Ethnic cleansing worm at the core of Israel

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "The coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine," Winston Churchill told the British House of Commons in 1948, "is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years."

By 1948, the pompous side of Churchill's character had completely taken over, but his words are enough to give pause to anyone writing on the 50th anniversary of Israel's statehood: we don't know how it's going to come out yet. But the past fifty years have given us a new context in which to view the Israeli experiment, for this is the era of the ethnic state.

At first the phenomenon was called decolonization, and the Zionists who fought to drive the British out of Palestine saw themselves as part of the anti-imperialist struggle. (So did the Soviet Union, the first of the great powers to recognize Israel.) But bitter experience has taught us that when you break the empires up, what you tend to get is ethnically-based successor states -- and a lot of bloodshed.

It is, in a way, a recapitulation in modern Africa, Asia and the Middle East of what happened in 19th century Europe, when the old multinational empires were broken up amid much bloodshed to yield ethnically uniform (or at least linguistically united) nations like Germany, Italy, Poland and Turkey. This time round, however, the ethnic groups fighting for 'self-determination' are often much smaller: Croatians, Eritreans, even East Timorese.

So the question that now presents itself is whether Israel's foundation 50 years ago, far from being the unique and cosmically significant event Churchill described, was just an early example of the 20th-century fashion of ethnic separatism. And there is certainly a case to answer, for Israel's statehood was built on a policy of 'ethnic cleansing'.

About 850,000 Palestinian Arabs, over a third of the total population, were living on what is now internationally recognized Israeli territory (within the pre-1967 borders) when the fighting started in 1948. By the time it ended only 150,000 remained. The rest had fled -- and they have never been allowed to return.

For decades Israeli propagandists insisted that the Palestinians flee of their own accord, in some irrational mass movement. Even if that had been true, it wouldn't justify refusing to let them return, but it wasn't true. They were deliberately driven out by an Israeli leadership that understood that a state with a big Palestinian minority could not be the explicitly 'Jewish' homeland they sought.

Assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was one of the first to admit it, recalling twenty years ago in his memoirs that the 50,000 Palestinian inhabitants of Lod (then Lydda) "did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of fire and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march." But those words were never published in Israel.

The cabinet committee that vetted Rabin's memoirs banned the publication of this passage "because it will ruin our claim that we acted humanely." Rabin dropped it, but his English-language translator had a copy of the original typescript and passed on the offending passage to the New York Times.

A new generation of Israeli historians now discusses the expulsion of the Palestinians openly, and hardly anybody in the academic or journalistic world denies the reality of what happened. (The political world is another matter.) But does this act of massive injustice at the start, never recanted or recompensed, define Israel forever as an 'ethnic state'?

The basic rationale of the ethnically defined state is almost always the same: we cannot be safe/happy/fulfilled unless we live in a state where we are the overwhelming majority, and the ones who make the rules. Separatist Sikhs and Slovaks and Sri Lankan Tamils and even French-Canadians all believe that with varying degrees of fervor. The Zionists who founded Israel were all convinced of it -- and they had the recent horrors of the Holocaust as evidence that they were right.

Israel today automatically grants citizenship to any Jew who wants to settle there, while refusing almost all other immigration and denying equal rights to the descendants of the Palestinians who stayed in 1948 and ended up as Israeli citizens. These are the hallmarks of an ethnically-based state -- and 50 years after the deed was done, Israel is still haunted by the unpurged legacy of the ethnic cleansing that happened at the start.

Meir Pail is a long-time gadfly of Israeli politics, a former staff officer who quit the army over Israel's secret decision to start a nuclear weapons program in the early 1960s. But the day that defined his life was April 9, 1948, when he was an observer from Haganah, the main Jewish militia, accompanying fighters from two more radical outfits, Irgun and the Stern Gang, in an attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin just west of Jerusalem.

His account of the day sounds remarkably like reports of the Bosnian Serb militia rampaging through the Moslem villages of north-eastern Bosnia in 1992. After the village militia ran out of ammunition and fled, "the people from Stern and Irgun went rushing from house to house shooting, slaughtering, killing and looting...."

"Arab men were taken to an old quarry between Givat Shaul and Deir Yassin. They lined them up with their back to the wall of the quarry and shot them all. I had a soldier with me who took pictures of it all." The next day he gave a full report and the pictures to the Haganah command, but they were never published.

Estimates of those killed range from 93 to 250, not much of a massacre by the 20th century's demanding standards. but Deir Yassin became the well-publicized symbol of what might await those Arabs who did not flee. It remains a potent and sensitive topic in Israel today, for if you admit that the Palestinians had good reason to flee, you open up a huge can of worms.

More than that, the ethnic cleansing that shaped the demography of modern Israel undermines the country's claim to moral superiority. "Look at it like this," suggests Pail. "You have a barrel of honey and a barrel of shit. If you take a teaspoon of honey and put it in the shit, it won't change it. But if you take a spoonful of shit and put it in the honey, the whole barrel is spoilt....We have suffered for this until now." Pail is a harsh judge, but he is right.

It's no crime for a state to be ethnically defined, though it is almost always wrong to grant one ethnic group special privileges over others. But ethnic cleansing is a great and terrible deed that maims both the victims and the perpetrators, and it will continue to haunt Israel until the Palestinian issue is finally addressed honestly.