Collateral Damage: Mid-to-Latter Part and Opening Remarks

collateral damage: Dotan's comments in the mid-to-latter part of the interview were useful and refreshingly candid, according to Rabble. But his opening remarks concerning the birth of the Israeli state betrayed his reluctance to confront, if not openly recall, Israel's violent origins the Zionist expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians 75 per cent of the native Arab population from their homeland, a brutal expulsion that did not occur as the collateral damage of war -- la guerre comme la guerre -- but as the result of a premeditated plan of ethnic cleansing known as Plan Dalet. It was important to hear Dotan's outrage at the lawlessness and fanaticism of such individuals who inflict the most heinous violence on Palestinians and their sympathizers in the name of religion. The plan predates Israel's war of independence and shows that its military triumph was anything but a miracle of David versus Goliath. To see Israel's birth as glorious is to hide the dark and dubious foundation of its statehood the deliberate decimation of the indigenous Palestinian people. Rather it was the result of a calculated strategy to create an ethnocratic state of Jewish majority, contingent on wiping out a substantial Arab presence from Palestine -- and this through massacre and formidable expulsion setting villages on fire, planting explosives in their midst, encircling villages militarily, and terrorizing villagers into flight through pillage and rape. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.