Ethnic Cleansing
The Zionist goal of establishing an exclusivist Jewish state in Palestine required and could only be realised on the basis of the forced expulsion of the Palestinian indigenous population. Zionist planners and ideologues confronted from the earliest period the presence of Arab Palestinians – at the site of their colonial project but looked upon them as an inferior and ultimately expendable. The Zionist slogan “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land” exemplifies one of the most pernicious forms of European notions of superiority as it denied the very presence and rights of the Arab Palestinian people in their homeland. The idea of ‘transfer’ or ethnic cleansing became, in the Nakba, the most ‘effective’ instrument for transforming Jewish settlers from a minority lacking land to a dominant majority. Ethnic cleansing, defined by the UN as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group,” was thus central.