Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy continues his efforts to awaken the consciousness of the citizens of Israel with another column published in the publication on June 25. Levy has concentrated his journalistic efforts on placing a spotlight on the escalated efforts to ethnically cleanse the occupied territories of the West Bank. His voice is one of a few prominent Israelis who are challenging the acceptance by the majority of the genocidal policy being imposed by advocates of Greater Israel running the Zionist state.
He begins his column on June 25, “Ethnic Cleansing 3.0: How Israel Became the Transfer State,” by citing as an example a statement from the head of Israel’s National Security Council, who convened an emergency meeting for “encouraging the voluntary emigration” of Gazans.
“Israel has become a transfer state,” he writes, “ one for whom ethnic cleansing is a central policy plank. This ethnic cleansing has a variety of different names and faces; it is sometimes overt and sometimes covert and repressed, but it is growing into a historical phenomenon in full swing, far from everyone’s sight. After the creation of apartheid, which was never the goal of Zionism or of the state, the transfer has arrived, the one goal for which apartheid was created in the first place.”
Addressing the question beginning to surface in writing, petitions, and public comments of a growing number of Israelis, “How did this happen?", he explains that there exists in Israel a worldview “that asserts that in this land there is room for only one people, us or them. This view is apparently held by the majority of Israelis, even those who shift uncomfortably in their armchairs when witnessing what is happening, which at best is almost never reported in the Israeli media.”
This subject is being raised by former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg and historian Omer Bartov, among others, who are attempting to force a public discussion of whether this policy stems from Zionist ideology. It is addressed in a statement leaked to the Guardian newspaper, signed by former Israeli prime ministers, four former ministers, 30 former security commanders, former heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet, a former attorney general, former judges, the former head of Tel Aviv University, rabbis, former ambassadors, and experts on international terrorism, in which they threaten legal action to stop “Jewish terror” and an “ideology of ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank.
Asked to comment about this in her weekly webcast, the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche said that she is not surprised by this, given that this policy is turning Israel’s neighbors “into mortal enemies… I mean, that is not a lasting perspective.” She reiterated her view that a commitment to the joint infrastructure project of an extended Oasis Plan is needed to reverse the thinking, by defining a goal which offers benefits to all parties, as a basis for lasting peace.
Attempting to awaken the consciousness of the Israeli citizenry, Levy ends his column provocatively: “Know that while you were asleep, a people is being dispossessed of its land, step by step.”
