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Page last updated
March 7, 2007
Understanding the conflict
"Transfer" - Ethnic Cleanising by another name
(See also The refugees)
Late September 2002: 187 Israeli academics sign a petition warning of ethnic cleansing: "We are deeply worried by indications that the "fog of war" could be exploited by the Israeli government to commit further crimes against the Palestinian people, up to full-fledged ethnic cleansing."
Almost 1,000 US academics and intellectuals are inspired to do the same
1. The growing clamor for ethnic cleansing
Ali Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada, 28 August 2002
'On 3 July 2002... An Israeli organization [has] 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 from the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea within a 3-5 year period.'
To see the article Abunimah refers to click here
2. A new exodus for the Middle East?
Benny Morris The Guardian, 3 October 2002
"Rightwing Israelis are talking about 'transfer' - the expulsion of all Arabs. Shocking as it sounds, the idea once had support from British and Arab officials, reveals distinguished Israeli historian Benny Morris. And, continuing our series on the Arab-Israeli conflict, he argues the Middle East might now be at peace if Israel's first leader had driven out all the Palestinians in 1948."
Comments on Benny Morris
a) Ian Katz reports on the story under the title Radical Israeli in u-turn on Palestinians
b) Short comments from Dr Nur Masalha and Syd Kaminski
c) Ran Greenstein's brief response
3. Exposing Israel's original sins
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz Book Review, 11 March 2000 A review of Correcting a Mistake - Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel, 1936-1956 by Benny Morris
"Correcting a Mistake is a collection of articles that come together to form a gripping, infuriating collage of injustices committed between 1936-1956 by the Jewish community of Palestine, and thereafter, the state, against the native Palestinians."
c. 3,200 words
4. A Historical Survey of Proposals to Transfer Arabs from Palestine 1895 - 1947
Rabbi Dr Chaim Simon
"The issue of population transfer is a very delicate subject. For this reason, many proposers confined the exposition of their ideas to diaries, private correspondence and closed meetings. In public they either ignored the subject of transfer or spoke against it. Even those who did propose various schemes were often reluctant to specifically suggest compulsory transfer. They relied on various euphemistic expressions to convey their intentions regarding compulsion"
A massive, 64,000 word on-going study to establish that ethnic cleansing has always been central to the Zionist project.
5. Sound the Alarm on Transfer
Stanley Heller reports
Shraga Elam a Jewish journalist living in Zurich reminds us that the goal of the Nazis until 1941 was deportation of the Jews. Then it moved on to extermination. He suggests that we stage protests using the most easily recognizable symbol of the Jewish catastrophe in WWII, the Star of David... overprinted with the word "Palestinian" and the words "Stop on the Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians"
6. Ethnic Cleansing: Past, Present and Future
Ran HaCohen
December 30, 2002
c. 1,700 words
'The struggle against "transfer" should [therefore] involve a concerted effort on all fronts: against plots to drive out Palestinians in the future, against their strangulation in the present, and for making the ethnic cleansing of 1948 (and since) part of our collective consciousness.'
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