Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
12 June
ZIONISM'S FIRST DREAM OF ETHNIC CLEANSING
On this day in 1895, the founder of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote in his diary of how he proposed to ethnically cleanse the native people from a future Zionist Palestine. “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.” Since then, Zionist policy before they had a state, and Israeli policy since 1948, has been to drive Palestinians into poverty and to drive them out of Palestine.
حلم الصهيونية الأول هو التطهير العرقي
12 يونيو
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1895 ، كتب مؤسس الصهيونية السياسية الحديثة ثيودور هرتزل ، في مذكراته كيف اقترح تطهير السكان الأصليين عرقياً من فلسطين الصهيونية المستقبلية. "سوف نرسل السكان المعدمين عبر الحدود للحصول على عمل لهم في بلدان العبور ، وحرمانهم من أي عمل في بلدنا.
" منذ ذلك الحين ، كانت السياسة الصهيونية قبل الدولة ، والسياسة الإسرائيلية منذ عام 1948 ، هي حرمان الفلسطينيين من فرص العمل وافقارهم واخراجهم من وطنهم
Herzl advocated the transfer of Palestinian peasants across the border in order to realise the Zionist project of colonisation. Benny Morris, a revisionist historian who recently added his voice to those advocating the transfer of Palestinians across the border, quoted the following from Herzl's diary: 'we shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country ... The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly'.' Not to be outdone, Israel Zangwill, a politically active British Zionist, popularised in imperial circles at the turn of last century the slogan 'a land without a people for a people without a land'.
Statements made by Zionist and British officials favouring transfer.
These officials included, on the Israeli side, Chaim Weizman, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, Israel's first president, prime minister and foreign minister, respectively. On the British side were foreign secretary Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton, the chancellor of the exchequer in 1944...
Had not the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 and the prevention of their return taken place, there would have been no Jewish state now with an overwhelming Jewish majority...the debate over the transfer of Palestinians from their homeland continues unabated, and is increasingly normalised as part of legitimate political discourse in Israel.
Demography and transfer: Israel's road to nowhere, in Third World Quarterly, Vol 24, No 4, pp 619-630, 2003 . Elia Zureik
The creation of Israel on May 15, 1948 was a violent process that entailed the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to establish a Jewish-majority state, as per the aspirations of the Zionist movement. Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres...armed Zionist groups had launched the process of displacement of Palestinians much earlier. In fact, by May 15, half of the total number of Palestinian refugees had already been forcefully expelled from their country.
Zionist paramilitary groups launched a vicious process of ethnic cleansing in the form of large-scale attacks aimed at the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their towns and villages to build the Jewish state, which culminated in the Nakba.
While some Zionist thinkers claim there is no proof of a systematic master plan for the expulsion of Palestinians for the creation of the Jewish state, and that their dispossession was an unintended result of war, the presence of a Palestinian Arab majority in what Zionist leaders envisioned as a future state meant the Nakba was inevitable.
Factsheet: The Palestinian Right To Return, a Basic Right Still Denied, Al Awda, September 12, 2006
Palestinian refugees represent the longest suffering and largest refugee population in the world today. In 2005, there were approximately 7.2 million Palestinian refugees, equivalent to 74% of the entire Palestinian population which is estimated at 9.7 million worldwide. The breakdown of the refugee population is as follows: [Read more]