Benjamin Netanyahu is taking a beating for saying that evacuating Israeli settlers from the West Bank was the equivalent of advocating for the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the Israeli prime minister’s recent video charge “unacceptable and outrageous” while the US State Department said Netanyahu’s words were “inappropriate and unhelpful”. In the clip, Netanyahu asked whether people in other parts of the world would accept demands for the removal of a specific ethnic group in their own countries, saying Palestinians were demanding that no Jews be allowed to reside in their territory.
It’s “outrageous that the world doesn’t find it outrageous,” Netanyahu said, urging viewers to ask themselves whether they would accept “a territory without Jews, without Hispanics, without blacks” in their nation. “Since when is bigotry a foundation for peace?” he asked.
The problem with Netanyahu’s premise is that the Obama administration, as well as all previous American administrations and the entire international community, state that the continued building of settlements is an obstacle to peace.
The term “ethnic cleansing” refers to the deliberate removal of an ethnic minority population from a particular territory, whether by expulsion or mass murder. The only mass ethnic cleansing that took place in the Middle East was in 1948 when some 700,000 Palestinians, the majority, were forced to leave their homes, their belongings, their villages and the land that had been theirs for centuries. They were never allowed to return. More than 400 villages and towns were wiped off the face of the earth, their ruins taken over by Jewish communities. Being barred from returning was worse than the expulsion. It is what proved that the cleansing was intentional. That is ethnic cleansing — there’s no other term for it.
The idea of settlers remaining in a Palestinian state once it is created is a recipe for disaster. Given Israel’s inability to control its own settler militants, and considering that most settlers reject the very idea of Palestinian statehood, leaving settlers under Palestinian rule would likely be a source of constant friction or worse. The settlers settled in the West Bank to ensure Israeli sovereignty, not to live under Palestinian rule. A sovereign Palestine should be able to control its own immigration and citizenship rules.
According to Israeli government data, Netanyahu pushed a wave of construction during the Obama presidency that matched, and even exceeded, the amount of building that took place under his predecessors during the Bush years. More than half a million Israelis have now settled in Palestinian territories. So the number of settlers now exceeds the number of expellees. They invaded a land that was not theirs, with the support of successive Israeli governments and despite the opposition of the entire world. They and the Israeli governments violated international law. Then along comes Netanyahu with the extraordinary assessment that settlers are actually victims. Not the ones they expelled, not the ones they disinherited of their land. He is comparing the invaders of the occupied territories with the people of the land who clung onto their lands and homes until they no longer could. But in Netanyahu’s reality, the settlements that were built for the purpose of precluding a Palestinian state are not an obstacle.
Many governments around the world view settlements in the West Bank as a violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids the transfer of an occupiers’ population into occupied territory. But all agree that the settlements were established under the auspices of the occupying power and against the wishes of the local inhabitants. It’s one thing to now claim sovereignty over settlement blocs because facts on the ground have created a new status quo, but to then describe Palestinian demands to remove all settlers as “ethnic cleansing” is as pretentious as the person who said it.
