-- Nasir Khan
What do we mean by the ethnic cleansing of Palestine? In my understanding, the notion of ethnic cleansing of Palestine covers all those major historic events and the policies that were used to take possession of the land of other people. What happened and how it happened at the hands of Zionists is part of the story historians call the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (e.g., Ilan Pappe, Richard Falk, etc.).
The Palestinians who opted to become citizens of Israel had no choice but to accept that a foreign power had taken over their land. If they didn’t like it, they could follow others who were forcibly driven out of historic Palestine and became refugees in neighbouring countries.
However, ethnic cleansing here does not imply that all Palestinians were physically eliminated. Some were killed. This is still going on in the occupied territories, as we saw in Gaza in the summer of 2014 and many times after. But this is part of the Israeli strategy to suppress any voice that stands for the restitution of the political rights of these people to their land by expropriating and confiscating more land that is still in the hands of Palestinians. This is an incremental Israeli expansion in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and keeping Gaza under siege. All this has been happening because of Western rulers' support of Israel and its expansionist policy, chiefly by the United States, Britain and their global allies.
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Photo: Palestinian exodus from their homeland in 1948
