Many here on DKos repeatedly accuse the Israeli government of carrying out a program of ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs, an accusation that flies in the face of the facts of Israel's Arab population and the actions of the Israeli government in its occupied territories. Now, though, a senior government leader has in fact called for ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. It's not, however, an Israeli leader, but the Palestinian Ambassador to the United States.
As reported by USA Today this week:
The Palestine Liberation Organization's ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews.
"After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated," Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. He was responding to a question about the rights of minorities in a Palestine of the future.
Excuse me? Would Ambassador Areikat, or any reasonable observer, accept a similar statement from a senior Israeli official about Palestinians or Muslims living in Israel without justified protest? (Remember that Kach, the Israeli Jewish political party that espoused such expulsions, has been banned in Israel for decades.) This would be true ethnic cleansing of towns and cities where Jews have lived literally for millennia. If this is the state that the Palestinians are asking the United Nations to recognize, one where those following a particular religion are officially rejected, anyone who believes in human rights should unite in opposition to the U.N. proposal.
I'm not holding my breath. {ProfJonathan}