What is happening in Gaza today is part and parcel of a 75-year-old enterprise of ethnic cleansing. This is the Zionist enterprise for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
We are presently witnessing in real time the murder of thousands of Palestinians, the bombings of hospitals in Gaza, the killing of babies in incubators, the destruction of mosques, homes, entire families and refugee camps. The depopulation of northern Gaza, the forced uprooting of the Palestinian population and the deliberate murder of fleeing refugees.
This is not something new. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine started in December 1947 with a series of Zionist attacks on Palestinian villages and neighborhoods, and has continued since then through repeated expulsions, arbitrary murders, torture, home demolitions, imprisonment, including that of children, the unlawful killing of Palestinian protesters, and widespread discrimination.
Since its establishment in 1948, the state of Israel has enforced massive land seizures against the Palestinians, and continues to implement a multitude of laws and policies to dispossess them. Since 1948, Israel has demolished hundreds of thousands of Palestinian homes and other properties across all areas under its jurisdiction. Palestinians are denied the most basic rights and freedoms, including drastic movement restrictions, chronic discriminatory underinvestment in Palestinian communities, the stealing of water resources and cultivated land, and the denial of refugees’ right of return.
Moreover, the two million Palestinians in Gaza live in an open-air prison, blocked by Israel from the outside world. The Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated places in the world. More than two-thirds of its inhabitants are refugees and their descendants, expelled by Israel in 1948, and more than half are under eighteen years of age. Since 2004, Israel has launched eight devastating attacks against Gaza’s largely defenseless population for the purpose of making life impossible for them. Thousands have perished, and tens of thousands have been left homeless, basic infrastructure hasbeen destroyed by Israel. For example, in 2014 Israel destroyed vital water 2and sewage infrastructure in one of their bombing campaigns against Gaza.In the meantime, Israel has subjected Gaza to a merciless illegal blockade.
How does one judge historical events? Are these random occurrences or do they follow an inner logic? In the case of Israel, the transformation of an overwhelmingly Palestinian land before 1948, with a large Palestinian majority, and centuries-old culture with deep connections to the land, into present-day Israel, is the result of the Zionist logic to impose an exclusive Jewish presence in Palestine.
In 1947 the population of Palestine, from the river to the sea, now also known as “Israel,” was 2/3 Palestinian, that is about 66% mostly Muslim and Christian, and 1/3 Jewish, out of a total of about 2 million people at the time. 95% of the land was in Palestinian hands and only 5% in Jewish hands. The Jewish population had grown since the 1920s from about 10%, to close to 30% as a result of European immigration fleeing persecution in Europe. Also, as a result of Zionist efforts to route displaced Jews to Palestine.
In March 1948, the Zionist leadership in Palestine, headed by David BenGurion, finalized a master plan, called Plan Dalet (Hebrew for D), for the depopulation of the non-Jewish population and the drive towards an exclusively Jewish state. This master plan called for the expulsion of Palestinian villages in rural Palestine. Detailed instructions were communicated to the Jewish militias of the Haganah, which was to become the backbone of the future Israeli army. Similar instructions were given for actions directed at Palestine’s urban centers.
The state of Israel was declared in May 1948. By the end of that year, 531 Palestinian villages and eleven urban neighborhoods and towns had been destroyed and their inhabitants expelled under direct orders of the Zionist leadership put out in March 1948. Massacres against Palestinians, as in the village of Deir Yassin, were committed by the Zionist militias.
By the end of 1948, half of the Palestinian majority population, or more than 800,000 people had been expelled from Palestine. These people hoped to return to their homes but were never allowed back by Israel. At present there are nearly 7 million Palestinian refugees around the world.
Zionism is a political ideology and a political current at the root of the state of Israel. Zionism seeks to genocide the Palestinian people as a people, to 3deny them a historical existence. It does this by ethnically cleansing Palestine from the inhabitants that populated the land prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. This should never be allowed.
Do not be deceived by the claims of antisemitism against the enemies of Zionism. There is nothing antisemitic about opposing Zionism. Judaism is a religion. Zionism is a political current. In fact, a growing number of Jews are anti-Zionist, having realized the criminality of a state and a political ideology that alleges to represent them.
Zionism attempts to justify its drive towards an exclusive Jewish state by saying that Palestine belonged to the 'Jews' 2000 years ago, and therefore, that the Zionist project is organic and legitimate.
But an organic connection to a land is not simply based on whether your ancestors thousands of years ago lived on it. And it is not based on the uprooting and the extermination of the local population living there and having an organic connection to that land. And it is certainly not based on a piece of paper by the British colonialists ceding the Palestinian land to the Jews.
It is based on the continuity of life and civilization and the organic development of history. Palestinian ownership of the land was always commensurate with the traditions of that land. True land ownership is defined by living customs and cultural relations, that make sense to the human beings living on that land from a historical perspective.
Palestine before Israel was characterized by harmonious relations between different ethnic and religious groups, which included Muslim, Christian and Palestinian Jews.
So, even under Ottoman rule, Palestinians still owned the land. Ownership of the land was defined by the way they lived on it, and how the land was used in a way that was fully commensurate with the local laws, norms, and civilization of the people living on it. There was no rule of 'pure force' or 'pure might' as in the criminal era of modern colonialism and of the state of Israel.
The Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine, on the other hand, is a methodical, cold-calculating rationalist modern project, and in no way were the Zionists attempting to coexist with the local population. In no way did they try to recognize the people and the civilization of the land they wanted to occupy.
They plainly ignored the existence of the Palestinians, and simply decided to exterminate them. They did not recognize them as human, to begin with, and did not risk any part of their own sense of humanity in the process. They did not even see them as animals to be enslaved. They saw them as nothing at all!
In the case of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the attempt was made not simply to inflict harm upon Palestinians, but to deny them the possibility of any historical development itself, to effectively exterminate them as a people by cutting them off from their land and from their own historical being.
How is Israel able to commit such horrendous crimes? First and foremost, it is because of the military and financial support of the United States government, and previously of British colonialism.
Between 1951 and 2022, US aid to Israel totaled close to $318 billion, making Israel the largest recipient of American foreign aid since World War II. Over 86% of annual American aid to Israel has funded military efforts.
All current military aid to Israel is part of the 10-year, $38 billion Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Obama administration in 2016. That means 10 million US dollars per day of military aid to Israel from the U.S. The agreement commits $500 million in missile defense funding and $3.3 billion in other military funding each year from 2019 to 2028. It is the third agreement of its kind, following two signed during the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations.
This outrageous amount of money should instead be going to improve the lives of the American people, not to fund crimes against humanity. It should be going to fund American health care, to improve living conditions in the U.S., as well as better housing, education, day care, family leave, infrastructure, public transportation, and more.
There is an increasing recognition by regular people in the U.S. of the criminality of Israel’s actions. The present events in Gaza, horrible as they are, have played a role in helping Americans realize the true nature of Israel.