Ethnic Cleansing was Always on the Table

It was as plain forty years ago as it is today

The following was published in the magazine Palestine Perspectives of May, 1984, by Muhammad Hallaj. Israel has always been focused on emptying Palestine of the people who have lived there for generations. The people who tilled the soil and tended the crops. The people who did their best to stay on their land as the leaders of the world gave most of it away and the “new owners” chipped away at the rest day by day.

The article was originally named “Israeli Anti-Semitism,” which is the correct term. Arabs are Semites. Both Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages, yet today the term has been redefined to apply only to Jews and further broadened to include any criticism of the state of Israel. Saying “Free Palestine,” which has no religious connotations, is now anti-semitism. To avoid misunderstanding, I have taken the liberty of renaming the article.

ISRAELI ANTI-PALESTINIANISM

A few years ago [i.e. a few years before 1984], the Israeli governor of the Galilee, Israel Koenig, submitted to the Israeli government a confidential report on the Arabs in Israel which contained recommendations on how to harass and impoverish them. Many people said at the time that the report represented a deviant anti-Arab attitude in Israel, forgetting the fact that it reflected a long-standing Israeli policy toward the remnants of Palestinian society in Israel.

According to the data on Jewish attitudes toward Israel’s Arab population (about 16%), published in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz (30 March 1984), 55 percent of Israeli Jews favor the imposition of restrictions on Arabs “so that they do not become a majority in the country,” 49 percent want the Arabs “encouraged” to leave Israel, 64 percent support more “supervision” of the Arabs, and 65 percent said it was impossible to trust most of Israel’s Arab population.

The data, derived from a study given at a seminar held at Haifa University, indicated that Jewish residents of the Galilee—where most of Israel’s Arabs live—display an even greater anti-Arab feeling. For example, 72 percent of them favor the imposition of more restrictions, 57 percent want the Arabs encouraged to leave, and 78 percent of them want “better supervision” over the Arab population.

This data gives credence to the view that, with the increase in the percentage of “non-Jews” resulting from the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel may have to resort to the mass expulsion of Palestinians or to become more explicitly an apartheid state on the South African model. Zionism, Israel’s ideology, which uses religion as the basis for one’s rights and obligations, lends itself to these possibilities.

One example of the restrictions imposed on the Palestinian residents of the West Bank is issuing license plates of a color that contrasts with the license plates of Israelis. These can be seen from a distance and such cars are forbidden to drive on certain roads “for security reasons,” of course.

Sometimes the Israelis encourage the Palestinians to leave by arresting them and driving them to a “border” point and dropping them off in the middle of nowhere. Another tactic was the rule that residency permits would expire if the holder left the country for more than six months. This makes it very difficult for students to study abroad and almost impossible for people to find work in the other countries. This is important since opportunities are very limited in the occupied territories for a variety of reasons—mostly due to the occupation itself.

Unfortunately, these measures are dwarfed by the repression that has existed in Gaza since the imposition of the Israeli blockade that started in 2007 and intensified to genocidal proportions in recent months. [See Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor https://euromedmonitor.org/en/gaza.]