How can Israel be said to kill Palestinian civilians? Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir herself affirmed in an interview:
"There were no such thing as Palestinians.... It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people, and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist." (Richard Cavendish remembers Israel's own Iron Lady)
Palestinians do certainly exist, as most people know, and remain an inconvenient stumbling block to those who seek to implement the Zionist dream. In the words of Yosef Weitz, former Director of the Lands and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund:
"...there is no room for two peoples in this country. If the Arabs leave it, that will satisfy us ... There is no other way but to remove them all; there must not be a single village left, or a single clan ..." (Yosef Weitz, Diary and Letters to My Sons, 1965
Palestinians, young and old, are indeed being killed as we saw daily on our screens, or as a Gazan said, "we were dying slowly. Now we are dying instantly because of the F-16s and all the Israeli and American technology."
The removal of Palestinians from both
Jewish and Arab areas, as defined by UN Partition Resolution 181 of
November 1947, was begun before the creation of Israel, by
Jewish
paramilitary groups,
some listed as terrorist by the UK government, such as the Irgun, the
Lehi, the Haganah and the Palmach.
Qisarya was the first
village to be expelled on 15 February 1948, Sa'sa that same night,
Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, Tiberias on April 19, 1948, Haifa on
April 21, 1948, Acre and Baysan, on May 6, 1948, Safad on May 10,
1948 and more. The terror continued after Israel declared its
independence on May 15, 1948, to include, amongst others, Dawaymeh on
October 28, 1948, where, according to Israeli archives quoted by
Ilan
Pappe:
" The Jewish troops who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death." (Review of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Mostafa Omar
By
the spring of 1949, only about 20% of the original Palestinian
population were left. The new state controlled about 77%
percent of the land, or 45% more than allocated in the partition
plan. Approximately 750,000 Palestinians had become refugees.
Israel's founding fathers had succeeded in securing a Jewish state
with a
Jewish
state with a Jewish majority.
Eight
years later, Israel attacked Egypt. This misguided adventure didn't
end as Israel planned, and it was forced to withdraw from the Sinai,
the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba. Expansionist
Ben-Gurion
concluded
then
there was "no point in expanding the borders of the state of
Israel" and that there would be no further "preventive wars" in his
time (What turned Ben-Gurion from
a hawk into a dove?)
However, the expansionist dream lived
on in his successors and the 1967 war was another of choice for
Israel, as Menachem Begin confirmed:
"In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him." (Address by Prime Minister Begin at the National Defense College, August 8, 1982
According
to
General
Mordechai Hod,
then
Commander of the Israeli Air Force, the Six-Day war had been
meticulously prepared: "Sixteen years of planning had gone into
those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the
plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it."
At
the end of the war, Israeli forces occupied the Sinai, the Gaza
Strip, the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem (Jordanian
territory) and the Syrian Golan Heights, territories which Israel
still controls, except for the Sinai given back to Egypt under a
peace agreement.
Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom are 1948
and 1967 refugees (some made refugees twice), now find themselves
herded into an ever-shrinking territory.
Israel's
self-declared
no-man's-land
takes up
half of Gaza's width (being roughly 6 km in its middle area), with
the result that 1.7 M people are crammed into
a
band
of about 3 km by 8 km
with
nowhere else to go but into the sea.
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