The making of Israel's apartheid

[subsuelo]

Phil Gasper recounts the history of how Israel was founded on the basis of the expulsion of the Arab population of Palestine.

In 1938, Ben-Gurion had declared:

The boundaries of Zionist aspiration include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, today's Jordan, all of Cis-Jordan and the Sinai...After we become a strong force as the result of the creation of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine. The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism, and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion. The state will have to preserve order--not by preaching, but with machine guns.

The Zionist project could only be completed if the local Arab population was expelled. As Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department, had put it in 1940, "there is no room for both peoples together in this country...And there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries. To transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left."

In 1948, this policy was put into effect. Zionist forces seized three-quarters of the land and expelled some 750,000 Palestinians.

Military groups whose leaders included the future Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, carried out massacres at villages like Deir Yasin--where over 100 men, women and children were murdered--designed to terrorize the rest of the Palestinian population to flee for their lives.

The official Israel Defense Forces carried out other massacres. One soldier gave the following eyewitness account of what happened at the village of Dueima:

They killed between 80 to 100 Arab men, women and children. To kill the children they fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one home without corpses...Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered "good guys"...became base murderers, and this not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination.

There were nearly 500 Palestinian villages in the territory that came under Israeli occupation after partition. During 1948 and 1949, nearly 400 of these were razed to the ground. More were destroyed in the 1950s.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/01/06/making-of-israeli-apartheid">SocialistWorker.org - read more

[Duckhunter935]

1. UN 1947 Partition

1947, the United Nations approved the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. On May 14, 1948 the state of Israel declared independence and this was followed by a war with the surrounding Arab states, which refused to accept the plan. The Israelis were subsequently victorious in a series of wars confirming their independence and expanding the borders of the Jewish state beyond those in the UN Partition Plan.