The idea of Israel has been based on killing, dispossessing and exiling all the non-Jews from the land given to them by God Almighty. David Ben-Gurion, the primary national founder and first prime minister of Israel, laid the foundation stone of what he used to call “Eretz Israel” (land given to Jews, Israel meaning the descendants of the tribes established by the sons of Jacob, the Jewish people), not on peaceful coexistence but on the idea of cleansing it from the “enemy.”
Born in Pionsk, Poland, to Jewish parents, Ben Grün immigrated to the Palestine region of the Ottoman Empire in 1906. Adopting the name of Ben-Gurion in 1909, as a major Zionist leader and the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, he never minced his words about the ownership of the “Eretz Israel.” In his early directives and instructions, he unashamedly used the word “tihur” (Hebrew word for cleaning, as in Arabic “tahir”), “nikkuy” (emptying), and “jihad” (as in Arabic “jihad,” meaning struggle or effort) as the main objective of his de-Arabization of Palestine.
For instance in his order for Operation Kippa (meaning “summit” as the aim of their struggle, but also "skullcap" in Hebrew) he despicably ordered his occupation brigades “their assault should aim: “Killing the enemy political leadership mukhtars” (the village aldermen as in Turkish “muhtar”), killing the inciters and their financial supporters and killing those villagers who joined assault against Jews during the British Mandatory System in Palestine.
If you look at Israeli historian and political scientist Ilan Pappe’s excellent compilation of Zionists’ atrocities before and after the creation of the State of Israel, you will have a clear picture of those foundation principles of Israel displayed in official documents and diaries. It has never been about creating a democratic, multiethnic and multireligious country; they intended to erect an ethno-religious state based on an ideology.
In the late 1800s, the Zionist ideology called for a Jewish state to be established in Palestine, and Theodor Herzl, the Budapest native and early adopter of the idea to create a Jewish-only land, requested an audience with Sultan Abdülhamid II. The Sultan, well-versed in the Zionist literature filled with the “Judaization” narrative, simply declined the request. Then Herzl offered to pay the Ottomans' foreign debts and to provide propaganda for the Ottoman Sultan in Europe in exchange for opening Palestinian lands to Jewish settlement and transferring governance to the Jewish people, but to no avail! Instead, Abdülhamid took a series of precautions to reverse the plan. But he was dethroned by the Young Turks, who had withdrawn the Ottoman soldiers from Palestine and opened the entire country to the Zionist settlement.
Ben Gurion knew the ultimate aim of Zionists in Palestine: Muslims and Christians should be expelled from the Holy Land (that is, Eretz Israel) and they would never come back to their homes, after all, “the old will die and the young will forget.”
“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 Muslim 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,” he wrote in May 1948, to the General Staff. (From Ben-Gurion, a Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.)
Yet, the requirements of international relations, especially the U.S. replacing the British in global politics after World War II, the Palestinian Christians were not treated as “enemies” in Ben-Gurion’s directives. Also, the Druze were treated as a tool to be wedged in Muslim villages.
From Dec. 11, 1947, when the British government declared that the Mandate in Palestine would end, to the official declaration of the foundation of Israel on May 14, 1948, there were 11 cease-fires and truces arranged through the United Nations. If you follow Ilan Pappe’s narrative, you’ll see that none of them stopped Ben-Gurion’s battalions’ ethnic cleansing and destruction of Arab villages:
“By 8 July 1948, the first truce had come to an end. It took the U.N. mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, ten days to negotiate another one, which came into effect on 18 July. As we have seen, 15 May 1948 may have been a very significant date for the 'real war' between Israel and the Arab armies, but it was totally insignificant for the ethnic cleansing operations. During the two periods of truce, they expelled altogether 70,000 people, and again after the second truce, they resumed the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestine with huge operations of uprooting, deportation and depopulation in both the south and the north of the country.”
After long months of atrocities and occupation of the Palestinian lands partitioned to Arabs by Ben-Gurion’s militia, and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their villages and towns, the League of Arab States’ five members: Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria sent 26,000 soldiers, without enough arms and transportation, to the Palestinians help, which resulted in a catastrophe for the Arabs: By the end of the war, Israel controlled all of the area that the U.N. had proposed for a Jewish state, as well as almost 60% the area proposed for an Arab state.
The U.N. “peace” plan had resulted in people being intimidated and terrorized by psychological warfare, heavy shelling of civilian populations, expulsions, seeing relatives being executed, and wives and daughters abused, robbed, and in several cases, raped.
United Nations emissary Count Folke Bernadotte had arrived in Palestine on May 20 and dared to put forward a proposal to re-divide the country in half and unconditional return of all the refugees. He had already called for the refugees’ repatriation during the first truce (using their basic human right to return), which had been ignored. When he repeated his recommendation in the final report he submitted to the U.N., he was assassinated by Ben-Gurion’s militia.
As president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Bernadotte had been instrumental in saving Jews from the Nazis during World War II, and this was why the Israeli government had agreed to his appointment as a U.N. mediator; they had not expected him to try to do for the Palestinians what he had done for the Jews only a few years before.
When Count Bernadotte was killed, Ben-Gurion’s army had lost the Gaza Strip to Egypt and the East of Jerusalem and some parts of the West Bank to Jordan; and he had to sign armistice agreements with Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. But as Israel was about to send teams to the cease-fire talks, Yigal Allon, a commander of the Palmach Militia and later a general in the Israeli Defense Forces, proposed an offensive to conquer the West Bank up to the Jordan River. He thought his forces could do it, but Ben-Gurion refused, thinking that the job required the promised delivery of the “communist ammunition support” from the Soviet Union, 25 war aircraft from Czechoslovakia, and more airplanes to be smuggled out of South Africa.
Ben-Gurion knew, with armistice or not, as soon as he replenished his war capacity, he’d continue his cleaning job. It happened as he expected. Thanks to the “Communist Zionists,” four Czech aircraft were disassembled and delivered on a cargo plane; and Ben-Gurion violated the 1949 Armistice Agreement by invading the Gaza Strip and later Egypt and occupying the Sinai Peninsula. He also sent two brigades to Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba, which they took with no resistance on March 10.
Professor Noam Chomsky narrates a story about this violation of the cease-fire in his book titled “Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians”:
“Shortly after, Ben-Gurion was touring the border with a young general, whom he asked, ‘How would you take those hills?’ pointing to the Mountains of Edom beyond the Jordanian border. The general made some suggestions and then said, ‘Why do you ask? Do you want to conquer those hills?’ Ben-Gurion responded: ‘I? No. But you will conquer them.’ He also maintained what his official biographer calls ‘his dream of annexing the Sinai Peninsula.’ After the 1956 conquest of the Sinai, Ben-Gurion announced the founding of ‘the Third Kingdom of Israel,’ and informed the Knesset that ‘Our army did not infringe on Egyptian territory... Our operations were restricted to the Sinai Peninsula alone.'”
There is a long list of all the cease-fires that did not stop Israel’s diabolical work of killing, dispossessing and exiling those people who opened their homes and their dinner tables to the poor Jewish immigrants and refugees expelled from European countries and Russia.
In 1956, colluding with Britain and France, Israel violated the 1949 Armistice Agreement again and rejected U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s request to leave Sinai.
In 1967, Israel yet again violated the Armistice Agreement, launching a surprise attack against Egypt and Syria. Despite claims Israel was acting in self-defense against an impending attack from Egypt, Prime Minister Menachem Begin later admitted that “Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” By then, Israel reinvaded the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
In 1973, Israel signed a cease-fire agreement arranged by the U.S. and the Soviet Union to end the Yom Kippur War, but violated it with a “green light” from U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. According to declassified U.S. documents, Kissinger told the Israelis they could take a “slightly longer” time to adhere to the truce and “teach Soviets and their Egyptian puppets a better lesson. Israel launched an attack and surrounded the Egyptian army, causing a major diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and the Soviets that pushed the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.
I am not going to summarize Israel’s 1981, 1982, 1988, 2001, 2002, 2008 and 2011 violations of cease-fires. I am not sure if we keep calling this entity Israel, because the name implies all the Jews; perhaps we should call it simply The Zionists.
The architects of the ethnic cleansing program have no motives emanating from any religion, but are acting to fulfill an ideological zeal. Real believers of Judaism are not even serving in Israel’s murderous armies. No true Jew believes in a divine plan to “Judaize” the Judea!
