Melondrop’s Reviews > The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine > Status Update

In Palestine, however, it is the immigrant community that decides the future of the indigenous people, not the other way around. (this is a weird quote, seeming to suggest that american 'citizens' are more legitimate than israeli 'citizens', which honestly undermines the entire argument....)

Not only in Israel, but also in the US and Europe, people genuinely concerned about the Palestine question needed to be reminded that this conflict was not just about the future of the Occupied Territories, but that at its heart are the refugees Israel had cleansed from Palestine in 1948. This was an even more formidable task after Oslo, because then it had seemed that the issue had simply been pushed aside...

In other words, as these areas (West Bank and Gaza) constitute only 22% of Palestine, Israel at one stroke reduced any peace solution to only a small part of the original Palestinian homeland. Not only that, it demanded - and continues to demand today - further territorial compromises...

The first of Israel's three guidelines - or rather, axioms - was that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had its origin in 1967: to solve it, all one needed was a agreement that would determine the future status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The true mission of the JNF, in other words, has been to conceal these visible remnants of Palestine not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also by the narratives it has created to deny their existence.

There are also many fig and almond trees. Most Israelis think these are 'wild' figs or 'wild' almonds, as they see them in full bloom...heralding the beauty of spring. but these fruit trees were planted and nurtured by human hands. wherever almond and fig trees, olive groves or clusters of cactuses are found, there once stood a Palestinian village still blossoming each year, these trees are all that remain.

In the new development town of Migdal Ha-Emek, the JNF did its utmost to try and cover the ruins of the Palestinian village Mujaydil, at the town's eastern entrance, with rows of pine trees, not a proper forest in this case but just a small wood. Such 'green lungs' can be found in many of Israel's development towns that cover destroyed Palestinian villages. (Qiryat Shemona over Khalsa, Ashkelon over Majdal, etc...)

When it set out to create nat'l parks on the sites of eradicated Palestinian villages, the decision as to what to plant was totally in the hands of the JNF. Almost from the start the JNF opted mainly for conifers instead of the natural flora indigenous to Palestine. In part this was an attempt to make the country look European, although this appears nowhere in any official document as a goal. (also for wood industry)

...A member of the committee was the first governor of the national bank, David Horowitz, who estimated the combined value of property 'left by the Arabs' at 100 million pounds.

But return or resettlement was not the only issue. There was also the question of the money expropriated from the 1,300,000 Palestinians, the ex-citizens of Mandatory Palestine, whose finances had been invested in banks and institutions that were all seized by the israeli authorities after may 1948. neither did israel's proposed policy of resettlement address the issue of Palestinian property now in israeli hands.