic
guilty of having politically sanctioned the ethnic cleansing of
Albanians from the Yugoslav province of Kosovo-to confirm the
existence of a "chain of command" between the Serb irregular forces in
Kosovo and Belgrade, and so justify the US-led bombardment of
Yugoslavia.
That trial has cost millions of dollars, lasted more than nine months
and taken evidence from more than 100 witnesses. Despite this, to date
the prosecution has failed to demonstrate that Milosevic himself either
masterminded the ethnic cleansing or ever explicitly ordered the
expulsion of the Albanian population of Kosovo.
There would be no such difficulty were Sharon to be brought to trial for
his treatment of the Palestinians, or if Netanyahu joined him in the
dock. The Israeli government has explicitly issued instructions to the
armed forces and publicly announced policies that are universally
recognised as constituting ethnic cleansing. Yet the world's statesmen,
the United Nations, the press and mainstream political commentators keep
silent.
The West's political blind spot serves to underline the hypocrisy of
their claim to have gone to war against Milosevic based on moral
considerations. The break-up of Yugoslavia was desired by the Western
powers in order to secure control of the strategically vital Balkan
region.
As the World Socialist Web Site explained in its statement of May 24,
1999, "Why is NATO at war with Yugoslavia? World power, oil and gold":
"The immediate material gains that might be plundered from Kosovo are
dwarfed by the far greater potential for enrichment that beckons in
regions further to the east where the NATO powers have developed immense
interests over the past five years.... [T]he dismantling of the USSR has
created a power vacuum in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia that
makes a new division of the world inevitable. The principal significance
of Yugoslavia, at this critical juncture, is that it lies on the Western
periphery of a massive swathe of territory into which the major world
powers aim to expand."
The statement continued, "Involved in the reintegration of the territory
of the former USSR into world capitalism is the absorption, by massive
Western transnational companies, of trillions of dollars in valuable raw
materials that are vital to the imperialist powers. The greatest
untapped oil reserves in the world are located in the former Soviet
republics bordering the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan). These resources are now being divided among the major
capitalist countries. This is the fuel that is feeding renewed
militarism and must lead to new wars of conquest by the imperialist
powers against local opponents, as well as ever-greater conflicts among
the imperialists themselves."
The same base economic and political considerations that in reality
shaped the hostility of the Western powers towards Milosevic's regime
now determine their acquiescence in face of Sharon's criminal actions.
In short, nothing must be allowed to get in the way of the drive by the
US and the major imperialist powers to secure control of the oil riches
of the Middle East. On occasion Sharon's actions against the
Palestinians have been criticised because they have been considered
counterproductive by Washington at a time when it is seeking to secure
the support of the Arab regimes for war against Iraq. But fundamentally
the US views Israel as the dominant military power in the region and its
main and most reliable proxy.
Israel's record of ethnic cleansing
Israel was founded in 1948 on the basis of the forcible expulsion of
tens of thousands of Palestinians as the precondition for establishing a
religious state with a Jewish majority population. Ever since it has
repeatedly resorted to expulsion, population transfer, resettlement and
forced relocation of the Palestinians.
In the aftermath of World War II and the Nazi holocaust, the United
Nations voted in 1947 for the partition of Palestine into separate
states for the Jews and the Palestinians. During the 1947-49 war between
the Jews and the Arab states that followed, the actions of Zionist
terror gangs played a major role in driving the Palestinians from their
homes. In all, some 700,000 Palestinians became refugees in other
countries and were not allowed to return to Israel.
According to the UN, the original refugees and their descendants now
number some four million. Many of those who remained were expelled from
their homes and resettled elsewhere within Israel. The Law of Return,
passed in 1950, and the Citizenship Law of 1952 granted every Jew the
right to immediate citizenship upon arrival in Israel.
In 1967, after the defeat of the Arab states in the June war, there was
another population transfer. About 250,000 of the 1948 refugees who had
lived in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza for 20 years fled.
Afterwards, there were attempts by successive governments to implement a
forced transfer. The Israeli forces expelled Palestinians living near
the cease-fire lines and destroyed their villages and towns. Kalkilya
was only the most well-known example. The Israeli authorities offered
financial incentives and free transportation to Palestinians who were
willing to leave, but there were few takers. Some of the refugees in the
Gaza Strip were transferred to camps in the Jordan valley. The security
forces demolished the homes of suspected militants and those of their
families and neighbours and deported them to Lebanon.
In 1982, following the invasion of Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians and Lebanese moved north to the suburbs of Beirut to avoid
the war and Israeli control of southern Lebanon. An international
investigation by six jurists, including the cofounder of Amnesty
International, found Israel guilty of attempted "ethnocide" and
"genocide" against the Palestinian people. The report stated that there
were no valid reasons "under international law for its invasion of
Lebanon, for the manner in which it conducted hostilities, or its
actions as an occupying force."
Ever since 1967, Israel has illegally built settlements in the
territories captured in the June war. More than 200,000 settlers now
live in 200 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, while a further
180,000 live in what was once East Jerusalem and its environs. The
settlement policy, which escalated after the 1993 Oslo Accords, involved
demolishing Palestinian homes, seizing their land by military or legal
means, and driving the Palestinians from the towns and villages.
Sharon's government incorporates or rests on ultra-orthodox and
settler-based political movements that explicitly advocate ethnic
cleansing under the guise of "population transfer". The Moledet
(Homeland) party is the ideological successor to the proscribed
far-right Kach movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. Its leader
Rehavam Ze'evi was, until his assassination in October 2001, a minister
in Sharon's government.
More recently, Gamla, a group founded by former Israeli military
officers and settlers and funded by American Jews, published detailed
plans for the "complete elimination of the Arab demographic threat to
Israel" by forcibly expelling all Palestinians, including Palestinians
in the Occupied Territories and Palestinian citizens of Israel within a
three- to five-year period. It is these extreme right-wing elements who
now determine official government policy.
To the extent that the policies of ethnic cleansing have now become
acceptable to the Israeli government, then the same applies to the US
and its allies. Washington's support for Sharon signals that no crimes
against humanity are too gross for the US to contemplate in the name of
"the war on terrorism". It is a warning of the kinds of methods that the
Bush administration will employ to subjugate the Middle East region and
so gain control of its oil riches.
Robb Chavez
Alianza El Paso/Burque y que
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