Roadmap to Genocide (Palestine) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Having lived for three years under Israeli military occupation in Palestine (1981-1984), I have been convinced that the daily violence and especially the contempt with which Israelis treat Palestinians meant that Israel intended ultimately to drive out and/or exterminate the indigenous people. This conviction has grown stronger over the years until now, as I watch the terrible fate of thousands of refugees in Gaza and the West Bank--people who have been driven in successive waves of massacre and land confiscation into ever smaller areas of the original land of Palestine--I am convinced that the state of Israel was designed from the beginning to exclude the original Arab inhabitants. Furthermore, it seems to me that discussions of the problem are useless if they begin with the assumption that we are dealing with two groups who are just having trouble accommodating themselves to sharing the same small piece of land, instead of seeing the conflict as a phase of massacre and ethnic cleansing in an ongoing process of genocide. If we look carefully at the genocide of the Native Americans, we see a parallel history: whole tribes driven farther and farther away from their original habitat, deprived of their use of the land, corralled into ever smaller and more remote "Reservations," starved, hunted down, and finally exterminated. On the ticking clock of the cycle of total annihilation, the Palestinian people are approaching their Wounded Knee. Unless we realize that Israel is engaged in genocide, all talk of a "peace process" merely screens the reality, and enables the genocide to continue. To give a contemporary example, either Condoleezza Rice is being disingenuous, or she is ignorant of the real Israeli agenda when she questions Israeli denial of entry to Palestinian-Americans (Merriman 2006). If Rice really understood the Israeli agenda, she would not need to ask. Worried that the Palestinian Arabs will soon outnumber Israeli Jews, Israel is using all methods to decrease the number of Arabs in the country, even refusing entry to Palestinians who returned to the country after the Oslo agreement to help build a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel.