The Link
Israel to deport entire Arab population beyond its borders
Last update – 07:18 1/04/2007
By Aviram Zinu
(Jerusalem)-In a surprise move sure to shock the world, Israels defense cabinet has announced a radical new program for dealing with the continuing Arab violence that it has dealt with ever since 1948. The new plan is to consist of forcefully deporting Arabs from areas Israel considers its own.
This plan comes as retaliation for the past years of ethnic violence that has stood as contrast to improving relations with Arabs situated inside Israels own territory. Defense minister Amir Peretz has commented in his typical fumbling English that,“we cannot ignore the past years of attacks, raids and other incidents have all come from a single region of Arabs.”
As a quick recap, the past 6 years have seen over 1,085 Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs among them 116 children, killed by suicide bombings and rocket attacks. Israel has attempted different techniques to control the massive series of attacks. Up until 2003, this involved raids into the occupied territories, when it was clear this failed, Israel switched tactics. The years since then have been marked with building fences and targeted assassinations of high profile targets.
While these measures helped, none stopped the tide. In the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, the Defense Cabinet commissioned a report that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has called “ground-breaking” to suggest a radical course of action. This report was delivered to the government in the tail-end of 2006, and plans started to implement it.
Yesterday evening, the government invited prominent journalists to a special briefing laying out the plan. The governments plan is quite simple; every village or inhabited location which sends out a terrorist to commit a hostile act will be destroyed and the inhabitants deported to the nearest border.
The plan relies on cooperation from neighboring countries, which is expected to be problematic as Jordan, Egypt and Syria all have a long history with Palestinian refugees causing similar trouble inside their own nations. However, Israel plans to sidestep this problem by not giving the nations much of a choice.
Predictably, this plan has met with immediate protests from human rights groups world wide. B'Tselem director of Palestinian refugees Moshe Cohen has denounced the plan, calling it “a travesty to the ideals of a democratic, equal nation.” Other human rights groups have chimed in, and efforts to stop this plan have already been launched.
Flash polls have already been done by several Israeli polling groups and have found widespread support for the plan. Over 78% of the population polled expressed some level of support for the plan, with common comments being “It's about time someone offered a new plan that wasn't a derivative of previous efforts.” On the other hand, the Foreign Ministers office has been shut down owing to the amount of complaints coming in from International bodies.
More updates as required.
