The HyperTexts

Zionist Quotes Continued: Herzl, Jabotinsky, Netanyahu, Weizmann, Sharon, Barak, Weitz, Ben-Gurion, Sharett, Dayan, Rabin, Begin

These quotations by right-wing Zionists―what they said in their own words―leave no doubt that their goal 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, Americans and the world, as the Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe") led directly to 9-11 and two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is a two-part collection of quotations; to start at the beginning please click Zionist Quotations Part I.

compiled by Michael R. Burch, an editor and publisher of Holocaust and Nakba poetry

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 from the 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.)

Demographic Maps

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




The HyperTexts