The “Transfer” of
Palestinians From Their Land
is a Step
Towards Genocide
by Robert Jensen
Dissident Voice
January 21, 2003
One way to cover
up a crime is to find a benign term that hides the violence and cruelty of the
act. Such is the case with "transfer," an idea increasingly being put
forward in Israel as a solution to conflict with the Palestinians.
Transfer
conjures up images of a worker reassigned to a new office, or a slip allowing a
rider to change buses for free. But transfer of the Palestinians would be
nothing less than ethnic cleansing.
The main public
proponents of this have been on the far right of Israeli politics, such as the
Moledet Party, which refuses to recognize Palestinian rights. But in a poll
earlier this year, 46 percent of Israelis supported transfer of Palestinians
out of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, while 31 percent favored
transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country.
As Israeli
author Tanya Reinhart argues in her new book "Israel/Palestine: How to End
the War of 1948," there has long been planning for "the second half
of 1948" by some Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon.
The phrase
refers to the 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes
during the 1948 war, which ended with Israel controlling 78 percent of
Palestine that existed under the British Mandate (compared with 56 percent
under the U.N. partition plan in 1947). Now some Israelis ponder whether can
they take 100 percent.
A military
campaign to achieve that had been unthinkable, but many now believe that under
the cover of a U.S. war against Iraq, Israeli soldiers would be free to finish
the job.
I say
"finish," because a slow ethnic cleansing is already underway,
primarily through the systematic destruction of the Palestinian economy; when
people cannot make a living, many will leave. A study for the U.S. Agency for
International Development released in August showed that one-fifth of
Palestinian children were malnourished, due to dramatically lowered Palestinian
incomes and disruptions of food distribution because of the tightened Israeli
occupation.
Life for
Palestinians means constant harassment at checkpoints. Olive trees, central to
agriculture there, are bulldozed by Israeli troops who claim they provide cover
for snipers. Palestinian homes are demolished, supposedly because Palestinians
build on their land without appropriate permits, which Israel will not give
them. This fall the residents of the Palestinian village Yanun chose to leave
rather than continue to endure the property destruction and assaults from
Israeli settlers from nearby Itamar.
As Effi Eitam of
the right-wing National Religious Party has put it, if Palestinians find
"the situation so hard and so dangerous that they prefer to move to some
other part of the world," well, he will shed no tears.
The plan appears
to be working. According to the Jerusalem Post, by August this year about
80,000 Palestinians had left the West Bank and Gaza, a 50 percent increase over
last year.
If this ethnic
cleansing -- either the slow version or expulsion by Israeli soldiers -- is
successful, another term may come into play: genocide. The crime of genocide is
generally associated with mass killing, but international law defines genocide
as acts intended "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group." One of the five types of acts is
"deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
Creating
conditions "so hard and dangerous" that they drive people off their
land is a way to eliminate the Palestinian people. Not all the Palestinians
need be killed; once completely dispersed in other countries, they will cease
to be a recognizable group that could press a claim to that land.
Is the world
ready to accept that kind of genocide as a solution to the conflict?
No doubt the
world is not; for years there has been a consensus on a diplomatic settlement
that calls on Israel to withdraw from illegally occupied territory in return
for peace. The key is whether the United States will allow it.
For years the United States -- which supplies Israel with diplomatic support, military assistance, and at least $3 billion a year in economic aid -- has backed Israeli power and called it a "peace process." Unless we demand that our government press for peace rooted in justice, this process will be the end of the Palestinian people.
Robert
Jensen, an
associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, is the
author of Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the
Mainstream and a member of the Nowar Collective. Email: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Other articles are
available at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/home.htm.