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Israel's record of ethnic cleansing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

It is these extreme right-wing elements who now determine official government policy.

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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