More of the British journalist’s animadversions on who is the real offender can be found here: “Who really wants ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Middle East?,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, February 8, 2025:

What’s exasperating about all this [hysterical charge of Israel committing “ethnic cleansing] is that we’ve just come through 16 months of shameless agitation for the end of the Jewish State. Modern anti-Israel activism, at root, is a dream of ethnic cleansing. 

Consider Columbia. Its woke students are fuming over Trump’s Gaza idea. Yet this is a campus where apocalyptic Israelophobia has run riot since Hamas’s pogrom 16 months ago. 

Campus activists referred to Israel as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and fantasised about a future when it would die. ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ’48!’, they cried, referring to 1948, when the modern state of Israel did not yet exist. Plainly put, they want the obliteration of the Jewish homeland.

‘Crush Zionism!’, the West’s activists cry. ‘End Zionism!’, their banners demand. 

They want the very belief in a Jewish homeland – which is all that Zionism is – killed off and buried. You should be grateful we’re not ‘going out and murdering Zionists’, said a spokesman for Columbia’s Gaza encampment last year. 

Trump might want to put up some plush condos in Gaza but at least he hasn’t raised the prospect of murdering everyone who believes in Palestinian statehood. Hostility to Israel’s right to exist is entirely commonplace on demonstrations in the West. 

That’s what ‘From the river to the sea’ means – the complete excision of the Jewish nation and its replacement by Palestine.

If you call for Israel to be completely destroyed, and its Jewish citizens to be expelled or killed, isn’t that “ethnic cleansing”? When you scream “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” you are calling for an end to the Jewish state, its replacement by a 23rd Arab state — “Palestine” — that will be judenrein.

Though the Israelis are now accused by all and sundry of committing “ethnic cleansing” or, still worse, of “genocide,” the charge is preposterous.

In 1949, there were 160,000 Arabs inside Israel. There are now more than two million Israeli Arabs. Does that sound like “ethnic cleansing” took place? 

What about Gaza? In 1967, when Israel took over Gaza from Egypt, there were 400,000 Arabs living there. When Israel relinquished control of Gaza in 2005, their number had more than tripled, to 1.3 million. Ethnic cleansing? 

The same was true in Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank). When Israel won that territory during the Six-Day war, 900,000 Arabs lived there. Now there are three million “Palestinian” Arabs living in Judea and Samaria. Once more, I ask: “Ethnic cleansing”?

In 1949, Egypt promptly expelled any Jews who were still living in Gaza when the war ended. 

Jews returned to Gaza, in a handful of settlements on the border with Israel, after winning the Strip in the Six-Day War. Then, when Ariel Sharon made the decision to pull out of Gaza in 2005, the Palestinians insisted that not a single Jew would be allowed to remain. 

The Hamas Charter calls for the complete eradication of the Jewish presence everywhere in “Palestine.” The Palestinian Authority has made clear that in its hoped-for future state, there will be no room for Jews. 

But at the same time, the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Muslims would be enraged, if Israel were ever to expel large numbers of Israeli Arabs from its territory.

Brendan O’Neill wants the world to stop accusing the Jewish state, so idiotically, of “ethnic cleansing” and aim that charge instead where it is deserved: right in the black heart of Hamas and all other jihadist groups.