Israel Guilty of Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians: UN Rapporteur
Richard Falk, United Nations rapporteur on human rights in
the Palestinian territories accused Israel
last week of “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. Speaking at a press
conference, he said that Israeli policies bore “unacceptable characteristics of
colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.” “Every increment of enlarging the settlements or every
incident of house demolition is a way of worsening the situation confronting
the Palestinian people and reducing what prospects they might have as the
outcome of supposed peace negotiations,” he added. Falk is an American who is
Jewish, is an international law expert and Professor Emeritus at Princeton
University in the US .
According to Falk, more than 11,000 Palestinians had lost
their right to live in Jerusalem
since 1966 due to Israel
imposing residence laws favoring Jews. At the same time, the Israeli government
was revoking Palestinian residence permits. “The 11,000 is just the tip of the
iceberg,” he said, “because many more are faced with possible challenges to
their residence rights.” Falk’s comments lend support to similar statements done in
the past regarding Israeli actions towards the Palestinians. In 2006, Ilan
Pappé, an Israeli historian and social activist who is a professor with the College
of Social Sciences and
International Studies at the University
of Exeter in the United
Kingdom , wrote a book called “The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine .”
In that book, Pappé states that the 1948 Palestinian exodus
was a planned cleansing of Palestine
that was carried out by the Zionist movement leaders, mainly David Ben-Gurion
and his associates. The process was carried out through the systematic
expulsion of Arabs from about 500 villages, complemented by terrorist attacks
executed mainly by members of the Irgun and the Haganah troops acting against
the civilian population. Pappé based his assumptions on the Plan Dalet and on village
files as a proof of the planned expulsions. Although the purpose of the plan
has been amply debated, it seems that the plan was a set of guidelines whose
purpose was to take control of the territory of the Jewish state and to defend
its borders and its people, including the Jewish population outside its borders
as a precaution against an expected invasion by Arab armies.
Predictably, the book caused an uproar. Benny Morris, an
Israeli professor of History in the Middle East Studies department of
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, wrote, “At best, Ilan Pappé must be one of
the world’s sloppiest historians: at worst, one of the most dishonest. In
truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two.” Morris himself stated, however, “In retrospect, it is clear
that what occurred in 1948 in Palestine
was a variety of ethnic cleansing of Arab areas by Jews. It is impossible to
say how many of the 700,000 or so Palestinians who became refugees in 1948 were
physically expelled, as distinct from simply fleeing a combat zone.”
Not everybody was equally critical of Pappé, though. Stephen
Howe, professor of the history of colonialism at Bristol
University , said that Pappé’s book
was an often compelling mixture of historical argument and politico-moral
tract. According to Howe, although Pappé’s book might not be the last word on
the events of 1948, it still is “a major intervention in an argument that will,
and must, continue.”
And it does continue. In November 2013, more than 50 public
figures in Britain
wrote a letter opposing an Israeli plan to forcibly remove up to 70,000
Palestinian Bedouins from their historic desert land –an act that critics
considered ethnic cleansing. The eviction and destruction of approximately 35
villages in the Negev desert, claims the letter, “will
mean the forced displacement of Palestinians from their homes and land, and
systematic discrimination and separation.”
Writing in Save Canada Post in 2010, Suzanne Weiss, a Holocaust survivor stated, “I am a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, the Nazis' mass murder of
Yet for me, the Israeli government's actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family's experiences under Hitlerism: the inhuman walls, the checkpoints, the daily humiliations, killings, diseases, the systematic deprivation. There's no escaping the fact that Israel has occupied the entire country of Palestine, and taken most of the land, while the Palestinians have been expelled, walled off, and deprived of human rights and human dignity.”
http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/apartheid-palestinians-rapporteur.html
The Agony of Palestine
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