Recently uncovered archives of Israel’s ethnic cleansing policy against the Palestinians have shed more light on operations where tens of thousands were forced to leave their homes and lands during the months of the 1948 Nakba.
By seeking to fulfil the Zionist agenda of establishing a ‘Jewish State’ in Palestine, Israel made it imperative to remove the native Palestinian-Arab population in a mass ethnic-cleansing drive to make room for European Ashkenazi Jews to come and colonise, in phases, all of historical Palestine. Records of such acts have been uncovered by many, but hidden records of the Israeli archives have been obtained and widely published by liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Accounts of the archives revealed that the Jewish Haganah and Stern gangs committed many atrocities against the Palestinians. Between July 12 and 13, 1948, more than 50,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims were expelled and forced to seek refuge in nearby Arab countries. The archives further included that “more than 400 emptied Palestinian villages and towns were looted and razed to the ground to prevent the Palestinians from ever returning to them and more than 750,000 Palestinians were barred from ever returning to Palestine”. Erasing Palestinian presence along with their homes was accomplished by “bombarding Palestinian homes at night while they slept”.
In his book Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, based on the leaked records, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote that “the 1948 Palestinian Exodus resulted from a planned ethnic cleansing of Palestine that was implemented by the Zionist movement, mainly by Ben Gurion. The birth of the Zionist state came drenched with blood”. Pappe believes that ethnic cleansing is still taking place to this day. He has based his analysis upon the facts that “Palestinian youths, along with the rest of the population, are being targeted by Israeli authorities for extrajudicial assassinations and indiscriminate killings”. Gurion’s ethnic cleansing, according to the archives, was named Plan Dalet — “put to compile inventory of Arab villages and towns with a list of their prominent Arab leaders targeted to be seized and shot on the spot”.
Plan Dalet was meant to create a power vacuum, eliminating effective Arab Palestinian opposition to the Zionist plan of ethnic cleansing. The current Palestinian divisions have effectively given the Zionist state a free hand to expand its colonies in the West Bank and Gurion’s Plan Dalet — in viewing the present against the past — is still active to this day.
Shulamit Aloni, who had once served as minister of education under the late Israeli prime minister, Yitzak Rabin, acknowledged that apartheid existed in Israel. She wrote, saying that “Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews who suffered for years and years the stigma of racial and religious prejudice, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practices its own form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population”. Ethnic cleansing and a racist occupying policy are meant to erase the Palestinian national identity while the Zionist colonists are still, to this very day, without any national identity that is required to identify them with their Zionist state.
A bid for endorsement of an Israeli ‘national identity’ or a ‘Hebrew’ one for the citizens of Israel has been rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court. Behind their insistence on a national identity, lies a deep inferiority complex due to the fact that all the Ashkenazi colonists originated from the Aryan tribes who converted to Judaism during the seventh century, when they were known as Khazars, living in present-day Ukraine. They are neither Israelites — “Beni Israel”, the children of Prophet Jacob, who changed his name to Israel — nor Hebrew Semites. Only the Arab-Palestinian Jews are the Hebrews and Israelites, as well. Therefore, the only legal national identity left for the Ashkenazis is the Jewish religious identity.
A major factor encouraging the Israeli apartheid agenda is a long-held attitude of all American administrations dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, manifest in abiding by the premise that “any possible settlement must match the positions of the stronger party”. Israel, in this case, being the stronger party whose “positions” must be accepted by the weaker party — Arabs. Such a premise has given Israel a supremacy that has energised its egotistical fervour, a position, according to Yitzhak Laor, that has “established a rigid apartheid legal system, as the High Court of Justice fades away”. Laor’s words featured in an article published in Haaretz under the title ‘Israel’s apartheid is worse than South Africa’s’.
Haaretz tried to define Israeliapartheid as “the meticulous sub-division of the people in Israel, guided by a principle of equality that benefits the ruling class”, which is the Aryan European Ashkenazi Jews over the Semitic Eastern Arab Jews and the Semitic Palestinian Arab native population. In 2011, Ehud Barak, the then Israeli defence minister, issued a statement that greatly shocked Israelis. He said: “If Israel does not achieve a peace deal with Palestinians, it will have to become a bi-national state or be undemocratic apartheid one.” In 2016, Israel has become both, with half of its population without any civil and political rights, whatsoever.
Ethnic cleansing added to apartheid, and driven by an inferior complex, has created a toxic atmosphere that is leading the racist Zionist colonists into a state of stupor steeped in egotism — something that invariable ends in self-destruction.
Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopaedia.
