Jewish leader forced to defend ‘ethnic cleansing’ claims

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin this week firmly rejected accusations that there was ethnic cleansing of Arabs during Israel’s War of Independence – at a parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism no less.

The exchange occurred during heated questioning at the second hearing of the inquiry on June 16, when Labor Upper House MP Stephen Lawrence pressed Ryvchin on whether ethnic cleansing had occurred during the population transfers of 1948.

“I firmly would dispute that it occurred,” Ryvchin said. “When we talk about ethnic cleansing, we talk about the forceable expulsion of a particular ethnicity or race of people from a territory. That did not occur as a program.”

When Lawrence suggested that whilst it may not have been a program, ethnic cleansing had occurred in particular instances, Ryvchin responded: “I resent and I reject the use of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’.”

Ryvchin acknowledged that people who lived in certain places prior to 1948 “ceased to live there” but attributed this to multiple factors, including “the natural human compulsion to flee a war zone” and Arab leaders telling people to “depart this war zone and then return once we’ve driven the Jews into the sea”.