Israeli soldiers stand over captured Egyptians and Palestinians at the start
of the war on June 5, 1967. (photo: Getty)
Declassified Israeli Transcripts Discuss Ethnic Cleansing
By teleSUR
17 November 17
Recently declassified cabinet meeting transcripts show that top Israeli
officials discussed ethnic cleansing tactics to deal with Six-Day War
fallout.
Declassified cabinet meeting minutes show that top Israeli cabinet officials
contemplated an ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip and Galilee, rewriting
history textbooks in favor of a pro-Zionist version of history, and
censoring political speech in newspapers to deal with the fallout of the
Six-Day War in 1967.
The material posted to the Israeli archives website shows hundreds of pages
of previously classified cabinet meeting minutes, including those between
August and December of 1967, which followed closely after the Six-Day War in
June. From this archive, Israeli officials demonstrated a lack of direction
following the war in which the Israeli military conquered and illegally
occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights,
and the Sinai Peninsula.
Officials initially contemplated the difficulties of administering the
illegally occupied lands.
"At some point we will have to decide. There are 600,000 Arabs in these
territories now. What will be the status of these 600,000 Arabs?" Prime
Minister Levi Eshkol asked.
"I suggest that we don't come to a vote or a decision today; there's time to
deal with this joy, or better put, there's time to deal with this trouble,"
he said. "But for the record I'm prepared to say this: There's no reason for
the government to determine its position on the future of the West Bank
right now. We've been through three wars in 20 years; we can go another 20
years without a decision."
Later documents show that Eshkol felt the pressure of ethnic diversity in
the occupied lands which were under the illegal administration of the
ethnocentric occupying forces.
"The strip of this country is like a miserable, threatening neck for us,
literally stretched out for slaughter," he said. "I cannot imagine it - how
we will organize life in this country when we have 1.4 million Arabs and we
are 2.4 million, with 400,000 Arabs already in the country?"
Eshkol and his cabinet later floated a covert ethnic cleansing policy by
"working on the establishment of a unit or office that will engage in
encouraging Arab emigration." The prime minister added, "We should deal with
this issue quietly, calmly and covertly, and we should work on finding a way
from them to emigrate to other countries and not just over the Jordan
[River]."
Eventually the cabinet discussed more extreme plans.
"Perhaps if we don't give them enough water they won't have a choice,
because the orchards will yellow and wither," Eshkol said in one meeting.
The prime minister also discussed the idea of initiating a war of aggression
against Palestinians to force them to leave their ancestral lands.
"Perhaps we can expect another war and then this problem will be solved. But
that's a type of 'luxury,' an unexpected solution."
Realizing the optics of the illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing,
Education Minister Zalman Aranne remarked:
"I do not for one minute accept the idea that the world outside will look at
the fact that we're taking everything for ourselves and will say, 'Bon
Appetit,'" he said. "After all in another year or half a year the world will
wake up; there's a world out there and it will ask questions."
After 50 years, Israel has instituted a "apartheid regime" in Palestine,
according to a landmark United Nations report that has since been retracted
following political backlash.
Rima Khalaf, the former UN Under-Secretary General and ESCWA Executive
Secretary, affirmed the report's findings by saying that the report "clearly
and frankly concludes that Israel is a racist state that has established an
apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people".
e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
