From The Palestine Chronicle.
By Iqbal Jassat/April 11, 2009
The minutes of a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 12 June 1938 records a chilling statement made by David Ben-Gurion:
“I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it”.
Ben-Gurion, an ardent Zionist was a migrant from Poland where he was born in 1886. Since his arrival in Palestine as a 20-year old, Ben-Gurion was destined to be heralded as not only the founder of the State of Israel and its first prime minister, but also as the mastermind of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
In his Diary, an entry on 12 July 1937, Ben-Gurion records writing to his son that the only course of action open to Zionism was: “The Arabs will have to go”. What was needed was an opportune moment for making it happen, as Israeli historian and senior academic Ilan Pappe observes in his awesome study The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Pappe describes Ben-Gurion as short of stature, with a large shock of white hair swept backwards and invariably dressed in khaki uniform.
In order to make sense of the current politics of Israel, which under the right-wing leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu remains adamant in denying Palestinian rights, its significant to grasp the malicious intent on the part of his predecessors. Zionist leaders such as Ben-Gurion developed and implemented concrete actions to empty Palestine of its natives. Its equally useful to recollect that in the period between 1919 to 1933 after 35,000 more Zionists immigrated to Palestine, Jewish hold of the land constituted less than 3% while their population stood at 12%.
It means that at the time the League of Nations approved Britain’s Mandate for Palestine in 1922, population figures reflected on a British census of Palestine reveals: 78% Muslim, 11% Jewish, 9.6% Christian, total population 757,182.
Historical facts, which chronicle the injustice committed against indigenous Palestinians by Jewish migrants, have unfortunately been relegated to mere footnotes.
Yet these footnotes reveal much despite efforts by Israel and its supporters to banish them from memory.
A further chilling message is the one attributed to Zionist leader Jabotinsky who wrote in 1939 that “…… the Arabs must make room for the Jews in Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs”.
Read the complete article here ...
No comments:
Post a Comment