- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his ministers
have openly declared that Palestinians must be driven out to make way for
Jewish settlements in land occupied illegally since the 1967 war.
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- Sharon and his cabinet utilised the November 15 ambush
of Israeli security forces in Hebron by Islamic Jihad and the ensuing gun
battle that killed 12 members of the Israeli armed forces and injured 15,
as well as three of the Palestinian attackers, to make their announcements.
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- Sharon himself called for "territorial contiguity"
between Kiryat Arba, a settlement overlooking Hebron, the tiny Zionist
enclaves and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a religious site venerated by
both Moslems and Jews, inside the city. Palestinians living between the
settlement, the enclaves and the Tomb would be forced to leave their homes
to make way for the settlers-a policy known throughout the world as ethnic
cleansing. He told army commanders in Hebron that Israel had to "take
advantage of the opportunity" to "minimise the number of Palestinians
living among Jewish settlers" and establish "Jewish points of
presence". He described this as "an appropriate Zionist response"
to such attacks.
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- Sharon's newly appointed foreign affairs minister and
main leadership rival, Benyamin Netanyahu, was even more explicit. "We
are going to cleanse the whole area and do the work ourselves." he
declared.
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- Israeli security forces immediately imposed a curfew,
arrested and blindfolded at least 40 Palestinians, bulldozed the homes
of Palestinian families and uprooted their olive groves.
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- This gave the ultra-nationalist settlers the green light
to establish an "outpost"-the basis for a new settlement-on the
vacant land and daub it with the racist slogan "Death to Arabs."
The settlers own language echoed the government's calls for ethnic cleansing.
The leader of the Hebron settlement, Zvi Katsover, said, "We have
to cleanse the ground to ensure an Israeli territorial continuity between
Kiryat Arba and Hebron." A thousand new homes are to be built in the
area. "I trust Sharon to implement the project," he added.
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- At a rally in Hebron, Benny Elon, leader of the ultra-right
wing Moledet (Homeland) party, declared, "There won't be just a Jewish
neighbourhood here. There will be a Jewish town here."
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- According to the New York Times, "In a turbulent
crowd, they [the settlers] pounded on the doors of nearby Palestinian houses
and then smeared the pale stone with blue graffiti: 'Every Arab killed
for me it's a holiday,' and, over and over, 'Vengeance'."
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- Later the government issued an order for the demolition
of a further 15 Palestinian homes on the route from Kiryat Arba to the
Jewish enclave in Hebron.
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- Silence from Western leaders
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- The expulsion of communities from their homeland, like
genocide, is recognised as a crime against humanity. The 1948 International
Declaration of Human Rights and other international covenants, including
the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, outlaw expulsions, population transfers,
resettlement and forced relocation of any kind.
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- But the statements by Sharon and Netanyahu elicited no
response from Israel's main backer, the United States, or any other Western
power. And even the liberal media did little more than report the words
of Sharon and Netanyahu. Not one of the editorial writers of the New York
Times or Britain's Guardian has seen fit to comment on Israel's explicit
advocacy of ethnic cleansing.
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- The deafening silence on Sharon's gross abuse of human
rights is particularly marked, given that it takes place against the backdrop
of the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic before the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The
Hague. The central purpose of The Hague tribunal is to find Milosevic guilty
of having politically sanctioned the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from
the Yugoslav province of Kosovo-to confirm the existence of a "chain
of command" between the Serb irregular forces in Kosovo and Belgrade,
and so justify the US-led bombardment of Yugoslavia.
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- That trial has cost millions of dollars, lasted more
than nine months and taken evidence from more than 100 witnesses. Despite
this, to date the prosecution has failed to demonstrate that Milosevic
himself either masterminded the ethnic cleansing or ever explicitly ordered
the expulsion of the Albanian population of Kosovo.
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- There would be no such difficulty were Sharon to be brought
to trial for his treatment of the Palestinians, or if Netanyahu joined
him in the dock. The Israeli government has explicitly issued instructions
to the armed forces and publicly announced policies that are universally
recognised as constituting ethnic cleansing. Yet the world's statesmen,
the United Nations, the press and mainstream political commentators keep
silent.
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- The West's political blind spot serves to underline the
hypocrisy of their claim to have gone to war against Milosevic based on
moral considerations. The break-up of Yugoslavia was desired by the Western
powers in order to secure control of the strategically vital Balkan region.
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- As the World Socialist Web Site explained in its statement
of May 24, 1999, "Why is NATO at war with Yugoslavia? World power,
oil and gold":
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- "The immediate material gains that might be plundered
from Kosovo are dwarfed by the far greater potential for enrichment that
beckons in regions further to the east where the NATO powers have developed
immense interests over the past five years.... [T]he dismantling of the
USSR has created a power vacuum in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia
that makes a new division of the world inevitable. The principal significance
of Yugoslavia, at this critical juncture, is that it lies on the Western
periphery of a massive swathe of territory into which the major world powers
aim to expand."
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- The statement continued, "Involved in the reintegration
of the territory of the former USSR into world capitalism is the absorption,
by massive Western transnational companies, of trillions of dollars in
valuable raw materials that are vital to the imperialist powers. The greatest
untapped oil reserves in the world are located in the former Soviet republics
bordering the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan). These
resources are now being divided among the major capitalist countries. This
is the fuel that is feeding renewed militarism and must lead to new wars
of conquest by the imperialist powers against local opponents, as well
as ever-greater conflicts among the imperialists themselves."
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- The same base economic and political considerations that
in reality shaped the hostility of the Western powers towards Milosevic's
regime now determine their acquiescence in face of Sharon's criminal actions.
In short, nothing must be allowed to get in the way of the drive by the
US and the major imperialist powers to secure control of the oil riches
of the Middle East. On occasion Sharon's actions against the Palestinians
have been criticised because they have been considered counterproductive
by Washington at a time when it is seeking to secure the support of the
Arab regimes for war against Iraq. But fundamentally the US views Israel
as the dominant military power in the region and its main and most reliable
proxy.
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- Israel's record of ethnic cleansing
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- Israel was founded in 1948 on the basis of the forcible
expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians as the precondition for
establishing a religious state with a Jewish majority population. Ever
since it has repeatedly resorted to expulsion, population transfer, resettlement
and forced relocation of the Palestinians.
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- In the aftermath of World War II and the Nazi holocaust,
the United Nations voted in 1947 for the partition of Palestine into separate
states for the Jews and the Palestinians. During the 1947-49 war between
the Jews and the Arab states that followed, the actions of Zionist terror
gangs played a major role in driving the Palestinians from their homes.
In all, some 700,000 Palestinians became refugees in other countries and
were not allowed to return to Israel. According to the UN, the original
refugees and their descendants now number some four million. Many of those
who remained were expelled from their homes and resettled elsewhere within
Israel. The Law of Return, passed in 1950, and the Citizenship Law of 1952
granted every Jew the right to immediate citizenship upon arrival in Israel.
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- In 1967, after the defeat of the Arab states in the June
war, there was another population transfer. About 250,000 of the 1948 refugees
who had lived in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza for 20 years fled.
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- Afterwards, there were attempts by successive governments
to implement a forced transfer. The Israeli forces expelled Palestinians
living near the cease-fire lines and destroyed their villages and towns.
Kalkilya was only the most well-known example. The Israeli authorities
offered financial incentives and free transportation to Palestinians who
were willing to leave, but there were few takers. Some of the refugees
in the Gaza Strip were transferred to camps in the Jordan valley. The security
forces demolished the homes of suspected militants and those of their families
and neighbours and deported them to Lebanon.
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- In 1982, following the invasion of Lebanon, hundreds
of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese moved north to the suburbs of
Beirut to avoid the war and Israeli control of southern Lebanon. An international
investigation by six jurists, including the cofounder of Amnesty International,
found Israel guilty of attempted "ethnocide" and "genocide"
against the Palestinian people. The report stated that there were no valid
reasons "under international law for its invasion of Lebanon, for
the manner in which it conducted hostilities, or its actions as an occupying
force."
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- Ever since 1967, Israel has illegally built settlements
in the territories captured in the June war. More than 200,000 settlers
now live in 200 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, while a further
180,000 live in what was once East Jerusalem and its environs. The settlement
policy, which escalated after the 1993 Oslo Accords, involved demolishing
Palestinian homes, seizing their land by military or legal means, and driving
the Palestinians from the towns and villages.
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- Sharon's government incorporates or rests on ultra-orthodox
and settler-based political movements that explicitly advocate ethnic cleansing
under the guise of "population transfer". The Moledet (Homeland)
party is the ideological successor to the proscribed far-right Kach movement
of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. Its leader Rehavam Ze'evi was, until his
assassination in October 2001, a minister in Sharon's government. More
recently, Gamla, a group founded by former Israeli military officers and
settlers and funded by American Jews, published detailed plans for the
"complete elimination of the Arab demographic threat to Israel"
by forcibly expelling all Palestinians, including Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories and Palestinian citizens of Israel within a three- to five-year
period.
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- It is these extreme right-wing elements who now determine
official government policy.
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- To the extent that the policies of ethnic cleansing have
now become acceptable to the Israeli government, then the same applies
to the US and its allies. Washington's support for Sharon signals that
no crimes against humanity are too gross for the US to contemplate in the
name of "the war on terrorism". It is a warning of the kinds
of methods that the Bush administration will employ to subjugate the Middle
East region and so gain control of its oil riches.
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- http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/dec2002/isra-d03.shtml
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