Ethnic Cleansing Talks at the White House 

by David Bedein
Israel Resource News Agency, Beit Agron, Jersusalem
April 14th, 2004

This day on the date that marks 139 years to the date of 
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the American president 
who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, "Ethnic Cleansing" 
talks began at the White House between President George W. Bush 
and Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. 

At the White House on this day, Sharon proposed the unilateral 
expulsion and ethnic cleansing of 8,000 Jews from 21 prosperous 
and productive farming communities that were pioneered more than 
thirty years ago in the Katif district of the Gaza Strip on 
sand dunes where Arabs had laid no claim.

Until this time, only totalitarian regimes had suggested such 
forced policies of ethnic cleansing, which in this case would 
quash the most fundamental human rights of families in Katif 
who are simple, productive homeowners and farmers.

If Sharon proposed such a unilateral ethnic cleansing policy 
to exile residents of an Arab city or Arab farming community, 
there would be an outcry of every possible voice in the world 
of human rights advocacy.

Is this because we are dealing with the proposed ethnic cleansing 
of Jews, where other standards of human rights may apply?

Human rights advocates have forgotten about the ethnic cleansing 
of Jews when the old city of Jerusalem was under Arab control 
from 1949 until 1967, when UN guarantees were ignored and when 
all Jews were expelled, all synagogues were burnt to a crisp, 
and even the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives 
was defiled by the construction of a hotel and army camp on the 
grounds of that cemetery. 

Meanwhile, international human rights advocates demand that 
Israel should once again cede the old city of Jerusalem to Arab 
control, while the openly declared intention of a proposed 
Palestinian Arab entity to ethnically cleanse any Jews from a 
future Palestinian Arab state does not seem to bother those who 
claim to support of human rights in the world community.

On April 13th, 2004, Moshe and Rachel Saperstein, residents of 
Neve Dekalim in Katif, met reporters and asked how it is that 
a government can make an arbitrary unilateral decision to expel 
citizens from their homes. Moshe Saperstein, who lost his arm 
in the Yom Kippur War and two fingers in a PLO terror attack in 
Katif, said matter-of-factly that he had no intention of willingly 
leaving his home. Rachel Saperstein put it succinctly, that 
"if you think that this will stop here, you are mistaken. 
This would be a precedent. Jewish communities anywhere in Israel 
or anywhere in the world could then be uprooted…in Hebron, 
in Jerusalem, or in any other country. They can always say 
'You see, Arik Sharon expelled Jews from their homes. We can do 
that too'."

Israel was founded as a refuge for the Jewish people as "a land 
for a people for a people Without a land." Yet now, even a Jewish 
national leader has embarked on a program of the deportation of 
Jews to appease the barking dogs of world opinion.

The world desperately needs to understand this.