Confronting the Bible's Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine: Zionism & the State of Israel

Dr. Prior is Professor of Biblical Studies in the University of Surrey, England, and visiting professor in Bethlehem University, Palestine. He is a biblical scholar and author of “Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry” and “The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique.” Dr Prior is also a Catholic priest with a deep understanding of the issues in Israel and Palestine. Not only did he go there on numerous times to live with both, his Thesis outlines ethnic cleansing by the Israelis and how they distorted and changed history...

If you have time, read the entire article, it's a bit long but very educational..here are some excerpts:

It is mid-October 2000; to date, at least 98 Palestinians and 7 Jews have been killed, and over 3,000, mostly Palestinians, injured in the Holy Land’s most recent unholiness. That’s the math of it.

It is, however, the morality of it that has engaged me over the past quarter of a century.
I would have been spared some pain had I not undertaken significant portions of my postgraduate biblical studies in the land of the Bible.

I have learned that, distinctively in the case of Zionist colonisation, a determined effort was made to rid the terrain altogether of the native population, since their presence in any number would frustrate the grand design of establishing a Jewish state. The necessity of removing the Arabs was recognised from the beginning of the Zionist enterprise — and advocated by all major Zionist ideologues from Theodor Herzl to Ehud Barak — and was meticulously planned and executed in 1948 and 1967. In their determination to present an unblemished record of the Zionist achievement, the fabricators of propagandistic Zionist history are among the most accomplished practitioners of the strange craft of source-doctoring, rewriting not only their history, but the documents upon which such a history was based. The propagandistic intent was to hide things said and done, and to bequeath to posterity only a sanitized version of the past.

Working against a background of bullet fire, and in the shadow of tanks, added a certain intensity to my research. Several bullets landed on the flat roof of Tantur on 25-26 September 1996. Two Palestinians, one a graduate of the University, were killed in Bethlehem, and many more, Palestinians and Israeli soldiers, were killed in the disturbances elsewhere in the West Bank.

little attention is given to broadly moral and human rights issues. In particular, he (W.D. Davies) excludes from his concern, “What happens when the understanding of the Promised Land in Judaism conflicts with the claims of the traditions and occupancy of its other peoples?” He excused himself by saying that to engage that issue would demand another volume, without indicating his intention of embarking upon such an enterprise.

"...I was shocked to hear Zionism described as “the high point of covenantal spirituality.” Zionism, as I saw it, both in its rhetoric and in its practice, was not an ideology of sharing, but one of displacing."

"...and rambled on about the Zionists' intentions to bring benefits to the indigenous population, etc. Losing patience, I asked him to produce evidence for his claims, adding that not only was there not such evidence, but the evidence there was showed that the Zionist ideologues were virtually at one in their determination to rid the land of Arabs."