<Ethnic cleansing

Racist State, Brutal Occupation, and Large-Scale Ethnic Cleansing

The racist discrimination in pushing out Palestinians in favor of Jews is cruel, scandalous, and reminiscent of the behavior of the Nazis (a comparison made often in the Israeli press, but not in the U.S. mainstream media). It was Nazi practice in occupied territories to dispossess the locals from homes to provide "lebensraum" for the "ubermenschen," and Amnesty International (AI) notes in discussing Israel's policy on demolitions that "The Palestinians are targeted for no other reason than because they are Palestinians" in a system where "the family may only have 15 minutes to take out what belongings they have before the furniture is thrown into the street and their home bulldozed" (AI, Israel: Home Demolitions, Dec. 8, 1999).

Israeli author Israel Shamir, writing in the Russian Israeli publication RI in December 2000, says that Israelis "are taught they belong to the Chosen People, who are Uber Alles. They have been indoctrinated in belief that the Gentiles are not fully human, and therefore can be killed and expropriated at will." And the U.S. Jewish observer Eduardo Cohen says that "traveling through Israel I encountered a deep, widespread and racist contempt for Arabs," based on the belief that Arabs "didn't share the same faculties of thought and reason that 'civilized human beings' possess" (OR, Oct. 18, 2000).

Arf