Stunning research has been published which suggests that almost half of Israeli Jews support the expulsion of all Arab Israelis. The report, put together by the Pew Research Center said 48 percent of those polled said that Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.
It might be thought that these views were a response to the current attacks by Palestinians from both the Occupied Territories and Israel itself. At a time of growing inter-communal tension such a brutal if totally unacceptable knee-jerk reaction could be expected. But the researchers were actually quizzing Israelis between October 2014 and May last year.
Therefore, it seems reasonable to take these findings as a clear indication of the long-hidden Israeli support for the Zionist notion of an entirely Jewish state. Such noxious plans are linked to the other key Zionist ambition of an Eretz (Greater) Israel which would gobble up not just the West Bank but other swathes of Arab territory. The early Zionists saw no place for Arabs in such a monster state. At the time, they assured the British and French governments with whom they were conspiring that the Arabs who lived in Ottoman Palestine were insignificant and did not need to be taken into consideration. The disastrous British Palestine mandate paved the way for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land the very minute the British administrators packed up and left.
Some senior British officials saw the gross injustice and betrayal of the Palestinians. They predicted that the foundation of the state of Israel would see pogroms and ethnic cleansing of a massive scale. But London took no notice. And the Palestinian tragedy, which had been sown by the virtually unhindered illegal immigration of Jews from Russia and war-ravaged Europe, was set in train.
Massacres, such as that at Deir Yassin, were designed to terrify the defenseless Palestinian population into flight. The 1967 Six-Day war enabled the Zionists to seize East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Syria’s Golan Heights. Ever since then, successive Israeli governments, whether allegedly socialist and liberal or right-wing and avowedly Zionist, have pursued the same racist agenda which involved confining Palestinians to ghettos while illegal settlers stole their land.
Those Palestinians who managed to avoid eviction in 1948 have ever since led a perilous existence as Israelis. Treated as second-class citizens in their own country, they have been subject to constant discrimination. The animus against them has increased with Israel’s changing demographic. The Israeli Jewish birth rate (1.7 percent) is being outpaced by that of Palestinians (2.1 percent). There are approaching two million Arabs in Israel’s eight million population. Some Zionists have been claiming that at the present rate of growth, within 50 years Jews in Israel will be outnumbered by Palestinians.
Whatever the truth of this, it is a convenient argument for rabid Zionists. Not content with having grabbed the country from its Arab inhabitants - before the 1940s the few Jews who had long lived in Palestine were not persecuted by the Arab majority - the Zionists have gone on to seize land and homes in the Occupied Territories. The clear message is that there never has been any place for the Palestinians in the Zionists’ long-term Israeli state. On this basis, the desire that Benjamin Netanyahu constantly expresses, for a resumption of the peace talks, is absolute hokum. The only thing the Zionists ever wanted was all of Palestine, but without a single Palestinian living there.
