...A central accusation in the letters to Haaretz Magazine ("The judgment of history," January 16) concerned the issue of "ethnic cleansing." I will repeat my words, which apparently did not register (perhaps because of the misleading title on the cover): I do not support the expulsion of Arabs from the territories or from the State of Israel! Such an expulsion would be immoral, and is also unrealistic. What I said was, that if in the future, these communities were to launch massive violence against the State of Israel in combination with a broad assault on Israel by its neighbors, and endanger its survival, expulsions would certainly be in the cards. As for Israeli Arabs, my comments may be seen to represent a minatory road sign pointing in two possible directions: They could, as a whole, choose the path of loyalty to the Jewish state and integration within it as equal citizens, and thus enjoy quiet, prosperous lives; or they could choose the path of disloyalty to the state and of active and violent support for those who seek its demise. The latter path - with which many Israeli Arabs identified in October 2000 and with which many in its leadership seem to identify today, in one convoluted way or another - will help lead to either the destruction of the Jewish state or to their being uprooted.

A general comment on the matter of ethnic cleansing: I am aware that "ethnic cleansing" is not politically correct and is morally problematic. But, what can we do - the history of the 20th century is replete with instances of ethnic cleansing that occurred under catastrophic circumstances and were ultimately beneficial for humanity, including for the expulsees themselves. Was not the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans (after World War II) - who contributed to the destruction of the Czechoslovak Republic - justified? And didn't it contribute, in the end, to their happiness, and certainly to the happiness of the Czech people? In the final analysis, didn't the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Turks against their Greek minority and by the Greeks against their Turkish minority after World War I contribute to the welfare and happiness of the two peoples, and to the peace that has prevailed between the two nations ever since?

One more thing: Among the biggest religio-ethnic cleansers in human history, in the distant past and in our time, has been the Arab Islamic nation. Mohammed and his men cleansed the Arabian Peninsula of its Jewish tribes, in part through the mass slaughter of the men and the enslavement and forced conversion of the young women. (According to the Koran, in one day, Mohammed's men massacred 800-900 men of the Bani Qureiza tribe - a larger number than all the Arab victims of Jewish massacres through the whole of the 1948 war.) In the ensuing centuries, the Muslim empires and the Arab states, with the help of the pogrom and the law, uprooted from their midst or forcibly converted most of their Christian communities and ethnically cleansed themselves of their Jewish communities. Has a single word of criticism about any of this history ever been voiced by MK Mohammed Barakeh and Dr. Haggai Ram and their friends? (And, by the way, every Jewish community that was conquered by the Arab armies in the course of the 1948 war, including the Jewish Quarter in the Old City, was ethnically cleansed and every site was completely leveled.)...