It’s difficult not to be emotionally overwhelmed when you visit a Nazi extermination camp. I’ve visited two: Auschwitz and Majdanek, both in Poland. Along with many other camps, these played a major role in the systematic murder by Nazi Germany of some six million European Jews between 1941 and 1945, an attempted “ethnic cleansing” known as the Holocaust.
Auschwitz, to the west of the delightful Polish city of Krakow, was constructed in 1941 and from the following year until late 1944, freight trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to its gas chambers. Of the 1.3 million sent to Auschwitz during that period, 1.1 million were murdered, mostly Jews. Records show that 865,000 were gassed on arrival, the remaining were murdered by starvation, exhaustion, disease or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments.
While more than 2 million people visit Auschwitz each year to view and reflect on the horrors displayed in the various buildings, many fewer visit Majdanek, possibly due to its position, close to the ancient city of Lublin in north-east Poland.
When you enter, you feel as if the Nazis have just left. The environment is quiet and less touristy, but the horrors are just as great.
The preserved gas ovens still have their doors open ready for use, and in the grounds there’s a recently erected mausoleum containing a huge mound of ashes and other remains of the 360,000 victims, mostly Jews.
The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s “final solution” of the Jewish question, but Jews have been persecuted throughout history. Finding a safe homeland was an idea rooted in Jewish history, but modern legal attempts began only in 1839.
It wasn’t until 1881 that the first wave of Jewish migration to Ottoman-ruled Palestine began, following pogroms in Eastern Europe. Political Zionism began shortly after in 1897, seeking to establish a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, finally giving Jews a home secured by law.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 set aside the region of Palestine for “international administration” under British control, and with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the UK became the first world power to endorse the establishment in Palestine of a “national home for the Jewish people”.
This was also the start of the current problems. Fast forward to today and although it’s hard to accuse Israel of carrying out the same ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that Jews themselves experienced, many neutral observers around the world are beginning to believe that Israel is doing exactly that.
Fingers are pointing to a document dated 13 October 2023 drafted by an Israeli government ministry proposing to transfer Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
Although an embarrassed Benjamin Netanyahu’s government played down the leaked report compiled by the Intelligence Ministry as a “hypothetical exercise”, it deepened long standing Egyptian fears that Israel wants to make Gaza into Egypt’s problem by ethnically cleansing the Strip of Palestinians.
The paper also revived for Palestinians memories of their greatest trauma—the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people who fled or were forced from their homes during the fighting surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.
In his much praised book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, Ilan Pappe, acclaimed by many as Israel’s bravest, most principled and incisive historian, describes in detail how the Hagana, the main Zionist underground militia in Palestine, aided and abetted by two Zionist terrorist groups, Stern and Irgun, gradually forced out Palestinians from their settlements inhabited for centuries.
The Zionist aim was to have an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine. Once the British cabinet had decided to end its mandate over the territory, clashes with Palestinian militias provided the perfect pretext for implementing the Hagana’s ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine.
When the decision was taken in March 1948, it took just six months to uproot more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people and destroy 531 villages, a catastrophe, or Nakba, which still haunts Palestinian refugees and exiles to this day.
The Israeli official version of events, echoed by Israeli historians, is that the flight of Palestinians was “voluntary”, and the Hagana had simply waged a “moral war” against a primitive and hostile Arab world. But Pappe provides copious evidence from Israeli sources, such as the diaries of future prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin, who was also leader of the Jewish terrorist group Irgun, that this is a myth.
Documents from military archives used by Zionist historians, he argues, ignore such atrocities as the poisoning of the water supply with typhoid in many areas, numerous cases of rape and dozens of massacres perpetrated by Jewish forces on the Palestinians.
For anyone who wishes to comprehend the enormity of the 1948 catastrophe, Pappe points to Walid Khalidi’s seminal book, All That Remains. This, he argues, completely destroys the denialists’ version of events.
Many western journalists witnessed the atrocities carried out by the Hagana, says Pappe, but none dared to openly criticise the actions of the Jewish nation just three years after the Holocaust and the cooling down of those ovens in Majdanek.
It’s probably for the same reason, seventy five years later, that many non-Arab states around the world still support Israel in today’s war against Hamas; although images coming out of Gaza of the catastrophic operations carried out by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) troops are beginning to change opinions.
The horrific murder and rape of so many innocent Israelis by Hamas on 7 October created huge support for Netanyahu’s decision to crush the terrorist group. But the IDF’s demolition of almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure and its killing of so many innocent Palestinians, reported to be about 19,000 at the time of writing, has rapidly diminished the support.
Over 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced, some repeatedly and half of the Strip’s population is starving, according to senior UN aid official, Carl Skau, as only a fraction of supplies needed to feed Gaza’s population has been allowed to enter the Strip. Nine out of ten people cannot eat every day.
“I am one hundred percent sure that Netanyahu’s main goal from the beginning was the ethnic cleansing of Gaza”, said Mustafa Barghouti, secretary general of the Palestine National Initiative in an interview with Jeremy Bowen of the BBC last week. “The goal is to push the Palestinian people from Gaza into Egypt—a terrible war crime”, he continued.
“I think their next goal will be to try to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. The simple fact is that Netanyahu realises from Israel’s past occupation of Gaza that the Strip with people in it is unmanageable, so he wants military control of Gaza without people”.
This is certainly what Simcha Rotman wants, but for a different reason. Rotman is a prominent Israeli MP for the far-right Religious Zionist party, on which Netanyahu’s government depends to stay in power.
For Rotman and other Jewish nationalists, Gaza is unquestionably part of Israel. When asked by Bowen what an Israeli occupation of Gaza would mean he retorted: “occupation is not the word. You cannot occupy your own land. Israel is not an occupier in Gaza because that’s the land of Israel”.
Jewish nationalists are delighted that Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas, as they see this as the biggest opportunity to remove the Palestinians and occupy the whole of the land of Israel they have had since 1967, when Israel defeated all its Arab neighbours in the “sixday” war.
So, is Israel really ethnically cleansing Gaza of Palestinians?
A UN expert thinks so. “Israel has already carried out mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war”, said Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.
“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba on a larger scale” she said. “In the name of selfdefence, Israel is seeking to justify what would amount to ethnic cleansing”.
Netanyahu and the IDF, however, continue to display deaf ears to any criticism of their reaction to the atrocities of 7 October as they order the relentless bombing of Gaza, not only turning it into an uninhabitable wasteland but also killing so many innocent Palestinian women and children.
Claims by the Israeli military to have used warnings to try to reduce civilian casualties have become little more than a cruel joke.
At the current rate, finishing the job of destroying Hamas could result in more than 100,000 dead Palestinians, including at least 30,000 children, and more than 2 million homeless. This would be ethnic cleansing in anyone’s language.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.