Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians in 1967
By Zachary Foster Israeli bulldozers destroying the ancient Moroccan Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem on June 10–12, 1967 source Introduction In June 1967, Israel invaded and occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. During and after the war, they depopulated the Golan, Latrun, Jordan Valley, Gaza’s refugee camps, and villages near Hebron and destroyed large swaths of the Golan, Qalqiya, Tulkarem and Jerusalem. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were loaded onto buses with varying degrees of coercion and shipped off to the border with Jordan, where they were forced to voluntarily leave Palestine forever. Altogether, Israel pushed out 300,000 Palestinians and 130,000 Syrians from their homes, leveling 131 Syrian villages and destroying 30 Palestinian villages, hamlets, herding communities, and refugee camps in whole or part (1, 2, 3). Israel wanted the land it conquered, just not the people living on it, the core principle of the Zionist movement, past and present. This is a brief history of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and Syrians in 1967. The Origins of the June 1967 War Israeli leaders lamented the failure to conquer all of Palestine in 1948. “I never forgave the Israeli government under Ben-Gurion for not letting us finish the job in ‘48-49,” once said deputy prime minister Yigal Alon. Or, as Moshe Dayan put it in 1949, the “frontier of Israel should be on the Jordan [River]… present boundaries [are] ridiculous.” The feeling among many was “we had not completed...
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