They Wouldn't Shoot...Would They?

Just occasionally, out of the spin and bias that clogs the pages of the Murdoch press' coverage of the Middle East conflict, will emerge, even if inadvertently, a smidgeon of context or a revealing insight into its root cause. Take the following, for example, from 'Breakout into Israel' ahead, by The Australian's hack* in Jerusalem, Abraham Rabinovich. (26/1/08)

"A senior Hamas official warned yesterday that the next breakout from the Gaza Strip could be into Israel, with 500,000 Palestinians attempting to march towards the towns and villages from which they or their parents fled or were expelled 60 years ago. 'This is not an imaginary scenario and many Palestinians would be prepared to sacrifice their lives', said Ahmed Youssef, political adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya. Israeli minister Ze'ev Boim said the threat must be taken seriously in light of the successful Hamas breakout into Egyptian territory on Wednesday, adding we must learn from what has just happened there'. "

Rabinovich's report contains one of those all too rare references in the ms media to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, which paved the way for the creation of a Jewish-majority state there. The ethnically cleansed of Palestine (some 85% of the indigenous population residing in the areas of Palestine overrun by Zionist forces in 1948) and their descendents make up the bulk of the Gaza Strip's population, and the 1949 UNGA Resolution 194 calling for the return of these refugees has been ignored by Israel to this day.

The "threat" of an eruption into Israel of Gazan refugees, spoken of by Ze'ev Boim, is not to the lives of Israelis as such, but to Israel's status as a state with a Jewish majority were the the Palestinian refugees, from Gaza and elsewhere, be allowed to return to their ancestral homes and lands in Israel proper. Appearing in Israeli public discourse as 'the demographic threat', the word takes us to the very heart of the Palestine-Israel conflict, the inconvenient truth of which is that the indigenous non-Jewish Palestinian Arab majority were driven from their homes and lands, so that the Zionist movement could establish a sovereign state with an overwhelming Jewish majority and lay claim to be a democracy. In other words, Israel, as a sovereign, Jewish state, was gerrymandered into existence by a monstrous act of ethnic cleansing. Lest we forget. Boim and his ilk haven't, but that's another story...

But why does Ahmed Youssef talk of these refugees being "prepared to sacrifice their lives?" Surely, if the Palestinian refugees simply broke through another wall in their Gaza ghetto and marched into Israel to exercise their fundamental human rights to return to and reclaim their property (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 13 & 17), the Israelis wouldn't just shoot them, would they? It wouldn't even cross their minds, would it? Well, yes it has:

"[Israeli Prime Minister, Levi] Eshkol had already had reason to be worried about the Gaza refugees roughly 2 years before the Six-Day War [of 1967]. The refugees were multiplying, and when their numbers reached 1/2 a million, he feared the situation would become explosive. Once, he asked the chief of staff what would happen if the Egyptians simply marched the refugees - women and children in the vanguard - toward the border with Israel. Rabin said they would not do that, and if they did, as soon as the IDF had killed the first 100, the rest would go back to Gaza." [1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, Tom Segev, p 524]

* Abraham Rabinovich: "Cairo, concerned over its own fundamentalists, has long taken exception to Tehran's support of militant Shia groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestine territories and militias in Iraq." (Iran and Egypt to restore relations, The Australian, 1/2/08) Hamas is Sunni, not "Shia."