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CounterPunch
February
5, 2003
The Demons of War
War
on Iraq Double Disaster for Palestinians
by RAMZY BAROUD
In the case of an American war on Iraq, Palestinians
will not be watching for a "smart bomb" heading their
way, but for the Israeli army forcing them out of their homes.
This possibility is of greater danger that one might think.
It is seldom that the international community
has stood in the face of Israel and halted its plans, whether
invading Arab land, "transferring" civilian populations,
destroying a refugee camp or ending a siege imposed on a church.
These violations have been repeated time and again, and were
almost entirely cloned during the ongoing Palestinian uprising:
the reoccupation of the West Bank, the "transfer" of
many Palestinian residents in the northern West Bank villages,
destroying much of the Jenin refugee camp and the siege on the
church of the Nativity (one ought to mention that many mosques
were destroyed or burnt to the ground by Israeli troops in the
last two years. Such news seems to be of lesser significance
in the Western media).
"Transfer", an euphemism of
ethnic cleansing is one of these terms with a non-threatening
sounding and catastrophic results. There is no need to examine
the sounding of the word however, since history has clearly detailed
the meaning of the expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral
homeland, and the massacres that often accompany it.
To ease the process of expelling Palestinians
in 1948 so that the Jewish state might obtain a "demographic"
advantage, many massacres took place, in Tantura, Deir Yassin,
Beit Daras and many more. Innocent Palestinians were slaughtered
in the streets and in their homes. 418 villages were destroyed,
and over 750,000 Palestinians were driven out of their land,
some at gunpoint while others fled for their lives as Zionist
gangs bombarded every Arab population center.
But the expulsion of Palestinians was
hardly the clean sweep Israel had hoped for. Israel's outright
Jewish majority was still threatened by the mere existence of
Arabs, whether those remaining inside the borders of the newly
established Jewish state, or by the refugees and the original
inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. On the eve of the 1956
Sinai war campaign, Israel was busily finalizing a plan to expel
Palestinians who remained, from northern Israel, an area known
as the Little Triangle. Now Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
was then a colonel. The celebrated warrior reportedly ordered
his subordinates to investigate how many buses it would take
to transfer 300,000 Palestinians out of northern Israel. The
plan didn't go through, not until 1967, when once again Israel
took advantage of war to transfer up to 300,000 Palestinians
from the West Bank.
Slower, but real expulsion has continued
to take place since 1967. Day after day, Palestinians find themselves
without land or shelters as Israeli Jewish settlements illegally
expand in the Occupied Territories. The process is painful to
watch and becomes more painful when one realizes that the international
community seems not to care. According to a recent study by the
Israeli group "Peace Now", the United States is the
main source of funds to these settlements, in defiance of United
Nations resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Israel uses every chance to expand the
settlements and to drive Palestinians out. The number of Palestinian
homes demolished is on the rise, this time no longer a scattered
demolition here and there, but concentrated attempts where entire
neighborhoods and villages are razed forever. Just in the last
month a lone, scores of homes and shops were destroyed in Nazlit
Issa, Tulkarm, Hebron and Nablus. With such wanton destruction
and the expulsion of the inhabitants of the lands, Jewish settlements
expand. Thousands of acres of fertile Palestinian land in Nablus
and Hebron and elsewhere had to be destroyed so that Itmar and
Kyriat Arba might grow, along with their fancy villas and swimming
pools.
The resurfacing fear of "Transfer"
is not an illusion created by Israel's dreadful habit of expelling
Palestinians at times of wars, wars created precisely for that
purpose. But the expulsion of Palestinians is no longer a far
off possibility championed by the infamous Meir Kahane and Rehevam
Zeevi. In an opinion poll on March 2002, administered by the
University of Tel Aviv, 46 percent of Israeli Jews support the
"Transfer" of Palestinians, while 60 percent favored
"encouraging" Palestinians to leave on their own. The
"encouraging" of Palestinians to leave might have been
taken by heart by Jewish settlers near the Yanoun village in
the West Bank. The settlers would raid the village every night
and open fire at Palestinian homes, they'd chase them out of
their lands and let there vicious dogs loose throughout the villages.
It was indeed encouraging enough, as the villagers packed their
belongings and left Yanoun on October 18, 2002, in a scene that
was almost an identical depiction of the black and white photos
of Palestinians being driven out of their towns and villages
in 1948.
While the fear of expulsion continues
to haunt entire communities in the West Bank, in particular Palestinians
in the Yatta area where 750 families are threatened to be removed
from their villages, the building of the enormous "security
wall" to separate the West Bank and Israel, was constructed
precisely to alienate dozens of villages and to trap the residents
between the "green line" and the West Bank, in the
midst of giant walls of concrete and barbered wire. It's only
a matter of time before thousands of Palestinians find themselves
"transferred" from these areas, for their existence
would soon be sited as a "security threat" for Israel.
Sharon's own cabinet now includes some
of the most vibrant pro "transfer" politicians in Israel,
and the subject has become so popular that some of the so-called
new historians are offering it as a "solution" to the
Arab-Israeli conflict. Benny Morris is one. It's Ilan Pappe,
one of Israel's most respected academics that found the most
suitable description for this: The "demons of the Nakba
(the Arabic word referring to the Palestinians Diaspora of 1948)
have returned to haunt Israel." I am afraid that these "demons"
have never abandoned Israel in the first place.
Despite the urgency of protesting the
war on Iraq, the international community, human rights organizations,
activists from all over the world must pressure Israel and its
main backer, the United States government to halt any plans to
expel Palestinians out of their land in the Occupied Territories
whether in the case of war or not. Israel must be held accountable
for its own actions and cannot be left to ravage Palestinians'
lives whenever a chance arises as a form of experimentation to
resolve its "demographic problems".
If attention continues to be diverted
from the Palestinian question, the world will awake one day with
another million Palestinians carrying their belongings and seeking
tents and water at some Arab country's border. It's our moral
responsibility to stop this ghastly ethnic cleansing, before
it starts, although as far as the residents of many Palestinian
villages in northern the West Bank are concerned, "transfer"
has already begun.
Ramzy Baroud
is the editor-in-chief of PalestineChronicle.com and the editor
of the anthology "Searching
Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion 2002."
50 percent of the editor's royalties will go directly to assist
in the relief efforts in Jenin. He can be reached at:
ramzy5@aol.com
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