POST 4....EXCERPTS OF ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT: Ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine “Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund...On December 19, 1940, he wrote: ‘It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country...The Zionist enterprise so far...has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with ‘land buying’ — but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe’...There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists.” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.” Ethnic cleansing — continued “Following the outbreak of 1936, no mainstream (Zionist) leader was able to conceive of future coexistence without a clear physical separation between the two peoples — achievable only by transfer and expulsion. Publicly they all continued to speak of coexistence and to attribute the violence to a small minority of zealots and agitators. But this was merely a public pose..Ben Gurion summed up: ‘With compulsory transfer we (would) have a vast area (for settlement)...I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it,’” Israel historian, Benny Morris, “Righteous Victims.” Ethnic cleansing — continued “Ben-Gurion clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible to remain in the Jewish state. He hoped to see them flee. He said as much to his colleagues and aides in meetings in August, September and October [1948]. But no [general] expulsion policy was ever enunciated and Ben-Gurion always refrained from issuing clear or written expulsion orders; he preferred that his generals ‘understand’ what he wanted done. He wished to avoid going down in history as the ‘great expeller’ and he did not want the Israeli government to be implicated in a morally questionable policy...But while there was no ‘expulsion policy’, the July and October [1948] offensives were characterized by far more expulsions and, indeed, brutality towards Arab civilians than the first half of the war.” Benny Morris, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949”
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 10:10:15 +0000
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