War on Iraq Double Disaster for Palestinians
by Ramzy Baroud
Dissident Voice
February 5, 2003
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 editor of the book Searching Jenin:
Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion (Cune, 2003), and
editor-in-chief of Palestine
Chronicle.com. He can be reached at: editor@palestinechronicle.com