𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜 𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐞

 This short piece I wrote in 2019. Some people may find it useful to understand the background to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and killings and terror against the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank.

— Nasir Khan

What do we mean by the ethnic cleansing of Palestine? 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 the citizens of Israel had no choice but to accept that a foreign power had taken over their land. If they didn’t like it, then they could follow others who were forcibly driven out of historic Palestine and had become refugees in the 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 the Western rulers’ support of Israel and its expansionist policy, chiefly by the United States, Britain and their global allies.