Ethnic Cleansing: An Established Plan in Israel’s Apartheid Policy

Prof. As’ad Abdul Rahman

Recently uncovered archives of Israel’s ethnic cleansing policy against the Palestinians have shed more light on such operations where tens of thousands were forced to leave their homes and lands during the months of the 1948 Nakba year.

By seeking to fulfill the Zionist agenda of establishing a ‘Jewish State’ in Palestine, Israel made it imperative to remove the native Palestinian Arab population in mass ethnic cleansing by all means possible to make room for European Ashkenazi Jews to come and colonize, in phases, all of historical Palestine. Records of such acts have been uncovered by many, but hidden records of the Israeli archives have been obtained and widely published by Haaretz.

Accounts of the archives revealed that the Jewish Haganah and Stern gangs committed many atrocities against the Palestinians. Just between July 12th and 13th of 1948, more than 50,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims were expelled to seek refuge in nearby Arab countries. The archives further included that “more than 400 emptied Palestinian villages and towns were looted and razed to the ground to prevent the Palestinians from ever returning to them and more than 750,000 Palestinians were barred from ever returning to Palestine”. Erasing Palestinian presence along with their homes was accomplished by “bombarding Palestinian homes at night while they slept”.

In his book “Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, based on the leaked records, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote that “the 1948 Palestinian Exodus resulted from a planned ethnic cleansing of Palestine that was implemented by the Zionist movement, mainly by Ben Gurion. The birth of the Zionist state came drenched with blood”. Pappe believes that ethnic cleansing is still taking place to this day basing his analysis upon the facts that “Palestinian youth along with the rest of the population are being targeted by Israeli authorities for extrajudicial assassination and indiscriminate killing”. Ben Gurion’s ethnic cleansing, according to the archives was named “Plan Dalet”  put to compile inventory of Arab villages and towns with a list of their Arab prominent leaders targeted to be seized and shot on the spot”.

Plan Dalet was meant to create a power vacuum eliminating effective Arab Palestinian opposition to the Zionist plan of ethnic cleansing. The current Palestinian divisions have effectively given the Zionist state a free hand to expand its colonial settlements in the West Bank and Ben Gurion’s “Plan Dalet” – in viewing the present against the past – is still active to this day.

Shulamit Aloni who once served as minister of education under the late Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin acknowledged that apartheid existed in Israel. She wrote saying that “Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews who suffered for years and years the stigma of racial and religious prejudice, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practices its own form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population”. Ethnic cleansing and a racist occupying policy are meant to erase the Palestinian national identity while the Zionist colonial settlers are still to this very day without any national identity needed to identify them with their Zionist state.

A bid for endorsement of an Israeli ‘national identity’ or a ‘Hebrew’ one for the citizens of Israel has been rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court.  Behind their insistence on a national identity, lies deep an inferiority complex due to the fact that all the Ashkenazi colonial settlers originated from the Aryan tribes who converted to Judaism during the 7th century when they were known as Khazars living in present day Ukraine. They are neither Israelites, “Beni Israel”, the children of Prophet Jacob who changed his name to Israel, nor Hebrew Semites. Only the Arab Palestinian Jews are the Hebrews and the Israelites, as well. Therefore, the only legal national identity left for the Ashkenazis is the Jewish religious identity.

A major factor encouraging the Israeli apartheid agenda is a long-held attitude of all American Administrations dealing with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict manifested in abiding by the premise that “any possible settlement must match the positions of the stronger party”, Israel in this case is the stronger party whose “positions” must be accepted by the weaker party, the Arabs in this case. Such a premise has given Israel a supremacy that energized its egotistical fever, a position, according to Yitzhak Laor,   “established a rigid apartheid legal system, as the High Court of Justice fades away”. Laor’s words came in an article in Haaretz published under the title “Israel’s Apartheid Is Worse than South Africa’s”.

Haaretz  tried to define Israeli Apartheid as “the meticulous sub-division of the people in Israel guided by a principle of equality that benefits the ruling class”, which is the Aryan European Ashkenazi Jews over the Semitic Eastern Arab Jews and the Semitic Palestinian Arab native population. In 2011, Ehud Barak, at the time Israel’s defence minister issued a statement that greatly shocked Israelis by stating: ” If Israel does not achieve a peace deal with Palestinians, it will have to become a bi-national state or be undemocratic apartheid one “. Israel, in fact, has become both in 2016 with half of the population without any civil and political rights, whatsoever.

Ethnic cleansing added to apartheid driven by a hidden inferior complex creates a toxic drink that is leading the colonial racist Zionist settlers into a deep drunkard state of egotism that always ends with self-destruction.