{"id":1664,"date":"2006-11-01T06:21:03","date_gmt":"2006-11-01T10:21:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=1664"},"modified":"2009-01-03T23:17:31","modified_gmt":"2009-01-04T04:17:31","slug":"the-ethnic-cleansing-of-palestine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=1664","title":{"rendered":"The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Geoff Simons (London: The Palestinian Return Center<\/a>. 2006).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Book review by Jim Miles (Palestine Chronicle Review) <\/strong><\/p>\n

Reading about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from this work is intense and relentless.\u00a0 Geoff Simons\u2019 look at the problem in Palestine of the Israeli onslaught against the indigenous population keeps coming at the reader, insistently, imperatively, and almost overwhelming to the point of exhaustion.\u00a0 Story after story, anecdote after anecdote,\u00a0 irrefutable evidence ongoing with excellent source information from personal diaries of those involved on both sides, government records, and NGO records all contribute to this seemingly never-ending compendium of information.\u00a0\u00a0 As a reader I ran through a full range of emotions:\u00a0 anger, frustration, hopelessness, rage, sadness, and the unsettling sense in both mind and heart that the cause of these feelings is the brutality and savageness of a society that is \u2013 that has \u2013 descended into a state of blind immorality.<\/p>\n

For all the wonderful words about \u2018peace\u2019 and \u2018democracy\u2019 and \u2018human rights\u2019 and \u2018advancement\u2019, the actions of the Israelis speak hundreds, thousands of times stronger about terror, murder, massacres, torture, racism, genocide \u2013 about the removal of a people from their indigenous land. From the early 19th Century statements about the need to displace Arabs, supported by biblical quotations and interpretations that the difference in the souls of non-Jews are different than those of the Jews is \u201cdeeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle\u201d<\/span> (although this is a 20th Century reference); that the \u201csouls of non-Jews come entirely from the female satanic sphere…created without [divine] knowledge…an earthly embodiment of Satan;\u201d<\/span> to the modern development of genetically engineered chemical warfare, searching for a particular \u2018Arab\u2019 gene (but unfortunately for the Israelis the Palestinians are also a Semitic people):\u00a0 Zionists have consistently displayed a full contempt and racist hatred of the \u2018other\u2019 that translates into the murder and maiming of children, the constant harassment and torture of the Palestinians, the constant drive to confiscate land by many means \u2013 the military, the wall, settlements \u2013 and the virtual imprisonment of a whole population in prison-based Bantustans in which the occupants have absolutely no rights.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

From these religious rationalizations, from the self-serving belief that they are god\u2019s chosen people, the \u201cbland assumption of a divine promise \u2018breeds an arrogance which institutionalizes the inferiority of other peoples and generates atrocities against them with alarming regularity.\u201d<\/span> Regular they are.\u00a0 Even before the Jewish people suffered their own holocaust, before they had started emigrating, they were working on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. In 1895 Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism said, \u201cthe process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.\u201d <\/span> Discretion is certainly not in the current Israeli repertoire, as backed by the American empire\u2019s power, the actions taken are blatantly obvious and criminal.\u00a0 The old propaganda idea of \u201ca land without people for a people without land\u201d<\/span> also started early but Palestine in the 1880s \u201chad a population density significantly higher than in Syria, the Lebanon and Asiatic Turkey.\u201d<\/span> The early Jewish settlers knew this but as a more \u2018civilized\u2019 race, they \u201cembodied a chauvinistic nationalism of racial superiority and imperialistic ambition.\u201d <\/span> The records that Simons accesses indicate that \u201cthe doctrine of ethnic cleansing has been central to Zionist thinking since the end of the 19th Century\u2026.the doctrine received substantial British and other international approval.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The first part of Simons work provides this overview of the policy of expulsion, of ethnic cleansing base on racist and prophetic beliefs, supported at first by the British, but not long afterwards by the Americans.\u00a0 There is a daunting supply of references, most drawn from Jewish sources, to indicate that ethnic cleansing by coercion or force is a \u201cpersistent doctrine\u201d<\/span> within the Jewish state.<\/p>\n

He continues with a look at the concept of terrorism and how it has been applied by the Jewish state, recognizing that \u201cwhile terrorism in the modern world is of concern in Jewish discourse\u2026 There is a violent tradition in Judaism, as there is in Islam and Christianity.\u201d<\/span> Terror against the Palestinian \u2018other\u2019 is supported by Gush Emunim, a messianic school, that delivers rationalizations such that a Jew who kills non-Jews \u201chas not violated the [religious] prohibition against murder,\u201d<\/span> and for Arabs who throw stones, the death penalty is \u201cnot only permitted but mandatory\u201d <\/span>and even the intent is enough to\u00a0 penalize.\u00a0 This of course can be seen in extension in the disproportionate military responses to Palestinian actions, including the recent Hezbollah attacks, and the combined American-Israeli pre-emptive attitude towards perceived threats and \u2018intent\u2019.\u00a0 As for regrets for Israeli massacres both past and present, the Gush Emunim leader said, \u201cI am sorry not only for dead Arabs but also about dead flies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Jewish terror started with the Haganah against the British, with attacks on infrastructure, with murder and kidnappings.\u00a0 These territorial ambitions through terror \u201chave been well documented,\u201d <\/span>and through the pursuit of war, \u201cterrorism would reach its zenith and ethnic cleansing [could] be prosecuted on a massive scale,\u201d<\/span> explaining in part the perpetual state of war that Israel creates for itself by denying very basic human rights to the Palestinians in defiance of not just human decency but international law.\u00a0 The occupation of the Westbank and Gaza after 1967 brought in a new phase of terrorism and ethnic cleansing.\u00a0 Deportations, especially of societal leaders, became a major component of these actions. Infrastructure destruction continued.\u00a0 Land confiscation under various ruses or outright force continued.\u00a0 Messianic fundamentalists, the core of the settlement policy, seriously aggravated all other actions. There are recognized and verified Jewish terrorist groups and while \u201cthe Israeli state has never had a monopoly on\u2026.terror\u2026 it would be a grave error to deny the historical efficacy of terrorism in furthering Jewish ambitions.\u201d<\/span> <\/p>\n

Simons continues with a look at the militarised state that Israel has created, defined by the large purchase of weapons from other countries, the provisioning of a well armed and well trained army, a highly technological arms industry aided by various other states including France, Britain, the U.S., and South Africa, the acquisition and use of chemical weapons and nerve gases, the denial of international treaties banning the latter, nuclear weapons, increasing American complicity and ongoing direct support.\u00a0 From his discussion on the Israeli use of terror and its massive military infrastructure, Simons says, \u201cUntil the character of the Israeli military state and its underlying philosophy are properly understood, there will be no route to peace and justice in the Middle East.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, with the immense support of the American empire and its military, economic, political and religious back up, Israel will not surrender what has become for it a slow but successful destruction of the Palestinian people.\u00a0 They exist at the moment in a state of terror, enduring ongoing physical and psychological torture, trapped in a series of open-air prisons, fully denied any human rights.\u00a0 The ongoing actions of the terror war in Israel are created to excuse any pretence of looking for a peaceful solution to the situation.<\/p>\n

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine<\/span> should serve as an indictment against the Israeli state and the American state that is in a symbiotic relationship with it.\u00a0 This is not a philosophical work as its thesis and summaries are short and succinct, massively supported from a wide variety of sources.\u00a0 It should create outrage at the whole Israeli enterprise of eliminating the Palestinians from their homeland.\u00a0 All the guns, tanks, helicopters, jets, fancy bullets, missiles, and other accoutrements of war do not represent a superior society or people, but one degraded by an immoral militarism to a state of blind obedience to a warped prophetic philosophy and a state of savage primitive cruelty to others.<\/p>\n

Geoff Simons’ work is an enormous contribution to the knowledge base about the actions perpetrated upon the Palestinian people by the Jewish state.\u00a0 The unanswered question is who will hold them responsible for their actions?\u00a0 When two of the largest military powers in the world deny the usefulness of the UN, deny the testament of many, many other countries who have signed various treaties denouncing warfare, terror, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and deny the notion that international courts can serve any proper function, then who can hold them responsible?\u00a0 I wonder, too, where human compassion has gone in the United States, in Canada (the first to cut off aid to the Palestinians when Hamas won the election), in Britain?\u00a0 No one who has not lived and suffered under conditions as they present themselves in Palestine can truly comprehend the severity and ugliness of life in the occupied land.\u00a0 That compassion, that sense of sharing human emotions, needs to be expressed through local political action, through education, through the awareness of what is happening in the name of violent prophets \u2013 and profits.\u00a0 The course of action is much slower than the speed with which military actions can destroy much good, but if the political and moral landscapes can be changed, then in the long perspective, much good can be achieved.<\/p>\n

To order the book, please write to The Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) info@prc.org.uk<\/p>\n

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor of opinion pieces and book reviews to Palestine Chronicles. His interest in this topic stems originally from an environmental perspective, which encompasses the militarization and economic subjugation of the global community and its commodification by corporate governance and by the American government.<\/p>\n

[read, on this site<\/a>, the e-Book by Dr. Yvonne Schmidt, “FOUNDATIONS OF CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS IN ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES<\/a>“. Diss. (Wien 2001), Revised Edition 2006.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Geoff Simons (London: The Palestinian Return Center. 2006). Book review by Jim Miles (Palestine Chronicle Review) Reading about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from this work is intense and relentless.\u00a0 Geoff Simons\u2019 look at the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-qQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1664"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5570,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions\/5570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}