Israel is 'ethnic cleansing' Gaza admits former Israeli army chief and defence minister
This is a statement of the obvious - but such a senior hawkish former IDF chief of staff confirming Israel is committing war crimes leaves apologists with nowhere to hide
He’s the former chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, and the former Israeli Defence Minister who served under Benjamin Netanyahu for 3 years. He’s an Israeli right-winger accused of war crimes who - back in 2009 - even turned down an invitation to visit Britain after being warned he might be arrested for those war crimes. 5 year slater, he was defence minister when Israel committed multiple recordd war crimes in its 2014 assault on Gaza.
But Moshe Ya’alon has, in a new speech, declared the truth.
Here’s a video of that speech, translated by the anonymous ever excellent anti-Zionist Israeli activist who goes by the Twitter handle ‘ireallyhateyou’.
He says here that the path Israel is being dragged along is "To conquer, annex, commit ethnic cleansing... and to establish Jewish settlements".
The interviewer is visibly gobsmacked and says “a couple of words that I never thought I would hear from you ever - ethnic cleansing, in the Gaza Strip?”
He says in reference to destroyed Palestinian cities of Gaza:
"There is no Beit Lahia, no Beit Hanoun, now they're operating in Jabalia, basically cleaning up the area of Arabs."
Back in April, he denounced Israel’s strategy and those facilitating it, saying:
"Half a year into a crisis with no end, when the only accomplishment of this government of messianists, draft-dodgers, and crooks is its own survival (thanks to you) - it’s time for soul-searching,”
Now it really is worth emphasising the politics of this man. Avner Gvaryahu, a former IDF soldier turned peace activist and executive director of the NGO Breaking the Silence, declares “this is of course accurate but very surprising come from him”.
He has today stood by his comments, with The Times of Israel reporting that he says he no longer believes the IDF is “the most moral army in the world”:
Doubling down on his comments from the previous evening, he says he believes his assessment to be “accurate,” and that there is “no other word for it” but ethnic cleansing, given that government lawmakers speak about how “the Strip will be cleansed of Arabs.”
Asked whether he wants to take back his use of the phrase, given that it is “extremely harsh,” Ya’alon reiterates that he spoke the way he did “on purpose, to sound the alarm.”
He further reportedly said that the IDF are being instructed to “carry out what are defined as war crimes”, notably to drive the population out to restore Jewish settlements.
On one level some of you might reasonably go - why do we need to point to these statements at all? The fact Israel is committing war crimes is simply an inarguable fact. It’s as obviously true as water being wet, the sky being blue, gravity existing, we could go on. Israeli leaders and officials repeatedly made clear they were going to commit war crimes from the very start in their public pronouncements. They have then committed those war crimes every single day, many of them livestreamed every single day.
We can see they have ethnically cleansed northern Gaza because they have ordered its inhabitants to leave by imposing a total siege there and then using violence to force those who survive to flee. On 6th November, the IDF publicly declared Palestinians will not be allowed to return to their homes in northern Gaza: in other words, ethnic cleansing.
It matters because there can be no hiding places for those who helped facilitate this crime, in word or deed or both. Even the former head of the Israeli army, the former defence minister of Netanyahu no less, publicly declares this is ethnic cleansing.
We said what would happen from the very start, and we were smeared and attacked for doing so.
Israel is now planning the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It is not remotely practical, even if it was ethical, for Gaza’s population to flee their homes en masse. This is collective punishment, a massacre, all with the direct approval of Western governments.
2 days later, I tweeted about the cheerleaders of Western bloodbaths:
They browbeat us every time with - We have to do something!
Critics were monstered as useful idiots for the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
Well how many would now look back at Afghanistan and Iraq and think, well thank god "we" did something!"
Now these sage moderates cheer on ethnic cleansing and overt war crimes, because Israel has to "do something".
Look back at what doing something means. You know what it means. You watched it happen. It means death on an unimaginable mass scale, and for what?
They have to be held to account. They are not moderates. They are extremists who have the blood of millions of people on their hands.
They're now cheering on something which - if it was Slobodan Milosevic doing it - they'd be calling genocide.
If we don't hold them to account for what will go down as one of the great crimes of the 21st century, then as Gaza is flattened, and thousands slaughtered, they will march, unfazed on to the next crime scene.
We were right about Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. There is no consolation to be had from those killing fields, because the only point of that horrendous vindication was to stop it happening again.
This time, don't let them get away with it, or this horror will endlessly repeat.
The point here isn’t to go - ‘I told you so!’ - to pat ourselves on the back and tell the world how smart we are, like we’ve won some public school debating society competition.
It’s because the scale of the crime being committed by the Israeli state is simply too big and will be recognised as a historical abomination that many of its apologists will try to claim that somehow they weren’t to know.
But we are living evidence that this excuse is a lie. We knew what would happen not because we are prophets or geniuses or have particularly unique insights, but because we listened to what Israeli leaders and officials said, and looked at and listened to the evidence with our eyes and ears and arrived at the only conclusions that evidence justified.
I want to end by quoting from an interview with the Israeli historian Adam Raz in the Israeli-Palestinian media outlet +972 Magazine, in which he rightly calls Israel’s onslaught a genocide.
He says:
When World War II ended in 1945, the [concentration] camps opened and the world was exposed to the most brutal form of extermination in history. I think something of this kind will happen when the gates of Gaza are opened. When that happens, the Israeli public will need to decide which road they’re going to take: responsibility or denial. I believe they will choose denial. And this is why I think Netanyahu won the war.
I think that is true, although Israel will undoubtedly do all it can do to suppress the physical evidence of its crime. We must not allow that. We must document every atrocity we can. But no crime in history of such a scale has been so confessed to and so evidenced as it actually happened. That is why there is no hiding place for those who facilitated one of the worst crimes of our age.