Now I took that definition and I broke it down, to historical chapters, and then I went to the present. And it was very clear to me that most mainstream Zionist ideology and the practices beginning with the major ethnic cleansing in 1948 when Israel systematically expelled 3/4 of a million Palestinians. But then, going on after '67, I'll give you three very short examples.
Between 1967 and until today, in the area that is called Greater Jerusalem, that is Jerusalem and everything that surrounds it, Israel had expelled by various means more than one quarter of a million Palestinians. They did it by not allowing people to come back after they left the country. By claiming that people who don't pay their parking tickets, they cannot stay in the Greater Jerusalem area. Sometimes people are not ethnically cleansed to Jordan. They can be ethnically cleansed to Ramallah, which is a half a hour drive from the Greater Jerusalem area. But they want to Judaize this whole area. So that's one place where ethnically cleansing continues as we speak.
Just two months ago, the Israelis were unhappy with the presence of Palestinian Bedouins in the south of Israel. And they initiated something which was called the Proper Plan. A plan to ethnically cleanse 70,000 Palestinians in the south of Israel. These Palestinians were very well organized and Israel is now thinking of how to do it in a different means because it was very clear, for the first time, this group would resist, by force.
DB: Now, you are talking about the Bedouins.
IP: The Bedouins, in the south. The Jordan Valley, which is an area which Israel wants to be clean of Palestinians has a population of 10,000 of Palestinians who are about to be evicted by force because it's under the radar of the international community. In the old city of Akka, there are 20,000 Palestinians living in the old city which the Israelis don't like. They want the old city to be cleaned both of its Arab history and the Arabs who live in it.
It's a lovely, crusader city, north of Haifa. And so it's piecemeal ethnic cleansing. I call it creeping ethnic cleansing or incremental ethnic cleansing. What the Israelis learned is that you cannot do the massive ethnic cleansing you did in 1948, again. The world is too alert, too focused, and the Palestinians are in much larger numbers. So they do it incrementally, they do it stage by stage.
But I really think that the future, as far as, unfortunately, most Israeli policymakers see it, is to have as much of what used to be Palestine as possible, with as few Palestinians in it, as possible. Now you can ethnically cleanse people by enclaving them, by putting them like in Gaza, in a ghetto. You don't have to expel the people of Gaza. You can just starve them to death. Or you can physically take them out of the area that you want. I think the world becomes more and more aware of it, because of the alternative media, like your station but because of the work of activists and so on.
And it's part of the new dictionary. We talk about apartheid, we talked about ethnic cleansing. I think we are experimenting with a new language when we talk about Israel and Palestine. Not peace process, not even occupation. It's colonialism, it's ethnic cleansing, it is apartheid. These are three new terms, if you want. Three new entries in a new dictionary that I think will dominate the conversation about Israel and Palestine, and would expose what the Israelis were trying to hide for many years. And we'll call a spade a spade. You will not be able to hide behind liberal Zionist ideas of Israel as a Jewish democracy.
DB: By the way, what's your definition of Zionism?
IP: Zionism, for me, today definitely is a racist ideology that is targeting only Palestinians, in a sense that Zionism says that the idea of a Jewish state is the most supreme value compared to any other value, whether it's a human rights value or a civil rights value. Zionism is an ideology of power, today, that would justify very much like apartheid, discriminating against the Palestinians in every aspect of life. Zionism, historically, was a bit more complex. It was a noble idea, to begin with, of people who were trying to find a secure place...
DB: "for Jews to live"
IP: ...from Nineteenth Century Europe. And even then, yeah, I'm not crazy about nationalism but it's okay, everybody else was trying to. I think Zionism became a colonialist project the moment it targeted Palestine as the land where it wants to fulfill its ambition, to find a secure home for the Jews, and to redefine Judaism as nationalism. The moment they decided to do it in Palestine it became a colonialist project. And what we needed to do then, and what we need to do now is to see what happens to the people at the receiving end of Zionism. Not what it does to Jews but what it does to others.
I think the late Edward Said, was quite right when he said "Basically, Zionism for Jews was not a bad thing. But it was the worst thing that could have happened to Palestinians."
DB: Well, this could be a one word answer. Do you see any difference between the Republicans and the Democrats when it comes to Israel and Palestine? No!?
IP: No, no, really. No. I don't see ... I mean the only good news in America are the campuses that have really changed, civil society has really changed. American political elite is still stuck in a horrible kind of posture that only perpetuates the suffering of people rather than ending it.
DB: Alright, two things, I want to get to. One is, in the context of the South Africa parallel, there is now a boycott of Israeli corporations that do business [in the occupied Palestinian territories]. Do you see that as an effective movement? Is that an important movement in this move to resist this kind of, what you call, ethnic cleansing?
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
