Israel was born and depends on ethnic cleansing

His admission about Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza was a shard of truth from former Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon, albeit dissociated from what created Israel in the first place. In an interview with Israel’s Democrat TV, Ya’alon told the interviewer: “There’s no Beit Lahia. There’s no Bein Hanoun. They’re currently operating in Jabalia, and essentially, they’re clearing the area of Arabs.”

The 1948 Nakba was the first Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Israel thrives upon ethnic cleansing, so Ya’alon’s statement merely pointed out the truth of Israel’s settler-colonial practice of replacing the indigenous population with Jewish settlers. However, while the genocide in Gaza needs to remain in focus, there cannot be any distinction between the Israel that was created by the Zionist terrorist groups’ ethnic cleansing in 1948, and Israel’s current ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

It’s clear that Israel was born and depends on ethnic cleansing.

We have a former Israeli minister calling out ethnic cleansing in Gaza, while most of the international community is still fixated on Israel’s purported right to defend itself and refusing to use the word genocide. Indeed, there is a growing consensus on, at the very least, stalling the implementation of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. What exactly are world leaders trying to achieve?

It is perhaps more reassuring to forget that the 1947 Partition Plan, which the UN now hypocritically marks as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, as the first concrete complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their country. Or that Israeli leaders repeatedly called for the eviction, dispossession and murder of Palestinians. “We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return,” wrote David Ben Gurion in 1948. What is happening in Gaza now, if not a more militarised version of the 1948 Nakba? And it’s a normalised genocide.

In 1988, then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir warned Palestinians who were planning a protest in the occupied West Bank against the visit of US Secretary of State George P Shultz, ”Anybody who wants to damage this fortress and other fortresses we are establishing will have his head smashed against the boulders and walls.” He added, “’We say to them from the heights of this mountain and from the perspective of thousands of years of history that they are like grasshoppers compared to us.”

Israel has spoken overtly of its colonial violence.

The world, however, has only internalised and promoted Israel’s fabricated security narrative. And even when complicity is being taken too far, the international community feels more beholden to its original travesty and what Israel reaped from it, than it is about stopping genocide in Gaza.

When Israel decided upon ethnic cleansing, it made no excuse for its plans. And why would it, when the international community stepped in to defend Israel’s actions instead of quashing the settler-colonial project before it was allowed to take root by uprooting the indigenous population?

With regard to Ya’alon’s declaration, which was reported by major mainstream media outlets such as CNN, what will it take for the international community to actually register the fact that even within Israel, there are some prominent individuals, clearly not blameless in Israel’s Zionist history, who admit that there is and has been ethnic cleansing in Palestine?

To use an ill-worded phrase when it comes to human rights, Israel is being portrayed as having taken a step too far by its own former leaders, but the international community is still committed to seeing the colonisation process through to its completion.

Israel was born and depends on ethnic cleansing