Letters | Sunday, 22 February 2009

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Jewish ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

I refer to two letters which appeared on Sunday 8 February: one by Evarist Saliba, “A shattered dream”, and the other by Herb Glatter, “Why not relocate Gazans?”
I wish to comment on a point in each letter, which are related to each other.
Mr Saliba said that the origin of the Palestinians’ problem began with the creation of the state of Israel by a UN decision (November 1947) which was rejected by the Arab states. The origin of the Palestinians’ problem did not begin with this UN partition resolution, but started with the establishment of Zionism in the late 19th century.
Zionism’s aim was to create a Jewish state in Palestine at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population who were to be “spirited away” or “transferred” outside Palestine. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the UN partition resolution gave enormous impetus to this Zionist aim of “spiriting away” and “transferring” Palestine’s Arabs.
Once the Jews knew what land was allocated to them for a state by the UN in 1947 they began, in January 1948, a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians who were residing in the territory allocated to the Jews, i.e., four months before war broke out with the Arab states in May 1948.
The Jews terrorised and forced Palestinians to leave their homes, often at gunpoint, massacring several hundreds of them, including women and children, and displacing several hundred thousand others, destroying their homes and villages so that they could never return.
This is what the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (catastrophe) which mainstream Jewish historiography has largely succeeded in covering up or distorting to this very day.
If that were not enough we have Herb Glatter’s scandalous suggestion, in his own letter, that more Palestinians should be “transferred” (out of Gaza); as if enough have not already been uprooted and displaced in the Nakba of 1948 and ever since.
Before the Jews admit to this gross crime against humanity, publicly apologise for it and grant the right of return to all Palestinians they expelled, there will never be peace in Israel-Palestine.

Christopher Dunkerley
Sliema

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