Refugees and Ethnic Cleansing

 Nakba - Not a Dirty Word 
Amaya Galili, YNet, Translation from Hebrew: Charles Kamen, JVoices.com - “Where will you be for the holiday? Are you going to the celebrations in town? To a picnic in the Carmel Forest? It’s really beautiful there! Won’t you come? Everyone’s going.” A few years ago I would have joined them; a picnic out in the country – what could be wrong with that? But something changed. People around me are celebrating, but I’m not. more

 Sderot Built on Ashes of Ethnically Cleansed and Defaced Najd 
Um Khalil Blog - We often hear about Palestinian rockets hitting the Israeli town of Sderot. What is often left out of these reports is that these rockets almost never kill or injure anyone, and only rarely cause damage. In addition, as this article describes, Sderot was built on the remains of a Palestinian town that had been ethnically cleansed by Israel’s founders in 1948. more

 Forgotten Christians 
Anders Strindberg, The American Conservative - At the time of the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, it is estimated that the Christians of Palestine numbered some 350,000. Almost 20 percent of the total population at the time, they constituted a vibrant and ancient community; their forbears had listened to St. Peter in Jerusalem as he preached at the first Pentecost. Yet Zionist doctrine held that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Of the 750,000 Palestinians that were forced from their homes in 1948, some 50,000 were Christians—7 percent of the total number of refugees and 35 percent of the total number of Christians living in Palestine at the time. more

 Ethnic Cleansing: How Palestine Became Israel 
If Americans Knew - In the late 1800s a small, fanatic movement called “political Zionism” began in Europe. Its goal was to create a Jewish state somewhere in the world. Its leaders settled on the ancient and long-inhabited land of Palestine for the location of this state. more

 Commentary: Embarrassing history 
Arnaud de Borchgrave in UPI - The Palestinians call Israel’s 1948 war of independence their nakba, or catastrophic ethnic cleansing, or forced exile. The Israelis, for their part, have steadfastly rejected any suggestion of ethnic cleansing as calumny in all its anti-Semitic horror. Historic revisionism is now under way. Without fanfare, just below the media radar screen, the Israeli Education Ministry has approved a textbook for Arab third-graders in Israel that concedes the war that gave birth to Israel was a “nakba” for the Palestinians. The textbook refers to the “expulsion” of some of the Palestinians and the “confiscation of many Arab-owned lands.” more

 Hitching a ride on the magic carpet 
Yehouda Shenhav in Haaretz - Any analogy between Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants from Arab lands is folly in historical and political terms.
An intensive campaign to secure official political and legal recognition of Jews from Arab lands as refugees has been going on for the past three years. This campaign has tried to create an analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi Jews, whose origins are in Middle Eastern countries - depicting both groups as victims of the 1948 War of Independence. The campaign's proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a "right of return" on Palestinians, and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of "lost" assets. more

 The Legacy of Ariel Sharon 
Robert Fisk in the UK Independent - This is a place of filth and blood which will forever be associated with Ariel Sharon. In Israel today, he may well be elected prime minister. Then he will be master of the most powerful nation in the Middle East; he will travel to America, he will visit the White House and shake hands with President George W Bush. But for everyone who stood in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut on 18 September 1982, his name is synonymous with butchery; with bloated corpses and disembowelled women and dead babies, with rape and pillage and murder... more

 Fortress Israel 
Ilan Pappe in the London Review of Books - The right of the Palestinian refugees expelled in the 1948 war to return home was acknowledged by the UN General Assembly in December 1948. It is a right anchored in international law and in accordance with notions of universal justice. More surprisingly perhaps, it also makes sense in terms of realpolitik: unless Israel agrees to repatriate the refugees, all attempts to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict are bound to fail. more

 Why a ‘right of return’ is necessary 
Sari Hanafi in The Daily Star - The right of return of Palestinian refugees to their place of origin is enshrined in four separate bodies of international law: humanitarian law, human rights law, the law of nationality as applied to state succession, and refugee law. more

 Response to Benny Morris’ “Politics by other means” in the New Republic
Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé in the Electronic Intifada - In a 17 March 2004 article, “Politics by Other Means”, Benny Morris offered a “review” of Ilan Pappé’s new book, “A History of Modern Palestine; one land, two peoples” (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which tells the history of Palestine from the point of view of its workers, peasants, children, women and all the subaltern groups that make the society and not its political elite. Morris’ “review” consisted of a series of ad hominem attacks and outright factual distortions. Ilan Pappé sent the following reply to the New Republic, who refused to publish it. more

 Israel Bars Rabin From Relating ’48 Eviction of Arabs
David K. Shipler in the New York Times - A censorship board composed of five Cabinet members prohibited former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from including in his memoirs a first-person account of the expulsion of 50,000 Palestinian civilians from their homes near Tel Aviv during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In it, Mr. Rabin attributes the final decision on expulsion to David Ben-Gurion, one of Israel’s founders and its first Prime Minister, who died in 1973. Mr. Rabin says that some Israeli soldiers refused to participate in driving out the Arabs and that afterward, propaganda sessions were required to soothe the consciences of embittered troops. more

 “Diagnosing Benny Morris: the mind of a European settler”
Gabriel Ash in the Yellow Times - Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the “moral” justification for a future genocide against Palestinians. Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every “ethnically cleansed” village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers. more

 Right of Return: Two-State Solution Again Sells Palestinians Short
Professor George Bisharat in the Los Angeles Times - It is a tragic irony that, more than 55 years ago, one desperate people seeking sanctuary from murderous racism decimated another — and continue to oppress its scattered survivors to this day. In 1948, about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, their land and possessions taken by the new Jewish state of Israel. This included the Jerusalem home of my grandparents, Hanna and Mathilde Bisharat, which was expropriated through a process tantamount to state-sanctioned theft. more

 Palestinian Refugees Return and Repatriation
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD in Sharing the Land of Canaan - Israel’s military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) is the most persistent military occupation on earth. But this 35-year-old occupation is only the second stage in the colonization of the land of Canaan. The first stage, between 1947-1949, generated the largest population of refugees still unsettled since World War Two, with the longest displacement in modern history. Until recently, two competing accounts of this catastrophic event existed. Recently, Israeli historians, such as Ilan Pappé, Benny Morris, Zeev Sternhall, Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, and Tom Segev, have validated the accounts of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and debunked the established Israeli myths of Israel’s creation. Using Israeli archives and declassified material, they were able to discover much of the hidden history of Zionism and they reveal a factual account of the establishment of Israel. more

 The Jews of Iraq
Naeim Giladi in The Link - I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called “cruel Zionism.” I write about it because I was part of it. more

 Life in a Palestinian Refugee Camp
Grace Halsell in Journey to Jerusalem - Entering the refugee camp, I feel I am entering some medieval ghetto. I walk along a narrow alleyway, skirting an open sewage ditch. I pass tens of dozens of one- and two-room houses, each leaning on the other for support. I am in a ghetto without streets, sidewalks, gardens, patios, trees, flowers, plazas, or shops—among an uprooted, stateless, scattered people who, like the Jews before them, are in a tragic diaspora. I pass scores of small children, the third generation of Palestinians born in the ghetto that has almost as long a history as the state of Israel itself. Someone has said that for every Jew who was brought in to create a new state, a Palestinian Arab was uprooted and left homeless. more