Is Israel Poised for a New Round of Ethnic Cleansing?

An Old Evil Renames Itself As “Transfer”

By Alison Weir

It’s not every day that you get the chance to prevent a crime against humanity. This is one of those times.

For several months now, those of us following events in Israel-Palestine closely have been hearing increasingly disturbing reports. Americans returning from the Palestinian occupied territories reported that the Israeli government appeared to be preparing to “transfer” the Palestinian population; in other words, to forcibly remove them from their homes and transport them elsewhere. Israeli parliamentary members began more and more openly to advocate such expulsion, and parties that actively promote transfer were included in the ruling coalition. A renowned Israeli historian suggested that the region would be much more peaceful today if all of Israel’s original inhabitants had been forced out in 1948, instead of only 60 percent. The implication was clear: it was not too late to remedy this lapse. A major Israeli daily reported that the military was studying the tactics that had been used by Germany in the Warsaw Ghetto, looking for tips on how to control an unwanted, violently rebelling population. Palestinians sent out e-mails describing Israeli soldiers going from house to house, counting the occupants—”taking inventory of us,” as one person wrote.

Here in the U.S. more and more supporters of Israel began openly debating the merits of “transfer.” Gamla, an American support organization for Israel, published a 9,000 word article entitled “The logistics of transfer.” The author argued that “the only possible solution” to the Palestinian Question was transfer of the Palestinians, and claimed that ancient Judaic literature substantiates this tactic. A group in New York fought to name a street after the Israeli government minister who had most ardently urged such “cleansing.”

For a number of months I ignored this mounting evidence. Keeping track of the daily cycle of Israeli fatal and mutilating violence, followed by violent Palestinian retaliation, was already a chillingly full-time endeavor. That this tragic two-year period of violence could turn out to be but the “calm” before the storm was beyond my ability to contemplate. But now, 178 Israeli academics and over 1,000 American professors have written two letters to the world community forcing us all to consider just such a possibility. And unlike many other writers, they are calling “transfer” by its real name: ethnic cleansing.

In letters released on the Internet they write: “We are deeply worried that the ‘fog of war’ [during an invasion of Iraq] could be exploited by the Israeli government to commit further crimes against the Palestinian people, up to full-fledged ethnic cleansing.”

They call on all of us to prevent this: “to make it absolutely clear that crimes against humanity will not be tolerated, and to take concrete measures to prevent such crimes from taking place.”

For that is what “transfer” is: a crime against humanity. It is what Hitler espoused; what Milosevic urged. It is the getting rid of people of the wrong kind...of the wrong race, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong religion...the wrong people. It is, by its very nature, violent, racist, cruel. It is the uprooting of human beings from their land, their homes, their heredity, their lives; a ripping out, by the very roots, of an entire culture. It is like the violent uprooting of a vast, rolling prairie—stalk after stalk ripped from the earth...each stalk another man, another child, another woman.

Some survive, many do not. Some die quickly, others wither slowly, invisibly, in hardship, grief, despair. In 1948, when over 700,000 Palestinian men, women and children fled their homes, one Red Cross worker at the time wrote: “No one will ever know how many children died.” This is “transfer.”

I refuse, any longer, not to pay attention. I refuse to stand by while evil renames itself and is entertained in respectable society. I refuse to remain silent while the filthy is perfumed and the unthinkable thought. I refuse to become guilty, through my inaction, of complicity with atrocity. The world has looked away before, too often, and in too many places. To its eternal shame.

I refuse.

The Dalit Plan Lives On

By Robert Younes, M.D.

Israel’s “Degan Plan” is being carried out to perfection. The Palestinian Authority’s autonomy has been destroyed. Yasser Arafat is holed up in what remains of his office in Ramallah. The Palestinian infrastructure is in rubble. The Oslo peace process, the Mitchell Plan, the Road Map, the Work Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Quartet Plan, and other variations of the peace plan theme in the Middle East are dead and buried.

The working plan’s namesake is Maj. Gen. Meir Degan, a Sharon protégé and the prime minister’s favorite assassin. In the 1970s, Degan ran Operation Caesarea, in which he and 40 of his very special agents formed death squads that assassinated anyone who displeased the Israeli government. Most of these people, of course, were Palestinian leaders. Nor did it make much difference if the assassinee was a radical or moderate Palestinian. If the former, blowing him away meant fewer annoyances or other attacks on Israelis. Moderate Palestinians were assassinated simply because Israel did not want anyone around who might be willing to negotiate—that might place Israel in the embarrassing position of having to talk peace. Assassinations also have been effective as provocations, providing Sharon an excuse to unleash the IDF on those who had the temerity to protest his wanton killings. More than 60 Palestinians have been assassinated since Sharon came to power. On Sept. 9, 2002, Sharon rewarded Degan for his successful wet work by appointing him head of Mossad.

While the Sharon government and its ardent American supporters—including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser, Leslie Wexner, and their fellow cabalists in JINSA, CSP, AIPAC, and the Round Table—are most pleased with the Degan Plan, Palestinians, understandably, are not. Who, after all, wants to be ethnically cleansed? Or, failing that, the target of the weapon of mass destruction known as the Israel Defense Forces? The IDF has quarantined Palestinians in concentration camp like Warsaw ghettoes to prevent news of their situation from contaminating the outside world. A person wanting to travel from one ghetto to another must be quarantined for hours at IDF military checkpoints and finally decontaminated of any dignity through multiple washings of extreme humiliation. Any outbreak of Palestinian resistance is quickly sterilized through the use of gunfire from 60-ton tanks and Apache helicopters.

In January alone in the West Bank, the IDF killed 70 Palestinians, 20 of them children. American-made bulldozers destroyed 1,037 Palestinian homes, 572 industrial shops, uprooted 9,975 fruit trees and confiscated 2,630 acres of land. If the Degan Plan is allowed to continue at this rate, by the end of the year another 840 Palestinians (240 children) will be added to the 2,119 already killed since Sept. 28, 2000, another 12,444 houses destroyed, 6,864 industrial sites demolished, 119,700 fruit trees uprooted and another 31,560 acres (50 square miles) confiscated.

The math is inexorable. Within a year or two, nothing will be left of the Palestinian economy, infrastructure, housing, agriculture, or land. Every Palestinian will become homeless, unemployment will be 100 percent, education will grind to a standstill, and anyone with any gumption to resist will be buried.

The Degan Plan, in fact, is but the most recent iteration of 1948’s Plan Dalit. That was the ethnic cleansing operation that forcibly moved Palestinians from their villages and towns to 60 refugee camps in Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Many more Palestinians—those who could afford it—created a vast Diaspora to the Gulf states, or overseas to North, Central, and South America, Europe and Australia. Plan Dalit produced 750,000 Palestinian refugees and destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages. The original refugees have grown in number to 3.5 million. Israelis increasingly are concerned that, if the Palestinians remain in their homeland and region, they will outnumber the Israelis in a generation.

To address the same problem that faced the Zionists—i.e., that the land they coveted was not “without people”—Plan Dalit has morphed into Plan Degan. To supplement their own numbers as they simultaneously attempt to rid Palestine of its remaining original inhabitants, the Israelis are frantically trying to induce Jews from anywhere to migrate there. This tactic has been known to backfire, however, as in the case of Christians, mainly from Eastern Europe and Russia, who became Israeli citizens under the false flag of being Jews and now constitute a population of Hebrew-speaking Christians.

The ultimate objective of Plan Dalit and its successors, however, is to transfer, ethnically cleanse, remove, ship out, displace, or drive out all Palestinians from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza to somewhere else in the world. “The Plan,” in fact, has been in effect since the birth of Israel in 1948, but at such a low level of intensity that it has not been noticed by most of the civilized world. Under American protection, “The Plan” has accelerated since 1967, but not so much as to attract unwanted attention. But creeping land confiscation, colonization of the West Bank and Gaza, destruction of infrastructure and the Palestinian economy has been going on for years.

Recently, however, under the watchful eye of the Bush administration and the distractions of the war on terrorism and a possible war on Iraq, “The Plan” has gone into overdrive—and, finally, the world has noticed! Europe, South America, Asia, the Muslim and Arab worlds—everyone, in fact, except Americans, it seems—finally understand the purpose of the “The Plan” and are protesting loudly. Isolated, Washington and Israel stand together, deaf and mute on the “The Plan.”

If left to the Zionists and their American apologists, the Plan Dalit/Degan Plan will create an ethnically pure Zionist state, half of whom are secular Jews. What will ensue from the struggle between secular Israelis and their Orthodox countryment? Will there be another Jewish Diaspora—this time from the Jewish “homeland”? Will Ariel Sharon be brought to justice in Belgium? will he be judged along with Slobodan Milosevic by The Hague’s International War Crimes Tribunal? Will the United States be found equally culpable for the war crimes being carried out with its money in the name of the Zionist state? Will future generations regard “good Americans” with the same harsh skepticism and as we today regard the “good Germans” of World War II?

Robert Younes, M.D. is media and public relations director for the Washington Report.