HAMAS V. EXTREMISTS AMONG ZIONISTS
http://israel-palestine-dialogue.blogspot.com/2014/08/hamas-v-zionists.html
I wrote a comment in an earlier piece, and many times before including on Sean Hannity shows on Fox News, that the Hamas rhetoric to kill every Jew or push them to sea is no different than the rhetoric of Golda Meier, Moshe Dayan and several others who have said similar ugly things to Palestinians, something like rats and roaches that need to be chased down to their holes during Nakaba and again later. Hamas Charter came nearly 50 years later. I am not defending Hamas wrongful expressions of their frustration.
This is the stance every opponent takes to have gains in negotiations, and it is downright stupid of the United States and Israelis leadership (Not the Jews but the short sighted hawks in the name of Israel and Judaism) to take this as gospel. They know it is wrong, but they will continue to do this to strengthen their position. It is rotten to highlight the ills of one and hide your own.
The bottom line goal should be Justice to the Palestinians and Security for Israel, and thus far, everything the Hawks have done goes against that goal. They obviously misguided and hurting Israel in pretensions of protecting her.
The Moderate Jews need to speak up, antisemitism is on rise, and it is not against Jews, but really against those who get away with power, its the injustice to the Palestinians that is unbearable to a majority of the world. The evil men continue to their stuff if the good men don’t speak up. Israel’s security should not be based on arrogance of military might, but goodwill of the people around the world.
Thanks to Mike Burch for sharing the following Link of Zionist Quotes. I would have said, not Zionists but extremists among Zionists.
Mike Ghouse
www.IsraelPalestineDialogue.com
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Quotes by Extremists among Zionists
http://www.thehypertexts.com/Zionist%20Quotes.htm
These quotations by right-wing Zionists leave no doubt that the racist goal of the militant Zionists from the very beginning was to “transfer” (ethnically cleanse) Palestinians and appropriate (steal) their land. While the stolen land may be “free” to Israeli robber barons, it has been very costly to Palestinians and Americans, as the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) led directly to 9-11 and two disastrous, unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
compiled by Michael R. Burch, an editor and publisher of Holocaust and Nakba poetry
Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second Prime Minister, explained why military attacks like Operation Cast Lead, Operation Pillar of Defense and Operation Protective Edge are doomed to fail, when he asked rhetorically: “Do people consider that when military reactions outstrip in their severity the events that caused them, grave processes are set in motion which widen the gulf and thrust our neighbors into the extremist camp? How can this deterioration be halted?”
Sharett was wise enough, or at least discerning enough, to anticipate that Israel’s militant dogma of the “Iron Wall” would lead to militant resistant groups like the PLO and Hamas.
The answer to Sharett’s question is surprisingly simple, but hard for fascists to understand: first stop stealing your neighbors’ land, if you want peace, since stealing their land is evil and requires a brutal military occupation, which makes it a war crime. Another Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, also admitted the root problem: “You cannot like the word, but what is happening is an occupation—to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation. I believe that is a terrible thing for Israel and for the Palestinians.”
So why doesn’t Israel take the first step required for peace, and stop robbing Palestinians of their ever-dwindling land? Probably because the transfer of Palestinian land into Jewish hands is a core belief of Israel’s national ideology, Zionism. On this page, you will find hundreds of quotations which confirm that racist expansionism has been the force driving Zionism for more than a century. Early Zionist leaders like Theodr Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion were very clear about their intention to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and acquire their land (a process that still continues in the West Bank today via the euphemistic “settlement expansion” that could lead to World War III). Immediately below are examples provided by Jewish historians, major newspapers, and other reputable sources. Please keep in mind that when the terms “transfer,” “eviction” and “removal” are used, the Zionists are talking about ethnic cleansing, a crime against peace and humanity. When the term “expropriation” is used, it means the theft of Palestinian land via superior firepower, which is armed robbery and fascism. When the right of return is denied to Palestinians, this dooms the victims of ethnic cleansing to remain stateless, rightless refugees forever.
Honest Jews have admitted the horror of what Israeli Jews did—not only to Palestinian refugees—but to Palestinians who were not evicted: “Do we sin only against the refugees? Do we not treat the Arabs who remain as second-class citizens? Did a single Jewish farmer raise his hand in the Parliament in opposition to a law that deprived Arab peasants of their land? … How lonely, in the city of Jerusalem, sits the Jewish conscience.”—Moshe Smilansky in his essay “Zion and the Jewish National Idea” published in the Menorah Journal, Volume XVI, 1958.
We can find the genesis of the problem in an 1895 diary entry of Theodr Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Herzl was clearly writing a recipe for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, long before the Holocaust or any major acts of Arab violence against Jews in Palestine:
“[We Zionists will] spirit the penniless population across the border [of the Jewish state] by denying it employment … Both the process of expropriation [theft of land] and the removal [ethnic cleansing] of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”—Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the racist expulsion of Palestinian Arabs, in his diary on June 12, 1895
Obviously, there is no need to be discrete and circumspect when people are doing acceptable things. Here are other Zionist leaders who clearly advocated ethnic cleansing, without bothering to be discrete or circumspect. In fact, in one of its first acts as a nation in 1948, Israel created a Transfer Committee to supervise the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians!
“It is our right to TRANSFER the Palestinians!”—Transfer Committee director Yossef (Joseph) Weitz
“We must work out a secret plan based on the removal of the Arabs … [and] include it in American political circles.“—Weitz
“There is no other way than to TRANSFER the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them.”—Weitz
“Not one village, not one [Arab] tribe should be left.”—Weitz
“If the Arabs leave, the country will become wide and spacious for us [Jews].”—Weitz
“Only after this TRANSFER will the country be able to absorb millions of our [Jewish] brothers.”—Weitz
“The TRANSFER of Arabs from the Jewish state [serves two aims]: to diminish the Arab population and release Arab land to Jews.”—Weitz
“The Islamic soul must be broomed [swept, ethnically cleansed] out of Eretz-Yisrael.”—Ze’ev Jabotinsky, spiritual father of the Likud
“Arabs must make room for Jews. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to TRANSFER the Palestinians.”—Jabotinsky
“If we desire that Israel should become and remain a Jewish State, we must first of all create a Jewish majority [by expelling Arabs.]”—Jabotinsky
“There is no Zionism, colonization, or Jewish state without the EVICTION of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.”—Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
“The interests of security demand that we get rid of them.”—Prime Minister Moshe Sharett
“TRANSFER [ethnic cleansing] could be the crowning achievement, the final stage in the development of [Zionist] policy.”—Sharett
“We are equally determined to explore all possibilities of getting rid, once and for all, of the huge Arab minority.”—Sharett
“[Land is acquired] by force—that is, by CONQUEST in war, or in other words, by ROBBING land from its owner.”—Menachem Ussishkin
“If there are other inhabitants there, they must be TRANSFERRED to some other place.”—Ussishkin
“Zionism is a TRANSFER of the Jews.”—David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister
“Regarding the TRANSFER of the Arabs, this is much easier than any other TRANSFER.”—Ben-Gurion
“The compulsory TRANSFER of the Arabs … could give us something which we never had [even in Biblical times].”—Ben-Gurion
“Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out the TRANSFER on a large scale.”—Ben-Gurion
“With compulsory TRANSFER we will have a vast area … I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”—Ben-Gurion
“It is impossible to imagine general EVACUATION without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.”—Ben-Gurion
“Let us not ignore the truth … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves … The country is theirs because they inhabit it.”—Ben-Gurion
“Before the founding of the state … our main interest was self-defense … But now the issue at hand is conquest, not self-defense.”—Ben-Gurion
“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria.”—Ben-Gurion
“We must do everything to ensure they [ethnically cleansed Palestinian refugees] never return.”—Ben-Gurion
“There are two issues here: sovereignty and the REMOVAL of a certain number of Arabs, and we must insist on both of them.”—Ben-Gurion
“Ben-Gurion was prepared to accept the [partition] … on two conditions: [Jewish] sovereignty and compulsory TRANSFER.”—Yosef Bankover
The last two statements are very important, because the two most important things to the Zionists were racist ideas: Jewish rule and ethnic cleansing of the Arabs to create an artificial Jewish majority. David Ben-Gurion was Israel’s George Washington and its first Prime Minister. If we want to understand why the government of Israel ordered hundreds of Palestinian villages and thousands of individual homes to be destroyed in 1948, leaving around 750,000 Palestinian farmers and their families homeless, destitute refugees, we need look no further than the quotes above. The question is not why the Palestinians fled. People often flee wars and natural disasters. The question is why their houses were destroyed and they were not allowed to return when the fighting was over and Israel’s borders were secure. The answer is that the men in power had long planned to “transfer” the Palestinians in order to “purify” the land for the Jews they deemed to be “superior” to Arabs. Zionist leaders like Menachem Begin were racists, fascists and religious fanatics, as Albert Einstein and 27 other leading Jewish intellectuals pointed out in their open letter to the New York Times in 1948.
Why is Israel constantly at odds with its neighbors? Is it because they irrationally “hate” Jews? No, it’s because they hate what Israeli Jews have done to their Palestinian brothers and sisters, who have been victims of Israeli racism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing since the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) began in 1948. The racism of Israel’s most prominent leaders is self-evident in the following quotations:
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian.”—Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (later parroted by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum)
“How can we return the held territories? There is nobody to return them to.”—Meir
“It is not as though there was a Palestinian people … and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them … they did not exist.”—Meir
“Anyone who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back … It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen.”—Meir
“The Palestinians are like crocodiles …”—Prime Minister Ehud Barak
“We shall reduce the Palestinians to a community of woodcutters and waiters.”—Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
“Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever.”—Prime Minister Menachem Begin
“[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs.”—Begin (see footnote)
“I believed and to this day still believe, in our people’s eternal and historic right to this entire land.”—Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
“They [the Palestinians] are as grasshoppers in our sight.”—Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir
“All of the land of Israel is ours.”—Shamir
Note: “[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs.” Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin said this during a speech to the Knesset, as cited by Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the ‘Beasts,”‘ New Statesman, June 25,1982. There is some debate about whether Begin was referring to all Palestinians, or only to Palestinian terrorists. But it hardly matters, since Begin was the preeminent terrorist in the Middle East, as pointed out in Albert Einstein’s 1948 Letter to the New York Times. Only a racist would claim that it is wrong for people of other races or ethnicities to do things he is justified to do himself.
The quotes above sound like Nazis talking about Jews, before and during the Holocaust. And these are the prime ministers of Israel talking! Unfortunately American politicians who claim to believe in equal rights and justice for all human beings also ignore the right of millions of completely innocent Palestinian women and children to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
You may also want to read and consider Israeli Prime Ministers who were Terrorists and Does Israel Really Want Peace?
As Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectuals pointed out in their open letter to the New York Times in 1948, the Zionist leaders had adopted the methods of the Nazis and other European fascists. So it is no wonder that Israel has never enjoyed real, lasting peace. And today the United States is also unable to find real, lasting peace because American politicians refuse to require Israel to act like a civilized nation. Instead, they provide Israel with billions of dollars in “loans” (none of which have ever been repaid) and advanced weapons, which Israel then uses to steal even more land and water from Palestinian farmers and their families. How does this take place?
“We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”—Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
While this may be hard for freedom-loving, independent-minded Americans to believe, as the saying goes, the “proof is in the pudding.” Recently, H.R. 4133 passed a deeply divided Congress by the stunning vote of 411 to 2. The bill gives Israel everything it needs to attack Iran, including refueling tankers, special munitions (i.e., bunker-busting bombs) and unlimited sums of money to finance the war and maintain Israel’s military supremacy in the Middle East. H.R. 4133 strongly suggests that Sharon was speaking the truth.
“There is a huge gap between us and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience.—President Moshe Katsav
“We [Jews] can be the vanguard of culture against [Arab] barbarianism.”—Theodore Herzl
“[Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.”—Ze’ev Jabotinsky
“[Gaza will suffer] a bigger Shoah [Holocaust]”—Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, shortly before Israel used white phosphorous on Gaza
“We shall use the ultimate force until Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”—Deputy Prime Minister Rafael Eitan
“[When we build settlements] Arabs will only be able to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”—Eitan
“We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.”—Rabbi Ovadia Yosef
“The killing [of Palestinians] is a good deed, and Jews should have no compunction about it.”—Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg
Ethnic cleansing is a terrible crime against peace and humanity. When people are made homeless, many of them will die of exposure, disease, starvation, and crime on the road. Zionists who advocated ethnic cleansing were clearly sentencing many innocent people to lives of suffering and premature deaths. To cause the premature death of an innocent person is murder. To target a large group of people for premeditated murder is genocide. Herzl’s original plan was economic ethnic cleansing, but is a slow, agonizing death in any way “better” than a quick death? One might suggest that his method was less humane for many victims than a war in which the victims at least could see the enemy and fight back. But in any case, the militant Zionists chose to speed up the process of ethnic cleansing by using brute force (the Iron Wall).
“We [Zionists] all applaud, day and night, the IRON WALL.”—Ze’ev Jabotinsky, spiritual father of the Likud
“This IRON WALL is our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.”—Jabotinsky
“Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.”—Jabotinsky
“Zionism is a colonizing adventure and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”—Jabotinsky
“The Arab is culturally backward … his instinctive patriotism … cannot be bought, it can only be curbed [by] major force.”—Jabotinsky
“There is no justice, no law, no God in heaven; only a single law which decides and supersedes all: [Jewish] settlement [of the land].”—Jabotinsky
“I devote my life to the rebirth of the Jewish State, with a Jewish majority, on both sides of the Jordan.”—Jabotinsky
“Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea [ethnic cleansing] a good name in the world.”—Jabotinsky
The last statement is stunning. Did Hitler give ethnic cleansing a “good name” when ethnic cleansing of German Jews was the first stage of the Holocaust?
Ze’ev Jabotinsky was the spiritual father of Herut and Likud, and of racist, fascist Israeli prime ministers like Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and Bibi Netanyahu. Jabotinsky did not agree with Herzl that the Palestinians could be ethnically cleansed via economic methods alone. His “updated” version Zionism depended on military superiority over Arabs, and brute force. The idea that “might is right” and that the stronger people can have their way with weaker people is the hallmark of fascism. Hitler and the Nazis said the same things about Jews, Gypsies and Slavs.
In 1977 Nahum Goldmann, founder and president of the World Jewish Congress and a president of the World Zionist Organization, said: “Israel has never presented the Arabs with a single peace plan. She has rejected every settlement plan devised by her friends and by her enemies. She has seemingly no other objective than to preserve the status quo while adding territory piece by piece.”
As we can see, the Zionists were often brutally honest about their intentions. Just as American white supremacists didn’t see anything wrong with robbing darker-skinned people of their land, water, homes, freedom and rights … even so Jewish supremacists didn’t see anything “wrong” with robbing Palestinians of their land, water, homes, freedom and rights.
“The [Palestinian] Arabs do not want us because we want to be the rulers.”—Menachem Ussishkin
“Eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories.”—General Eitan Ben Elyahu
“The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its existence is only bluff.”—General Matityahu Peled
“We enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands … “—Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair
“We should conquer any disputed territory in the Land of Israel. Conquer and hold it, even if it brings us years of war.“—Benzion Netanyahu
“The tendency toward conflict is in the essence of the Arab.”—Netanyahu
“[The Arab’s] existence is one of perpetual war.”—Netanyahu
“[Operation Cast Lead was] not enough. It’s possible that we should have hit harder.“—Netanyahu
“There are no two peoples here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population.”—Netanyahu
“There is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation.”—Netanyahu
“They only call themselves a people in order to fight the Jews.”—Netanyahu
“[Arabs] won’t be able to exist, and they will run away from here. But it all depends on the war, and whether we will win the battles with them.”—Netanyahu
“[Arabs] won’t be able to face war with us, which will include withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more.”—Netanyahu
The last statement is very important because it echoes what Herzl said in 1895 about getting rid of the poor. And we can see Netanyahu’s updated plan in effect in Gaza, where Palestinian children cannot attend the best schools even if they win scholarships, and where the electricity is often cut off deliberately for long periods of time.
Moshe Dayan, Israel’s most famous general and defense minister, was very candid about the real intentions and methods of the Zionists:
Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.—Moshe Dayan, 1956
We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here … There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.—Moshe Dayan, from an address given to Technion University students (March 19, 1969), a transcription of which appeared in Ha’aretz (April 4, 1969)
If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.—Moshe Dayan, as quoted in Newsweek (October 17, 1977)
In two cases I did not fulfill my role as defense minister, in that I did not stop things that I was sure should have been stopped.—Moshe Dayan, on not stopping the construction of Israeli settlements on the Golan Heights and in Hebron, in a 1976 interview with Rami Tal, as quoted in Associated Press reports (May 11, 1997)
Along the Syria border there were no farms and no refugee camps; there was only the Syrian army … The kibbutzim saw the good agricultural land … and they dreamed about it … They didn’t even try to hide their greed for the land … We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was …The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.— Moshe Dayan, on pre-1967 clashes with the Syrians, in a 1976 interview with Rami Tal, as quoted in The New York Times and Associated Press reports (May 11, 1997)
Using the moral yardstick mentioned by [Moshe Sharett], I must ask: Are [we justified] in opening fire on the Arabs who cross [the border] to reap the crops they planted in our territory; they, their women, and their children? Will this stand up to moral scrutiny . . .? We shoot at those from among the 200,000 hungry Arabs who cross the line … will this stand up to moral review? Arabs cross to collect the grain that they left in the abandoned villages and we set mines for them and they go back without an arm or a leg … [It may be that this] cannot pass review, but I know no other method of guarding the borders. then tomorrow the State of Israel will have no borders.—Moshe Dayan, on the anti-infiltration policy against Palestinian refugees in the early 1950s
The only method that proved effective, not justified or moral but effective, when Arabs plant mines on our side [is retaliation]. If we try to search for the [particular] Arab [who planted mines], it has not value. But if we harass the nearby village … then the population there comes out against the [infiltrators] … and the Egyptian Government and the Transjordanian Government are [driven] to prevent such incidents, because their prestige is [assailed], as the Jews have opened fire, and they are unready to begin a war … the method of collective punishment so far has proved effective.—Moshe Dayan
All that is required is to find an officer, even a captain would do, to win his heart or buy him with money to get him to agreed to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place. While trying to work out a plan to internally destabilize Lebanon in favor of a Christian-Maronite government.—Moshe Dayan
A new State of Israel with broad frontiers, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israel Government extending from the Jordan to the Suez Canal.—Moshe Dayan, a
statement made in April 1973 from the peaks of Massada
During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road.—Moshe Dayan, Ma’ariv, 7 July 1968
Moshe Dayan unfolded one plan after another for direct action. The first — what should be done to force open blockade of the Gulf of Eilat. A ship flying the Israeli flag should be sent, and if the Egyptians bomb it, we should bomb the Egyptian base from the air, or conquer Ras al-Naqb, or open our way south of Gaza Strip to the coast. There was a general uproar. I asked Moshe: Do you realize that this would mean war with Egypt?, he said: Of course.—Moshe Sharett, as quoted in Iron Wall (1999) by Avi Shlaim, on a suggestion in the mid-1950s to lure Egypt into a war to neutralize the modernization of its army
Moshe Dayan saw no need for American guarantees of Israel’s security and strongly opposed America’s conditions i.e. that Israel forswear territorial expansion and military retaliation. In an informal talk with the ambassadors to Washington, London, and Paris, Dayan describe military retaliations as a “life drug” to the Israel Army. First, it obliged the Arab governments to take drastic measures to protect their borders. Second, and this was the essence, it enabled the Israeli government to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and the army. Gideaon Rafael, also present at the meeting with Dayan, remarked to Moshe Sharett: “This is how fascism began in Italy and Germany!”—Iron Wall (1999) by Avi Shlaim
Rocking the boat is his favorite tactic, not to overturn it, but to sway it sufficiently for the helmsman to lose his grip or for some of its unwanted passengers to fall overboard.—Ambassador Gideon Rafael, about Dayan
The disciples of Herzl and Jabotinsky firmly believed in their “right” to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and rob them of their land, homes, property, water, natural resources, human rights and freedom. The only real difference of opinion was about the methods to be used. Herzl favored being circumspect and discreet, operating in the shadows and using Jewish money and global political influence to rob the Palestinians of their jobs and ability to make money, after which they would be forced to leave the Jewish state, surrendering the land they could not afford to rent. Jabotinsky disagreed, saying that the Zionists should use superior firepower to take whatever they wanted, then continually crush the will and spirit of the Palestinians. This has been Israel’s modus operandi since the day Israel became a state.
I am an editor and publisher of Holocaust poetry, and obviously not an anti-Semite. I have always opposed racism and racial injustices, in part because my family has Native American blood. My grandmother was so dark and exotic-looking that people called her Gypsy. My father was also dark with jet-black hair, although it is white today. Our family staunchly supported Israel until I became the “black sheep” after reading the incredibly racist statements by leading Zionists on this page, and realizing that Israel has been treating Palestinians the way my ancestors were once treated by the white supremacists running the U.S. government during the Trail of Tears …
In an interview with the Sunday Times published on June 15, 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “It is not as though there was a Palestinian people … and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them … they did not exist.” (Also reported in the Washington Post, June 16, 1969)
A few months earlier Meir (known as “Mother Israel”) had asked rhetorically, “How can we return the held territories? There is nobody to return them to.” (March 8, 1969). Her incredibly racist comment has recently been repeated by American presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Now please suppose that you were a Palestinian child, facing the accumulated might, hypocrisy and zealous fury of Israel and the United States: … how would you feel? Wouldn’t it be terrifying to hear the leaders of nuclear-armed nations calmly suggesting that you don’t exist, or at least not in the same way that other people exist?
Perhaps now we can understand why so many Palestinian children feel a sense of overwhelming despair, and why some of them sometimes blow themselves and other people to pieces. We can also understand why great humanitarians like Albert Einstein (a Jew), Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky (a Jew), and Norman Finkelstein (a Jew) have been harshly, sternly and publicly critical of Israeli racism against Palestinians. Why do the leaders of Israel sound like the Grand Wizards of the KKK when they talk about Palestinian children?
Bigotry, the Sacred Disease
The problem with Golda Meir’s hideous statements above, and with hundreds of similar statements by high-ranking Israelis to follow, if you continue reading on this page, is obvious: bigotry. Heraclitus called bigotry the “sacred disease.” Israel has turned bigotry into a state religion which now threatens not only Palestinian children, but Jewish and American children as well. Americans, by acquiescing to demands that they consider only the rights of Jews while ignoring the self-evident rights of Palestinians, have endangered American children. If you care about all the children of the world, and the future of the world they are destined to live in, I hope you will bear with me for a few minutes and allow me to explain why Golda Meir said what she said, why she was wrong, and what we can do about it.
“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”
—Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994
“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”
—Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio
“Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.”
—Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, as published in the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989
In 1923, radical Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky—spiritual father of the Likud, and Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Bibi Netanyahu—wrote that the “sole way” for Jews to deal with Arabs in Palestine was through “total avoidance of all attempts to arrive at a settlement,” which Jabotinsky euphemistically termed the “iron wall” approach. Not coincidentally, a picture of Jabotinsky graced Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s desk. Source: The Village Voice, “Death Wish in the Holy Land,” Dec. 12, 2001
During a sermon preceding the 2001 Passover holiday, the influential Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef exclaimed: “May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them.” He added: “It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.” Source: Ha’aretz April 12, 2001
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel … Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”—Rafael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, quoted in Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983, and The New York Times, April 14, 1983.
“[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs.”—Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the ‘Beasts,”‘ New Statesman, June 25, 1982
“We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return.”—Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, July 18, 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s “Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet,” Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
“We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters.”—Uri Lubrani, Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s special adviser on Arab Affairs. Source: “The Arabs in Israel” by Sabri Jiryas
“The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more.”—Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel, August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000.
“…the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish … with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary.”—Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department. From “Israel: an Apartheid State” by Uri Davis, p. 5
“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours … Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”—Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998
“Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”—Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, in his diary, June 12, 1895 entry
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, head of the Kever Yossev Yeshiva (school of Talmud) in Nablus stated, “The blood of the Jewish people is loved by the Lord; it is therefore redder and their life is preferable.” Ginsburg declares in Baruch Hagever that what Baruch Goldstein did in murdering 29 unarmed Palestinian civilians at their house of worship constitutes, “a fulfillment of a number of commands of Jewish religious law … Among his (Goldstein’s) good deeds, as enumerated, are … taking revenge on non-Jews, extermination of the non-Jews who are from the seed of Amalek … and the sanctification of the Holy Name. The murders have led, in the rabbi’s opinion, to clear knowledge among the Jews that “the life of a Jew is preferable to the life of a non-Jew…”
The Israeli Chief Rabbi of the Sephardim, Eliahu Bakshi Doron, in a radio broadcast on Tuesday, July 9, 1996, praised the Biblical figure Phinehas for having killed the Israelite Zimri, because Zimri had sex with a Midianite woman. Rabbi Doron said that Phinehas had committed a “pure” act. He then referred to Zimri as “the first reform Jew.”
“The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.”
—Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson
“Foreign Minister Shimon Peres is very worried about the expected international reaction as soon as the world learns the details of the tough battle in the Jenin refugee camp.” It added that Israeli Defense Force (IDF) officers have similar worries: “The bulldozers are simply ‘shaving’ the homes and causing terrible destruction. When the world sees the pictures of what we have done there, it will do us immense damage.”
—April 9th, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz
“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel.
We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”
— Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
Ben-Gurion stated in 1937, during the Arab revolt: “This is a national war declared upon us by the Arabs. … This is an active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews. …But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.”
“You cannot define the loss of human life in terms of the number of Israelis killed by brutal, savage, inexcusable Palestinian terror. And it does take place. The fact of the matter is that three times as many Palestinians have been killed, and a relatively small number of them were really militants. Most were civilians. Some hundreds of children.” —Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter
“A partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning. I am certain that we can not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country and the region.”
—David Ben Gurion, in a letter to his son, 1937
“There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left.”
—Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, which was responsible for the organization of settlements in Palestine, 1940
“The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.”
—Rabbi Fischmann, member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, in his testimony to the U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry, 1947
“Before (the Palestinians) very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they and their ancestors have lived We are the generation of colonizers and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a house.”
—Moshe Dayan
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” —Golda Meir, in a statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June 1969.
“I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism.”
—Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first Foreign Minister and later Prime Minister (p.51 Simha Flapan, “The Birth of Israel”, 1987)
Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s First President
Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) was a Russia-born Jew. In 1904 he emigrated to England. During WWI, he developed a method of producing acetone, which was required for the production of artillery shells. This earned him favor with the British government. In 1917 he helped secure the promise of the British government to create a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine (the Balfour Declaration). Along with Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann was one of the “big three” responsible for making political Zionism a reality. Weizmann was a charismatic, persuasive speaker who became the first president of Israel.
But Weizmann sometimes sounded like Hitler:
“We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not …You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world.” (Chaim Weizmann, “Judische Rundschau,” No. 4, 1920)
In 1914, Weizmann lied, saying Palestine was “a country without people” when in fact hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lived there:
“In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite this people with this country? The owners of the country [the Ottoman Turks] must, therefore, be persuaded and conceived that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the [Jewish] people and for the country, but also for themselves.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 6)
Other Zionists like Golda Meir would also claim that the Palestinians didn’t really exist, were not a people, did not constitute a nation, etc. They sounded like Nazis who denied the humanity of Jews.
Weizmann described the Palestinian people as inhuman steppingstones:
“the rocks of Judea … obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 17)
Zionists often use such dehumanizing language, referring to Palestinians as: dirty, unclean, primitive, uncultured, naive, ignorant, savage, a “demographic problem,” and as “ticking time bombs” (because they might have babies and outnumber Jews), etc.
Weizmann visited Jerusalem in late 1918, and described the ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhoods to his wife:
“There’s nothing more humiliating than ‘our’ Jerusalem. Anything that could be done to desecrate and defile the sacred has been done. It is impossible to imagine so much falsehood, blasphemy, greed, so many lies. It’s such an accursed city, there’s nothing there, no creature comforts … [It] hasn’t a single clean and comfortable apartment.” (One Palestine Complete, p. 71)
So it seems Jewish “superiority” was just a racial myth, as racial superiority invariably is. Also in 1918 Weizmann condescendingly criticized Arabs for believing in what actually ended up happening to them:
“The poor ignorant fellah [Arabic for peasant] does not worry about politics, but when he is told repeatedly by people in whom he has confidence that his livelihood is in danger of being taken away from him by us, he becomes our mortal enemy… The Arab is primitive and believes what he is told.” (One Palestine Complete, p. 109)
The Zionists seemed to be blind to their own racism. They admitted that the Jews were far from “superior,” then looked down their snooty noses at Arabs who were smart enough to figure out what they were actually up to. In 1919 at the peace conference at Versailles, Weizmann proved Arabs were correct in their assumptions, saying:
“the country [Palestine] should be Jewish in the same way that France is French and Britain is British.” (One Palestine Complete, p. 117)
Weizmann repeated the same idea to the English Zionist Federation on September 19, 1919:
“By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 41)
But in the early 1900s, Zionism was not popular with most Jews; it was the dream of small numbers of zealots who often emulated the philosophy, stratagems and methods of Hitler:
“The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was built on air … every day and every hour of these last ten years, when opening the newspapers, I thought: Whence will the next blow come? I trembled lest the British Government would call me and ask: ‘Tell us, what is this Zionist Organization? Where are they, your Zionists?’ … The Jews, they knew, were against us [the Zionists]; we stood alone on a little island, a tiny group of Jews with a foreign past.” (UN: The Origins And Evolution Of The Palestine Problem, section V)
The Holocaust changed things, and understandably so. But it was the Zionists who insisted that Jews not only resettle in Palestine, but drive out the Palestinians and seize control of the region. On May 25, 1942, Weizmann said:
“Palestine alone could absorb and provide for the homeless and the stateless Jews uprooted by the war. It [has galvanized] all the sympathy of the world for the martyrdom of the Jews … the Zionists reject all schemes to resettle these victims elsewhere—in Germany, or Poland, or in sparsely populated regions such as Madagascar.” [It was Hitler who had first suggested Madagascar as a place where the Jews of Europe might be sent, before writing off the idea as infeasible and coming up with his horrendous “final solution.”] (Israel: A History, p. 113)
So, in effect, the Zionists used the Holocaust to provide the “warm bodies” needed for a Jewish state. To be fair, it was going to be very difficult for most of the Jewish refugees, no matter where they went. And there were millions of non-Jewish displaced persons as well. Their suffering is often forgotten, but shouldn’t be. The problem was not that the world was insensitive to the plight of Jews and other displaced persons. The problem was that the world was recovering from a world war that had left perhaps 70 million people dead, millions more displaced, and much of Europe and Russia a mass of smoking ruins. But the Zionists put their racist agenda on a pedestal, and thus created tremendous suffering for Jews and Arabs alike. Nothing mandated Jewish refugees seizing control of the regions that granted them safe harbor. Only Palestine suffered that fate. Everywhere else they went the Jews became democrats who asked for equal rights, and increasingly received them. But they were unwilling to settle for democracy in Palestine; thus to the rest of the world they seem hypocritical. If they want equal rights for themselves, how can they deny equal rights to other people? Is that fair?
Weizmann tried to extend Zionist colonization beyond British Mandated Palestine. In 1934 he tried to interest the French Mandate authorities in a Jewish settlement plan for Syria and Lebanon. Similar ideas were also proposed by Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan. (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 47)
Weizmann informed the Peel Commission of his expansionist vision in 1937:
“We shall spread in the whole country in the course of time … this is only an arrangement for the next 25 to 30 years.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 62)
Weizmann fantasized about Palestinians leaving voluntarily, writing in a letter dated April 28, 1939 to the American Zionist Solomon Goldman:
“The realization of this project [a land purchase] would mean the emigration of 10,000 [Palestinian] Arabs [to Jabal al-Druze in Syria], the acquisition of 300,000 dunums … It would also create a significant precedent if 10,000 Arabs were to emigrate peacefully of their own volition, which no doubt would be followed by others.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 167)
On July 8, 1947, Weizmann described how stateless Jews felt, to UNSCOP (the UN Special Committee On Palestine):
“We ask today: ‘What are the Poles? What are the French? What are the Swiss?’ When that is asked, everyone points to a country, to certain institution, to parliamentary institution, and the man in the street will know exactly what it is. He has a passport. If you ask what is a Jew is—well, he is a man who has to offer a long explanation for his existence, and any person who has to offer an explanation as to what he is, is always suspect—and from suspicion there is only one step to hatred or contempt.” (Israel: A History, p. 147)
But of course this is how stateless, dispossessed Palestinians feel today. Why should we elevate the needs, desires and feelings of Jews above those of Palestinians?
By war’s end in 1949, Chaim Weizmann was ecstatic to see the long-anticipated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians a reality:
“a miraculous clearing of the land: the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 175)
What sort of man speaks of the ethnic cleansing and murders of human beings—including women and children—as the “simplification” of a task? What does that sound like, but the cold hard “math” of Hitler & Company? How can ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide be called “miraculous”?
Golda Meir said that Israel is above the law:
“This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.”
The Elders
Here are the opinions of the Elders of the human race:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”—Thomas Jefferson
“Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“The cause of unrest in Palestine, the only cause, arises from the Zionist movement …”—Winston Churchill
“A Zionist state in Palestine can only be installed and maintained by force and we should not be a party to it.”—Franklin Roosevelt
“I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state.”—Albert Einstein
“What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct.”—Mahatma Gandhi
“I have no doubt that they [the Jews] are going about it the wrong way.”—Mahatma Gandhi
“… they are … despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them.”—Mahatma Gandhi
“I wish they had chosen non-violence … but according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.”—Mahatma Gandhi
Why American children are endangered, and all the children of the world
But first, please consider what Golda Meir’s racism, fascism and fanaticism may mean for the world’s children, as evidenced in this exchange with Alan Hart, the author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews:
Hart: “I recall the words spoken to me many years ago by Golda Meir, Mother Israel, when she was prime minister. At a point during an interview I did with her for the BBC’s Panorama programme, I interrupted her to ask, “Prime Minister, I want to be sure I understand what you’re saying … You are saying that if Israel was ever in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it?”
Meir “without the shortest of pauses for reflection, and in the gravel voice that could charm or intimidate American Presidents according to need” replied: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Hart: “Within an hour of that interview being transmitted at eight o’clock on a Monday evening, The Times (pre-Murdoch and not then a cheerleader for Zionism) had changed its lead editorial. Its new editorial quoted what Golda had said to me, [adding] its own opinion: ‘We had better believe her.’ I did, and still do.”
Should we believe Alan Hart? I, for one, do. I remember reading Robert Fisk’s book The Great War for Civilisation with a sense of growing horror. In it, Fisk mentioned seeing high-ranking American diplomats like Colin Powell and Madeline Albright acting deferentially, even fearfully, around Israeli politicians. Considering the normal operating mode of American politicians—hubris—that seems hard to believe, unless Israel has been threatening to use nuclear weapons. When I put two and two together, it seems to me that Israel has told the United States, “Unless we are allowed to have our way with Palestinians, and the world acquiesces to our brutal, unjust treatment of them, we are willing to unleash a nuclear Armageddon on the world.”
Does this mean Israel can hold the entire world hostage? No, I believe there is a peaceful, nonviolent solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Please allow me to explain …
How soon they forget
“Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation?
Have they forgotten the collective punishment,
the home demolitions,
in their own history so soon?
Have they turned their backs
on their profound and noble religious traditions?”
—Desmond Tutu
A Simple Program for Peace
All too often the people on one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict bitterly criticize people on the other side, and nothing good results. My goal is not to condemn anyone for the sake of condemnation, nor is it to win an argument; my goal is to find a positive, peaceful solution. Yes, I believe Israel and the United States need to cure themselves of the sacred disease of bigotry, and I convinced that doing so requires honesty rather than hypocrisy. But I believe positive change is possible, so please allow me to present my “simple program for peace.” Hopefully this will persuade you that, while I strongly oppose what Israel and the United States have done in the past, and continue to do in the present, I am not here to merely vent. And please keep in mind that “simple” does not mean “easy.” Here’s the plan:
•Israelis and Americans need to be honest about what really happened to the Palestinians: the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba. The Nakba (Arabic for “Catastrophe”) has been ongoing since 1948; thus entire generations of Palestinian children have been born and lived (and now many of those children have died) without having ever drawn a free breath. How would we feel, if this was the case for our children?
• Israel needs to unconditionally grant Palestinians equal rights and the protection of fair (nonracist) laws and courts. Why? Because every human child is self-evidently entitled to equal rights and justice, and on this planet justice requires fair laws and courts. There can never be racial peace where there is racial injustice, so establishing fair laws and courts is absolutely necessary if Israel wants peace, and if Americans want to avoid more events like 9-11 and more unwinnable wars abroad.
• Americans must understand that it is not “unfair” to require Israeli Jews to do what Americans did themselves, when the United States finally abandoned government-sanctioned racism in the form of Jim Crow laws and kangaroo courts.
• Because Israel’s leader seem to be either unwilling or unable to “pull the trigger” and treat Palestinians as human beings with fully equal rights, they need encouragement from the United States and the world to start moving in the right direction. Fortunately, there is a simple way for the world to encourage Israel to take the all-important first step of treating everyone as equals. The solution is a new UN resolution based on the American Creed of equal rights and justice for all human beings. No American president can veto the American Creed, so this new UN resolution should pass, where so many others have been short-circuited. Such a resolution backed by economic sanctions (which will hopefully not be needed, once Israel reads “the writing on the wall”) will force Israel to either make the Palestinians full citizens of a single state, or grant them independence. If you don’t understand why this plan will work, please check out the Burch-Elberry Peace Initiative for more details.
The “logic” of racism, fascism and fanaticism
Now, getting back to Golda Meir’s idea that Palestinians are nobodies who never really existed: something is obviously wrong with her “logic,” if we can call it that. If the Palestinians didn’t exist, it makes no sense to say that they weren’t thrown out and that their country wasn’t taken from them. If there never were beings called Martians, would it make any sense for me to say, “Martians never did exist, and by the way I didn’t throw them out in order to steal their planet”? Of course not. Golda Meir was obviously lying, for a specific purpose, or she was trying to rationalize something that seems utterly alien to those of us who believe that all earth’s children are created equal. Having read her autobiography, a book written about her by her son, a number of other books in which she played important roles, and hundreds of other books and articles about Israel, Palestine, Zionism and the history of the Middle East, I believe I know enough to suggest that she was rationalizing. What she really meant probably goes something like this: “We Jews have a long, glorious history as a civilization with a superior culture. But the Palestinians are just a disorganized rabble with an inferior culture, so we don’t consider them to be our equals, or even close. Therefore, because they are not really a ‘people’ compared to us, we have the right to take their land by force, evict them, and keep them from ever returning. Their suffering means little or nothing, compared to our achievements, since we are a ‘people’ and they are not.”
In other words, she was a racist and a fascist.
And unfortunately most of the other leaders of Israel since its rebirth as a nation in 1948 have also been fascists. I can prove this quite easily, simply by quoting what they said, discussing what they did, and showing how their words and deeds meshed, and betrayed them as racists and fascists. How do know that Hitler was a fascist? All we have to do is read what he said and consider what he did. Hitler was a racist and a fascist because he believed Aryans were “superior” to all other races, and that because they were “superior” they were entitled to seize lebensraum (“living room”) from other races, using any degree of force and brutality necessary, even against women and children. Although Hitler did not plan to commit genocide at first, in the end he realized that the Jews had nowhere to go, and that it was going to be very expensive to keep millions of them alive perpetually. Hence, his horrendous “final solution.” But it all began with the same utterly alien idea that Golda Meir expressed above: that people of other races were “nobodies” who didn’t really “exist” or “matter” because they fell far short of the “glory” of the “Master Race.”
What does Israeli fascism mean, for the Children of Gaza?
What does Israeli fascism mean for the children of Gaza and Occupied Palestine, as Israel takes more and more of their land and they, too, have nowhere else to go? I believe the end result will inevitably be the same: genocide, extermination … unless the world acts to keep it from happening.
Does this mean that Israel is beyond hope? No. Please consider Germany at the end of World War II. Millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and other “undesirables” had been murdered during the Holocaust. Perhaps 70 million people had died worldwide. Much of Germany lay in smoldering ruins. But after the Allies forced Germany to establish fair laws and courts, a new Germany soon emerged from the rubble. The people were the same. Many Jews continued to live in Germany, and there was no sudden outpouring of affection between them and Germans. Far from it. (Most of the Jewish Holocaust survivors I’ve talked to have great disdain for the Germans, to this day.) What saved Germany and allowed a new Germany to emerge was not a sudden change of human hearts, but a far better and fairer form of government based on the idea that all human beings are equal, and thus deserve the protections of fair laws and courts.
Does it bother me that Golda Meir spoke like a fascist? Yes, it does. Does it bother me that so many other high-ranking Israelis sound and act like fascists? Yes, it does. But I know that America has its share of fascists, and yet they are virtually powerless. Why? Because if they break the law, they go to jail and/or pay fines and civil damages. While no one can change the prejudices of another person’s heart, a decent system of government can protect people from those prejudices.
And I also know something else that I consider very promising: when Golda Meir lived in the United States she was a firm believer in democracy; furthermore, when Israeli Jews come to the United States they almost invariably become firm, even devout, believers in equal rights for all human beings. While they may seem terribly hypocritical today, there is hope. The hope is that Israel will adopt a far better, fairer form of government. The day Israel establishes fair laws and courts, its terrible problems with racial injustice and violence will begin to ameliorate, as was the case in Germany after WWII and in the United States once its Jim Crow laws and kangaroo courts were finally laid to rest by the reforms of the American Civil Rights Movement.
And finally, not being a racist, I know there are many Jews of good conscience who do not support the racism, fascism and fanaticism of Israel’s current government. We have to remember that the United States was far from a true democracy for most of its existence, as it denied equal rights to women, blacks and other minorities. Even today the United States still has not granted fully equal rights to non-heterosexuals. But the United States has made considerable progress since the American Civil Rights Movement of the mid 1900s. This implies that Israel can also make considerable progress in a relatively short period of time, if only it will establish equal rights and the protection of fair laws and courts for everyone. The Burch-Elberry Peace Initiative explains how this can be accomplished.
But what about Israel today, and this modern Trail of Tears?
“I equated the ejection of Palestinians
from their previous homes within the State of Israel
to the forcing of Lower Creek Indians
from the Georgia land where our family farm was now located;
they had been moved west to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears
to make room for our white ancestors.”
—Jimmy Carter
Israel’s hypocrisy is a very real problem. According to Golda Meir’s reprehensible “logic,” Germans had the right to confiscate the land, houses and property of Jews, to sweep them into squalid ghettos and concentration camps, and to keep them from ever returning to “polite society,” simply by claiming that German civilization and culture were “superior” to Jewish civilization and culture.
“As to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza …
the so-called ‘Palestinian autonomous areas’ are bantustans.
These are restricted entities
within the power structure of the Israeli apartheid system.”
—Nelson Mandela
Of course Jews insist that what the Nazis did to them during the Holocaust was wrong, and of course they are absolutely correct to do so. But it seems that many Jews want to have their cake and eat other people’s cake too. Whenever anti-Semitism is practiced against Jews, they insist that anti-Semitism is wrong. (I agree.) But whenever they practice anti-Semitism against Arabs, they try to justify their reprehensible behavior by falling back on the grotesque logic of Hitler and the Nazis. (I disagree.) Obviously Hitler was either wrong or right, and today everyone who’s not a racist and a fascist knows he was wrong. But isn’t it passing strange that enough Jews agree with Hitler to keep Palestinians in chains, and the world on the brink of World War III?
On a Christmas visit to Jerusalem in 1989,
Desmond Tutu said that if the colors and names were changed
“a description of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank
could describe events in South Africa.”
He also said that he was “very deeply distressed”
by his visit to the Holy Land,
because “it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”
He made similar comments in 2002,
speaking of “the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks,
suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.”
—Desmond Tutu
If a Jewish professor anywhere in the world is slighted, legions of Jewish activists fire off aggrieved emails about the evils and dangers of anti-Semitism. (Well and good.) But if Jewish “settlers” and the Israeli military practice anti-Semitism against little Palestinian schoolgirls, spitting on them and cursing them as they trudge their way to kindergarten, somehow that doesn’t “count.” (Why?)
It bothers me greatly to think of little children being shamed and humiliated by adults. My business partner is a fine young black man. When I made him a partner in the business I own, he told me an illuminating story. He said that when his father was a little boy growing up in Mississippi, he was commanded to call little white boys “Sir.” I have never forgotten that story, and I think about it often. When I learned that Jewish robber barons were insulting, spitting on and sometimes abusing Palestinian children on their way to school, I thought of the dark days of racism in the South, when little black boys and girls had to face the bigotry of white adults. How do such things make you feel?
If such things don’t bother you, I fear we are of two different species. If they do bother you ― if they bother you a lot, as they do me ― then please keep in mind my idea about a new UN resolution based on the American Creed of equal rights and justice for all human beings. All children who are abused, shamed and humiliated by adult bigots need and deserve the protections of fair laws and courts.
Don’t you agree?
Israeli racism and hypocrisy
Here’s another racist remark by Golda Meir: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” (As quoted in Media Bias and the Middle East by Paul Carlson, p. 10, and The Agony of the Promised Land by Joshua Levy, p. 187)
The racist assumptions here are that Jews love their children, that Palestinians don’t, and that Palestinian resistance to Jewish domination is based on racial “hatred” rather than on the honest, loving desire of Palestinians for their children to experience the freedom Americans value so highly. But of course the American Founding Fathers rebelled against and forcefully resisted the British monarchy, imperiling their children. Did this mean the American Founding Fathers were inferior beings who didn’t love their children? Or does it suggest that imperialist regimes like those of King George and Golda Meir make it very difficult for parents to raise their children, since they force them to choose between raising their children as serfs or imperiling their lives?
Once again Golda Meir’s words betray her racism, her fascism and her fanaticism. And once again they also betray her hypocrisy, and Israel’s hypocrisy, because Meir and other high-ranking Zionists clearly ascribed a much higher value to creating a Jewish state than they did to the welfare and happiness of the children of Israel. Please consider the evidence below, which I turned up during my research for this article. I was born in 1958, so on a whim I decided to see what Golda Meir was up to in 1958. To my surprise, when I did a Google search for “Golda Meir 1958” the top four stories, according to Google, were about Golda Meir preventing sick and disabled Jews from emigrating to Israel! Like Hitler, it seems she only valued Jews who were able to work for a fascist state that valued their productivity over their humanity. The Jews who unable to work, including children, could either languish, rot, or die. Here’s an article on the subject, by one of Israel’s leading newspapers, followed by commentary from other sources:
Golda Meir told Poland: Don’t send sick or disabled Jews to Israel!
Haaretz
December 9, 2009
by Lily Galili, Haaretz Correspondent
In 1958, then-foreign minister Golda Meir raised the possibility of preventing handicapped and sick Polish Jews from immigrating to Israel, a recently discovered Foreign Ministry document has revealed.
“A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah [the immigration of Jews to Palestine], because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration,” read the document, written by Meir to Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Katriel Katz.
The letter, marked “top secret” and written in April 1958, shortly after Meir became foreign minister, was uncovered by Prof. Szymon Rudnicki, a Polish historian at the University of Warsaw. In recent years, Rudnicki has been researching documents shedding light on Israeli-Polish relations between 1945 and 1967.
The document had not been known to exist before this time, and scholars of the mass immigration from Poland to Israel that took place from 1956 to 1958 were unaware of Israel’s intent to impose a selection process on Jews leaving Poland [most of whom were] survivors of the Holocaust and its death camps.
The “coordination committee” Meir refers to was a joint panel consisting of representatives of the government and the Jewish Agency.
Rudnicki’s study, undertaken together with Israeli scholars headed by Prof. Marcos Silber of the University of Haifa, has already been published in a book in Polish.
The Hebrew version of the book will be published in a few months. However, the document containing the suggestion about the selection process does not appear in the book because it did not impact relations between the two countries.
“Although there are numerous documents on the issue of immigration, we did not find in the archives of Israel or Poland—where they also opened the party archive for us—any response to this request by Golda to the ambassador in Poland,” Rudnicki told Haaretz. “In this respect, the document remains an internal matter of Israel,” he said. However, Rudnicki concedes that the content of the document surprised him as a scholar and a Jew.
“This is a very cynical document,” he said. “It is known that Golda was a brutal politician who defended interests more than people.”
[But as we shall see, this fascist, Stalinistic preference for the needs of the state over the happiness of individuals lies at the core of Zionism.]
Commentary from other sources
Israel’s George Washington, David Ben-Gurion, also ranked the goals of Zionism and a fascist state far above the lives and happiness of Jewish children, saying: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.” (Quoted on pp 855-56 of Shabtai Teveth’s Ben-Gurion)
“Golda Meir struck me as a very impressive and persuasive personality, though she has shown little or no understanding for the Arabs of Palestine or for the justice of their demands. She has always talked a great deal about the ‘historical and spiritual rights of the Jews’, but it is difficult to accept the validity of ‘historic rights’ which can only be achieved at the expense of people who have been living in the same place for 2,000 years. The principle which she applies on behalf of the Jews, and by which she justifies the expulsion of the Palestinians, would, if applied elsewhere, reduce the world to a state of total chaos.” (General Odd Bull, former Chief of Staff of UNTSO, War and Peace in the Middle East, p.42)
There will be those who are shocked at the revelation that Golda Meir, whose grandmotherly appearance belied a cold and cynical persona, told Poland under the Stalinists not to send sick or disabled Jews to the ‘Jewish State’. My friend Mark Elf, of Jews sans frontieres [Jews without borders] attributes this to eugenicism and he is right. But that is not the whole story. Throughout the Nazi era a policy of selectivity operated. Rescuing the elite at the expense of the masses. Israel only wanted, as Arthur Ruppin put it, the cream of the Jewish Diaspora. ‘Good human material’ no less. Golda Meir’s attitude to the sick and disabled was little different from that of Hitler, who described them as being ‘useless mouths’ who were to be ‘awarded’ a merciful death … [it was] Meir who launched the Zionist counteroffensive at the 1938 Evian Conference. This conference was designed to put a gloss and halo around the Western countries in their refusal to admit the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. The Zionists were outraged that they weren’t invited as representatives of the Jews, despite being a tiny minority at that time. They were also worried—what if countries do accept refugees: won’t that negate the need for a Jewish State? They needn’t have worried because no country bar tiny San Domingo agreed to accept any more refugees. San Domingo agreed to admit 100,000 Jews and that sent the Zionists into a panic. Their ‘logic’ being that if countries other than Palestine could save Jews from Hitler, why bother building up a Jewish state. Good question, so they set about ensuring that no country would take Jewish refugees! They call it ‘cruel Zionism’ because they can be as cruel to Jews as to Arabs when the mood takes them. And just as in Argentina they didn’t want the ‘wrong sort’ of Jews, so too in Israel. (Tony Greenstein, writing on his blog, December 10, 2009)
Yosef Grodzinsky, professor of Psychology at Tel Aviv University, and Professor and Canada Research chair in NeuroLinguistics at McGill University, sheds light on the Zionist preference for ‘good human material’, in an illuminating interview with Chris Spannos:
Spannos: Maybe you could begin by summarizing the reasoning underlying the belief that Zionism and its product—the state of Israel—is the ultimate manifestation of Jewish identity? Where does this reasoning come from?
Grodzinsky: Zionist discussions of Jewish identity frequently question the nature of Jewish existence in Diaspora, and its feasibility. Can a Jewish national identity survive without a designated territory, and independent of Zionism? Does it require a national language (and if so, should it be Hebrew)? Must a Jew be religiously Jewish? The Zionist outlook on these questions has always been crystal clear: Jewish nationalism is Zionism; Hebrew is the national language, a Jew is a member of the Jewish religion. Fritz (Yitzhak) Baer, doyen of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, helped shape this view, which was then espoused by the Zionist leadership. In The Galut [State of Exile], he wrote in the 1930s … [that] since the Jews manifest a national unity, even in a higher sense than the other nations, it is necessary that they return to a state of actual unity. Baer’s clear world view had immense influence on the thinking of leaders and activists, especially on David Ben-Gurion, prominent leader and Israel’s first prime minister. Interestingly, while these positions date back to the origins of the Zionist movement, looking at current Zionist thought, it has remained the same.
Spannos: Many Diaspora Jews recognize a radically different view acknowledging a diversity of outcomes for Jewish identity. Could you elaborate on this view and its origins?
Grodzinsky: Diaspora Jews, especially those in the West who had more freedom of movement than others, tended to acknowledge the multiplicity of future plans for Jews, which to them legitimized multiple Jewish agendas. I mean, their existence was the very proof that such agendas were feasible. Salo Baron of Columbia University, the first professor of Jewish Studies at an American university, presented a view radically different from Baer’s, his contemporary. To Baron, Jewish ideology and politics correlated with migration patterns and residential loci, in a way that did not deprive a Jew of a national identity: One essential symptom of Jewish history, which appears to be of particular significance nowadays, is that the life of the Jewish people more or less regularly takes place in worlds set apart from one another. The Baer/Baron debate, then, revolved around issues of unity versus diversity of Jewish fates, choices, and identities. Little, if any, residue of this debate still exists, unfortunately. This is due, in part, to the Holocaust (as will become clear below), but also thanks to a remarkable propaganda success of the Zionists, who have made world Jewry align with their view. Question the singularity of the State of Israel as the ultimate expression of Jewish nationalism, and you risk being accused of anti-Semitism; do so as a Jew, and you should expect to be dubbed a self-hater.
Spannos: How did the Holocaust impact this debate?
Grodzinsky: The Holocaust put an end to the intense debate regarding the relationship between the Jew and the forming Zionist entity. In its shadow, it has often been said, Jews could no longer be safe anywhere but in Eretz Yisrael, their homeland. Jews, on this view, should either live in the Jewish national home in Palestine, or support it vigorously, because it is their fallback option, should all hell break loose. I have been hearing the rhetoric about Israel’s role as a “safe haven” for Jews in danger since my childhood; rarely have I heard the opposite position, one that’s in fact valid today, to my mind: that the State of Israel and its actions actually put world Jewry at risk.
Spannos: Zionist organizers frequently used the callous phrase chomer ‘enoshi tov, or “good human material”. What does this phrase say about how Zionists viewed Jews in the Displaced Persons (DP) Camps? Why was this population so important for the Zionists?
Grodzinsky: We are now moving to my book, whose Hebrew version is titled chomer ‘enoshi tov. I was interested in the relationship between Jews and Zionists at times of crisis, and focused on Jewish survivors in post-war Germany on Displaced Persons (DP) camps that the US Army and the UN set up after the War, to assemble and care for millions of civilian victims of the Nazi regime. Jews were quickly put in separate camps, and became the miserable dwellers of the Jewish DP camps, the main location of my story. I went there (I mean, to archival material about these places) in order to see what the Zionists, by now close to accomplishing their goal and establishing an independent Jewish state, did to help Jews in need. Jerusalem dispatched hundreds of trained envoys to post-war Europe. What did they want and do? Their goal was openly stated, expressed by Ben-Gurion: to populate Palestine with multitudes of Jews. This translated into a plan to bring all the survivors to Palestine. Hence, survivors seeking Palestine immigration were dubbed “good material,” whereas the others were viewed as weaklings. Here’s an example: “The camps now house just the remainder of Sheâerit ha-pleyta [The Surviving Remnant]. The pioneering human material, that with human, Zionist awareness, has already left the camps on its way to Palestine through a variety of routes. What has now remained is that stuff that is glued to the old soil, like the remains of a meal stuck to the bottom of a burnt pot, which must be scrubbed and removed. No attempt at convincing them can work: The homeland is on fire! Could a son not rush to save his home from the fire? These words reach their ears, but leave their hearts untouched.” I read these documents, much to my amazement, in the correspondence between envoys in Germany and their Jerusalem leadership, housed in the Central Zionist Archives. Now, when you read such expressions, you can’t help but be reminded of the objectionable phrase “human dust,” used by General Patton in reference to Holocaust survivors. It was such expressions that gained him his notoriety as an anti-Semite, and ultimately led him to lose the command of the US Army in Germany late summer 1945. Zionist envoys, you see, were not anti-Semitic, of course; nor were they hateful. But as the text shows, their attitude towards the survivors did not regard their value as human beings who had just been through horrific suffering, humiliation, exploitation, and loss; rather, those who could help the Zionist endeavor in Palestine were ‘good material,’ whereas others, who sought to rebuild their lives elsewhere, were despised.
Spannos: How did Jews in the DP Camps feel about the creation of a Jewish state? What kind of discrepancy was there between how they felt and where they actually migrated over time?
Grodzinsky: The Zionist idea appealed to most Jewish survivors. Taking part in the Zionist plan was a totally different matter. Much to the chagrin of the Zionist organizers, the majority of the Jewish DPs were more interested in immigrating to the United States than to Palestine. America harbored promise, and thus Jewish survivors flocked to the American Zone of Germany in the hundreds of thousands, hoping to obtain a U.S. immigration visa. A demographic survey I conducted indicates that while almost all Jewish DPs said they wished to go to Palestine, only 40% actually moved to the Jewish state, with the rest dispersing to all parts of the West. Of these, about 120,000 went to the United States, once it opened its gates to DP immigration in late 1948.
Spannos: In your book you illustrate how, where there was a conflict between Zionist interests and the interests of Jews in DP camps, Zionist organizers, planners and activists put their interests before the well-being of the Jewish refugees. Let’s look at your first illustration, the 1945 children’s affair. What happened to Jewish children in DP camps during 1945?
Grodzinsky: It is important to see the utilitarian logic behind the Zionist stance: As the ultimate goal was to populate Palestine with multitudes of Jews, they tried to target weak Jewish populations. Strong communities were less interested in Palestine immigration: When things are good, as they were in America (relatively speaking, of course), why move to a war zone? Thus a decision was made to focus on the Jewish DP camps, and envoys were dispatched to Germany, driven by Ben-Gurion’s vision to bring 250,000 survivors from Germany to Palestine. If this is the goal, then a Jew heading west is not an asset. This is why the Zionists objected to initiatives aimed at evacuating Jewish child survivors from Germany right after the war. This is a shocking affair. Several thousand sick, malnourished, and vulnerable orphans, still at great risk, were forced by the Zionists to stay in the camps, even though arrangements were made for them to arrive to safety in England and France. The rest of this tragedy constitutes chapter 4 of my book.
Spannos: Another illustration of Zionist self-interest over Jewish suffering post-holocaust is the 1948 compulsory draft of Jews, from DP camps, into the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). How did Zionists institutionalize forced conscription in the DP camps?
Grodzinsky: Indeed, the drive to bring Jewish DPs to Palestine reached its peak in 1948, when the end of the British Mandate over Palestine, and the subsequent declaration of statehood, led to a full-scale war. Serious manpower shortages led the Israelis to look for volunteers for the IDF in the DP camps. Survivors were reluctant: “We have already smelled fire,” said many “let others smell it now.” The failure to recruit volunteers led to a forced conscription, officially enacted on April 11th, 1948. It brought 7,800 new draftees to Palestine, a significant addition to the fighting army. I recognize that the thought of a Zionist forced conscription in the U.S. controlled zone of Germany sounds insane. Yet it actually happened, as massive documentation I discovered in the Jewish DP archives in New York and Tel Aviv indicates: The American military government quite generously let the DPs run their camps as almost fully autonomous localities; Zionist survivors, together with envoys from Palestine, organized and took control of these camps early on, as I detail in the book. When the time came, they could exercise this control, sending holocaust survivors to fight in a land they had never seen, whose language they did not speak, and most importantly, for a cause they did not necessarily support.
Spannos: I understand that the Zionists at times even resorted to using violent methods against Jews in DP camps for the purposes of conscription. What did this look like?
Grodzinsky: Yes, violent methods were used when necessary. I was shocked to find eviction orders issues to draft deserters, fines, other punishments, and in some instances, even physical beatings. Most important, to my mind, is not the violence itself but the coercion, And the irony: The very movement that was created to bring deliverance to the Jews now took possession of Jewish national identity, and in its name expropriated the rights of the people, so that its own needs could be served. Thus, while the establishment of the state was predicated on a conflict with the Arabs over territory, it also led to a conflict with Jews over people. Much has been written on the former, less on the latter. My book is an attempt to fill this gap by focusing a critical lens on the actions of the pre-state Zionist movement. As I was writing it, I tried to give a voice to simple, ordinary Jews, whose suffering as they were ground by the mills of big ideas is rarely discussed. I sought to emphasize the fate of regular individuals, whose life stories form a rich web of alternative Jewish paths.
Spannos: You write that “If we would like to see the gravity of the problem, and also try to connect it to our present day existence, it is important to understand what in the eyes of the Zionists legitimized the conscription of Jews in Europe to the Israeli army.” How did they legitimize it and how was it made possible that it—historically—was able to make sense to them?
Grodzinsky: We can perhaps end this interview where we started: The feeling among Zionists that they have the fate of all Jews in their possession. As rabbi Michael Lerner, in his preface to my book, puts it “Zionist arrogance did not start with the Palestinians.” Primo Levi, in his book The Truce tells about a post-war incident where Zionists hooked up an extra car to a train he was riding on his long way home from Auschwitz. They were focused, self-assured, confident, he writes. They did not ask anyone whether they could connect their car to the train, “they just did it.” Many good things happen in this way. But not always. Regarding Holocaust survivors, the Zionists were focused, clear-headed, with a coherent plan. That’s no small matter. Yet this self-assurance “ever so familiar to many a reader I’m sure” â has also led to much suffering and destruction.
Israeli Prime Ministers constantly mislead the American public
In her autobiography, Golda Meir paints herself as a “mother” to the Palestinian people, never mentioning the destruction of their homes and villages. But of course she knew the terrible truth, having said in a rare moment of clarity:
“It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]’. (As acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department, she had visited Arab Haifa and reported back to the Jewish Agency Executive on May 6, 1948; from “The birth of the Palestinian Refuge problem revisited” by Benny Morris, p. 309)
The American public has been deceived, over and over again, by the Prime Ministers of Israel and other high-ranking Israelis. They tell us they want “peace” when what they really want is the American money, weapons and influence that allow them to continue the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, the theft of their land, and the creation of a fascist state that puts “achievements” above human happiness.
Jewish hypocrisy mounts to the skies
“What do you gain, Soviet Union, from this miserable policy? Where is your decency? Would it be a disgrace for you to give up this battle? (Golda Meir, on the suppression of freedom of Jews in the USSR to the World Conference on Soviet Jewry, Brussels, published in the New York Times, 2-20-1976)
But what about the miserable polices of Israel, its lack of decency, and its disgraceful treatment of Palestinian women and children? Why is the pot calling the kettle black?
Serfs and slaves always rebel: hence, 9-11
But why are we are seeing the same sort of racism at work in Israel today that once caused so much suffering for Jewish children during the Holocaust? According to pro-Israeli propagandists, I should say “Never again!” to every act of anti-Semitism against Jews, but I should either wink at or turn my back on acts of Jewish anti-Semitism against Palestinians. (Why?)
” . . . if you follow the polls in Israel for the last 30 or 40 years,
you clearly find a vulgar racism that includes a third of the population
who openly declare themselves to be racist.
This racism is of the nature of “I hate Arabs” and “I wish Arabs would be dead“.
If you also follow the judicial system in Israel
you will see there is discrimination against Palestinians,
and if you further consider the 1967 occupied territories
you will find there are already two judicial systems in operation
that represent two different approaches to human life:
one for Palestinian life and the other for Jewish life.
Additionally there are two different approaches to property and to land.
Palestinian property is not recognised as private property
because it can be confiscated.
—Nelson Mandela
The leaders of Israel and their legions of apologists and propagandists helped bring about 9-11 and two terrible wars, by constantly demanding that Americans support Israel, when Israel is literally crushing the life from millions of Palestinians. Have some Muslim men reacted with violence? Yes, they have. But what would we say about a slave who saw his wife and children being treated like animals, if he rose up against his “masters”? Would we be shocked if he resorted to violence? Of course not. And we must keep in mind that, according to the American Declaration of Independence, it is not a crime to break an illegal law created by an unjust government; rather, it is the right and duty of men to rise up and forcefully overthrow anyone who deprives them of their self-evident rights. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were rich aristocrats whose living conditions were far better than those of most Palestinians today. They claimed the right to rise up and kill their English overlords, as long as those overlords denied them equal rights and representative government. So according to the American Founding Fathers, unless Israel grants Palestinians either fully equal rights or independence, they have the right and duty to rebel.
Israel’s racial discrimination is daily life of most Palestinians.
Since Israel is a Jewish state, Israeli Jews are able to accrue special rights
which non-Jews cannot do.
Palestinian Arabs have no place in a “Jewish” state.
Apartheid is a crime against humanity.
Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property.
It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality.
It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians,
contrary to the rules of international law.
It has, in particular, waged war against a civilian population,
in particular children.
—Nelson Mandela
The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against their Nazi overlords. The Nazis had created “laws” they expected the Jews to obey, but those laws were racist and therefore illegal. Americans understand the right of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto to rise up against their Nazi overlords. Americans also understand the right of black slaves to disobey the racist, illegal “laws” of their white “masters.” Americans also understand that it was the racist, illegal “laws” of the white settlers that caused Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to go on the warpath. Today Americans freely admit that it was Andrew Jackson who was wrong, and Sitting Bull who was right when he hoped for peace but chose the path of war when a racist white government proved it didn’t want “peace,” but to continually steal land from Indians, by breaking treaty after treaty.
So Americans should be able to understand the predicament of the Palestinians today, since they are experiencing very similar injustices at the hands of the governments of Israel and the United States.
American hypocrisy compounds Israeli hypocrisy
In their slavish obedience to Israel’s demands for “support,” Americans have also become raging hypocrites, by claiming rights for themselves which they deny to Palestinians. What would George Washington & Co. have done, if they were Palestinians and Americans were trying to dictate their fates from across a vast ocean? I have no doubt that Washington & Co. would have fired salvo after salvo at the agents of the distant tyrannical government attempting to rule them from afar. If we had asked them why they were attacking us, they would have said, “Because you either have to give us equal rights and representative government, or you have to grant us independence. Until you do, you are imperialists and we have the right and duty to kill you.”
If we believe our Founding Fathers, and have no wish to be imperialists because being imperialists brings down the wrath of other people on our hubristic heads, we need to avoid repeating the mistakes of the British monarchy. And Israel also needs to stop constantly repeating King George’s mistake. King George could have avoided fighting the Revolutionary War by doing one of two eminently sensible things: (1) He could have treated the Americans as equals, or (2) he could have granted them independence.
King George’s mistake was electing to employ force because he wanted to impose his will on people who refused to be his lapdogs. Now Palestinians have informed Israel and the United States that they are no one’s lapdogs. According to our own Declaration of Independence, we should inform Israel that it’s time to make the Palestinians fully equal citizens, or to grant them their independence. The only other possibility is war, but why should the United States participate in a war in which it has nothing to gain and everything to lose?
Washington and Jefferson advised Americans to avoid costly entanglements with other nations. The costliest entanglement of all time would no doubt be a major war in the Middle East, since there are 1.5 billion Muslims today and it would be mind-bogglingly expensive to defeat them. But why should we try? We have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Is there any doubt what Washington and Jefferson would advise? Why are we fighting on the side of the imperialists, against the democrats? It makes no sense.
But then there is no reason for Israel to fight, either. Israel has simply refused to do what everyone knows must be done. Why? Because it has decided to steal land it doesn’t even need, for ideological (fascist) purposes. But why should Americans pay for such a program with our money and lives? The cost to date has been beyond enormous: 9-11, two wars, multitudes of lives lost, huge sums of money flushed down the drain, with nothing at all to show for any of it. How did this come about? Let’s go back to the origins of the crisis …
“There could be no greater calamity
than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people.
Despite the great wrong that has been done us,
we must strive for a just and lasting compromise with the Arab people …
Let us recall that in former times
no people lived in greater friendship with us
than the ancestors of these Arabs.”
—Albert Einstein
The origin of the conflict: Jewish racism against Palestinians
Golda Meir was wrong. Obviously, there was a Palestinian people, and today there undeniably still are millions of Palestinians, many of them innocent children living in very dire straits inside the walled ghetto of Gaza, under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and in squalid refugee camps scattered across the Middle East (to understand the horror, younger readers might conjure up images of the movie District 9). And of course today almost no one who knows anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict denies that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their land during the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948, to Jews intent on creating a Jewish state in Palestine.
“Israel should withdraw from all the areas
which it won from the Arabs in 1967,
and in particular Israel should withdraw completely
from the Golan Heights,
from south Lebanon
and from the West Bank.”
—Nelson Mandela,
But how did it start? How did someone like Golda Meir, a mother as well as a Prime Minister, come to dehumanize Palestinian children? Why did she lie, or seem to lie, to the British and American publics? And what was her purpose, since no sane person lies without a reason? And how is it possible that so many other high-ranking Israeli Jews have said things just as horrible, and worse? If American politicians utter ethnic slurs, they get reprimanded or fired. Hell, sportscasters get fired in the United States for making racist remarks. So how is it possible that Israeli politicians get away with calling Palestinians “nonexistent,” “grasshoppers,” “cockroaches,” etc.? Can the old saw that “where’s there smoke, there’s fire” apply in this case? Is Israel is a bastion of racial prejudice, like Nazi Germany?
Israel must “strive for peace based on justice,
based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories,
and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state
on those territories side by side with Israel,
both with secure borders.”
—Desmond Tutu
But then why is the government of the United States providing Israel with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of financial aid and advanced weapons? Shouldn’t we tell Israeli Jews to act like civilized human beings, if they want our friendship, support, money, political influence and military hardware?
As Ron Paul has pointed out, Americans are morally responsible for what we do with our money. We are also morally responsible for what we do with our weapons. If I give a gun to a known pedophile and he uses it to rape a child, I am at best an idiot, if not his accomplice. If we give money and weapons to racists intent on inflicting massive suffering on the people they despise ― millions of them women and children who have never hurt a fly ― what does that say about us as a nation and as a people?
The study of history can be both fascinating and frightening, especially when we see history repeating itself in terrible ways. Today we all understand Adolf Hitler’s horrendous “final solution” for the children of Auschwitz: extermination. But have we ever bothered to ask ourselves about the likely fate of the children of Gaza, unless the world acts to save them? And how many people are aware of the many disturbing parallels between Adolf Hitler and Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism and thus of the modern nation of Israel? Does what Golda Meir said about Palestinian children ― that they don’t exist ― relate to the twisted “logic” of Hitler and Herzl?
Yes, I believe it does. This letter by Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectuals to the New York Times, published on December 4, 1948, discusses the fascist leanings of the nascent state of Israel. Einstein pointed out that Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel, was the leader of a racist, terrorist right-wing organization similar in disturbing ways to the Nazi party:
“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ … a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist right-wing chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who opposed fascism throughout the world, if currently informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents … A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin … this incident exemplified the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other fascist parties, they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions.
The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine, bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike) and misrepresentation are means, and a ‘Leader State’ is the goal.
In the light of the foregoing consideration, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin’s efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel of support to Begin. The undersigned therefore take the means publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party, and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.” [pp. 352-353]
A scanned image of this letter is available at this link.
Einstein’s support for a Jewish presence in Palestine clearly did not extend to Jews seizing control of the region and subduing or displacing Arabs. His dream was always of a form of Judaism based on the teachings of Hebrew prophets who called for chesed [mercy, compassion, lovingkindness] and social justice. As he saw the nature of the Jewish state that emerged, Einstein distanced himself from the racism, nationalism and militarism which soon became its watchwords.
Einstein considered the message of the prophets to be the living, beating heart of Judaism, saying: “The Zionist goal gives us an actual opportunity to put into practice, through a viable solution of the Jewish-Arab problem, those principles of tolerance and justice that we owe primarily to our prophets. I am convinced that the living transmission of those principles is the most important thing in Judaism.” He also said: “To be a Jew, after all, means first of all, to acknowledge and follow in practice those fundamentals in humaneness laid down in the Bible: fundamentals without which no sound and happy community of men can exist.”
He also said: “I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from practical consideration, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the ideas of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain, especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state. We are no longer the Jews of the Maccabee period. A return to a nation in the political sense of the word would be equivalent to turning away from the spiritualization of our community which we owe to the genius of our prophets.”
Voices of Reason: an Eye for an Eyelash?
Before we study the origins of the Jewish anti-Semitism against Arabs, let’s first consider these voices of reason:
Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at the University of Oxford: “The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel’s insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash.” (“How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe,” The Guardian, January 7, 2009)
Shlaim again: “It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.” (“How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe,” The Guardian, January 7, 2009)
Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, one of two foreign doctors working at Gaza’s biggest hospital, al-Shifa, told CBS News: “I’ve seen one military person among the hundreds that we have seen and treated. So anyone who tries to portray this as sort of a ‘clean war’ against another army are lying. This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza and we can prove that with the numbers.” (CBS News, January 5, 2009)
[I have read a number of reports by Israeli soldiers who said they never saw an enemy combatant during the invasion of Gaza. If there had been any major resistance, there would have been large numbers of dead Israeli soldiers. But there were only 13 Israeli deaths, compared to around 1,400 Palestinian deaths. More than 300 of the Palestinian dead were children. Once again the numbers don’t lie: it was a massacre.]
Al Haq, a Palestinian legal rights group, reports that 80 per cent of Palestinian fatalities have been civilians. According to figures cited by the World Health Organization, at least 40 per cent have been children. (Jonathan Cook, “Civilian death toll spurs legal action,” The National, January 9, 2009)
“Even the death toll cited above does little to communicate the true one-sidedness of the wider violence, injustice and cruelty. One hardly knows where to begin. For example, largely unmentioned by the media, prior to the latest invasion, 14 Israelis had been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from Gaza over the last seven years as against 5,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks.” (Seumas Milne, “Israel’s onslaught on Gaza is a crime that cannot succeed,” The Guardian, December 30, 2008)
[Also, it’s important to note that the rocket firings are not entirely without reason. For more than sixty years Israel has denied Palestinians their self-evident rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If Israel had treated American women and children with such disregard, and had inflicted so much suffering on them, American men would be raining down missiles on Tel Aviv. So why not be honest, and admit that men of all races and creeds will “fight fire with fire” when their loved ones are made to suffer unjustly?]
Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) characterized the death toll as reaching “alarming proportions” and indicative of “extreme violence indiscriminately affecting civilians.”
But don’t the Jews own all the land and have the right to impose their will on Palestinians?
In the midst of so much carnage is there any rational, legal or moral basis for Jews to claim they “own” all the land? Here are comments on the matter by H. G. Wells, Gandhi, Churchill, FDR, and other luminaries:
“If it is proper to ‘reconstitute’ a Jewish State which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.” (H. G. Wells, quoted by Frank C. Sakran in Palestine Dilemma, p. 204)
“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English, or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct.” (Mahatma Gandhi, Tendulkar, Mahatma, Vol. IV, 1938, p. 312)
“The Arabs of Palestine used to have the same rights over Palestinian territory as the French exercise in France and the English in England. These rights have been violated without any provocation on their part. There is no evading this simple fact.” (Maxime Rodinson, Israel and the Arabs, 1968)
“We Germans feel that the Palestinian people are entitled to self-determination as much as any other people in the world, as much as we Germans.” (Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, speaking at a press conference in Cairo on December 28, 1977)
“The cause of unrest in Palestine, and the only cause, arises from the Zionist movement, and from our promises and pledges in regard to it.” (Winston Churchill, House of Commons, June 14, 1921)
“A Zionist state in Palestine can only be installed and maintained by force and we should not be a party to it…” (President Franklin Roosevelt, 5 March 1945, Department of State’s Foreign Relations, Volume III)
“Because we took the land this gives us the image of being bad, of being aggressive. The Jews always considered that the land belonged to them, but in fact it belonged to the Arabs. I would go further: I would say the original source of this conflict lies with Israel, with the Jews—and you can quote me.” (Yehoshofat Harkabi, former Israeli Chief of Military Intelligence, in “Peace Won’t be a Plane Ticket to Cairo,” International Armed Forces Journal, October 1973, p.30)
“The Palestinians had lived in the country since the dawn of history … They are the earliest and the original inhabitants of Palestine. The Palestinians of today are the descendants of the Canaanites, the Philistines, and the other early tribes which inhabited the country.” (Henry Cattan, Palestine and International Law, p. 13)
“If the views of the advanced Zionists prevail there is trouble ahead. Many, very many, intelligent and informed Jews admit this. It is conceded that the present inhabitants of Palestine have occupied their lands for centuries; indeed, some of the Syrian communities claim descent from the Hittites who were in possession at the dawn of history. Be that as it may, all who know the situation from actual contact and not from propaganda leaflets admit that these people have dwelt in their present homes for two thousand years, that the occupancy of the Jews does not go back to immemorial times, and that their sojourn before the Dispersion was brief. Why should these ‘old settlers’ be expelled, they ask, to make room for newcomers?” (Stephen Bonsal, Suitors and Suppliants at Versailles, p. 45)
“…the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a ‘right’ to Palestine based on an occupation of two thousand years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.” (Report of the King-Crane Commission, August, 1919)
“Palestine is not the original home of the Jews. It was acquired by them after a ruthless conquest, and they have never occupied the whole of it, which they now openly demand. They have no more valid claim to Palestine than the descendants of the ancient Romans have to this country. The Romans occupied Britain as long as the Israelites occupied Palestine, and they left behind them in this country far more valuable and useful work. “If we are going to admit claims based on conquest thousands of years ago, the whole world will have to be turned upside down…” (Lord Sydenham, Hansard, House of Lords, June 21, 1922)
“I believe it was the intention of the Zionists, right from the beginning, to dispossess the Palestinians from their homes, and I believe the British Government was aware of this.” (Arnold Toynbee, in the introduction to an address by Sir John Richmond at a meeting in the House of Commons, London, May 27, 1971)
“…the extent to which the refugees were savagely driven out by the Israelis as a part of a deliberate master plan has been insufficiently recognized.” (John H. Davis, Commissioner-General of UNRWA 1959-63, The Evasive Peace, p. 57)
“Jewish terrorism … in such savage massacres as Deir Yassin … ‘encouraged’ Arabs to leave the areas the Jews wished to take over for strategic or demographic reasons. They tried to make as much of Israel as free of Arabs as possible.” (I. F. Stone, New York Review of Books, August 3, 1967)
“The Jewish combatants there and elsewhere made skillful use of psychological warfare to break their opponents’ morale, and the effect upon the civilians was only what was to be expected. At a later stage, the Israeli armed forces did not confine their pressure on the Arab civilian population to playing upon their fears. They forcibly expelled them: for example, the population of ‘Akka (including refugees from Haifa) in May; the population of Lydda and Ramleh (including refugees from Jaff) in July; and the population of Beersheba and Western Galilée in October.” (George Kirk, The Middle East 1945-50, p. 264)
“The Zionist version of the Palestinian exodus is a myth manufactured after the cataclysm took place. If the Zionists could show that the refugees had really fled without cause, at the express instructions of their own politicians, they would greatly erode the world’s sympathy for their plight—and, in consequence, the pressure on themselves to allow them to return. Thus in public speeches and scholarly-looking pamphlets they peddled this myth the world over. It was not until 1959 that the Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi, exposed it for what it is. His painstaking researches were independently corroborated by an Irish scholar, Erskine Childers, two years later. Together, they demonstrated that the myth was not just a gross misrepresentation of accepted or even plausible facts; the very ‘facts’ themselves had been invented. Orders for the evacuation of the civilian population had not simply been issued, the Zionists said, they had been broadcast over Arab radio stations. One had come from the Mufti himself. This was the cornerstone of the Zionist case. Yet when these two scholars took the trouble to examine the record—to go through the specially opened archives of Arab governments, contemporary Arabic newspapers and the radio monitoring reports of both the BBC and the CIA—they found that no such orders had been issued, let alone broadcast, and that when challenged to produce chapter-and-verse evidence, the date and origin of just one such order, the Zionists, with all the apparatus of the State of Israel now at their disposal, were quite unable to do so. They found, on the contrary, that Arab and Palestinian authorities had repeatedly called on the people to stay put and the Arab radio services had consistently belittled the true extent of Zionist atrocities.” (David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, pp. 136-7)
But even if Palestinians fled their homes voluntarily, there still was no reason non-combatants should have been prevented from returning once the hostilities were over. And there was certainly no “need” for their homes and villages to be destroyed. It takes a considerable amount of planning and execution to destroy hundreds of villages, so the best argument that this was the plan is the fact that it happened.
“It seemed to me to be symptomatic of a certain blindness to the human reactions of others that so many Israelis professed not to understand why the Arabs who had been driven from their lands should continue to hate and try to injure those who had driven them out.” (General E.L.M. Burns, Chief of Staff of UNTSO, Between Arab and Israeli, p. 162)
“It is my considered opinion that the State of Israel is a racist state in the full meaning of this term: In this state people are discriminated against, in the most permanent and legal way and in the most important areas of life, only because of their origin. This racist discrimination began in Zionism and is carried out today mainly in co-operation with the institutions of the Zionist movement.” (Dr. Israel Shahak, “The Racist Nature of Zionism and of the Zionist State of Israel”, Pi-Ha’aton (the weekly newspaper of the students of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), November 5, 1975)
“Israel has gradually become a more and more openly racist country. Anyone not Jewish is at best second-class in Israel.” (Maxim Ghilan, 1974, How Israel Lost Its Soul, Pelican Books, London)
“…Now in the State of Israel, those who are tempted along the hallucinatory path of power and conquest have to justify their course by calling on the same devils who, in the Diaspora, were directed against themselves.” (Maxim Ghilan, 1974, How Israel Lost Its Soul, Pelican Books, London)
“—-The State of Israel is presented, both at home and abroad, as the embodiment of social democracy, a mixture of all that is good in capitalism and in socialism, the original, the archetypal Welfare State. This suggestion is, of course, a lie.” (Maxim Ghilan, 1974, How Israel Lost Its Soul, Pelican Books, London)
“…Israeli society is basically a settlers’ society. It does not primarily concern itself with the “Indians” or “Niggers” of the land. Its first priority is the creation of a united economic establishment for the Jewish Israelis. Only then does it concern itself (almost as an afterthought) with the captive Palestinians.” (Maxim Ghilan, 1974, How Israel Lost Its Soul, Pelican Books, London)
Whence Such Virulent Racism?
It has been quite some time since the United States had a full-throttle racist at the helm. Perhaps the last one really bad one was Andrew Jackson, who forced Native American women and children to walk the Trail of Tears. Before him, there were any number of Presidents who spoke glowingly of the glories of “equality” and “democracy” while owning slaves themselves, including Thomas Jefferson, the coiner of the ringing phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” and the father of our country, George Washington. But truth be told, Washington and Jefferson considered themselves to be “more equal” than blacks and Native Americans. Jefferson raised his children by Sally Hemmings as slaves in his own (admittedly very expensive) home, and once had a slave whipped for stealing nails, while a sermon on Christian ethics was read to him. If the irony of that escapes you, God help you, but hopefully it didn’t.
My point is simple and hopefully obvious by now: the hypocrisy of people like Washington, Jefferson and Golda Meir can result in devastating suffering for innocent children. Fortunately for the United States, it’s been awhile since we had a Grand Wizard of the KKK running the show. Unfortunately for the children of Gaza, Israel has had nothing but Grand Wizards of the KKK running the show.
As you read this page, please keep in mind that I am an editor and publisher of Holocaust poetry ― not a racist and certainly not an anti-Semite. I am for the Jewish people, not against them. But to not be a racist, I must also be for the Palestinian people, most of whom are Semites. If I oppose what Nazi Germany did to the Jews during the Shoah (Hebrew for “Catastrophe”), then I must also oppose Zionism when it inflicts similar suffering on Palestinians, at it has during the Nakba (Arabic for “Catastrophe”). If I criticize Nazi Germany, that doesn’t make me anti-German. If I criticize my own government, as I often do, that doesn’t make me anti-American. And if I criticize the government of Israel for allowing Jewish racists to abuse and humiliate Palestinian children on a daily basis, the same way an American “democracy” once allowed white racists to abuse and humiliate black children on a daily basis, that certainly doesn’t make me an anti-Semite. In all three cases, my criticism is aimed at the policies and actions of governments and individuals fully capable of changing their boorish, brutal, reprehensible behavior. It is not “wrong” to criticize brutes and boors, and it is not “unfair” to suggest that Israel needs to do what the United States did, when it finally abandoned Jim Crow laws and kangaroo courts during the days of the American Civil Rights Movement.
And please keep in mind that I am not opposed to the dream of Zionism. If any family or extended family wants to live together in peace and security, I can certainly understand and sympathize, because I feel the same way about my family. But I understand that if I want my family to live together in peace and security, we can’t steal my neighbors’ land and abuse their children, or we’ll have a war on our hands. This is, of course, the dilemma Israeli Jews face today, because the government of Israel keeps stealing Palestinian land and allowing the abuse of Palestinian children. To their eternal shame, many Jews and Christians use the Bible to excuse the inexcusable, while turning blind eyes and deaf ears to the cries of multitudes of innocent women and children. Of course German Christians once sat in the pews of their tidy, white-washed churches and sang hymns of praise to God and Jesus, while Jewish children suffered unimaginable torments and despair just a few yards away. And of course white American Christians once sat in the pews of their tidy, white-washed churches and sang hymns of praise to God and Jesus, while black children suffered and died in slave hovels and Native American children walked the Trail of Tears. Was it really the “divine plan” for Christians to live out their “manifest destiny” at the expense of the people of other races and creeds? One would hope Jesus had higher standards. But then why do American Christians insist that it is the “manifest destiny” of Jews to trample Palestinian children underfoot, when there is plenty of land for everyone, if only Israeli Jews would learn to share and share alike? Much of the land Israel stole from Palestinians in 1948 lies fallow to this day, inside the borders of Israel, because most Israeli Jews prefer to live in urban areas. Obviously, it makes no sense to steal land one doesn’t even need, from children who are perishing and their families, especially when in so doing one brings the world to the brink of World War III.
How can such incomprehensible things happen, in the modern world? I hope you will bear with me for a few minutes, because I believe I can make a strong case that the children of Gaza face the same ominous demon that the children of Auschwitz once faced: a virulent, fanatical, unreasoning strain of anti-Semitism. But I think I can also make a strong case for what the world clearly needs to do, to save the children of Gaza. The solution is simpler than almost anyone believes, although “simple” does not mean “easy.” I will quickly summarize my main points, then provide a wealth of facts to back up my main assertions. Most of these facts will come in the form of direct quotations from the diaries and other writings of the leading Zionists: Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, et al. As with Hitler, these men’s words both reveal and betray them. They repeatedly, often arrogantly, announced what they were doing, and why, in no uncertain terms. If you take the time to read this page in its entirety, I believe you may agree that I have a strong case when I say that:
(1) Adolf Hitler and Theodor Herzl began with the same “solution” to the “Jewish problem”
(2) Like Hitler, Herzl, the founder of political Zionism and the modern state of Israel, was an anti-Semite
(3) The founders of the modern state of Israel practiced anti-Semitism, directed at Palestinians
(4) The early Zionists did not merely seek a safe haven for Jews, but to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Arabs
(5) This plan was in place and being implemented long before the Holocaust
(6) The Palestinians understood what the Zionists intended and had every right to resist
(7) The solution today is for Israel to establish equal human rights, fair laws and fair courts for everyone
(8) This can be accomplished via a new UN resolution based on the American Creed, backed by economic sanctions (which will probably not be necessary once the government of Israel sees the “handwriting on the wall”)
Please keep in mind that I am offering facts and arguments for a specific purpose, which is peace and the protection of innocent women and children on both sides of the conflict, including the children of Gaza but also Israeli and American children. Why I say this will become clear, if you continue to read.
While at times I may seem to be “against” Israel, it is not my goal to attack or harm anyone, but only to help make peace possible. I simply believe that it is necessary at this time for Israeli Jews, American Jews and other Americans to admit what really happened to the Palestinians, confess that what happened cannot be justified, then do what must be done to establish peace through justice, in the form of equal rights, fair laws and fair courts for everyone in the region, without excuses or exceptions. White Americans once did very similar things to African Americans and Native Americans. But today most white Americans freely admit that what happened in the past was wrong, and we don’t continue to treat blacks and Indians as “inferior beings” or third-class citizens. If we can’t or won’t correct all the injustices of the past, we can at the very least stop heaping new injustices on the heads of innocent women and children. The first step is to stop trying to justify the unjustifiable and excuse the inexcusable. The next step is to immediately and unconditionally grant Palestinians equal rights and the protections of fair laws and courts. This is only just, and history has proven that fair laws and courts can lead to racial peace, even in the wake of the most terrible atrocities. Soon after post-WWII Germany established fair laws and courts, Jews were able to live in relative peace there, despite the recent and still-fresh horrors of the Holocaust. Soon after the United States finally granted minorities the protections of fair laws and courts, the grandchildren of black slaves were able to attend integrated schools, and today we have a black president, black senators, black judges and black generals. The myth of white “superiority” was always a myth; so too is the myth of Jewish “superiority” to Palestinians. If we want to avoid World War III, we need to learn the hard lessons of the Holocaust and say “Never again!” to such things happening to other people’s children, or there will inevitably be hell to pay.
Herzl, Hitler and the terrible implications of Jewish anti-Semitism for the children of Gaza
Was Theodor Herzl an anti-Semite who, like Adolf Hitler, directed intense self-loathing at people who looked like him: short, dark, non-Aryan? Is the modern state of Israel running on the same sort of high-octane anti-Semitic racism that fueled the boilers of Nazi Germany? If so, what does this mean for the children of Gaza and for the Palestinians as a people, since they are not Aryan in appearance?
What sort of world do we inhabit, if 65 years after the end of the Holocaust the children of Gaza must live in abject misery and peril of their lives because they “look wrong”? Why have rich, powerful Jewish Overlords herded them into giant holding pens to keep them from “getting out of line,” when they haven’t done anything to harm anyone? This was the modus operandi of the Nazis: to collectively punish all Jews for the crimes of a few. But if it was wrong for Hitler’s disciples to herd innocent Jewish children into giant corrals, how can it be right for Herzl’s disciples to do the same thing to innocent Palestinian children?
The parallels are indeed fascinating, frightening and disturbing … especially when we consider that another event like 9-11 or even World War III could be triggered by Israel’s horrendous treatment of the Palestinians. What if a plague breaks out in Gaza and the Muslim world blames Israel and the United States for the deaths of multitudes of innocents? World War III might be the result. So it is not only wrong for Israel to deny Palestinians human rights and freedom, but it is very dangerous for Israeli and American children as well, because once people have been stripped of their ability to care for themselves, whatever happens to them becomes the responsibility of the people in power. If a Jewish child died due to poor medical care in a Nazi concentration camp, who was responsible: the child, his parents, or the Nazis? The answer is obvious. But then who is responsible for the deaths of Palestinians who die in the shadows of Israel’s so-called “security walls” because ambulances were help up at the gates? Who built the walls? Israel. Who supplied hundreds of billions of dollars in financial aid and advanced weapons to Israel, without ever requiring an accounting of how the money was spent or how the weapons were used? The United States. While Israeli Jews and American Christians constantly harp on “Islamic terrorism,” in reality the governments of Israel and the United States have inflicted far more terror on far more people over a much longer period of time. If we want to avoid another 9-11, World War III and a nuclear Armageddon, it’s past time to confront the truth and stop harming other men’s women and children and causing them to die prematurely, because to cause the premature death of an innocent person is murder. If my child needs a doctor and you deliberately keep my child’s ambulance from reaching a hospital, and my child dies, what does that make you, and how should you expect me to feel about you? If we want peace with the Muslim world, we must understand that we cannot afford to give money and weapons to anyone who chooses to deny Muslim children the things we cherish for our own children: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (or, at the very least, not living in abject misery for the sake of robber barons).
Herzl and Hitler: twin sons of different mothers?
How can such terrible things happen, in the first place? Did the father of Zionism and Israel, Theodor Herzl, agree with Adolf Hitler that there was a “Jewish problem” simply because most Jews were not tall, fair-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed Nordic demigods? Was Herzl’s “solution” to the Jewish problem exactly the same as Hitler’s original “solution” (i.e., exporting Jews to some distant, remote hinterland where they could not offend Aryans by being seen and heard)? If so, how should the civilized world, which has determined racism to be an abomination, deal with Israeli anti-Semitism against Palestinians? Has Israel erected walls twice as high as the Berlin Wall throughout Palestine because most Jews decline to see or hear the suffering of the Semites their government and military persecute so terribly: the Palestinian Arabs? If it was wrong for Germans to refuse to see and hear the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust, how can Jews justify closing their eyes and ears to the suffering of Palestinians today? (Of course pro-Israel propagandists routinely claim that the walls are for “security” purposes only, but this is patently untrue, an obvious lie. Security walls are built along borders, on one’s own side of the land. But Israel’s “security walls” snake deep inside the West Bank, stealing valuable land and water resources from the Palestinians. If I build a wall halfway across my neighbor’s yard, using armed men to keep him at bay, it’s obvious that I’m trying to steal his land, so if I claim to want “peace” with him, of course he knows I’m lying. If Israel wants true peace and real security, obviously it has to stop stealing Palestinian land.)
Adolf Hitler, the prophet-evangelist-father of Nazism, didn’t set out to exterminate the Jews. The first use of the term “final solution” by the Nazis may have been in a Nazi party document published in 1931, which said: “… for the final solution of the Jewish question it is proposed to use the Jews in Germany for slave labor or for cultivation of the German swamps administered by a special SS division.” While that document is chilling enough, there is no mention of deliberate genocide.
Theodor Herzl, the prophet-evangelist-father of Zionism, didn’t set out to exterminate the Palestinians. Just as Hitler saw Jews merely as obstacles in the way of German nationalism, so Herzl saw Arabs merely as obstacles in the way of Jewish nationalism. It seems possible that Hitler never fully considered what his various solutions to the “Jewish problem” would mean for millions of completely innocent Jewish women and children. It seems possible that Herzl never fully considered what his various solutions to the “Jewish problem” would mean for millions of completely innocent Arab women and children. But Hitler’s “solutions” led to the suffering and premature deaths (i.e., murders) of multitudes of Jews, and Herzl’s “solutions” led to the suffering and premature deaths (also murders) of multitudes of Palestinians. Hitler was the single person most responsible for World War II. Herzl could be the single person most responsible for World War III. And the two seem very similar in a number of ways:
They both had loving, doting mothers who encouraged their artistic pursuits.
They were both extremely close to their mothers.
They were both intelligent but often indifferent students.
They were both daydreamers and loners who were intolerant of criticism.
The were both narcissists who suffered bouts of depression, envy, self-disgust and self-pity.
They both read poetry and wrote poetry.
Mussolini called Hitler a sentimentalist; Herzl’s biographer Amos Elon called him an “absurd sentimentalist.”
They both moved to Vienna, where they were frustrated artists (Herzl a playwright, Hitler a painter).
They were both rejected repeatedly in their chosen fields of artistic endeavor.
Their artistic failures and non-Aryan looks drove them both to self-loathing, perhaps to self-hatred.
Hitler came to loathe the “alien face” of the Jew: perhaps because he despised his own?
Herzl spoke of finding a land where Jews with “hooked noses” and “bow legs” could live apart.
They were both great admirers of German Kultur (culture) and detested Eastern/Oriental culture.
They both considered Slavs and other non-Aryans to be inferior, “servant peoples.”
The were both obsessed with “the Jewish problem.”
They both spoke and wrote extensively about the “Jewish problem.”
They both came up with multiple highly implausible “solutions” to the “Jewish problem.”
Hitler’s “solutions” including exporting Jews to other nations, enslavement, and genocide.
Herzl’s “solutions” included fighting duels, mass conversion, intermarriage and ethnic cleansing of Arabs.
They both were avid admirers of Wagner, an anti-Semite who called Jews “a colony of worms.”
They both wrote glowingly of Martin Luther, an anti-Semite who advocated robbing and killing Jews.
Although being short (around 5′ 8″) and dark, they both admired tall, blue-eyed, fair-skinned people.
They were both infatuated with women with “golden” hair and blue eyes.
Hitler married Eva Braun, a golden-haired, blue-eyed woman.
Herzl married Julie Naschauer, a “petite, blond, blue-eyed” woman.
They both despised the physical characteristics of Jews, Arabs and other “Orientals” (i.e., Semites).
They both had “crazy dreams” which they made come true, against all odds.
They were both charismatics; people compared Herzl to the Hebrew prophets and Christ.
They both acquired infatuated disciples who considered them to be “the Messiah.”
They both spoke of being prophets and instruments or helpers of the Messiah.
They both believed they were meant to personally intervene in human history.
Like Hitler, Herzl was convinced that he personally would “save” his people.
Like Hitler, Herzl was fascinated by the “phenomenon of the mob” and mob manipulation and control.
Hitler was a Nazi; Herzl was an Ashkenazi Jew.
Herzl left a detailed record of his thoughts, in the form of his own “massive notes, diaries and letters.” Readers interested in verifying my facts above should read Herzl, by Amos Elon, because Elon’s biography is based on the written record Herzl left us himself. Few lives have been as extensively and thoroughly documented as those of Herzl and Hitler ― yet another parallel.
Et Tu Brute? Jewish anti-Semitism
Hitler and Herzl seemed to loathe the people who looked the most like themselves. Is this not symptomatic of some deep-seated disease, which needs to be cured once and for good? Why hasn’t Israel received the message the Jews waited long centuries to hear: that there is nothing wrong with being short, dark, “different” or non-Aryan. Hitler is dead. The Nazis were defeated. The Holocaust is over. Why has Israel become a bastion of racism, when Jews should prize racial equality like the proverbial pearl of great price?
Why do so many Israelis favor Jews with Germanic origins over Jews of oriental extraction? Isn’t there something terribly wrong with a society that sees one person as “good/clean/superior” and another person as a “bad/unclean/inferior” based on skin tone and some strip of dirt where their ancestors originated? What sort of nation would the United States be, if we had to know a young girl’s ethnic and geographical origins, in order to properly value her as a human being?
The genesis and evolution of Hitler’s final solution
Hitler’s “final solution” evolved over time and only became genocide when he realized that feeding and caring for millions of Jews who could no longer feed and care for themselves (because the Nazis had stolen their land, homes and property) was incredibly expensive. In the cold calculations of fascism, there is a limit to how much money superior beings are willing to invest in keeping inferior beings alive and in good health. Now that Israel is faced with feeding and caring for millions of despised Palestinians, will its leaders come to the same chilling conclusion? Is genocide inevitable for the children of Gaza, unless the world persuades Israel that Hitler and Herzl were wrong?
Will the world stand by and allow Israel to do to the children of Gaza what Nazi Germany did to the children of Auschwitz?
Hitler tried to “export” his “Jewish problem” to other countries for years. It was not until 1940-1941 that he junked the last of his hare-brained schemes (to export the Jews to Madagascar) and decided that the final “final solution” would be genocide. This decision seems to have been reached during the time that Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, was being planned. Russia had millions of Jews who were spread out across a huge geographical area. It would have been incredibly expensive and a logistical nightmare to round them up and transport them to concentration camps, in the middle of a war between two military titans. So the decision was made for Nazi assassins to accompany the regular German troops and shoot Jews and other “undesirables” on sight. The assassins would kill women and children, not just men. Once this horrendous decision had been made, it was only “logical” for the Nazis to start killing women and children in the European concentration camps as well, along with any men unable to provide slave labor.
It seems inconceivable that modern human beings could be so coldly, so inhumanly “logical.” But of course white American Christians once made Native American women and children walk the Trail of Tears, and many of them died horrible deaths along the way. And of course white American Christians once forced black women and children to serve as slaves, and many of them died exquisitely horrible deaths — including those who perished in the dark, dank, festering holds of slave ships. So if today’s “people of the book” are willing and able to consign Palestinian women and children to this new Trail of Tears, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Perhaps the ethics of Jews and Christians — like beauty and racism — are only skin deep.
The kind of racism that allows one human being to consider another human being completely and utterly insignificant is obviously the stuff of nightmares. It led to the Shoah (“Catastrophe”) of the Jews. Has it now led to the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of the Palestinians? I, for one, am convinced that it has. But why take my word for it? Let’s take a look at what the leading Jewish Zionists said themselves. Then you can draw your own conclusions …
Israeli Apartheid: did it “just happen” or was it planned, from the start?
The following quotes are drawn fromthe published books and personal diaries of leading Zionists, and from declassified Israeli government and military documents. They often read like the of Hitler and his Nazi goons, as they plotted the ethnic cleansing of the Jews in the days before their “final solution.” What do these quotes mean for the children of Gaza and Occupied Palestine?
Theodor Herzl
Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) is the person primarily responsible for the invention of Zionism as a political movement and international force. Born into a prosperous Budapest family, he was secular (not religious), cosmopolitan, an intellectual, a doctor of law, a minor play writer, and the founder of the World Zionist Organization. Herzl observed the “Dreyfus affair” in France with an understandable sense of dread (Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French military, was wrongfully convicted of treason and sent to Devil’s Island). The wave of French anti-Semitism produced (or perhaps exposed) by the Dreyfus trial led Herzl to write Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”). The book was published in 1896 with the subtitle “An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question.” (Righteous Victims, p. 20)
On June 12, 1895 Herzl wrote of the Palestinians in his diary:
“We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.” (Complete Diaries and America And The Founding Of Israel, p. 49 and Righteous Victims, p. 21-22)
Of course there is nothing “gentle” about taking what little penniless people have, denying them employment, and leaving them homeless and destitute. But that is exactly what happened to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, and there was nothing at all “gentle” about the methods employed against them at that time, or since. And please note that Herzl’s plan was formed nearly a half century before the Holocaust. The Palestinians played no role in European anti-Semitism, which was largely a Christian phenomenon. Their fate was sealed by a conspiracy between European Jews and Christian Zionists like Lord Balfour and Winston Churchill, long before the Nazis rose to power. The Holocaust accelerated the rate at which Jews emigrated to Palestine, but the Zionists were not merely looking for a safe place to land and take shelter in a storm. They came with the intent, from the beginning, of evicting the Palestinians, which meant leaving them landless, homeless and destitute, which in turn meant them suffering and dying in large numbers. This ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, with all the suffering and death it produced, would eventually lead to 9-11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why? Because the United States would eventually replace Great Britain as Israel’s “rich uncle” and benefactor, supplying Israel with hundreds of billions of dollars in financial aid and advanced weapons, while vetoing one UN resolution after another that could have helped the Palestinians become a free, independent nation. The Muslim men who opposed the Nakba did not have the military capacity to take on Israel and the United States directly, so some of them resorted to terrorism. But what about the large-scale, systematic terrorism that had been practiced against completely innocent Muslim women and children for more than fifty years? In this case the egg (Israeli and US terrorism against Palestinians) clearly preceded the chicken (Muslim terrorism against the US).
In 1897 Herzl outlined a major goal of Zionism during the first Zionist Congress convention held in Bessel, Switzerland:
“We have an important task before us. We have met here to lay the foundation-stone of the house that will someday shelter the Jewish people … We have to aim at securing legal, international guarantees for our work.” (Israel: A History, p. 14)
But what was required was only the guise of legality because there is nothing “legal” about stealing someone else’s land and freedom, while denying them basic human rights and dignity.
On September 3rd, 1897 he wrote:
“Were I to sum up the Basle Congress in a word—which I shall GUARD AGAINST PRONOUNCING PUBLICLY—it would be this: At Basle I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.” (Israel: A History, p. 15)
This policy of saying one thing publicly and another thing privately would become a hallmark of Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. They would spoon-feed tidbits of information palatable to the American public, using words like “democracy” and “equal rights,” while always intending to create a racist state with as many Jews and as few Palestinians as possible, regardless of the suffering and deaths inflicted on the Arab majority. In other words, their basic tactics were identical to Hitler’s, since Hitler demanded “living room” for “superior” Aryans and was willing to take it by hook and crook (force and robbery) at the expense of “inferior” races.
At the same time Herzl was keeping his true intentions close to the vest, he was also advocating the use of “tremendous propaganda” to woo the Jewish masses into providing the warm bodies a Jewish state would require. Twice in his book The Jewish State, Herzl spoke of using propaganda to further the Zionist cause.
Benny Morris (a Jewish historian), describes Herzl’s “game plan”:
“Herzl regarded Zionism’s triumph as inevitable, not only because life in Europe was ever more untenable for Jews, but also because it was in Europe’s interests to rid [itself of] Jews and [relieve itself] of anti-Semitism: the European political establishment would eventually be persuaded to promote Zionism. Herzl recognized that anti-Semitism would be harnessed to his own—Zionist—purposes.” (Righteous Victims, p. 21)
Herzl clearly saw the Zionist enterprise as being colonial. On July 7, 1902, he told the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in London:
I am not speaking of artificially made colonies, but self-helping colonies, which have that great national idea.” (Israel: A History, p. 21)
Thus, while the United States was firmly opposing European colonialism, and while Britain and France were in the process of granting their colonies abroad independence, European Jews were in the process of creating the world’s last (or at least hopefully its last) colony. And what is colonization, but foreigners exerting their will by force on weaker natives, resulting in massive suffering and premature deaths (i.e., murders) among the indigenous majority?
The Jewish state in Palestine, Theodor Herzl wrote, would be Europe’s bulwark against the “inferior” races, among them the detested Palestinian Arabs:
“We can be the vanguard of culture against barbarianism.” (One Palestine Complete, p. 150)
What he failed to admit to the unsuspecting general public was the tremendous degree of barbarianism that would be required for Jews to dispossess Palestinians and drive them from their land, farms and homes. His “vanguard of culture” would become like Hitler’s vanguard of superior culture annexing Eastern Europe and Russia.
Like Hitler, Herzl was a fanatic inspired by the racist and nationalistic fervors of his time. Before he arrived at the idea of ethnically cleansing Palestinians in order to create a Jewish state in Palestine, he had proposed such bizarre schemes as:
(1) Personally presenting all Jews to the Pope, for a mass conversion.
(2) Intermarrying all Jews with non-Jews.
(3) Ridding the world of the Jewish race through mass conversion and intermarriage.
(3) Having Jews fight duels with non-Jews in order to raise their “social position” and “prestige.”
(4) Fighting duels with well-known anti-Semites himself.
While the Zionist movement he founded would hail him as a prophet, Herzl was indifferent to God and religion and failed to have his son Hans circumcised (although ironically Herzl’s disciples would persuade Hans to have himself circumcised as an adult). Herzl was infatuated with girls and women who were “blond, blue-eyed, fairy-tale creatures.” His idea of masculinity, as with Hitler, was the antithesis of himself: a “blond, mustached, dapper … lady-killer.” Like Hitler, he fixated on the ugly and grotesque, saying, “Seeing makes me unhappy. For whenever I see, I see something ugly or vulgar.” Like Hitler, he was prey to self-loathing, self-disgust, self-hatred and self-pity. His fear of women was “real and deep.”
Herzl was a severe critic of European anti-Semitism who wrote “There is no good deed that excuses a bad one.” He was appalled by “the recklessness of pseudointellectuals who enthused over anarchist crimes with “Never mind the victims if it is a beautiful gesture.” And yet he would calmly propose the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, being sure not to let the general public know the suffering his plans were sure to produce. In the end, he and Hitler had the same purpose, the same tactics and the same methods: ethnic cleansing, racist propaganda, mob control, etc. Thus, the foundations of Nazi Germany and the modern state of Israel are eerily similar.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky
Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was born in Tsarist Russia to a liberal Jewish family. He worked as a journalist in Rome and Vienna and soon became a polemicist for the Zionist cause. He was also one of the founders of the Haganah (the paramilitary wing of Zionism). Jabotinsky protested the exclusion of Transjordan (modern-day Jordan) from British Mandate Palestine, establishing the Revisionist Party in 1925 (so called because it sought to “revise” the terms of the Mandate). The right-wing Revisionist Movement eventually evolved into the Herut and Likud parties. Jabotinsky also created the youth movement Betar, which like the Hitler Youth was “characterized by militaristic, some might say fascist, appearance (dark brown uniforms), activities (parade ground drills) with firearm exercises, slogans, and a militaristic ideology and structure.” Jabotinsky admired Mussolini and “repeatedly sought affiliation with and assistance from Rome.”
In 1923, Jabotinsky said that the “sole way” for Jews to deal with Palestinians was through “total avoidance of all attempts to arrive at a settlement.” (The Village Voice, “Death Wish in the Holy Land,” Dec. 12, 2001)
This doctrine of avoiding peace at all costs has remained in effect ever since, as the government of Israel merely pretends to be interested in “peace” while continuing to “redeem” the land by “cleansing” it of Palestinians.
Jabotinsky advocated using force to crush Palestinian nationalism, creating the doctrine of the IRON WALL in an article run by Ha’aretz Daily in 1923:
“… Settlement can thus develop under the protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an IRON WALL which they will be powerless to break down … a voluntary agreement is just not possible. As long as the Arabs preserve a gleam of hope that they will succeed in getting rid of us, nothing in the world can cause them to relinquish this hope, precisely because they are not a rubble but a living people. And a living people will be ready to yield on such fateful issues only when they give up all hope of getting rid of the Alien Settlers. Only then will extremist groups with their slogan ‘No, never’ lose their influence, and only then their influence be transferred to more moderate groups. And only then will the moderates offer suggestions for compromise. Then only will they begin bargaining with us on practical matters, such as guarantees against PUSHING THEM OUT, and equality of civil, and national rights.”
Unlike other Zionist leaders, Jabotinsky spoke his mind publicly. He “criticized the ideologues in the Zionist leadership (such as Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett) who thought that Palestinians could be bribed into selling their country and rights.” Jabotinsky believed Jewish rights overrode Palestinian rights and he warned that violence was inevitable, saying in 1923:
“The Arabs loved their country as much as the Jews did. Instinctively, they understood Zionist aspirations very well, and their decision to resist them was only natural … There was no misunderstanding between Jew and Arab, but a natural conflict … No Agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arab; they would accept Zionism only when they found themselves up against an IRON WALL, when they realized they had no alternative but to accept Jewish settlement.” (America And The Founding Of Israel, p. 90)
Jabotinsky was branded a racist by many other Zionists in the 1920s. However, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders later came to adopt his IRON WALL doctrine, and implement it. Jabotinsky understood the Palestinian people’s attachment to their country, saying in 1923:
“They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true favor the Aztecs looked upon Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. Palestine will remain for the Palestinians not a borderland, but their birthplace, the center and basis of their own national existence.” (Righteous Victims, p. 36)
Jabotinsky advocated ruthless colonization of Palestine, saying in 1925:
“Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an IRON WALL which the native population cannot break through. This is, in to, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 28)
And he also stated that other Zionists believed in the need for an “Iron Wall”:
“In this sense, there is no meaningful difference between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an IRON WALL of Jewish bayonets, the other proposes an IRON WALL of British bayonets, the third proposes an agreement with Baghdad, and appears to be satisfied with Baghdad’s bayonets—a strange and somewhat risky taste—but we all applaud, day and night, the IRON WALL.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 28)
Of course there were exceptions, such as the great Jewish scientist, intellectual and humanist Albert Einstein, who constantly called for Jews to treat Arabs humanely. But his voice was drowned out in the mass chorus of anti-Semitism against Arabs, which was excused by the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany, as if one evil deed somehow excused the other.
Jabotinsky called Zionism a “colonizing adventure” that required force, like Britain colonizing India:
“If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will maintain the garrison on your behalf … Zionism is a colonizing adventure and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 45)
Unfortunately, such “colonizing adventures” are extremely hard on the women and children being displaced and left homeless. Jabotinsky constantly advocated the use of force, saying in 1926:
“The tragedy lies in the fact that there is a collision here between two truths … But our justice is greater. The Arab is culturally backward, but his instinctive patriotism is just as pure and noble as our own; it cannot be bought, it can only be curbed [by] force majeure [major force].” (Righteous Victims, p. 108)
How could Jewish justice be “greater” if Jews were dispossessing innocent women and children? Like Hitler and other racists, Jabotinsky based his cold, hard calculations on the racial and cultural superiority of the invaders. He declared that Zionism had no justice, no law, and no God, other than Jewish colonization of the land:
“There is no justice, no law, and no God in heaven, only a single law which decides and supersedes all—[Jewish] settlement [of the land].” (Righteous Victims, p. 108)
According to Jabotinsky, European Jews have little in common with the “Orient,” by which he meant the Middle East:
“We Jews have nothing in common with what is called the ‘Orient,’ thank God. To the extent that our uneducated masses have ancient spiritual traditions and laws that call the Orient, they must be weaned away from them, and this is in fact what we are doing in every decent school, what life itself is doing with great success. We are going in Palestine, first for our national convenience, [second] to sweep out thoroughly all traces of the ‘Oriental soul.’ As for the Arabs in Palestine, what they do is their business; but if we can do them a favor, it is to help them liberate themselves from the Orient.'” (One Palestine Complete, p. 151)
So much for the Jews “returning” to their ancient homeland, their religion and their God! Like many other Zionists, Jabotinsky disdained the “Oriental soul” and saw Zionism as a way to “cleanse” the land of inferior beings. Today this rabid Jewish racism is not only directed at Arabs, but also at Jews of Arab extraction, by Jews of European extraction. Israel is dealing with layers of racism: Jew against Arab, European Jew against Oriental Jew, Oriental Jew against African Jew, etc.
Like many Zionists, Jabotinsky was not satisfied with stealing just Palestine from the Arabs, saying in 1934:
“I devote my life to the rebirth of the Jewish State, with a Jewish majority, on both sides of the Jordan.” (Israel: A History, p. 76)
Unlike Jewish humanists like Albert Einstein, Jabotinsky refused to accept equality with Arabs:
“For a long time, many Jews, including Zionists, were unwilling to understand the simple truth. They maintained that the creation of important positions in Palestine (settlements, cities, schools, etc.) is enough. According to them a national life could be freely developed even though the majority of the population were to be Arab. This is a great mistake. History proves that any national position, however strong and important cannot be safeguarded as long as the nation which built it does not constitute a majority. A minority can safeguard its cultural position only as long as it can control the local majority. Sooner or later, every country in the world is to become the national state of the predominant nation there. Thus if we desire that Eretz Yisrael should become and remain a Jewish State, we must first of all create a Jewish majority.” (The Ideology of Betar)
The ideology above was being taught to the children of Betar, as their “marching orders.” Jabotinsky also advocated forced expulsion of Arabs, saying in a letter dated November 1939:
“There is no choice: the Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 29)
He was obviously a racist intent on ethnic cleansing:
“We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East … The Islamic soul must be broomed [swept] out of Eretz-Yisrael … [Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 29)
His use of the term “broomed” makes it sound as if he’s talking about sweeping away dung, or flies. Unfortunately, this kind of virulent racism can be found in the words and deeds of many of the leaders of Israel throughout the years, as you will see if you continue reading. It’s as if the United States was being run by the Grand Wizards of the KKK.
Just before Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, he verified what many people have come to believe, that the Zionists were copying the tactics of the Nazis:
“The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations … Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea a good name in the world.” (One Palestine Complete, p. 407)
Adolf Hitler “transferred” Jews from their homes, leaving them homeless and destitute, and Jews rightly called the result a Holocaust. The crime of forcible expulsion (“transfer”) was among the charges brought against Adolf Eichmann, one the architects of the Nazi Holocaust, by the state of Israel. Israel executed Eichmann for his crimes. But if evicting a Jewish families from their homes and causing their premature deaths constitutes murder, war crimes and a Holocaust, what should we say and do when Israeli Jews do the same things to Palestinians?
Since Palestinians are Semites, isn’t Zionism guilty of the same crimes as Nazism: anti-Semitism, ethnic cleansing, mass murder and attempted genocide? Why not hold Israel to the same standard as all civilized nations and insist that Israel establish equal rights, fair laws and fair courts for everyone, or let the Palestinians have their freedom as an independent nation?
Here, he explains why Israel has the “right” to expand its borders to the east of the Jordan River:
“Palestine is a territory whose chief geographical feature is this: that the river Jordan does not delineate its frontier but flows through its centre.”—Vladimir Jabotinsky, at the 16th Zionist Congress, 1929, quoted by Desmond Stewart in The Middle East: Temple of Janus, p.304.
Benyamin Netanyahu
Benyamin Netanyahu is the current Prime Minister of Israel.
On June 17, 1996 Netanyahu’s office released a statement outlining his government’s guidelines with regard to the peace processes. It said no to withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, no to a Palestinian State, no to an official Palestinian presence in Jerusalem, and no to the refugees’ right of return “to any part of the Land of Israel west of the Jordan River”. (Elia Zureik, The Palestinian Refugees: Background, Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, 1996. p. 127)
“Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.” (Benyamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, as published in the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989)
But of course “mass expulsions” would include completely innocent Palestinian women and children. Et tu, Brute?
Chaim Weizmann
Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) was a Russia-born Jew. In 1904 he emigrated to England. During WWI, he developed a method of producing acetone, which was required for the production of artillery shells. This earned him favor with the British government. In 1917 he helped secure the promise of the British government to create a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine (the Balfour Declaration). Along with Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann was one of the “big three” responsible for making political Zionism a reality. Weizmann was a charismatic, persuasive speaker who became the first president of Israel.
But Weizmann sometimes sounded like Hitler:
“We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not …You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world.” (Chaim Weizmann, “Judische Rundschau,” No. 4, 1920)
In 1914, Weizmann lied, saying Palestine was “a country without people” when in fact hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lived there:
“In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite this people with this country? The owners of the country [the Ottoman Turks] must, therefore, be persuaded and conceived that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the [Jewish] people and for the country, but also for themselves.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 6)
Other Zionists like Golda Meir would also claim that the Palestinians didn’t really exist, were not a people, did not constitute a nation, etc. They sound just like the Nazis who denied the humanity of Jews.
Weizmann described the Palestinian people as inhuman steppingstones:
“the rocks of Judea … obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 17)
Zionists often use such dehumanizing language, referring to Palestinians as: dirty, unclean, primitive, uncultured, naive, ignorant, savage, a “demographic problem,” and as “ticking time bombs” (because they might have babies and outnumber Jews), etc.
Weizmann visited Jerusalem in late 1918, and described the ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhoods to his wife:
“There’s nothing more humiliating than ‘our’ Jerusalem. Anything that could be done to desecrate and defile the sacred has been done. It is impossible to imagine so much falsehood, blasphemy, greed, so many lies. It’s such an accursed city, there’s nothing there, no creature comforts … [It] hasn’t a single clean and comfortable apartment.” (One Palestine Complete, p. 71)
So it seems Jewish “superiority” was just a racial myth, as racial superiority invariably is. Also in 1918 Weizmann condescendingly criticized Arabs for believing in what actually ended up happening to them:
“The poor ignorant fellah [Arabic for peasant] does not worry about politics, but when he is told repeatedly by people in whom he has confidence that his livelihood is in danger of being taken away from him by us, he becomes our mortal enemy… The Arab is primitive and believes what he is told.” (One Palestine Complete, p. 109)
The Zionists seemed to be blind to their own racism. They admitted that the Jews were far from “superior,” then looked down their snooty noses at Arabs who were smart enough to figure out what they were actually up to. In 1919 at the peace conference at Versailles, Weizmann proved Arabs were correct in their assumptions, saying:
“the country [Palestine] should be Jewish in the same way that France is French and Britain is British.” (One Palestine Complete, p. 117)
Weizmann repeated the same idea to the English Zionist Federation on September 19, 1919:
“By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 41)
But in the early 1900s, Zionism was not popular with most Jews; it was the dream of small numbers of zealots who often emulated the philosophy, stratagems and methods of Hitler:
“The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was built on air … every day and every hour of these last ten years, when opening the newspapers, I thought: Whence will the next blow come? I trembled lest the British Government would call me and ask: ‘Tell us, what is this Zionist Organization? Where are they, your Zionists?’ … The Jews, they knew, were against us [the Zionists]; we stood alone on a little island, a tiny group of Jews with a foreign past.” (UN: The Origins And Evolution Of The Palestine Problem, section V)
The Holocaust changed things, and understandably so. But it was the Zionists who insisted that Jews not only resettle in Palestine, but drive out the Palestinians and seize control of the region. On May 25, 1942, Weizmann said:
“Palestine alone could absorb and provide for the homeless and the stateless Jews uprooted by the war. It [has galvanized] all the sympathy of the world for the martyrdom of the Jews … the Zionists reject all schemes to resettle these victims elsewhere—in Germany, or Poland, or in sparsely populated regions such as Madagascar.” [It was Hitler who had first suggested Madagascar as a place where the Jews of Europe might be sent, before writing off the idea as infeasible and coming up with his horrendous “final solution.”] (Israel: A History, p. 113)
So, in effect, the Zionists used the Holocaust to provide the “warm bodies” needed for a Jewish state. To be fair, it was going to be very difficult for most of the Jewish refugees, no matter where they went. And there were millions of non-Jewish displaced persons as well. Their suffering is often forgotten, but shouldn’t be. The problem was not that the world was insensitive to the plight of Jews and other displaced persons. The problem was that the world was recovering from a world war that had left perhaps 70 million people dead, millions more displaced, and much of Europe and Russia a mass of smoking ruins. But the Zionists put their racist agenda on a pedestal, and thus created tremendous suffering for Jews and Arabs alike. Nothing mandated Jewish refugees seizing control of the regions that granted them safe harbor. Only Palestine suffered that fate. Everywhere else they went the Jews became democrats who asked for equal rights, and increasingly received them. But they were unwilling to settle for democracy in Palestine; thus to the rest of the world they seem hypocritical. If they want equal rights for themselves, how can they deny equal rights to other people? Is that fair?
Weizmann tried to extend Zionist colonization beyond British Mandated Palestine. In 1934 he tried to interest the French Mandate authorities in a Jewish settlement plan for Syria and Lebanon. Similar ideas were also proposed by Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan. (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 47)
Weizmann informed the Peel Commission of his expansionist vision in 1937:
“We shall spread in the whole country in the course of time … this is only an arrangement for the next 25 to 30 years.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 62)
Weizmann fantasized about Palestinians leaving voluntarily, writing in a letter dated April 28, 1939 to the American Zionist Solomon Goldman:
“The realization of this project [a land purchase] would mean the emigration of 10,000 [Palestinian] Arabs [to Jabal al-Druze in Syria], the acquisition of 300,000 dunums … It would also create a significant precedent if 10,000 Arabs were to emigrate peacefully of their own volition, which no doubt would be followed by others.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 167)
On July 8, 1947, Weizmann described how stateless Jews felt, to UNSCOP (the UN Special Committee On Palestine):
“We ask today: ‘What are the Poles? What are the French? What are the Swiss?’ When that is asked, everyone points to a country, to certain institution, to parliamentary institution, and the man in the street will know exactly what it is. He has a passport. If you ask what is a Jew is—well, he is a man who has to offer a long explanation for his existence, and any person who has to offer an explanation as to what he is, is always suspect—and from suspicion there is only one step to hatred or contempt.” (Israel: A History, p. 147)
But of course this is how stateless, dispossessed Palestinians feel today. Why should we elevate the needs, desires and feelings of Jews above those of Palestinians?
By war’s end in 1949, Chaim Weizmann was ecstatic to see the long-anticipated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians a reality:
“a miraculous clearing of the land: the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 175)
What sort of man speaks of the ethnic cleansing and murders of human beings—including women and children—as the “simplification” of a task? What does that sound like, but the cold hard “math” of Hitler & Company? How can ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide be called “miraculous”?
Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon [1928-] is currently a vegetable, which may be an improvement, considering his actions when his brain was functional. He is a former Israeli general, Foreign Minister, and Prime Minister.
According to the pre-vegetative-state wisdom of Ariel Sharon, Israel is above the law, or is a law unto itself:
“Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial.” (Quoted by BBC News Online)
Addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Sharon said:
“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.” (Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998)
At the same time he said:
“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours … Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” (Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998)
Ehud Barak
Ehud Barak [1942-] has served Israel as Defense Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister.
Ehud Barak, on Israeli TV (date undetermined, but confirmed by former Israeli Knesset Member Marsha Friedman) said: “If I were a Palestinian, I would be a terrorist.” (Speaking about Ariel Sharon’s policies toward the Palestinians.)
“I would have joined a terrorist organization.” Ehud Barak’s response to Gideon Levy, a columnist for Ha’aretz newspaper, when Barak was asked what he would have done if he had been born a Palestinian.
Yosef Weitz
Yosef (Joseph) Weitz (1890-1970) was a Polish Jew who settled in Palestine in 1908. Weitz was a director of the Jewish National Fund who espoused “transferring” Palestinians from their homes, farms, and businesses. His diary (contained in five volumes located in the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem) contains injunctions not to “miss the opportunities” offered by the 1948 war to ethnically cleanse the land that came under Jewish control. His diary also contains evidence of atrocities perpetrated against Palestinians by the fledgling Jewish state.
The transfer policies of the Zionists were clearly formulated long before the war of 1948. While some pro-Israel apologists deny that there was a Transfer Committee, there is no doubt that the polices attributed to the Transfer Committee were actually enacted: ethnic cleansing of hundreds of Palestinian villages, the complete destruction of many of the smaller villages, the reduction of the Arab percentage of the population in towns that were not completely destroyed, the eviction of Muslim Palestinians when Christian Palestinians were not evicted, etc. According to Weitz himself, the general plan had been formulated “as early as 1940,” with a specific limitation of the non-Jewish percentage of the population in mind:
“There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument: … the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish … with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary.” (From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p. 5)
So why quibble, when the historical facts agree with the master plan of the architects? Weitz formulated a plan which is still being implemented by Israeli settlers (colonists) to this day: seizing the high ground:
“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours … Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” (From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p. 5)
According to Benny Morris:
“Through 1948 he had ready access to cabinet ministers … and often, he [Weitz] met with Ben-Gurion … Weitz’s connections also encompassed the Yishuv’s military brass, especially on the level of district, area and battalion commanders, [in short] Weitz was well-placed to shape and influence decision-making regarding the Arab population on the national level and to oversee the implementation of policy on the local level.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 182)
Yosef Weitz stated the two main goals of “transfer” on November 15, 1937:
“…the transfer of the Arab population from the area of the Jewish state does not serve only one aim—to diminish the Arab population. It also serves a second, no less important, aim which is to [take] land presently held and cultivated by the Arabs and … release it for Jewish inhabitants.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 94-95)
Land taken from Palestinians individuals would be given to Jewish individuals. This is exactly what Nazi Germany did when it stole Jewish land, homes and property and gave it to Germans. Weitz was obsessed with “transferring” the Palestinian people to neighboring Arab countries. He wrote in his diary on December 20, 1940:
“… it must be clear that there is no room in the country for both [Arab and Jewish] peoples … If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us … The only solution is a Land of Israel, at least a western land of Israel [i.e., Palestine, since Transjordan is the eastern portion], without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises … There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Palestinian Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [Bedouin] tribe. The transfer must be directed at Iraq, Syria, and even Transjordan [eastern portion of Eretz Yisrael]. For this goal funds will be found … And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 131-132)
On March 18, 1941 Weitz recorded in his diary while visiting Jewish colonies in the Jordan Valley:
“Once again I come face to face with the land settlement difficulties that emanate from the existence of two people in close proximity … We have clashing interests with the Arabs everywhere, and these interests will go and clash increasingly… and once again the answer from inside me is heard: only [Palestinian Arab] population transfer and evacuating this country so it would become exclusively for us [Jews] is the solution. This idea does not leave me in these days and I find comfort in it in the face of enormous difficulties in the way of land-buying and settlement.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 132)
On a visit to Mishmar Ha’emek a few day later, Weitz wrote:
“I am increasingly consumed by despair. The Zionist idea is the answer to the Jewish question in the Land of Israel; only in the land of Israel, but not that the [Palestinian] Arabs should remain a majority. The complete evacuation of the country from its other inhabitants and handing it over to the Jewish people is the answer.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 132)
When a “Jewish majority” in Palestine was not attainable via Jewish immigration and natural population growth, Zionists advocated the use of force to ethnically cleanse and to dispossess the Palestinian people. On June 26, 1941, Weitz wrote in his diary:
“Throughout the journey my reflections were focused on that plan, about which I have been thinking for years: the plan … of evacuating the country for us [Jews]. I know that difficulties … but only through population transfer will redemption come … There is no room for us with our neighbours … development is a very slow process … They [the Palestinian Arabs] are too many and too much rooted [in the country] … the only way is to cut and eradicate them from the roots. I feel that this is the truth… I am beginning to understand the essence of the miracle which should happen with the arrival of the Messiah; [a] miracle does not happen in evolution, but all of a sudden, in one moment… I can see the enormous difficulties but this should not deflect us from our aim; on the contrary, we must double our efforts to overcome the difficulties and find a listening ear, first in America, then in Britain and then in the neighboring countries. There the money will make it. People and money will be transferred there. We will set up an apparatus from the Yishuv manned by distinguished experts and these will supervise the Arab transfer and resettlement and a second apparatus will receive the [Jewish] redeemers and plant them in the land … I pondered these measures all the way from Tel Aviv and also while visiting near Ramat Hasharon and K’afr Azar. This is the aim, the redemption, and the dream.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 134)
This racist idea of Jews “cleansing” and “redeeming” the land can clearly be seen flourishing in Israel even today, as Jews bulldoze Palestinian houses and trees to the ground in acts of government-sanctioned robbery. Most robbers at least have the sense to steal things of value. But many Zionists believe that only Jewish hands and Jewish labor have any value, so they insist on eradicating anything created or planted by Palestinians: even valuable houses and olive trees.
In similar passion, Weitz also spoke about expanding the “Jewish state’s” borders to include areas in Lebanon and Syria. While meeting Menachem Ussishkin on June 22, 1941, he wrote:
“The land of Israel is not small at all, if only the Arabs will be removed, and if its frontiers would be enlarged a little; to the north all the way to Litani [River in Lebanon], and to the east including the Golan Heights … while the [Palestinian] Arabs [are] transferred to northern Syria and Iraq … From now on we must work out a secret plan based on the removal of the [Palestinian] Arabs from here … [and] … to include it into American political circles … today we have no other alternative … We will not live here with Arabs.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 134-135)
So Americans were to become unwitting accomplices in the secret plan to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestinians, while constantly increasing the borders of the Jewish state. This secret plan would eventually backfire on Americans in the form of 9-11, although the secrecy was so successful most Americans still haven’t managed to put two plus two together.
Just as anti-Semitic Nazis refused to live with Jews, so anti-Semitic Jews refused to live with Arabs. In the summer of 1941, Yosef Weitz wrote:
“Large [Palestinian Arab] villages crowded in population and surrounded by cultivated land growing olives, grapes, figs, sesame, and maize fields … Would we be able to maintain scattered settlements among these existing villages that will always be larger than ours? And is there any possibility of buying their [land]?… and once again I hear that voice inside me called: evacuate [ethnically cleanse] this country.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 133)
Like other Zionists, Weitz envisioned a “Jewish state” on parts of “Eretz Yisrael” as a jumping ground for a “complete redemption.” He wrote this in his diary one day after the vote on the UN partition plan in November 1947:
“The creation of the Hebrew State in part of the country is the beginning of complete redemption … How should we solve the question of the [Palestinian] Arabs who constitute half of the state population? … I have been working day and night in these days on the calculation of the land in the Hebrew state … Indeed we still need to redeem much until most of the cultivated land will be our property.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 182)
In other words, ridding the land of Palestinians would be an act of “redemption” according to the endlessly strange religion of racism. But as late as 1947, after almost half a century of relentless effort, the collective ownership of the Jewish National Fund (which constituted one-half of all Jewish land ownership) amounted to a mere 3.5% of Palestine. Weitz knew the only solution was to steal the rest of the land, by force (i.e., armed robbery):
“without taking action to transfer [the Palestinian Arab] population, we will not be able to solve our question by [land] buying.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 133)
Weitz knew the obvious truth:
“[most of the land is] not Jewish-owned or even in the category of the state domain whose ownership could be automatically assumed by a successor government. Thus, of 13,500,000 dunums (6,000,000 of which were desert and 7,500,000 dunums of cultivable land) in the Jewish state according to the Partition plan, ONLY 1,500,000 dunums were Jewish owned.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 183)
But the war of 1948 provided the perfect excuse for Jews to take the land without paying for it. On January 13, 1948 Weitz talked to his Haifa Jewish National Fund colleagues about taking measures to evacuate the lands of Wadi Qabbani:
“I gave instructions not to miss the opportunities in the turbulent hour.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 184)
Weitz wrote in his diary in January 1948 about the inhabitants of Daliyat al-Rawha’ south of Haifa:
“Isn’t now the time to be rid of them? Why continue to keep in our midst these thorns at a time when they pose a danger to us? Our people are weighing up a solution.” (Benny Morris, p. 55)
The people “weighing up the solution” came to be known as the Transfer Committee. Weitz wrote in his diary on the 20th of February 1948 about the Bedouins crossing Baysan valley to Transjordan:
“It is possible that now is the time to implement our original plan: transfer them there.” (Benny Morris)
Weitz wrote in his diary about the inhabitants of Qumya and al-Tira in the Baysan valley:
“They must be forced to leave their villages until peace comes.” (Benny Morris, p. 56)
But a peace never came that allowed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return to their homes, because the Zionists destroyed hundreds of villages and forever barred their return, or at least to this day. In April, Weitz started to lobby the Israeli Cabinet in favor of his obsession (“transfer”). He met Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv on April 4 1948, and asked for an audience to discuss:
“[the] question of evacuating/clearing out the Arabs … [ten days later] [we] must direct our war towards the removal of as many Arabs as possible from boundaries of out state. The guarding of their property after their removal is a secondary question … Finally it was agreed that I would submit a proposal for [Palestinian Arab] removal from localities based on my considerations.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 186)
On April 18, 1948 he started to build a list of the villages to be ethnically cleansed first. He wrote:
“I made a summery of a list of the Arab villages which in my opinion must be cleared out in order to complete Jewish regions. I also made a summery of the places that have land disputes and must be settled by military means.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 186)
What civilized nation allows its military to decide civilian land disputes? Weitz explained why so many Palestinians were fleeing. According to him all what that it took was “several shells … [to] whistle over them”, and that was enough. On April 21, 1948 he wrote in his diary:
“Our army is steadily conquering Arab villages and their inhabitants afraid and fleeing like mice. You have no idea what happened in the Arab villages. It is enough that during the night several shells will whistle over them and they flee for their lives. Villages are steadily emptying, and if we continue on this course—and we shall certainly do so as our strength increases—then villages will empty of their inhabitants.” (Israel: A History, p. 174)
Weitz also described how fear was used by Haganah commanders to “encourage” Palestinians to flee. On April 24, 1948 Weitz wrote in his diary regarding the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages in the Haifa area:
“I was happy to hear from him [a Haganah officer] that this line was being adopted by the commander … to frighten the Arabs so long as flight-induced fear was upon them.” (Israel: A History, p. 173)
Many Americans still believe that the Palestinians willfully abandoned their homes, farms, and business. But ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages obviously did not happen by “accident.” On April 28, 1948 Weitz wrote:
“Khayriyah and Saqiyah [two Palestinian Arab villages in the coastal plain] have also been cleared out [“also” meaning that other villages had previously been cleared out]. My plan is getting implemented.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 186)
In the following quote, note how Weitz was pressuring other Israelis to encourage Palestinian flight. On May 4, 1948 he wrote in his diary regarding Beisan valley:
“The Beit Shean [Beisan] Valley is the gate for our state in the Galilee …. I told them [Beisan Valley Jewish representatives] that clearing [of Palestinian Arabs] is the need of the hour.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 187)
In August 1948, Yosef Weitz stated his opposition to any future Palestinian return to their home, farms, and business:
“[Palestinian] villages should be destroyed so that they do not attract their refugees to return. What can be bought [from Palestinians] should be bought … [But] first we must set policy: Arabs who abandoned [their homes, farms, and businesses] should not [be allowed to] return.” (Benny Morris, p. 148-9)
But most Palestinians were never compensated for the land, homes, farms, businesses and property they lost, even though Jews claimed billons of dollars in reparations from Germany after the Holocaust. How is that fair? In late November 1948, Weitz recorded that two of his officials at the Jewish National Fund complained that “the army continues to destroy villages in the Galilee, which we are interested in [for purposes of settling Jewish immigrants].” Weitz wrote:
“[The village had been] completely leveled and I now wonder if it was good that it was destroyed and would it not have been a greater revenge had we now settled Jews in the village houses … [The empty houses are] good for settlement of [our Jewish] brothers who wandered for generation upon generation, refugees … steeped in suffering and sorrow, as they, at last, find a roof over their heads. This was [the reason for] our war.” (Benny Morris, p. 169)
But what had Palestinians done to deserve Weitz’s “revenge”? The Holocaust was committed by German Nazis, not Palestinian farm families. Weitz’s “solution” only created new multitudes of homeless, wandering refugees. Should we have compassion for Jewish refugees, but not for Palestinian refugees? Why? Soon after hostilities ended in 1949, Weitz pleaded with Ben-Gurion to take a firm and unequivocal stand against any possibility of restoring Palestinian refugees to their homes. In September, he proposed a series of measures which would drive the refugees far from the border areas, deep into Arab hinterlands. He insisted that Palestinian refugees:
“… must be harassed continually.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 29-30)
In mid-1949 the Transfer Committee recommended that if Israel was to repatriate Palestinian refugees, she must categorically refuse to return them to their villages—only to towns where they should not exceed 15% of the Jewish population. (1949, The First Israelis, p. 29-30)
In 1949 Weitz described his racist dismay at the increasing numbers of Oriental Jews:
“You know that we do not have a common language with them. Our culture level is not theirs. Their way of life is medieval … While I was talking to Yosef Shprintsak, he expressed anxiety about preserving our cultural standards given the massive immigration from the Orient. There are indeed grounds for anxiety, but what’s the use? Can we stop it?” Yaakov Zrubavel, head of the Middle East Department of the Jewish Agency, concurred. ” Perhaps these are not the Jews we would like to see coming here [Jewish state], but we can hardly tell them not to come…” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 156)
Zionism had degenerated into anti-Semitism not only aimed at Arabs, but also at Jews with the “wrong” bloodlines, geographic origins and religious beliefs. Weitz was jubilant that Palestinians are no longer a majority in “Eretz Yisrael”:
“[During the British Mandate period, the JNF had purchased land] crumb by crumb. But now a great change has taken place before our eyes. The spirit of Israel, in a giant thrust, has burst through the obstacles, and has conquered the keys to the land, and the road to fulfillment has been freed from its bonds and its guardians-enemies [the Palestinians, most of whom were farmers and their wives and children]. Now, only now, the hour has come for planning considered [regional] plans … The abandoned lands will never return to their absentee owners.” (Benny Morris, p. 179)
By war’s end in 1949, Weitz feared that the “infiltrating” (returning) Palestinian refugees were coming back to their homes. He wrote Moshe Sharett that this “problem” was causing him “great anxiety”:
“Every day our men encounter familiar faces, people who had been absent, and now they are walking about freely, step by step, returning to their villages. I fear that while you are discussing the issue in Laussanne and in other places, the problem is (unfortunately) solving itself—the refugees are coming back! And our government has taken no action to stop infiltration. There seems to be no authority, either military or civilian. We’ve loosened the rope, and the Arab, with his sly cunning, senses it and knows how to take advantage of it.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 31)
Weitz was among a few Zionists (along with Moshe Sharett and Aharon Cizling) who warned that the “Palestinian refugee problem” would not solve itself in due course of time, contrary to the opinions of other Zionists like Ben-Gurion, Begin, and Golda Meir:
“The ring of embittered [Palestinian] Arabs surrounding us with hatred and vengeance on all sides will not be loosened for many years to come, and we will act as a barrier to a genuine peace between us and our neighbors.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 31)
In the latter part of 1949, Weitz proposed helping Christian Palestinian Arabs emigrate to South America. He wanted to purchase lands for them in the province of Mendoza. He went to Argentina to study the feasibility of the project first hand, however, he later noted that nothing came of his proposal since the Israeli government was unable to make up its mind. (1949, The First Israelis, p. 63-64)
When it was possible Yosef Weitz often preferred purchasing Palestinian Arab lands rather than expropriating it. Ben-Gurion thought that such policy was a waste of money and eventually would drive up the price of the land. Weitz continued to purchase land even after war’s end, among other reasons, because he feared that the Jewish National Fund and its entire staff would become superfluous and be closed down. He noted bitterly in his diary:
“Ben-Gurion’s way of thinking is that the [Jewish] state is above everything, and that the Zionist Federation is only there to serve it, and should exist only as long as it is needed.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 85-86)
When the first Israeli Knesset convened in 1949, two elected Palestinian Arab-Israelis were present wearing their tradition headdresses. Weitz wrote in his diary:
“It chilled the heart and angered the soul … I do not want there to be many of them. Perhaps they will integrate into society. But it will take several generations before they become loyal to the [Jewish] state.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 43)
David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion [1886-1973] was Israel’s George Washington. After leading Israel to victory in the 1948 war, he was elected the first Prime Minister of Israel on February 14, 1949.
On July 12, 1937, Ben-Gurion made a diary entry about the benefits of the compulsory population transfer:
“The compulsory transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the first and second Temples … We are given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government and sovereignty—this is national consolidation in a free homeland.” (Righteous Victims, p. 142)
On August 7, 1937 he told the Zionist Assembly during their debate of the Peel Commission:
“… In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin … it is important that this plan comes from the [British Peel] Commission and not from us … Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale. You must remember, that this system embodies an important humane and Zionist idea, to transfer parts of a people to their country and to settle empty lands. We believe that this action will also bring us closer to an agreement with the Arabs.” (Righteous Victims, p. 143)
Ben-Gurion explained the “transfer solution” in a joint meeting between the Jewish Agency and Zionist Action Committee on June 12th, 1938:
“With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] … I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” (Righteous Victims p. 144)
In a 1938 speech he said:
“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves … The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take their country away from them.” (Noam Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle pp 91-2 and Simha Flapan’s Zionism and the Palestinians, pp 141-2)
He put the goals of Zionism above the lives of children:
“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.” (Quoted on pp 855-56 of Shabtai Teveth’s Ben-Gurion in a slightly different translation. Also quoted by Martin Gilbert in “Israel was everything” in The New York Times, June 21, 1987.)
Ben Gurion called American Jews “human dust,” as if they were worthless unless they lived in Israel.—cf. Israel: Utopia incorporated, Uri Davis, Zed Press, London, 1977, p. 19. According to that “logic,” the victims of the Holocaust were also “human dust.”
This heartless mindset has been confirmed by multiple Jewish sources:
“The last thing on earth that interested the Zionist leaders was humanitarian work, saving victims and refugees.”—Moshe Menuhin, The Decadence of Judaism in our Time, Exposition Press, New York, 1965.
“The Zionists’ … main preoccupation is not to save Jews alive out of Europe but to get Jews into Palestine.”—Richard Crossman, Washington Diary for 1946.
“In my opinion, the Israeli occupation regime in the conquered territories is not only not a liberal one; it is in fact one of the most cruel and repressive regimes in modern time.”—Dr. Israel Shahak, Middle East International Supplement, May 1975.
“Torture of Arab prisoners is so widespread and systematic that it cannot be dismissed as ‘rogue cops’ exceeding orders. It appears to be sanctioned as deliberate policy.” —The Sunday Times, June 19, 1977.
“With my own eyes I have seen marks of torture on the faces and bodies of suspects and accused persons. I say it here and now, and challenge anyone to contradict it.”
—Felicia Langer (Israeli lawyer) in a public address at the Conway Hall, London on 15 May 1974.
Ben-Gurion had no intention of settling for the borders established by the UN partition plan, telling his General Staff in May 1948:
“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.” (Quoted in Ben-Gurion, A Biography by Michael Ben-Zohar)
“The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan: one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.” (Ben-Gurion in a 1937 speech, accepting a British proposal for partition of Palestine which created a potential Jewish majority state, as quoted in New Outlook, April 1977.)
“Take the American Declaration of Independence for instance. It contains no mention of the territorial limits. We are not obliged to state the limits of our State.”
—Ben Gurion’s diary, May 14, 1948, as quoted by Michael Bar Zohar in The Armed Prophet, p.133.
“If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.” (Ben-Gurion, as quoted in The Jewish Paradox : A personal memoir by Nahum Goldmann, translated by Steve Cox, p. 99. ISBN 0-448-15166-9.)
“The assets of the Jewish National Home must be created exclusively through our own work, for only the product of the Hebrew labor can serve as the national estate.” (As quoted in Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War by Shabtai Teveth, p. 66.)
David Ben-Gurion wrote this in his diary on July 18, 1948:
“We must do everything to insure they [the Palestinians] never do return.” (Quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, p. 157)
Fifty years later, in 1998, Ariel Sharon made the same point:
“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.” (Ibid.)
But of course he considered it immoral for Nazis to “transfer” Jews from their homes to concentration camps. In a speech addressing the Central Committee of the Histadrut on December 30, 1947 Ben-Gurion said:
“In the area allocated to the Jewish State there are not more than 520,000 Jews and about 350,000 non-Jews, mostly Arabs. Together with the Jews of Jerusalem, the total population of the Jewish State at the time of its establishment, will be about one million, including almost 40% non-Jews. such a [population] composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish State. This [demographic] fact must be viewed in all its clarity and acuteness. With such a [population] composition, there cannot even be absolute certainty that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority …. There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60%.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 176 & Benny Morris p. 28)
On February 8th, 1948 he said to the Mapai Council:
“From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema [East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood] … there are no [Palestinian] Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, it has not been as Jewish as it is now. In many Arab neighborhoods in the west one sees not a single Arab. I do not assume that this will change … What had happened in Jerusalem … is likely to happen in many parts of the country … in the six, eight, or ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population in the country.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 180-181)
He also said:
“We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area … I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 181)
The concept of “transferring” European Jews to Palestine and “transferring” the Palestinian people out is central to Zionism. Ben-Gurion made this clear in 1944:
“Zionism is a TRANSFER of the Jews. Regarding the TRANSFER of the Arabs this is much easier than any other TRANSFER. There are Arab states in the vicinity … and it is clear that if the [Palestinian] Arabs are removed [to these states] this will improve their condition and not the contrary.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 159)
But of course he was either a fool or a liar. Anyone who has seen pictures of Palestinian refugee camps knows the terrible truth. Once multitudes of people have been made homeless and destitute, other people do not have the resources to take them all in.
In 1938, Ben-Gurion wrote:
“With compulsory transfer we [would] have vast areas … I support compulsory [population] transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it. But compulsory transfer could only be carried out by England … Had its implementation been dependent merely on our proposal I would have proposed; but this would be dangerous to propose when the British government has disassociated itself from compulsory transfer … But this question should not be removed from the agenda because it is central question. There are two issues here : 1) sovereignty and 2) the removal of a certain number of Arabs, and we must insist on both of them.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 117)
On July 30, 1937 Yosef Bankover, a founding member and leader of Kibbutz Hameuhad movement and a member of Haganah’s regional command of the coastal and central districts, stated that Ben-Gurion would accept the proposed Peel Commission partition plan under two conditions: (1) unlimited Jewish immigration, and (2) compulsory population transfer for Palestinians:
“Ben-Gurion said yesterday that he was prepared to accept the [Peel partition] proposal of the Royal commission but on two conditions: [Jewish] sovereignty and compulsory transfer … As for the compulsory transfer—as a member of Kibbutz Ramat Hakovsh [founded in 1932 in central Palestine] I would be very pleased if it would be possible to be rid of the pleasant neighborliness of the people of Miski, Tirah, and Qalqilyah.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 70)
Ben-Gurion became obsessed with “transferring” the Palestinian Arabs out of Palestine, and he started to contemplate the mechanics and potential problems that could arise if “transfer” to be implemented. Ben-Gurion contemplated the “Arab Question” in “Eretz Yisrael” and wrote:
“We have to examine, first, if this transfer is practical, and secondly, if it is necessary. It is impossible to imagine general evacuation without compulsion, and brutal compulsion. There are of course sections of the non-Jewish population of the Land of Israel which will not resist transfer under adequate conditions to certain neighboring countries, such as the Druze, a number of Bedouin tribes in the Jordan Valley and the south, the Circassians and perhaps even the Metwalis [the Sh’ite of the Galilee]. But it would be very difficult to bring about resettlement of other sections of the Arab populations such as the fellahin and the urban populations in neighboring Arab countries by transferring them voluntarily, whatever economic inducements are offered to them.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 129)
He also said:
“The possibility of large-scale transfer of a population by force was demonstrated, when the Greeks and the Turks were transferred [after WW I]. In the present war [WW II] the idea of transferring a population is gaining more sympathy as a practical and the most secure means of solving the dangerous and painful problem of national minorities. The war has already brought the resettlement of many people in eastern and southern Europe, and in the plans for the postwar settlements the idea of a large-scale population transfer in central, eastern, and southern Europe increasingly occupies a respectable place.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 129)
On December 19, 1947, Ben-Gurion advised the Haganah on the rules of engagement with the Palestinian population. He stated:
“we adopt the system of aggressive defense; with every Arab attack we must respond with a decisive blow: the destruction of the place or the expulsion of the residents along with the seizure of the place.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 176-177 and Israel: A History, p. 156)
Ben-Gurion was happy and sad when the U.N. voted to Partition Palestine into two states, Palestinian and Jewish. He was happy because “finally” Jews could have a “country” of their own. On the other hand, he was sad because they have “lost” almost half of Palestine, and because they would have to contend with a sizable Palestinian minority, well over 45% of the total population. In the following few quotes, you will see how he also stated that a “Jewish state” cannot survive being 60% Jewish; implying that something aught to be done to remedy the so called “Arab demographic problem”. He stated on November 30, 1947:
“In my heart, there was joy mixed with sadness: joy that the nations at last acknowledged that we are a nation with a state, and sadness that we lost half of the country, Judea and Samaria, and, in addition, that we [would] have [in our state] 400,000 Arabs.” (Righteous Victims, p. 190)
The Sefer Toldot Ha-Haganah, the official history of the Haganah, clearly stated how Palestinian villages and population should be dealt with:
“[Palestinian] villages inside the Jewish state that resist should be destroyed … and their inhabitants expelled beyond the borders of the Jewish state … Palestinian residents of the urban quarters which dominate access to or egress from towns should be expelled beyond the borders of the Jewish state in the event of their resistance.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 178)
Ben-Gurion clearly didn’t intend to honor the borders established by the U.N. partition plan:
“Before the founding of the state, on the eve of its creation, our main interests was self-defense. To a large extent, the creation of the state was an act of self-defense … Many think that we’re still at the same stage. But now the issue at hand is conquest, not self-defense. As for setting the borders—it’s an open-ended matter. In the Bible as well as in our history, there all kinds of definitions of the country’s borders, so there’s no real limit. No border is absolute. If it’s a desert—it could just as well be the other side. If it’s sea, it could also be across the sea. The world has always been this way. Only the terms have changed. If they should find a way of reaching other stars, well then, perhaps the whole earth will no longer suffice.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 6)
But of course most modern, civilized nations do accept permanent borders. During a visit to Haifa, Ben-Gurion was told that Abba Khoushi, a labor leader and an official in the Haifa’s City Hall, was trying to persuade Palestinians city to stay. Ben-Gurion reportedly said:
“Doesn’t he have anything more important to do?” (Benny Morris, p. 328)
On June 16, 1948, there were calls by members of the MAPAM party for the return of Jaffa’s “peace minded” Palestinian refugees, and in response, Ben-Gurion stated during a Cabinet meeting:
“I do not accept the version [i.e. policy] that [we] should encourage their return … I believe we should prevent their return … We must settle Jaffa, Jaffa will become a Jewish city … If the Arabs were allowed to return to Jaffa and elsewhere and the war is renewed, our chances of ending the war as we wish to end it will be reduced … Meanwhile, we must prevent at all costs their return … I will be for them not returning after the war.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 75)
Moshe Sharett agreed with Ben-Gurion and stated during the same Cabinet meeting:
“… they will not return. [That] is out policy. They are not returning.” (Benny Morris, p. 141)
When Ezra Danin, a Cabinet member, proposed installing a puppet Palestinian Government in the Triangle area (northwest of the occupied West Bank), Ben-Gurion impatiently declared on October 21, 1948 that Palestinians in Israel were good for only one thing:
“The Arabs of the land of Israel have only one function left to them—to run away.” (Benny Morris, p. 218)
On September 26, 1948, he proposed that Israel should attack the West Bank. According to his diary, Israeli forces would take:
“Bethlehem, and Hebron, where there are about a hundred thousand [Palestinian] Arabs. I assume that most of the Arabs of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron would flee, like the [Palestinian] Arabs of Lydda, Jaffa, Tiberias, and Safad, and we will control the whole breadth of the country up to the Jordan.”
In another diary entry he wrote:
“It is not impossible … that we will be able to conquer the way to the Negev, Eilat, and the Dead Sea, and to secure the Negev for ourselves; also to broaden the corridor to Jerusalem, from north to south; to liberate the rest of Jerusalem and to take the Old City; to seize all of central and western Galilee and to expand the borders of the state in all directions.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 14)
But when Chaim Laskov proposed the occupation of most of the West Bank in July 1958, Ben-Gurion objected because in his opinion Palestinians would no longer run away. He wrote in his diary:
“This time the Arabs on the West Bank will not run away!” (Iron Wall, p. 200)
During a meeting for the Mapai party center on July 24, 1948, Ben-Gurion clearly stated his thoughts and attitude towards the Palestinian Arabs, especially in the light of their behavior and flight during the war. He said:
“Meanwhile, [a return of Palestinian refugees] is out of the question until we sit together beside a [peace conference] table … and they will respect us to the degree that we respect them and I doubt whether they deserve respect as we do. Because, nevertheless, we did not flee en mass, [And] so far no Arab Einstein has risen and [they] have not created what we have built in this country and [they] have not fought as we are fighting … we are dealing here with a collective murderer.” (Benny Morris, p. 331)
So in Ben-Gurion’s opinion, the absence of an Arab Einstein, the fleeing of Palestinian Arabs during war, and not fighting are good reasons for not respecting Palestinians’ rights! That was, of course, the way Hitler and the Nazis thought.
Moshe Dayan in his address to the Technion in Haifa, reported in Haaretz on April 4, 1969:
“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, ‘What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!'” (Quoted in The Jewish Paradox by Nahum Goldmann, p. 99)
“To maintain the status quo will not do. We have to set up a dynamic state bent upon expansion.”—David Ben Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, The Philosophical Press, New York, 1954, p. 419.
Moshe Sharett
Moshe Sharett [1894-1965] was the director of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department and the first Israeli foreign minister.
He wrote in 1914:
We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture … Recently there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about “the mutual misunderstanding” between us and the Arabs, about “common interests” [and] about “the possibility of unity and peace between two fraternal peoples.” … [But] we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes … for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate, all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise. (Righteous Victims, p. 91)
In other words, overtures of peace on the part of Arabs were to be rejected, because the Zionists didn’t want peace or partners: they wanted the whole enchilada for themselves.
Sharett declared in 1947:
“Transfer could be the crowning achievement, the final stage in the development of [our] policy, but certainly not the point of departure. By [speaking publicly and prematurely] we could mobilizing vast forces against the matter and cause it to fail, in advance.” (Righteous Victims, p. 254)
He added:
“[W]hen the Jewish state is established—it is very possible that the result will be transfer of [the Palestinian] Arabs.” (Righteous Victims, p. 254)
In August 18 1948, Sharett wrote to Chaim Weizmann, explaining the Israeli government’s determination to block the return of Palestinian Arab refugees:
“With regard to the refugees, we are determined to be adamant while the war lasts. Once the return tide starts, it will be impossible to stem it, and it will prove our undoing. As for the future, we are equally determined to explore all possibilities of getting rid, once and for all, of the huge Arab minority [referring to the Palestinian Israeli citizens of Israel] which originally threatened us. What can be achieved in this period of storm and stress [referring to the 1948 war] will be quite unattainable once conditions get stabilized. A group of people [headed by Yosef Weitz] has already started working on the study of resettlement possibilities [for the Palestinian refugees] in other lands … What such permanent resettlement of ‘Israeli’ Arabs in the neighboring territories will mean in terms of making land available in Israel for settlement of our own people requires no emphasis.” (Benny Morris, p. 149-150)
During the armistice negotiation with Jordan, Israel pressured King Abdullah to concede sovereignty over Wadi ‘Ara and Sharett assumed that the Palestinian Arabs inhabiting the land would be expelled, saying:
“The interests of security demand that we get rid of them.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 28)
In response to an announcement made by the Jewish Agency in mid-1949 that Israel would be willing to take back Palestinian refugees, and even to compensate them when the war ended, Sharett instructed his Director General not to repeat such an announcement, and in that regard:
“We must not be understood to say that once the war is over they [Palestinian refugees] can return … We’ll keep every option open.”
Then days later Sharett wrote Dr. Nahum Goldmann, exulting in:
“… the most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine … The opportunities opened up by the present reality for a lasting and radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state, are so far-reaching, as to take one’s breath away. The reversion of the status quo ante is unthinkable.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 29)
Menachem Ussishkin
Menachem Ussishkin [1863-1941] was the Hebrew Secretary of the First Zionist Congress and later was the President of the Jewish National Fund for 18 years. He played a big role in Jewish acquisition of land in Palestine before the Nakba of 1948.
In 1904, before Zionism matured into a powerful political force, Menachem Ussishkin stated that:
“[Land is acquired] by force—that is, by CONQUEST in war, or in other words, by ROBBING land from its owner; … by expropriation via government authority; or by purchase… [The Zionist movement is limited to the third choice] until at some point we become rulers.” (Righteous Victims, p. 38)
In April 28, 1930 Ussishkin stated in an address to journalists in Jerusalem:
“We must continually raise the demand that our land be returned to our possession … If there are other inhabitants there, they must be transferred to some other place. We must take over the land. We have a GREATER and NOBLER ideal than preserving several hundred thousands of [Palestinian] Arabs fellahin [peasants].” (Righteous Victims, p. 141)
It’s hard to see what is so “great” and “noble” about manhandling innocent women and children, and stealing land from farmers. On May 19, 1936 Ussishkin declared:
“What we can demand today is that all Transjordan be included in the Land of Israel … on condition that Transjordan would be either be made available for Jewish colonization or for the resettlement of those [Palestinian] Arabs, whose lands [in Palestine] we would purchase. Against this, the most conscientious person could not argue … For the [Palestinian] Arabs of the Galilee, Transjordan is a province … this will be for the resettlement of Palestine’s Arabs. This the land problem … Now the [Palestinian] Arabs DO NOT WANT us because we want to be the rulers. I will fight for this. I will make sure that we will be the landlords of this land … because this country belongs to us not to them … ” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 51)
In 1937 Ussishkin wrote about the proposed ethnic cleansing:
“We cannot start the Jewish state with … half the population being Arab … Such a state cannot survive even half an hour. And about transferring sixty thousand Arab families he said: “It is most moral … I am ready to come an defend … it before the Almighty.” (Righteous Victims, p. 143-144 and Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 37)
In 1938 Ussishkin commented on the partition plan proposed by the British Peel Commission:
“We cannot begin the Jewish state with population of which the Arab living on their lands constitute almost half and the Jews exists on the land in very small numbers and they are all crowded in Tel Aviv and its vicinity … and the WORST is not only the Arabs here constitute 50 percent or 45 percent but 75 percent of the land is in the hands of the Arabs. Such a state cannot survive even for half an hour … The question is not whether they will be majority or a minority in Parliament. You know that even a small minority could disrupt the whole order of parliamentary life … therefore I would say to the [Peel] Commission and the government that we would not accept reduced Land of Israel without you giving us the land, on the one hand, and removing the largest number of Arabs, particularly the peasants, on the other before we come forward to take the reins of government in our lands even provisionally.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 111-112 and Righteous Victims, p. 143-144)
Moshe Dayan
Moshe Dayan [1915-1981] was an Israeli military leader who rose to Chief of Staff, who later became Defense Minister and Foreign Minister of Israel. Dayan belonged to a new generation of tough home-grown military commanders. He was born in 1915 to Shmuel Dayan (a member of the first Knesset) in Degania near the Sea of Galilee. In 1935, he joined the Haganah while still in his teens, and in 1941 he lost an eye in an Allied operation against the forces of the French Vichy Government in Lebanon. During the 1948 war, his battalion captured Ramla and Lydda, and he later became the governor of Jerusalem. He was a war hero who eventually became Israel’s Defense Minister. He also was a farmer, a secret poet, an amateur archaeologist, a politician, and a statesman who served as Foreign Minister under Menachem Begin.
Dayan wrote in his memories regarding the ethnic cleansing and destruction of Palestinian villages:
“[houses were destroyed] not in battle, but as punishment … and in order to CHASE AWAY the inhabitants … contrary to government policy.” (Righteous Victims, p. 328)
In September 1967 Dayan told senior staff in the Israeli Occupation Army in the West Bank that some 200,000 Palestinian Arabs had left the West Bank and Gaza Strip:
“we must understand the motives and causes of the continued emigration of the Arabs, from both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and not undermine these cause after all; we want to create a new map.” (Righteous Victims, p. 338)
On 30 July 1973 Dayan said to Time Magazine:
“There is no more Palestine. Finished …” (Iron Wall, p. 316)
Dayan questioned the dubious “morality” of Israel’s “anti-infiltration” policy:
“Using the moral yardstick mentioned by [Moshe Sharett], I must ask: Are [we justified] in opening fire on the Arabs who cross [the border] to reap the crops they planted in our territory; they, their women, and their children? Will this stand up to moral scrutiny …? We shoot at those from among the 200,000 hungry Arabs who cross the line [to graze their flocks]—will this stand up to moral review? Arabs cross to collect the grain that they left in the ‘abandoned’ [the term often used by Israelis to describe the ethnically cleansed] villages and we set mines for them and they go back without an arm or a leg … [It may be that this] cannot pass review, but I know no other method of guarding the borders.” (Righteous Victims, p. 275)
In the mid-1950s, Dayan was anxious to initiate a “preventive” war against Egypt to neutralize the modernization of its army, according to Moshe Sharett’s diary:
“Moshe Dayan unfolded one plan after another for direct action. The first—what should be done to force open the blockade of the Gulf of Eilat. A ship flying the Israeli flag should be sent, and if the Egyptians bomb it, we should bomb the Egyptian base from the air, or conquer Ras al-Naqb, or open our way south of Gaza Strip to the coast. There was a general uproar. I asked Moshe: Do you realize that this would mean war with Egypt?, he said: Of course.” (Iron Wall, p. 105)
Dayan wrote in the 1955 regarding the collective punishments imposed on Palestinian civilian population by the Israeli Army:
“The only method that proved effective, not justified or moral but effective, when Arabs plant mines on our side [in retaliation]. If we try to search for the [particular] Arab [who planted mines], it has not value. But if we HARASS the nearby village … then the population there comes out against the [infiltrators] … and the Egyptian Government and the Transjordan Government are [driven] to prevent such incidents because their prestige is [assailed], as the Jews have opened fire, and they are unready to begin a war … the method of collective punishment so far has proved effective.” (Righteous Victims, p. 275-276)
And in the 1950s he also stated on the same subject :
“We could not guard every water pipeline from being blown up and every tree from being uprooted. We could not prevent every murder of a worker in an orchard or a family in their beds. But it was in our power to set high price for our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying … It was in our power to cause the Arab governments to renounce ‘the policy of strength’ toward Israel by turning it into a demonstration of weakness.” (Iron Wall, p. 103)
The “too high” price Dayan mentions is collective punishment such as house demolition, uprooting trees, etc.
Dayan stated in an oration at the funeral of an Israeli farmer killed by a Palestinian Arab in April 1956:
“… Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We should demand his blood not from the Arabs of Gaza but from ourselves … Let us make our reckoning today. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house … Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.” (Iron Wall, p. 101)
Dayan saw no need for American guarantees of Israel’s security and strongly opposed America’s conditions that Israel forswear territorial expansion and military retaliation. In an informal talk with the ambassadors to Washington, London, and Paris, Dayan describe military retaliations as a “life drug” to the Israel Army. First, it obliged the Arab governments to take drastic measures to protect their borders. Second, it enabled the Israeli government to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and the army. Gideon Rafael, also present at the meeting with Dayan, remarked to Moshe Sharett:
“This is how fascism began in Italy and Germany!” (Iron Wall, p. 133-134)
While planning the attack on Egypt in 1956, Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan were trying to work out a plan to internally destabilize Lebanon in favor of Christian-Maronite government, and Dayan proposed:
“All that is required is to find an officer, even a captain [later to be Sa’ed Haddad] would do, to win his heart or buy him with money to get him to agreed to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, and create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place.” (Iron Wall, p. 133-134)
This plan was implemented 25 years later during the Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982. More than 20,000 civilians were killed, and yet Israel had to withdraw with its tail between its legs in May 2000.
In November 1967, he was also quoted as saying:
“We want [Palestinian] emigration, we want a normal standard of living, we want to encourage emigration according to a selective program.” (Righteous Victims, p. 338)
At a July 14, 1968 meeting in his office, he said:
“The proposed policy [of raising the level of public service in the occupied territories] may clash with our intention to encourage emigration from both [Gaza] Strip and Judea and Samaria. Anyone who has practical ideas or proposal to encourage emigration—let him speak up. No idea or proposal is to be dismissed out of hand.” (Righteous Victims, p. 339)
So twenty years after the Nakba of 1948, it was still Israeli policy of “encouraging” Palestinians to leave Gaza and the West Bank. When Dayan addressed the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), as quoted in Ha’aretz on April 4, 1969, he said:
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu’a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
In series of interviews conducted in 1976 (later published in Yediot Ahronot after his death in 1981), Dayan confessed that his greatest mistake was that, as a Minister of Defense in June 1967, he did not stick to his original opposition to storming the Golan Heights, and he described how the confrontation with the Syrian evolved to a war:
“Never mind that [when asked if Syrians had initiated the war from the Golan Heights]. After all, I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let’s talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plough someplace where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was. I did that, and Laskov and Chara [Zvi Tsur, Rabin’s predecessor as chief of staff] did that, Yitzhak did that, but it seems to me that the person who most enjoyed these games was Dado [David Elzar, OC Northern Command, 1964-69].” (Iron Wall, p. 236-237)
Moshe Dayan once remarked “describing Israel’s relationship with the United States”:
“Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.” (Iron Wall, p. 316)
“During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road.”—Moshe Dayan, Ma’ariv, July 7, 1968.
Yitzhak Rabin
Yitzhak Rabin, an Israeli Prime Minister, said: “We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters” (Uri Lubrani, Ben-Gurion’s special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960; from “The Arabs in Israel” by Sabri Jiryas; also published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979)
“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!'” (Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979)
“[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat.” (Yitzhak Rabin, explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry, quoted by David Shipler in the New York Times, 04/04/1983, citing Meir Cohen’s remarks to the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee on March 16)
Rabin was the deputy commander of Operation Danny, the largest Israeli military operation to that point, which involved four IDF brigades. The cities of Ramle and Lydda were captured, as well as the major airport in Lydda, as part of the operation. Following the capture of the two towns there was an exodus of their Arab population. Rabin signed the expulsion order, which included the following, “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age.”
Rabin was famous (or infamous) for ordering Israeli troops to “break the bones” of Palestinian demonstrators (mostly children).
Henry Kissinger stated “I ask Rabin to make concessions, and he says he can’t because Israel is too weak. So I give him arms, and he says he doesn’t need to make concessions because Israel is strong” (quoted in Findley’s Deliberate Deceptions, p.199).
Rabin once said in the Knesset: “For all its faults, Labor has done more and remains capable of doing more in the future [in expanding Jewish settlements] than Likud with all of its doing. We have never talked about Jerusalem. We have just made a fait accompli [accomplished fact]. It was we who built the suburbs in [the annexed part of] Jerusalem. The Americans didn’t say a word, because we built these suburbs cleverly.”
Ariel Sharon was the eleventh Prime Minister of Israel. On October 14-15, 1953, under Sharon’s command, Israeli squads attacked the unarmed Arab village of Qibya in the demilitarized zone, where they blew up 42 houses and killed more than 60 residents who were trapped inside. The details were so gruesome that the U.S. joined in a U.N. condemnation of the Israeli action, and for the first and only time, suspended aid to Israel in reprisal. In September 1982, the massacre of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps was committed. More than 2,500 Palestinian women, children and elderly people were slaughtered in cold blood. The Israeli high court held a number of Israeli military officers, including Sharon, responsible.
Menachem Begin
Menachem Begin (1913-1992) was born in in Brest Litovsk, currently Belarus, and graduated as a lawyer from the University of Warsaw, Poland. After the Germans occupied Poland, he sought refuge in Lithuania. In 1942, he emigrated to Palestine where he led the Irgun terror gang. Since he opposed British policies, Begin waged a war of terror against both the British and Palestinians. Begin was wanted by the British for acts of terrorism and war crimes. The Irgun and Begin were credited with the most famous massacre against Palestinian civilians, during the 1948 war, at DEIR YASSIN.
From 1948 to 1977, Begin led the Israeli opposition as a member of the Likud party, and in 1977 he became Israel’s sixth Prime Minister. He is credited with achieving the first peace treaty and neutralizing Egypt’s army. With Egypt sidelined, Begin began attacking the PLO and destroying its bases in Lebanon. He resigned office in 1983 soon after the death of his wife, and then lived in seclusion until his death in 1992.
Begin was a disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and a strong believer in the IRON WALL theory. The loss of both his parents during the Holocaust had a profound affect on his politics. Nazi war crimes against Jews were often cited by Begin as excuses for his heavy-handed policies against Arabs.
One day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine, Begin imperiously proclaimed:
“The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized … Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever.” (Iron Wall, p. 25)
Soon after Begin was elected Prime Minister in 1977, the government’s foreign policy was stated as follows:
“… the Jewish people have the unchallengeable, eternal, historic right to the Land of Israel [including the West Bank and Gaza Strip], the inheritance of their forefathers” (Iron Wall, p. 354-355)
Begin used the Holocaust as a justification for the invasion of Lebanon. On June 5, 1982 he told the Israeli Cabinet:
“The hour of decision has arrived. You know what I have done, and what all of us have done. to prevent war and bereavement. But our fate is that in the Land of Israel there is no escape from fighting in the spirit of self-sacrifice. Believe me, the alternative to fighting is Treblinka, and we have resolved that there would be no Treblinkas. This is the moment in which courageous choice has to be made. The criminal terrorists and the world must know that the Jewish people have a right to self-defense, just like any other people” (Iron Wall, p. 404-405).
Almost 18 years later, the Israeli army was forced out of Lebanon after murdering more than 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. In the new Treblinka it was Lebanese and Palestinian civilians who were being murdered, not Jews.
When American President Ronald Reagan threatened to review American-Israeli relations over the indiscriminate carpet bombing of Beirut in 1982, once again Begin used the Holocaust to excuse his actions:
“Now may I tell you, dear Mr. President, how I feel these days when I turn to the creator of my soul in deep gratitude. I feel as a Prime Minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing Berlin where amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface. My generation, dear Ron, swore on the alter of God that whoever proclaims his intent to destroy the Jewish state or the Jewish people, or both, seals his fate, so that which happened once on instruction from Berlin—with or without inverted commas—will never happen again” (Iron Wall, p. 404-405).
When President Reagan sent a letter to Begin condemning the attack on the Iraqi civilian nuclear reactor in June 1981, Begin responded with a letter replete with references to the Holocaust:
“A million and half children were poisoned by Zyklon gas during the Holocaust. Now Israel’s children were about to be poisoned by radioactivity. For two years we have lived in the shadow of the danger awaiting Israel from the nuclear reactor in Iraq. This would have been a new Holocaust. It was prevented by the heroism of our pilots to whom we owe so much.” (Iron Wall, p. 387)
Menachem Begin was strongly influenced by Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall theory:
“The deterrent power, or in Jabotinsky’s language THE IRON WALL was intended to convince the Arabs that they would not be able to get rid of the sovereign Jewish presence in the Land of Israeli, even if they would not bring themselves to recognize the justice of the Jewish people’s claim to the homeland.” (Iron Wall, p. 354)
In 1991, Binyamin Begin, the son of Menahem Begin and a prominent voice in the Likud party, said:
“In strategic terms, the settlements (in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza) are of no importance.” What makes them important, he said, was that “they constitute an obstacle, an insurmountable obstacle to the establishment of an independent Arab State west of the river Jordan.” (Findley’s Deliberate Deceptions, p. 159)
Israel “will never withdraw from the occupied territories.”—Menachem Begin’s speech on West Bank for Israel independence day, New York Times, May, 1981.
Golda Meir
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s most infamous quote was: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian.”
“How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.”—Golda Meir (March 8, 1969, quoted in Chapter 13 of The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace by Alfred Lilienthal )
“Any one who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back must also say how he expects to take the responsibility for it, if he is interested in the state of Israel. It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen.” (Golda Meir, 1961, in a speech to the Knesset, reported in Ner, October 1961)
“This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.” (Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971)
My delegation cannot refrain from speaking on this question—we who have such an intimate knowledge of boxcars and of deportations to unknown destinations that we cannot be silent. (On Soviet actions in Hungary, to the UN General Assembly 11/21/1956, but she was certainly silent, or lied through her teeth, about the deportations of Palestinian farmers and their completely innocent children.)
Arab sovereignty in Jerusalem just cannot be. This city will not be divided—not half and half, not 60-40, not 75-25, nothing. (Time, 02-19-1973.)
Miscellanies
Israeli Prime Minister Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers said Palestinians who opposed Jews were ‘as grasshoppers in our sight.'” (New York Times, April 20, 1988)
“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” (Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, New York Times, Feb. 28, 1994)
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, the head of the Kever Yossev Yeshiva (school of the Talmud) in Nablus stated: “The blood of the Jewish people is loved by the Lord; it is therefore redder and their life is preferable.”
Rabbi Ginsburg also said: “The killing by a Jew of a non-Jew, i.e. a Palestinian, is considered essentially a good deed, and Jews should therefore have no compunction about it.” (From “Five General Religious Duties Which Lie Behind the Act of the Saintly, Late Rabbi Baruch Goldstein, May his Blood be Avenged”)
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel … Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” (Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983)
“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” (Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983)
“There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.” (Israeli President Moshe Katsav, The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001)
The influential Rabbi Ovadia Yosef proclaimed during a sermon preceding the 2001 Passover holiday: “May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them.” He added: “It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.” (Ha’aretz, April 12, 2001)
David Goldman wrote: “We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel … Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”
Michael Ben-Yair, Attorney General of Israel, 1993-1996 (in Ha’aretz): “We [Israel] enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the Occupied Territories, engaging in theft and funding justification for all these activities … we [Israel] established an apartheid regime.”
“The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war.” (Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha’aretz, 19 March 1972)
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has declared that Gazan civilians should not be allowed “to live normal lives” and Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter has previously demanded that Israel take action “irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians.” (Jonathan Cook, Disappearing Palestine, p.132)
The full title of Jonathan Cook’s book indicates the results and perhaps the purpose of Israeli policy: Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s experiments in human despair. Behind “a mask of false legitimacy” Israel “has carried out the destruction of Palestinian identity and living space and the theft of resources.” It seems the despair Israel produces has a specific purpose: encouraging Palestinians to pack up and leave, although most of them have nowhere to go without becoming homeless and destitute, like millions of other Palestinian refugees. (Cook, Disappearing Palestine, p.70)
In 2002, General Eitan Ben Elyahu, a former head of Israel’s air force, declared on Israeli television that “eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories.” (Cook, op. cit., pp. 134-135)
Disturbingly, up to 60 percent of Israeli Jews support schemes to encourage or force Arabs to leave both the occupied territories and Israel. (Cook, op. cit., p. 141)
Israeli ministers have been ordered not to give unauthorized interviews to avoid a repeat of last year’s PR disaster when Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened the Palestinians with a “bigger Shoah,” or Holocaust. (“Israeli minister warns of Palestinian ‘holocaust,'” The Guardian, February 29, 2008)
The Palestinians are seen as obstacles by Israel’s leaders. Like ants infesting a picnic blanket, they must be crushed underfoot or swept aside. Noam Chomsky, a leading Jewish intellectual, writes: “Traditionally over the years, Israel has sought to crush any resistance to its programs of takeover of the parts of Palestine it regards as valuable, while eliminating any hope for the indigenous population to have a decent existence enjoying national rights.” Chomsky has been denied entry to Israel; so much for freedom of speech and dissent in the “only democracy” in the Middle East. (“Chomsky on the US, Israel, and Gaza,” January 8, 2009)
Chomsky also notes: “The key feature of the occupation has always been humiliation: they [the Palestinians] must not be allowed to raise their heads. The basic principle, often openly expressed, is that the ‘Araboushim’—a term that belongs with ‘nigger’ or ‘kike’—must understand who rules this land and who walks in it with head lowered and eyes averted.” (Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, p. 489)
Chomsky notes that the violent reactions of Hamas “can be condemned as criminal and politically foolish, but those who offer no alternative have no moral grounds to issue such judgments, particularly those in the US who choose to be directly implicated in these ongoing crimes—by their words, their actions, or their silence.”
On May 24, 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a joint session of the U.S. Congress that “I believed and to this day still believe, in our people’s eternal and historic right to this entire land.” While he, like other Israeli prime ministers before him, talked about the possibility of Israel giving land back to the Palestinians, like his predecessors he seemed to merely be saying what Americans want to hear. (The senators and congressmen lapped up everything he said, applauding time and time again.) But as the Southern proverb goes, “the proof is in the pudding” and in this case the pudding proves Israel intends to steal as much Palestinian land as possible, for as long as possible, for the sake of Jewish robber barons stealing land they don’t need, since most of the land stolen from the Palestinians in 1948 lies fallow to this day, inside the borders of Israel. (Washington Post, May 24, 2006)
“… it is the duty of the [Israeli] leadership to explain to the public a number of truths. One truth is that there is no Zionism, no settlement, and no Jewish state without evacuating Arabs, and without expropriating lands and their fencing off.” (Yesha’ayahu Ben-Porat, Yedi’ot Aharonot 07/14/1972, responding to public controversy regarding the Israeli evictions of Palestinians in Rafah, Gaza, in 1972, cited in Nur Masalha’s A Land Without A People, 1997, p.98)
“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours … Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” (Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998)
“The very point of Labor’s Zionist program is to have as much land as possible and as few Arabs as possible!” (Yitzhak Navon, “moderate” ex-Israeli President, cited on p.179 of Nur Masalha’s A Land without a People and Bernard Avishai’s The Tragedy of Zionism, p. 340)
Israel Zangwill, who had visited Palestine in 1897 and came face-to-face with the demographic reality, stated: “Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two souls to the square mile, and not 25% of them Jews … [We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 7- 10 and Righteous Victims, p. 140)
The socialist Zionist Hahman Syrkin, the ideological founder of Socialist Zionism, proposed in pamphlet entitled “The Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State” which was published in 1898 that:
“Palestine thinly populated, in which the Jews constituted today 10 percent of the population, must be evacuated for the Jews.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 11)
In October 1882, Validimir Dubnow, one of the earliest Zionist pioneers in Palestine, wrote to his brother articulating the ultimate goals of the Zionist movement:
“The ultimate goal … is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years … The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland.” (Righteous Victims, p. 49)
In October 1882 Ben-Yehuda and Yehiel Michal Pines, two of the earliest Zionist pioneers in Palestine, wrote describing the indigenous Palestinians:
“… There are now only five hundred [thousand] Arabs, who are not very strong, and from whom we shall easily take away the country if only we do it through stratagems [and] without drawing upon us their hostility before we become the strong and populous ones.” (Righteous Victims, p. 49)
While the Zionist leadership was discussing the morality of “transferring” the Palestinian people in December 1918, Yitzhak Avigdor Wilkansky, an agronomist and advisor at the Palestine Office in JAFFA, felt that, for practical reasons, it was:
“impossible to evict the fellahin [Palestinian Arab peasants], even if we wanted to. Nevertheless, if it were possible, I would commit an injustice towards the [Palestinian] Arabs. There are those among us who are opposed to this form the point of view of supreme righteousness and morality … [But] when you enter into the midst of the Arab nation and do not allow it to unit, here too you are taking its life … Why don’t our moralists dwell on this point? We must be either complete vegetarians or meat eaters: not one-half, one-third, or one-quarter vegetarian.” (Righteous Victims, p. 140-141 and America And The Founding Of Israel, p. 71)
In 1919 Lord Balfour, the father of the Balfour Declaration, justified the usurpation of Palestinians right of self determination:
“Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder important then the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit the ancient land.” (Righteous Victims, p. 75)
What arrogance and hubris, to consign hundreds of thousands of innocents to the dustbin, in the name of “God” and a “superior” culture!
As early as October 25, 1919 Winston Churchill knew that Zionism implied the clearing of the indigenous population:
“There are the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine, and who take it for granted that the local [Palestinian] population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 15)
In 1938 Berl Katzneslon, the influential Mapai leader, knew what lay ahead for the Palestinians:
“There is the question of how the army, the police, and the civil service will function and how a state can be run if part of its population is disloyal … only a small minority of [the Palestinian] Arabs will remain in the country.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 115)
The following is a discussion between members of the Knesset (MK) regarding the demographic make-up of the nascent “Jewish state” soon after the 1948 war:
Shlomo Levi, MK: ” The large number of Arabs in the country worries me …”
Eliyahu Camreli, MK: “I’m not willing to accept a single Arab, and not only an Arab but any gentile. I want the State of Israel to be entirety Jewish, the descendents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob …”
Yehiel Duvdenvany, MK: “If there was any way of solving the problem of transfer [i.e., ethnic cleansing] of the remaining 170,000 [Palestinian] Arabs we would do so …”
David Hakohen, MK: “We didn’t plan the departure of the Arabs. It was a miracle …”
Z. Onn: “The landscape is more beautiful—I enjoy it, especially, when traveling between Haifa and Tel Aviv, and there is not a single Arab to be seen.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 46-47)
One is reminded of how Nazis must have celebrated not having to see Jews, once they had been transferred to ghettos and concentration camps.
On August 14, 1948 Yigael Yadin (one of the founding members of the Haganah and Israel’s chief of staff between 1948-1951), wrote Moshe Sharett advocating a non-return policy for the Palestinian refugees:
“Because of the spread of diseases among the Arab refugees, I propose that [we] declare a quarantine on all our conquered areas. We will thus be able to more strongly oppose the demand for the return of the Arab refugees and all infiltration by Arabs [back] into the abandoned villages—in addition to our opposition [to the return] on understandable military and political ground.” (Benny Morris, p. 139-140)
At the start of the First Truce (June 11—July 8) during the 1948 war, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Department noted the Arab leaders’ calls for the return to Palestine of 300,000 Palestinian refugees. It also noted the trickle of Palestinian refugees “infiltrating” back to their villages. The Department conjectured that a major reason for this return of Palestinians was their desire:
“to harvest the [summer] crops… The Arabs in their places of wandering are suffering from real hunger.” But this harvest-geared return, the department warned, could “in time bring in its wake [Palestinian Arab re-]settlement in the villages, something which might seriously endanger many of the achievements we accomplished during the first six months of the war. It is not for nothing that Arabs spokesmen are … demanding the return … [of the Palestinian refugees], because this would not only ease their burden but would weigh us down considerably.” (Benny Morris, p. 140)
Prior to the start of Operation Hiram in northern Palestine in October 1948, the Foreign Ministry advised the Israeli Army to keep the Galilee as clear as possible of Palestinian Arabs:
“… try during conquest [to make sure] that no [Palestinian] Arabs inhabitants remain in the Galilee and certainly that no refugees from other places remain there. Truth to tell, concerning the attitude to the Christian [Palestinian Arabs] and the problem of whether to discriminate in their favor and to leave them in their villages, clear instructions were not given [by us?] and we did not express an opinion.” (Benny Morris, p. 226)
As Operation Hiram was being concluded in late October 1948, some internal Palestinian refugees remained in al-Rama, east of Acre. A former resident of Ghuwayr Abu Shusha (north of Tiberias) described his experience of being ethnically cleansed to Lebanon as the following:
“The people in Ar Rama were ordered to assemble at the centre of the village. A Jewish soldier stood on top of a rise and addressed us. He ordered the [Palestinian] Druze present … to go back to their homes… Then he ordered the rest of us to leave to Lebanon … Although I was given a permission to stay by my friend, Abu Musa [a Local Israeli Jewish officer], I could not remain without the rest of my tribe who were forced to flee.” Unlike the Ar Rama Palestinian Christian community, these non-resident did not remain but moved off to Lebanon. (Benny Morris, p. 227)
Similarly, a Palestinian refugee from Sha’ab (east of Acre) described his experience as the following:
“The Jews grouped us with the other [Palestinian Arab] villagers, separating us from women. We remained all day in the village [al-Bi’na] courtyard … we were thirsty and hungry.” Two Palestinian villagers, he recalled, were taken aside and shot dead, and the other Palestinian refugees were robbed from their valuables. Some 200 men were selected and driven off, presumably to a POW camp. The refugee went on to say:
“It was almost night … [The] al-Bi’na mukhtar asked the Jews to permit us to stay overnight … rather then travel [northwards] at night with our old men, women, and children. The Jews rejected the mukhtar’s request and gave us [i.e., the refugees] half an hour to leave … When half an hour passed, the Jews began to shoot in the air … they injured my nine-year old son in the knee. We walked a few hours until we reached Sajur … We were terrified, the road was full of people in every direction you looked … all in a hurry to get to Lebanon.” A few days later, after a brief stay in the Palestinian Druze village of Beit Jann, they reached Lebanon. (Benny Morris, p. 227-8)
As the Israeli Army was entering Eilabun (a Palestinian Maronite Christian village) on October 30, 1948, the soldiers went on rampage in the village looting Palestinians properties. In a letter dated January 21st, 1949 sent to the Israeli Minority Affair Ministry by Faraj Diab Surur, the Eilabun’s Mukhtar, along with other village notables described the looting and the ethnic cleansing of their village by the Israeli soldiers as the following:
“When the [Israeli] commander selected 12 youngsters (shabab) and sent them to another place, then he ordered that the assembled inhabitants to be led to [al-]Maghar and the priest asked him to leave the women and babies and to take only men, but he refused, and led the assembled inhabitants—some 800 in number—to [al-]Maghar preceded by military vehicles … He himself stayed on with another two soldiers until they killed the 12 youngsters in the streets of the village and then they joined the army going to [al-]Maghar. He led them to [al-]Frarradiya. When they reached Kafr ‘Inan they were joined by an armored car that fired upon them [refugees] … killing one of the old men, Sam’an ash Shufani, 60 years old, and injured three women … At [al-]Frarradiya [the Israeli soldiers] robbed the inhabitants of IL 500 and the women of their Jewelry, and took 42 youngsters and sent them to a detention camp, and the rest the next day were led to Meirun, and afterward to the Lebanon borders. During this whole time they were given food only once. Imagine then how the babies screamed and the cries of the pregnant and weaning mothers.”
Subsequently, the Israeli Army looted the village of Eilabun. In early 1949, many of these refugees were allowed back to their homes after relentless lobbying by Aharon Cizling (the Israeli Agriculture Minister) in the Israeli Cabinet. It is worth noting that these returnees were among the few hundreds to be allowed back to their homes, farms, and businesses, however, the mass majority of the Palestinian people are still dispossessed and homeless since the 1948 war. (Benny Morris, p. 229-230)
As the Israelis rampaged the friendly Palestinian village of Huj (northeast of Gaza), Yitzhak Avira (an old-time Haganah Intelligence Service officer) registered a complaint against the continued destruction of the village. He wrote Ezra Danin (a member of the 1st and 2nd Transfer Committees and a Haganah Intelligence Officer) on August 16, 1948 that:
“… recently a view has come to prevail among us that the Arabs are nothing. Every Arab is a murderer, all of them should be slaughtered, all the villages that are conquered should be burned … I … see a danger in the prevalence of an attitude that everything of theirs should be murdered, destroyed, and made to vanish.”
Danin answered: “War is complicated and lacking in sentimentality. If the commanders believe that by destruction, murder, and human suffering they will reach their goal more quickly—I would not stand in their way. If we do not hurry up and do [things]—our enemies will do these things to us.” (Benny Morris, p. 167)
As the Israeli soldiers were occupying the al-Dawayima (northwest of Hebron), the solders perpetrated a mostly unknown massacre on October 28-29, 1948. According the Shabtai Kaplan, a MAPAM party member, and eyewitness accounts, he describe the atrocity to Al Hamishmar editor as the following:
“The first wave of conquerors [89th Battalion of the 8th Brigade] killed about 80-100 [male Palestinian] Arabs, women and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was no a house without dead,” Kaplan wrote. Kaplan’s informant , who arrived immediately afterwards in the second wave, reported that the Arab men and women who remained were then closed off in the houses “without food and water.” Sappers arrived to blow up the houses. “One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house … and to blow up the house with them. The sapper refused … The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a [Palestinian] woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clean the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby.” The soldier witness, according to Kaplan, said that “cultured officers … had turned into base murderers and this not in the heat of the battle … but out of system of expulsion and destruction. The less Arabs [who] remained—the better. This principle is the political motor of the expulsion and atrocities.”
Kaplan understood that MAPAM in this respect was in bind. The matter could not be publicized; it would harm the State and MAPAM would lambasted for it. (Benny Morris, p. 222-3)
The Israeli Operation Command for the Northern Front Carmel described the flight of the Palestinian refugees into Lebanon (soon after the concluding of Operation Hiram) as the following:
“They abandoned the villages of their birth and that of their ancestors an go into exile … Women, children, babies, donkeys—everything moves, in silence and grief, northwards, without looking to right or left. Wife does not find her husband and child does not find his father … no one knows the goal of his trek. Many possessions are scattered by the paths; the more the refugees walk, the more tired they grow—and they throw away what they had tried to save on their way into exile. Suddenly, every object seems to them petty, superfluous, unimportant as against chasing fear and the urge to save life and limb.”
“I saw a boy aged eight walking northwards pushing along two assess in front of him. His father and brother had died in the battle and his mother was lost. I saw a woman holding a two-week-old baby in her arm and a baby two years old in her left arm and a four-year-old girl following in her wake, clutching at her dress.”
“[Near Sa’sa’ northwest of Safad,] I saw suddenly by the roadside a tall man, bent over, scarping with his fingernails in the hard, rocky soil. I stopped. I saw a small hollow in the ground, dug out by hand, with fingernails, under an olive tree. The man laid down the body of a baby who had died in the arms of his mother, and covered it with soil and small stones.” Near Tarshiha [northeast of Acre], Carmel saw a 16-year-old youth “sitting by the roadside, naked as the day he was born and smiling at our passing car.” Carmel described how some of the Israeli soldiers, regarding the [Palestinian] refugee columns with astonishment and shock and “with great sadness,” went down into the wadis and gave the [Palestinian] refugees bread and tea. ” I knew [of] a unit in which no soldier ate anything that day because all [the food] sent it by the company kitchen was taken down to the wadi.” (Benny Morris, p. 231-2)
An officer of the police national headquarters, who had visited the villages of Elabun and Mrar (in the Galilee) in November 1948, reported:
“All the inhabitants of Elabun were deported, except for four villagers who are Greek Orthodox, and a small number of old people and children. The total number of inhabitants left in the village is 52. The priests complained bitterly about the expulsion of the villagers and demanded their return … In Mrar, most of the inhabitants remained, except for many of the Muslims.” (1949, The First Israelis, p. 28)
On May 10, 1948, Aharon Cohen, the director during the war of the Arab Department of the newly formed MAPAM party, wrote in a memorandum to the party’s Political Committee:
“There is a reason to believe that what is being done … is being done out of certain political objectives and not only out of military necessities, as they claim sometimes. In fact, the transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the boundaries of the Jewish state is being implemented … the evacuation/clearing out of [Palestinian] Arab villages is not always done out of military necessity. The complete destruction of the villages is not always done only because there are no sufficient forces to maintain a garrison.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 181)
On July 24 the Mapai Center held a full-scale debate regarding the Palestinian Arab question against the background of the ethnic cleansing of Ramla and Lydda. The majority apparently backed Ben-Gurion’s policies of population transfer or ethnic cleansing. Shlomo Lavi, one of the influential leaders of the Mapai party, said that:
“… the … transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs out of the country in my eyes is one of the most just, moral and correct things that can be done. I have thought of this for many years.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 192)
This was seconded by Avraham Katznelson, another influential Mapai leader, who said there was:
“nothing more moral, from the viewpoint of universal human ethics, than the emptying of the Jewish state of the Arabs and their transfer elsewhere … This requires [the use of] force.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 192)
In an interview with the Sunday Times Golda Meir, Israel’s Prime Minister between 1969-1974, stated in June 1969:
“It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them, they did not exist.” (Iron Wall, p. 311)
“Regarding the Galilee, Mr. [Moshe] Sharett already told you that about 100,000 Arabs still now live in the pocket of Galilee. Let us assume that a war breaks out. Then we will be able to cleanse the entire area of Central Galilee, including all its refugees, in one stroke. In this context let me mention some mediators who offered to give us the Galilee without war. What they meant was the populated Galilee. They didn’t offer us the empty Galilee, which we could have only by means of a war. Therefore if a war is extended to cover the whole of Palestine, our greatest gain will be the Galilee. It is because without any special military effort which might imperil other fronts, only by using the troops already assigned for the task, we could accomplish our aim of cleansing the Galilee.” (From a protocol of the Government of Israel, translated from Hebrew by Israel Shahak, in “Truth or Myth about Israel? Read between Quotation Marks” by Charley Reese in The Orlando Sentinel, June 13, 1999; later published as “What Israeli Historians Say About 1948 Ethnic Cleansing” in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1999)
“Our right in Gaza is exactly like our right in Tel Aviv. We are colonizing Gaza exactly in the same manner in which we colonized Yafa. Those who doubt our right in Gaza should doubt our right in Tel Aviv as well.”—Israel Galili, quoted in Haaretz, April 18, 1972 as reprinted in Israel: Utopia incorporated, Uri Davis, Zed Press, London, 1977, p. 15.
“We take the land first and the law comes after.” —Mr. Palmon, Arab affairs adviser to the Mayor of Jerusalem (quoted in The Guardian, 26 April 1972).
“In later years it became a Zionist habit to speak not only in two but in several voices, to run several lines of persuasion at the same time. A result was to debauch to movement with propaganda to an extraordinary extent so that Zionists, preoccupied with higher truth at the expense of the yet more essential lower truth, got a not undeserved reputation in the world for chronic mendacity.”—Christopher Sykes, Cross Roads to Israel, pp. 24 and 26.
“We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise solution. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism”.—General Yehoshafat Harkabi, Ma’ariv, 2 November 1973.
“But if we are asked: ‘Did you in all this wide country with her many deserts and her few Jewish farmers, did you have to make a mockery of all your oaths before yourselves and before the council of nations? Did you have to betray all the prophecies of your prophets who foresaw the return of the people to the land? Did you have to desecrate all law and all justice—in order to steal a few thousand dunams from a handful of miserable Arab villagers?’ When we are asked that, we shall not be able to lift our heads.”—Azriel Karlibach, writing under the pseudonym of Rabbi Ipcha Mistraba, Ma’ariv, 25 December 1953.
“There is no Zionist settlement, and there is no Jewish State, without displacing Arabs and without confiscating lands and fencing them off.”—Yeshaayahu Ben-Porat, Yediot Aharonot, 14 July 1972.
“Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”—Irgun proclamation against partition, quoted by Menachem Begin in The Revolt: Story of the Irgun, p.335.
“Paradoxically, it seems that, after complaining of centuries of persecution, Israelis are now tempted to see a lack of anti-Semitism as an obstacle to encouraging emigration to Israel.”—Ric Marsden, The Sunday Times, 16 November 1975.
“Consider the question of the Soviet Jews. It does not seem to be understood in the West the Jews are not discriminated against as Jews in the allocation of exit permits. Not only comparatively but absolutely, very many more Jews have been allowed to emigrate than have members of any other group. Last year 33,000 arrived in Israel (not to mention others who set out in that direction and switched destination en route). The rate is now running at 3,000 a month. But it would not be possible to find even one hundredth of that number who were granted visas among Tartars or Ukrainians or Armenians. Or even plain Russians. When ordinary Soviet citizens are told that a vital trade agreement awarding their country most-favoured-nation status with the US is being blocked in Congress because Soviet Jews are demanding as an absolute right something few other inhabitants can expect as a special privilege—then the result is likely to be spontaneous outbreaks of anti-Semitism.”
—Alan Brien, “Soviet dissidents: friends they could do without”, The Times (London), 9 September 1973.
Related pages: Christians may want to consider the ethical question What would Jesus do?If you are unfamiliar with the real history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or have been told that Israel is “only defending itself,” please read Albert Einstein’s 1948 letter to the New York Times and Einstein on Palestine: the Prophet of Peace. If you want to understand how the maps below relate to Israel’s new offensive against Gaza, known as Operation “Pillar of Defense” or the biblical “Pillar of Clouds,” please click here Amud Annan “Pillar of Fire.” If you want to hear the opinion of the former U.S. president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who negotiated peace talks between Israel and Palestinians, please click here Jimmy Carter: “Israeli policy is to confiscate Palestinian territory.”
Map 1 of 1946 Palestine shows more than 90% of the land belonging to Palestinians; at this point Jewish settlers had paid for most of the land they occupied
Map 2 of 1947 U.N. partition plan of Israel and Palestine; the land in the white areas was not “given” to Israel; Israeli Jews took the additional land
Map 3 of 1967 borders of Israel and Palestine; these are the “1967 lines” aka as the “1949 armistice lines”; once again Israeli Jews took the additional land
Map 4 of 2000 borders shows how Israel keeps taking land outside its legal borders, creating discontiguous Palestinian bantustans