There are many Palestinians who are not under occupation, but none of them, and this includes those in the refugee camps, are free from the potential danger of

There are many Palestinians who are not under occupation, but none of them, and this includes those in the refugee camps, are free from the potential danger of future ethnic cleansing. It seems more a matter of Israeli priority rather than a hierarchy of 'fortunate' and 'less fortunate' Palestinians. Those today in the Greater Jerusalem area are undergoing ethnic cleansing as we speak. Those who live in the vicinity of the apartheid wall Israel is constructing, half completed, are likely to be next. Those who live under the greatest illusion of safety, the Palestinians of Israel, may also be targeted in the future. Sixty-eight per cent of the Israeli Jews expressed their wish, in a recent poll, to see them transferred'. Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is not correctly identified. The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness. Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is its ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for the Palestinians. They can never be part of the Zionist state and space, and will continue to fight - and hopefully their struggle will be peaceful and successful. The ethnic cleansing started before May 1948 and continued into the next year. My parents were forced to leave Haifa in early 1948, with my oldest sister (one year old at the time). When I talk about this with friends, they mostly shrug and say, it's complicated. In reality, it's not complicated at all. It is the simple but horrific story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a crime against humanity that Israel has wanted to deny and cause the world to forget. Retrieving it from oblivion is incumbent upon us, not just as a greatly overdue act of historiographical reconstruction; it is a moral decision, the very first step we must take if we ever want reconciliation to have a chance, and peace to take root, in the torn lands of Palestine and Israel.