Apartheid

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4.3. Ethnic Cleansing of Non-Existent People
To some Israelis, the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’ never referred to anything or
anyone, so with the establishment of the state of Israel, no one was disregarded or
dispossessed. The other people who claimed the land, the Palestinians, did not exist in the first
place. Golda Meir, a founder and the fourth Prime Minister of the State of Israel (1968-1974)
contended that:
It was not as though there was a Palestinian people and 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. 400
Jewish immigrants established themselves in Israel, taking Palestinian land, using it
for grazing, building on it, making it their own, so that by 1967 (when the rest of Palestine
became Israeli land) the Palestinians became entirely landless. Many Palestinians had been
forced to move to neighboring Arab countries (Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon) after Al Nakba –
the disaster (of Palestinian dispossession) in 1948 – whereby they became refugees. The
majority of Palestinians then became refugees after Israel invaded the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip in 1967.
Confiscation of land began with the establishment of Israel, during which more than
400 Palestinian villages were destroyed, depopulated and replaced by Israeli towns and
settlements. Before this, Zionists had legally bought land in British-held Palestine, and of
course this still happens today, in a legal manner, within the state of Israel. However,
Palestinians are not allowed to buy land in Israel, even if they are Israeli citizens. Since this is
racist discrimination, and racism is a crime against humanity, the legality of some Jewish land
purchases within Israel may therefore come under debate. Moreover, Zionists have repeatedly
tried to buy territory occupied by Israel, although this illegal under international law (the 4 th
Geneva Conventions, to which Israel is a signatory). This is especially taking place in east
Jerusalem, where long lines of middlemen are arranged so that it appears that not Israeli Jews,
but foreigners, are buying the land. 401
Crude land confiscation, land theft, is also still taking place today, after 58 years of
occupation, and thirteen years of the ‘Arab-Israeli peace process’, which was supposed to put
an end to further confiscation of Palestinian land. 402 During the Intifadas, even more
of the total population owned 75 per cent of the arable land in 2004, 14 years after liberation from white rule. See
Esipisu: Namibia Says Starts Expropriating White Farms, 2004.
400 Quoted in The Sunday Times, London, June 15, 1967. The perpetuation of this very consciously created myth
and/or obfuscation can still be seen today. In a highly unusual opinion article for this newspaper – Lewis, A.: At
Home Abroad: The Price of Occupation, The New York Times, June 2, 2001 – the author relates: “When I wrote
critically of the settlements in a recent column, I got letters and messages seeking to justify them in the most
fantastic terms. One dismissed Palestinians as a nonexistent nation - people who had ‘crept into the country from
Egypt, Jordan and Syria.’ . . . Other readers insisted that Jewish settlements in the occupied territories were built,
as one put it, ‘on unwanted, unclaimed property.’ Can such readers really be ignorant of the pain suffered by
Palestinians who have seen their olive groves bulldozed to make room for settlements?”
401 Palestine & The UN: 50 years of Historic Injustice, 1998: 2; Miftah: Palestinian Jerusalemites Targeted
Again, 2005. Similarly, Dutch settlers in the Cape Colony sometimes stole cattle and sometimes bought it in the
Cape Colony. Land was not for sale in pre-White South Africa, but of course it became a fought-for source of
wealth just as in Palestine. See N.N.: Oppression Of Khoikhoi and Xhosa, no date.
402 Kiley: Palestinians Driven Out by Israeli ‘Apartheid’, 2000; N.N.: Gulf Media Slam ‘Racist’ Israeli Buffer
Zone Plan, February 23, 2002. The plan, announced by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon on February 21,
envisaged a military buffer zone between Jews and Palestinians, up to 3 kilometers deep, with concrete barriers,
trenches, mine fields and electronic fences, to be set up on the Palestinian side of each of the numerous physical
ethnic divides. The Israeli excuse for the tightening of blockades and the proposed buffer zone is that they are
responses to suicide attacks on territory held by Jews. Even some Israelis, however, concede that several suicide
attacks took place during blockades. Thus, the Palestinian militants are always likely to find a way into Jewishheld
territory. See Ass’adi: Palestinians Say Israeli Checkpoints Stir Fury, 2002; Heritage: Analysis - Israel