Let’s get this out of the way straight away. Jews, or Israelis, have never said that Palestine had no inhabitants before the Jews began to arrive in the late 19th century.
What has been said, about the inhabitants of Palestine, is that they didn’t constitute a people. The inhabitants were not only extremely ethnically diverse - they didn’t even form a nation state at all. There was no centralised system. No taxes. No civil service. No national education. And no military which stood in for the entire area of Palestine. The Palestinians did not have a state of any description. Not in ancient times. Not in the 19th century. Not in 1947. And not today.
Palestinians’ could never really have been ethnically cleansed because there hasn’t ever been a single ethnic or culturally-united people to constitute the Palestinians - certainly not a nation made up exclusively of Arab Muslims.
At the time when the Palestinians were supposedly ethnically-cleansed, by the new state of Israel in 1947/8, ‘the Palestinians’ included Greeks, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Germans, Afghans, Bosnians, Sudanese, Algerians, Tartars, Cops, Maronites, Bohemians, Bulgarians, Georgians and others.
Just to get this point across.
In the 19th century, for example, Palestine contained entire villages of Druze, Bosnians and Egyptians all taken separately. As for the language being spoken in Palestine. There were Czech, Finnish, Hindustani, Hebrew, Dutch, Kurdish, Russia, Serbians, Syrian and Turkish speakers. The British government substantiated this fact, in 1920, when it wrote:
‘The people west of the Jordan are not Arabs, but only Arabic-speaking. The bulk of the population are fellahin... In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race.’
Ethnic Cleansing?
Since the West Bank has settlements which only constitute around 2% of the entire area, it is hard to make sense of the soundbite ‘ethnic cleansing’. (Gaza is now Judenrein.)
Similarly, if the Israelis have been ethnically cleansing Arab Palestinians since 1947/8, then they haven’t done a good job of it. In Gaza, for example, there has been a massive increase in the number of Palestinians in that area.
If we take the period 1950 to 2007, the population rose from 240,000 (in 1950) to almost 1.5 million (in 2007). More generally, and if we go back to 1948, we can say that the Palestinian Arab population has increased from just over a million to over six million today. That constitutes a doubling in size with each new generation.
More interestingly, that huge increase in population in the disputed territories was largely thanks to the Israelis. When Israel took over the administration of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, as a result of a defensive war against the surrounding Arab states, the average lifespan of a Palestinian was 48 years. The infant morality rate approached 100 per 1,000 live births. But because of the Israeli administration, which provided clean drinking water and an increase in literacy for Palestinians, by 2008 Palestinians were living an average of 72 years - that is 24 years older than the rate in 1967. Similarly, infant mortality had dropped to 23 per 1,000, compared to the previous 100 per 1,000 in 1967. If this is a case of ethnic cleansing, then it was ethnic cleansing as carried out in a Lewis Carroll world.
Eyewitness Account: Jenin 2002
There are plenty of so-called ‘eyewitness accounts’ of Israeli ‘ethnic cleansing’. The problem is that some of them have been concocted out of thin air. Most of the rest are blatant and cynical exaggerations.
Take the 2002 case in the West Bank town of Jenin. In this instance, there were ‘eyewitness accounts’ of Israeli bulldozers shovelling hundreds of Palestinians into mass graves. In addition, there were also stories, or 'eyewitness accounts', of Israelis soldiers killing Palestinian children in front of their parents and then throwing their corpses into sewage tips and wells.
What really happened in 2002?
Jenin was really a battle, in a war of defence, between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian terrorists. These Israeli soldiers went from house to house searching for combatants or terrorists. They found them. 56 of them, mostly armed, were indeed killed by Israelis soldiers, as was the case for the Israeli soldiers - 23 of them were killed.
If we stick to the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’, it is absurd to suggest, or state, that this was an example of such a thing. Why is that? Well, for a start, the Israelis themselves lost more than half the number of the Palestinians who were killed. In other words, ethnic cleansing in which for every two Palestinians killed, there was once dead - or more - Israeli.
So it is strange to read the words of our own Chris Patten, the European Union’s ‘external relations commissioner’ at the time. He said that
‘Israelis can’t trample over the rule of law, over the Geneva conventions, over what are generally regarded as acceptable norms of behaviour.’
A similar kind of thing happened again in 2009. The Guardian newspaper published a ‘special investigation’ into Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in January 2009. Clancy Chassay, the Guardian journalist responsible, claimed that Israelis committed ‘war crimes’ by targeting civilians, ambulances, hospitals and such like.
But this wasn’t original research by Clancy Chassy. The ‘facts’ were really allegations which weren’t backed-up with any independent evidence. The ‘evidence’ that was offered came exclusively from people in Gaza. What’s the problem with that? Well, most, if not all, of them were Hamas supporters. Either that or they were nothing more than the lying puppets of Hamas who had to lie about these things in order not to be tortured - or even killed - by Hamas itself.
Many Palestinians did indeed die during Operation Cast Lead. The problem is that many, or perhaps just some, of those Palestinians who died were amongst those who were kept in houses, by Hamas, which Israelis had ordered to be vacated. Some of these Palestinians were even forced to go on various rooftops by Hamas and other Islamic groups.
So why was there this blatant disregard for the lives of their fellow Palestinians? Well, for a start, every Palestinian who was killed (due to being a human shield) would have been classed as an ‘Islamic martyr’ or a ‘Palestinian martyr’ - even if they were non-military Palestinians. Thus, in a sense, for these men, women and children, death had certainly ‘lost its sting’. Hamas made sure of that.
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