"Transfer": ethnic cleansing.

"What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible in such great hours is not carried out--a whole world is lost."

These words, spoken by Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, conveyed to an audience at the UW last June by Zionist expert Norman Finkelstein, the son of holocaust survivors, undergirds a horror that seems at hand: the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

"The word for crisis in Chinese," says US foreign policy specialist Stephen Zunes, "is a compound character for danger and opportunity."

The crisis is the US's impending invasion of Iraq; the danger is obvious for Israel, but the opportunity for Israel is also as clear.

Many fear that a US-led invasion of Iraq would provide the cover for an Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza strip. For this case, there is an awful precedent: while the world's attention was focused on the mighty British navy sailing to the Falklands, Israel invaded Southern Lebanon, ultimately killing over 20,000 people.

With the rise of self-determination and the decolonization process that followed WWII, massive population transfers as political solutions fell out of favor. The term ethnic cleansing and its practice became subject of the world's ire.

Yet for some reason the once taboo subject of "transfering" Palestinians to neighboring countries is now at the center of Israeli politics again.

According to Ilan Pappe, an Israeli revisionist historian, "You can see this new assertion talked about in Israel: the discourse of transfer and expulsion which had been employed by the extreme Right, is now the bon ton of the center."

Benny Morris, another revisionist, commenting on the first round of ethnic cleansing in Palestine in 1948, completed his recent rightward drift when he wrote in the Guardian, "Perhaps [Ben-Gurion] would now regret his restraint [in 1948]. Perhaps, had he gone the whole hog, today's Middle East would be a healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state between Jordan and the Mediterranean and a Palestinian state in Transjordan [contemporary Jordan]."

As a reminder, Ben-Gurion's "restraint" in 1948 saw the massacres of civilians, caused the destruction of over 450 Palestinian villages and forced 700,000 Palestinians into exile. Morris was one of the first Israeli historians to document these atrocities.

Taking things one step further, the Israeli settler and military veteran organization Gamla has even drafted a paper on the "logistics of transfer" (www.gamla.org).

For thinkers like Finkelstein and Pappe, Zionism guarantees one of two outcomes: an apartheid state or ethnic cleansing. Given the Palestinian rejection of Oslo's "the way of South Africa, " the original goal of transfer is the only consistant conclusion in Zionist logic.

Support for such a conclusion has even washed ashore in Washington, DC.

House majority leader Dick Armey said on MSNBC that he is content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank, simply believing that "the Palestinians should leave."

"Forward" reported on October 18 that House Majority Whip Tom DeLay spoke at an event where, 'Thousands of Evangelical Christians waving Israeli flags cheered last week as Knesset member Benny Elon called for the "relocation" of Palestinians from the West Bank into Jordan.'

Also in attendance were Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

'Elon, whose Moledet Party advocates the "transfer" of Palestinians to Arab countries, said that a "resettlement" of the Palestinians is prescribed by the Bible,' the same article added.

In the summer issue of Middle East Reports, Don Wagner exposes the history of Evangelical Christian Zionism, predating mainstream European Jewish Zionism by several centuries. Today Evangelical Christians are some of the staunchest ideological and financial supporters of Israel, although for nefarious reasons and mutually exclusive ends.

Whether or not the Bush administration would allow the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to happen is another question.

Yet one has to take stock of the situation when Sharon tells Bush, "We never had such relations with any president of United States as we have with you... And we never had such a cooperation in everything as we have with the current administration" (NYT).

Apartheid: the 60/40 split

However, there is another group that seems to think that the facts on the ground in the occupied territories should lead one to a different conclusion.

Avi Primor, the vice president of Tel Aviv University, wrote in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, "Without anyone taking notice, a process is underway establishing a Palestinian state limited to the Palestinian cities, a state comprised of a number of separate, sovereign-less enclaves, with no resources for self-sustenance. The territories of the West Bank and Gaza remain in Israeli hands, and its Palestinian residents are being turned into `citizens' of that foreign country."

Israel's construction of a West Bank separation barrier seems like an expensive project for a country planning on expulsion. (A full report on the "separation barrier" is available at the B'tselem website, www.btselem.org.)

According to Geoffrey Aronson, Director, Research and Publications for the Foundation for Middle East Peace, "Israel is building this fence, not in order to leave these territories but in order to stay in these territories. Sharon wants to pacify the security concerns of Israelis while retaining control over security and continuing settlements in these territories."

Giving historical context to his argument, he says:

"Under the Oslo framework, Israel transferred some measure of control to the Palestinian Authority in Areas A and B encompassing 40 percent of the West Bank. This is the area that Israel really had no interest in, in terms of security or Israeli settlement. So these were relatively painless transfers. These were the areas where 97 to 98% of Palestinians live. By transferring these areas to the PA, Israel believed it could relieve itself of the burdens of everyday occupation, while retaining the advantages of effective strategic control over the entire West Bank through its total control of Area C, which is 60% of the West Bank, including control over the borders with Egypt and Jordan.

"In 1997 or 98, Sharon had a long talk with Sandy Berger, Clinton's NSC Director, in which he put forward his idea of a creation of a Palestinian state as a way of accommodating Palestinian needs, but more importantly, for him, as a way of establishing a territorial framework for permanent Israeli security control, including settlements. The map he proposed then and the map he has been thinking of for many decades is based on this 60% of the West Bank. But the antecedents for Sharon's map were not the Oslo agreements. They were the settlement maps that Sharon created in the 1970s."

The best argument against expulsion seems to be that the other Arab states--Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria--wouldn't stand for it; not because the Arab leaders have natural feelings of solidarity with the Palestinians, but because the millions of Palestinian refugees already in those countries are unwanted, politically liable guests.

For those concerned with the plight of the Palestinians, these are more than academic questions--they go to the root of our activism and advocacy.

We have to ask ourselves if we need to take transfer seriously, and what will we do if it begins.

We also have to begin to grapple with Israel's fortified control of the West Bank and Gaza in this post-Oslo period; and soon, we will have to wonder if calling for an end to the occupation makes sense any more.