Ethnic cleansing & annexation in Lebanon. posted by Richard Seymour

Israel on Thursday told Lebanese residents to leave the southern sector of the country below the Litani River within 24 hours.

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Some 600 people, many of them family of United Nations workers, or U.N. staffers deemed nonessential, were being evacuated to a cruise ship off the war-ravaged city of Tyre, which lies several miles south of the Litani River. Many who remain in the port city appeared to be stranded , lacking -- with banks shuttered, gasoline scarce and bombed roadways nearly unnavigable -- the money or means to flee.

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The International Committee of the Red Cross and other international aid agencies cited growing concern over the number of Lebanese civilians being displaced by the Israeli air campaign, particularly in the hard-hit villages and towns of southern Lebanon. The number forced to leave their homes was estimated at 500,000 in a country with a population of 4 million.

Although Ben-Gurion accepted partition, he did not view the borders of the Peel commission plan as permanent. He saw no contradiction between accepting the Jewish state in part of Palestine and hoping to expand the borders of this state to the whole Land of Israel. The difference between him and the Revisionists was not that he was a territorial minimalist while they were territorial maximalists but rather that he pursued a gradualist strategy while they adhered to an all-or-nothing approach.

The nature and extent of Ben-Gurion's territorial expansionism were revealed with startling frankness in a letter he sent to his son Amos from London on 5 October 1937. There Ben-Gurion professed himself to be an enthusiastic advocate of a Jewish state, even if it involved the partitioning of Palestine, because he worked on the assumption that this state would be not the end but only the beginning. A state would enable the Jews to have unlimited immigration, to build a Jewish economy, and to organize a first-class army. "I am certain," he wrote, "we will be able to settle in all the other parts of the country, whether through agreement and mutual understanding with our Arab neighbours or in another way." Both his mind and his heart told Ben-Gurion, "Erect a Jewish State at once, even if it is not in the whole land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come." (Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, Penguin, 2000, p 21)

"[T]o the north, the Litani river, to the northeast, the Wadi 'Owja, twenty miles south of Damascus; the southern border will be mobile and pushed into Sinai at least up to Wadi al 'Arish; and to the east, the Syrian Desert, including the furthest edge of Transjordan." (Quoted, Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, 1992, p 87).