The Right of Return
1) The Right of Return in International Law:
–All refugees have a right to return to areas from which they have fled or were forced, to receive compensation for damages, and to either regain their properties or receive compensation and support for voluntary resettlement. This right derives from a number of legal sources, including customary international law, international humanitarian law governing rights of civilians during war, and human rights law. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in Article 13(2) that “[e]veryone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his own country.” This is an individual right and cannot be unilaterally abrogated by third parties.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
–In December 1948, following Israel’s establishment and the attendant displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians from areas that fell within its control, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194,which states:
“refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”
–The Palestinian right of return has been confirmed repeatedly by the UN General Assembly, including through Resolution 3236, which
“Reaffirms also the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.”
–The Palestinian right of return has also been recognized by major human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, which issued a policy statement on the subject in 2001. It concluded:
Amnesty International calls for Palestinians who fled or were expelled from Israel, the West Bank or Gaza Strip, along with those of their descendants who have maintained genuine links with the area, to be able to exercise their right to return. Palestinians who were expelled from what is now Israel, and then from the West Bank or Gaza Strip, may be able to show that they have genuine links to both places. If so, they should be free to choose between returning to Israel, the West Bank or Gaza Strip. ‘Palestinians who have genuine links to Israel, the West Bank or Gaza Strip, but who are currently living in other host states, may also have genuine links to their host state. This should not diminish or reduce their right to return to Israel, the West Bank or Gaza Strip.
–According to a statement issued by Human Rights Watch in 2000:
HRW urges Israel to recognize the right to return for those Palestinians, and their descendants, who fled from territory that is now within the State of Israel, and who have maintained appropriate links with that territory. This is a right that persists even when sovereignty over the territory is contested or has changed hands.
–The U.S. government supported Resolution 194, and consistently voted to affirm it until 1993, when the administration of President Bill Clinton began to refer to Palestinian refugee rights as a matter to be negotiated between the two parties in a final peace agreement. In recent years, the U.S. has supported the right of refugees to return to places like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and East Timor.
-Palestinian Refugees and the Right of Return, An International Law Analysis:
The Palestinian refugees’ right of return has not diminished since the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 194 in December 1948 but rather, has, on the contrary, gained even greater weight with the intervening passage of more than seventy years since the period of initial displacement of the Palestinian refugees. The right of return, as set forth in Resolution 194, conforms with binding principles, codified in the four separate bodies of international law as explained above, strengthening its relevance as a durable solution for Palestinian refugees. Implementation of the right of return – and the other associated rights enumerated in Resolution 194 (i.e., restitution and compensation) – is, therefore a logical necessity for a just and legal peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, under international law.
2) Palestinian Refugees: Facts & Figures:
–Palestinian refugees are the largest and longest-standing population of displaced persons in the world. Reliable figures on their numbers are hard to find, as there is no centralized agency or institution charged with maintaining this information. However, a survey released in 2010 by BADIL, the Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, found the refugee and displaced population to be at least 7.1 million, made up of 6.6 million refugees and 427,000 internally displaced persons. It also found that refugees comprised 67% of the Palestinian population as a whole. http://www.badil.org/en/publication/press-releases/24-2010/1934-release-of-qsurvey-of-palestinian-refugees-a-idps-2008-2009q.html
–Most Palestinian refugees are Palestinians and their descendants who were expelled from their homes in the parts of historic Palestine that were incorporated into the newly created state of Israel in 1948. Other Palestinian refugee categories include Palestinians who fled their homes but remained internally displaced in areas that became Israel in 1948; Palestinians who were displaced for the first time after Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip in the 1967 War; Palestinians who left the occupied territories since 1967 and have been prevented by Israel from returning due to revocation of residency rights, denial of family reunification, or deportation; and Palestinians internally displaced in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip since 1967.
–Most Palestinian refugees live in camps in the occupied territories and neighboring Arab countries, with 1.9 million in Jordan, 1.1 million in Gaza, some 779,000 in the West Bank, 427,000 in Syria, and 425,000 in Lebanon. Throughout the region, many Palestinians rely on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to survive. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/89571/middle-east-palestinian-refugee-numberswhereabouts
3) Responsibility for the Palestinian Refugee Problem:
–During the creation of Israel (1947-9), more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled by Zionist militias and Israeli government forces seeking to create a Jewish-majority state in historic Palestine, where the indigenous Palestinian Arab population was the overwhelming majority (approximately 67% in 1947). Palestinians call this the “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe” or “disaster.”
–By the time of the declaration of the state of Israel in May 1948 and the entry of neighboring Arab countries into the conflict, more than 200 Palestinian towns had already been emptied as people fled in fear or were driven out and expelled by Zionist paramilitaries.
Nakba and the process of Palestinian dispossession , May 2008.:
After 60 years of the Nakba, we Palestinians understand the ongoing process of dispossession to consist of four layers:
- The first is the international community’s complicity in transferring the Jewish question from Europe to Palestine, its continuing support for the State of Israel, and its failure to enforce international law to protect Palestinian rights and meet their needs for self-determination through an end to Israeli occupation.
- The second is the State of Israel’s relentless colonization of Palestinian land, endless and atrocities against the Palestinian people, constant violations of international law and human rights, and its failure to implement Article 11 of UN Resolution 194 on the return of refugees, as well as their violation of all agreements with the Palestinian leadership since the Oslo Accords of 1993.
- The third is the Arab leadership’s political hypocrisy, its cynical use of the tragedy of Palestine as a manipulative tool in local, regional and global politics, and the tangled web of inter-Arab alliances and rivalries that prevents it from meeting its responsibilities towards its Palestinian brethren.
- The fourth is Palestinian society’s internal conflicts, wavering loyalties according to events and priorities, infiltration and influence by their Arab brothers and foreign actors including Israel, and crisis of leadership characterized by a lack of strategy, bitter rivalry, and a priority on political survival; and most painfully for Palestinian society, the current fragmentation of the proud, deep-rooted Palestinian identity.
Nakba and the process of Palestinian disposition
–By the end of 1948, some three-quarters of the Palestinian Arab population had been expelled. It’s estimated that more than half were driven out under direct military assault. Others fled as news spread of massacres committed by Zionist forces in Palestinian cities and towns such as Deir Yassin, Ad Dawayima, Eilaboun, Saliha, and Lydda.
An Interview with Benny Morris BY ARI SHAVIT:https://www.counterpunch.org/2004/01/16/an-interview-with-benny-morris/
Invite Describes Deir Yassin as ‘Abandoned Arab Village’ by Akiva Eldar: https://www.haaretz.com/1.5022856
Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict by Norman Finkelstein
Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict by Norman Finkelstein
-More than 400 Palestinian cities and towns would be systematically destroyed by Zionist and Israeli forces. In dwellings that weren’t destroyed, Israel rapidly moved Jews, many of them recently arrived immigrants from Europe, into the newly emptied Palestinian homes.
The Nakba did not end in 1948 but continues until today, not only in the memories of loss and defeat but in the form of Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land for settlements and for Jewish communities inside Israel proper. With no prospect of freedom and political independence or of integration into Israel as citizens with equal rights in sight, with policies on the ground that contain all the elements defining apartheid in international law, and with a world that continues watching passively, the Nakba remains an ever present aspect of the consciousness of the Palestinian people. Israel’s attempt to obliterate historical memory has failed as the Palestinian people continue to identify themselves as belonging to their original homes in Palestine. Israel’s problem is thus not only “knowing that there is not one single place in its colonial settlement that did not have a former Arab population, but in its realization that there is no place today in its imaginary ‘Jewish State’ that does not still have an Arab population who claims it.”Despite the disintegration of Palestinian society and despite all Israeli attempts to the opposite, the Palestinian narrative and connection to the homeland remains deep rooted in the common identity of the people and has kept their struggle for rights, self determination and dignity alive. More than 70 years after their mass expulsions, Palestinians remain against all odds steadfast in their quest for historical justice and for statehood.
For more than 70 years they did not surrender nor did they concede their national identity or rights. They countered numerous “Israelization” attempts, preserving their language and terminology. They stood strong in the face of Israeli aggression and international ignorance, they showed readiness for compromise and accepted unfair agreements (such as Oslo), but never gave up their struggle for freedom and independence. They resisted the occupation with all means and in all spheres of life through education, building homes and institutions, worshipping, preserving their heritage and narrative – showing the whole world that this is their homeland and they are here to stay. They made every effort to keep hope alive and could not be deterred from pursuing their goal to return and build their independent state. They have succeeded in keeping their just cause in the headlines while exposing Israel as an openly human rights violating settler colonial entity with an apartheid system in the making. Over 12 million Palestinians all over the world and their ever growing international support base continue to struggle in pursuit of justice. And it is those “achievements” of the Nakba 70 years on, and not the “catastrophe” itself, which should be kept in mind notwithstanding all disillusionment and lack of perspectives, when Palestinians face Israel’s celebrations this year of their state foundation and alleged Jewish victories.
4) Plan Dalet:
–The expulsion of the majority of the Arab population of Palestine during Israel’s establishment was not an unintended consequence of war, but rather a preconceived strategy of “transfer.” The blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was Plan Dalet, which was developed and implemented under the leadership of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the forerunner of the Israeli army, the Haganah. The Geneva Bubble, Ilan Pappe on the prehistory of the latest proposals https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n01/ilan-pappe/the-geneva-bubble
PLAN DALET: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine by Walid Khalidi
PLAN DALET: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine by Walid Khalidi
-Two months prior to Israel’s declaring independence, on March 10, 1948, the Zionist leadership under Ben-Gurion adopted Plan Dalet, which laid out in detail a plan for the forcible depopulation and destruction of Palestinian towns and villages. Amongst other things, it called for:
Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously. Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.
5)The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine: Israeli and Zionist Leaders in Their Own Words:
-In 1895, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote 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.” (America And The Founding Of Israel, p. 49 & Righteous Victims, p. 21-22)
-David Ben Gurion,Israel‘s first prime minister:
–On July 12, 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary explaining the benefits of the compulsory population transfer (which was proposed in British Peel Commission):
“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)
-Similarly on August 7, 1937 he also stated to 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 [Palestinian] 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)
-On the same subject, Ben-Gurion wrote in 1937:
“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)
And in 1938, he also 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
2-Compulsory population transfer for Palestinians. He stated that:
“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)
And regarding the Peel Commission, on June 9, 1937 he also stated:
“In my opinion we must insist on the Peel Commission proposal, which sees in the transfer the only solution to this problem. And I have now to say that it is worthwhile that the Jewish people should bear the greatest material sacrifices in order to ensure the success of transfer.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians,p.70)
-Ben-Gurion explained how compulsory population transfer could be implemented. He said in 1937:
“…. because we will not be able to countenance large uninhabited areas absorb tens of thousands of Jews remaining empty …. And if we have to use force we shall use it without hesitation — but only if we have no choice. We do not want and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places. Our whole desire is based on the assumption — which has been collaborated in the course of all our activity in the country — that there is enough room for us and the Arabs in the country and that if we have to use force – not in order to dispossess the Arabs from the Negev or Transjordan but in order to assure ourselves of the right, which is our due to settle there-then we have the force.” (Righteous Victims,p. 142)
-Ben-Gurion became obsessed about “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 [Palestinian] 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.129)
Similarly, he also added:
“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 [referring to 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 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. 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 ought 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 [Palestinian] Arabs.” (Righteous Victims,p. 190)
–While addressing the Central Committee of the Histadrut on December 30, 1947, Ben-Gurion stated:
“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)
-According to Sefer Toldot Ha Haganah, the official history of the Haganah, it clearly stated how Palestinian villages and population should be dealt with. It stated:
“[Palestinian Arab] villages inside the Jewish state that resist ‘should be destroyed …. and their inhabitants expelled beyond the borders of the Jewish state.’ Meanwhile, ‘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 was enchanted that Jerusalem’s neighboring Palestinian communities had been emptied. He stated to the Mapai Council on February 8, 1948:
“From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema [East Jerusalem Palestinian m neighborhood]. . . there are no [Palestinian] Arab. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, it has not been Jewish as it is now. In many [Palestinian] Arab neighborhoods in the west one sees not a single [Palestinian] 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)
-In a speech addressing the Zionist Action Committee on April 6, 1948, Ben-Gurion clearly stated that war could be used as an instrument to solve the so called “Arab demographic problem”. He stated:
“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, even if only in an artificial way, in a m military way. . . . I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of [Palestinian] Arab population.” (Benny Morris, p. 181 & Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 181)
Ben-Gurion clearly never believed in static borders, but dynamic ones as described in the Bible. He stated during a discussion with his aides:
“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)
It has been customary among all Zionists leaders to use the Bible to justify perpetrating WAR CRIMES. Regardless of the methods used to build the “Jewish state”, the quote above is a classical example how the Bible and the great and ancient religion of Judaism is used to achieve political objectives. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Png17wB_omA&t=477s
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lY6DQt2aGI0
During the same 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. . . . The return of [Palestinian] Arabs to Jaffa [would be] not just foolish.” If the [Palestinian] 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,”he said, and, leaving no doubt in the ministers’ minds about his views on the ultimate fate of the [Palestinian] refugees, he added: “I will be for them not returning after the war.”(Benny Morris, p. 141 & 1949,The First Israelis,p.75)
Similarly, Moshe Sharett (first Israeli Foreign Minister, and for a brief period between 1954-1955 he was the second Israeli Prime Minister) agreed with Ben-Gurion on rejecting Palestinian refugees return, and stated during the same Cabinet meeting:
“Can we imagine a return to the status quo ante?” He asked. It was inconceivable. Rather, the government should now perused the Yishuv (Palestinian Jews before 1948) of “the enormous importance of this [demographic] change in terms of the solidity of the state structure and [of] the solution of crucial social and political problems.” Israel should be ready to pay compensation for the abandoned land but “they will not return. [That] is out policy. They are not returning.”(Benny Morris, p. 141)
Although an important document dating July 16, 1948 is still classified by the Israeli censorship, there is enough information to indicate the link in Ben-Gurion’s mind between the concept of “transfer” and war. It was at the time that Ben Gurion stated that he:
“was not surprised” at the Arab exodus and that “we should prevent Arab return at any cost.” He also cited ones again theTurkish-Greek war crime as an “example” in which the Turks “expelled the Greeks from Anatolia.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 191-192)
It is extremely ironic to point out that this is the SECOND time in history when Turks are cited as an “example” to justify perpetrating WAR CRIMES. The first was used by the earliest Zionist leaders (such as Chaim Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, and Moshe Sharett), and the second was used by Hitler when he cited the Turkish genocide of 1.5 million Armenians (during WW I) as a precedent for the holocaust!
When Ezra Danin, a Cabinet member, proposed installing a puppet Palestinian Government in the Triangle area (northwest of the occupied West Bank), Ben-Gurion had impatiently declared on October 21, 1948 that Palestinians in Israel were good for one thing, running away. He said:
“The Arabs of the land of Israel [Palestinians] have only one function left to them — to run away.”(Benny Morris, p. 218)
With no emotions, ten days later, while Ben-Gurion was on a tour of the Galilee,he describes Palestinian exodus in his dairy as follows:
“and many more still will flee.” (Benny Morris, p. 218)
On September 26, 1948, he proposed the Israeli provisional government that Israel should attack the West Bank. Again, he had reiterated how a war could be used as an instrument to “transfer” population, and he used Lydda’s and Ramla’s occupation and the subsequent expulsion of their population as a precedent. According to a detail plan of the operation recorded in 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 entry he writes: “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”(emphasis added). (Simha Flapan,p. 48 & 1949,The First Israelis, p. 14)
Ironically, when Chaim Laskov proposed the occupation of most of the West Bank in July 1958, Ben-Gurion objected because in his opinion Palestinians have learned that lesson already, simply they won’t run away. He wrote in his diary:
“This time the [Palestinian] Arabs on the West Bank will not run away!,” meaning if the Palestinians would flee as a result of war (as what already happened during the 1948 war), he would not mind the occupation and annexation of the West Bank.(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? This is the embodiment of the typical supremacist colonial mindset. Ironically enough , Ben Gurion forgot the flee of European Jews from Nazi persecution, The bloom of every aspect from science to industry to agriculture in Nazi Germany , does this justify their actions? How Palestinians fought with what they have against Western backed Zionist terror groups? The presence of a civilization here before the inception of The Zionist state! , and the Position of Albert Einstein from the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which he rejects. (The reader is encouraged to read the argument of this article: https://wiki.handala.info/en/desert_bloom_myth )
Einstein had conflicting views , he supported the creation of a Jewish national homeland in the British mandate of Palestine but was opposed to the idea of a Jewish state “with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power.”
(David E. Rowe & Robert Schulmann [de], Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb (2007), p. 33.)
(Evan Wilson, A Calculated Risk: The U.S. Decision to Recognize Israel (1979) 2009 p.149.)
In 1948, prior to the creation of the State of Israel, Albert Einstein was solicited by the Stern Gang to raise money and support for its terrorism against the British and the Palestinians. In the United States, the Stern Gang operated under the title of “American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel.” Here is Einstein’s response written the day after the massacre at Deir Yassin, the same day it was first reported in The New York Times. The original letter is slated to become part of the Deir Yassin Remembered Archives. He deeply criticized Menachem Begin’s Herut (Freedom) Party for the Deir Yassin massacre attributed to “terrorist bands”, (Einstein 1948) and likened Herut to “the Nazi and Fascist parties”. He further stated “The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party”. Einstein said of the party that “Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism…It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character”, while also criticizing Irgun by calling it a “terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization”
New Palestine Party Visit of Menachem Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed
It also could be argued that the Christian Crusaders, in comparison to Jewish Zionism, had said similar views about Muslims and Arabs as well (overlooking the Arabic Islamic golden age) However, after 200 years of Crusaders’ occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, Arabs produced their versions of Einstein (in Cordoba, Seville, Cairo, Toledo, Baghdad, … etc.), and fought well under Saladin’s command. Along with the subsequent Mongol and Tatar invasions, the Crusaders genocide became a sad footnote in the human history. If history shall be used as an example, then it’s too early to ride off Arabs only after seven decades of ethnic cleansing and dispossession.
-Moshe Sharett (The first Israeli Foreign Minister, and for a brief period between 1954-1955 he was the second Israeli Prime Minister):
-Sharett, when he was the director of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, declared in 1947:
“Transfer could be the crowning achievements, 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)
And also 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, Moshe Sharett wrote to Chaim Weizmann, explaining the Israeli government’s determination to block the Palestinian Arab refugees’ return:
“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 [Palestinian] 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 and from Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, p. 105)
During the armistice negotiation with Jordan, Israel pressured H.M. King Abdullah to concede sovereignty over Wadi ‘Ara area (nearby Tulkarm and Jinin), and Moshe Sharett assumed that the Palestinian Arabs inhabiting the land would be expelled, he said:
“I imagine that the INTENTION is to get rid of them. 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 ends, Moshe Sharett instructed his Director General not to repeat such an announcement, and in that regard he stated:
“We must not be understood to say that once the war is over they [referring to Palestinian refugees] can return. …. We’ll keep every option open.”
Then days later Sharett wrote Dr. Nahum Goldmann that:
“the most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine, in a way more spectacular than the creation of the [Palestinian] Arab population. . . . The opportunities opened up by the present reality for a lasting and radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state [referring to the Palestinian Arabs inhabiting area allotted to the “Jewish state” by the 1947 UN Partition plan], 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)
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” (from Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 91)
On partition:
“The [Palestinian] Arab reaction would be negative because they would lose everything and gain almost nothing…They would lose the richest part of Palestine; they would lose major Arab assets, the orange plantations, the commercial and industrial centers and the most important sources of revenue for their government which would become impoverished; they would lose most of the coastal area, which would also be a loss to the hinterland Arab states…It would mean that they would be driven back to the desert.” (from Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, p.59)
Menachem Ussishkin (one of the leading and founding fathers of Zionism, from 1923 until 1941 he was the powerful chairman and member of the Jewish National Fund, the president of the 20th Zionist Congress, the permanent president of World Zionist Organization’s Zionist Action Committee, and a member of the Jewish Agency Executive):
-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 form its owner; . . . by expropriation via government authority; or by purchase. . . [The Zionist movement was limited to the third choice] until at some point we become rulers.” (Righteous Victims, p. 38)
-In April 28, 1930 Menachem 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 great and NOBLER ideal than preserving several hundred thousands of [Palestinian] Arabs fellahin [peasants].” (Righteous Victims, p. 141)
-On May 19, 1936,Menachem 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 Menachem Ussishkin wrote about the proposed ethnic cleansing by the Peel Commission:
“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 and defend … it before the Almighty.” (Righteous Victims,p. 143-144 and Expulsion Of The Palestinians,p. 37)
In 1938 Menachem Ussishkin commented on the partition plan proposed by the British Peel Commission in 1937:
“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 [Palestinian] Arabs here constitute 50 percent or 45 percent but 75 percent of the land is in the hands of the [Palestinian] 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 [Palestinian] 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; see also Righteous Victims,p. 143-144)
The Zionist historian Lousis Lipsky wrote describing the personality of Menachem Ussishkin :
“There are many obstinate Zionists in the early days but none had his arrogance. He was rude and despotic, paternal and sentimental. . . . Had he been asked he would have said he could not stomach the Arabs or the English. He ignored them both as long as possible.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians,p. 48)
It is worth noting that Ussishkin also stated that the frontiers of the Land of Israel stretched from the “GREAT SEA” [the Mediterranean] to the Euphrates and were not Balfour frontiers. These wider frontiers are clearly
“drawn on the wall map of my Jewish National Fund Office.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians,p. 85)
-MOSHE DAYAN (An Israeli military leader and politician. A commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (1953–1958) during the 1956 Suez Crisis, and a Defense Minister during the Six-Day War in 1967):
Moshe Dayan stated his opinion regarding his anti-infiltration policy in the early 1950s:
“Using the moral yardstick mentioned by [Moshe Sharett],I must ask: Are [we justified] in opening fire on the [Palestinian] 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 [Palestinian] 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 [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. then tomorrow the State of Israel will have no borders.” (Righteous Victims,p. 275)
-Moshe 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 [Palestinian] 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” of a price Dayan is referring to is the collective punishment such as house demolition, uprooting trees, ..etc.
-Moshe 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 [Palestinian] 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 [Palestinian] 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)
-He wrote in his memories regarding the ethnic cleansing and destruction of ‘Imwas, Bayt Nuba, Yalu, and big portion of the West Bank city of Qalqilya:
“[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 Moshe 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 [Palestinian] Arabs, from both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and not to undermine these cause after all,we want to create a new map.” (Righteous Victims, p. 338)
-And in November 1967, he was also quoted 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)
-And in July 14, 1968 at a 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)
On 30 July 1973 Moshe Dayan said to Time Magazine:
“There is no more Palestine. Finished . . .” (IronWall, p. 316)
and in April 1973 from the peaks of Massada he proclaimed a vision:
“a new State of Israel with broad frontiers, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israel Government extending from the Jordan [river] to the Suez Canal.” (Iron Wall, p. 316)
-Yosef Weitz, director, Jewish National Fund Land Settlement Committee (1932-1948):
“…the transfer of [Palestinian] 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 advocate land presently held and cultivated by the [Palestinian] Arabs and thus to release it for Jewish inhabitants.” (from Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 94-95)
“It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples…If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us…The only solution is a Land of Israel…without Arabs…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 tribe.” (from Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 27)
“Once again I come face to face with the land settlement difficulties that emanate from the existence of two people in close proximity…only population transfer and evacuating this country so it would become exclusively for us is the solution.” (from Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 132)
-Chaim Weizmann, served as president of the Zionist Organization and later as the first president of Israel:
“[the indigenous population was akin to] the rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.” (from Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 17) Note how Weizmann referred to the Palestinian people, as rocks. Usually Zionists use similar dehumanizing language to refer to the Palestinian people, such as rocks, primitive, naive, ignorant, savage, demographic problem, ticking time bombs, question, 5th column, obstacles, “transfer solution”, ” should be cleared”, “should be broomed”, etc.
In 1918 Chaim Weizmann denied the existence of an Arab nation in Palestine and portrayed them as ignorant and naive. He described Palestinians in a letter to a colleague of his:
“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)
Chaim Weizmann wrote in a letter dated April 28, 1939 to the American Zionist leader Solomon Goldman about the possibility of acquisition of a large tract of land belonging to the Palestinian Arab Druze in the Galilee and eastern Carmel:
“The realization of this project 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 [Palestinian] Arabs were to emigrate peacefully of their own volition, which no doubt would be followed by others.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 167)
Ironically, what actually happened during the 1948 war was almost the complete opposite. The Palestinian Druze Arabs were the ones who were permitted to stay (among other minorities too like Shi’ites and Maronite Christians), especially in and around the Haifa and al-Carmel area.
This was seconded by Avraham Katznelson, another influential Mapai leader (Mapai was a democratic socialist political party in Israel, and was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the modern-day Israeli Labor Party in 1968), who also said:
“more moral, from the viewpoint of universal human ethics, than the emptying of the Jewish state of the [Palestinian] Arabs and their transfer elsewhere …. This requires [the use of] force.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p.192)
The following is a discussion between MAPAI secretariat regarding demographic make up of the “Jewish state” soon after the 1948 war:
Shlomo Levi, MK: ” . . . The large number of [Palestinian] Arabs in the country worries me. The time come when we will be the minority in the State of Israel. There are now 170,000 [Palestinian] Arabs in the country, including 22,000 school-age children. The natural increase among [Palestinians] Arabs is high and keeps growing, especially if we give them all the economic advantages which we are intending to give: health, education and big benefits. There is no such rate of natural increase anywhere in the world, and we have to give careful thought to this imminent danger. Such an increase could match our immigration. . . . We may reach the point when the interests of [Palestinian] Arabs rather than of the Jews will determine the character of the country. . . .”
Eliyahu Camreli, MK: “I’m not willing to accept a single [Palestinian] Arab, and not only an Arab but any gentile. I want the State of Israel to be entirety Jewish, the descendents of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. . . .”
Yehiel Duvdenvany, MK: “If there was any way of solving the problem way of transfer [the Israeli propaganda term for ethnic cleansing] of the remaining 170,000 [Palestinian] Arabs we would do so. . . .”
David Hakohen, MK: “We didn’t plan the departure of the [Palestinian] Arabs. It was a miracle. . . .”
Z. Onn: “The landscape is more beautiful—-I enjoy it, especially, when traveling between Haifa and Tel Aviv, and there is not a single [Palestinian] Arab to be seen.” (1949,The First Israelis, p. 46-47)
By war’s end in 1949, Chaim Weizmann was surprised by a sudden “miracle”:
Palestinians are almost out of “Eretz Yisrael”, how did that happen? As if the the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Stern terror gangs were angels who played no role in this sudden and swift so called “miracle”. He described the EXODUS of the Palestinian people from their homes, farms, and businesses as follows:
“A miraculous CLEARING of the land: the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 175 & Simha Flapan, p.84)
Note the racist use of the term “simplification” as if the Palestinian people are a question or a mathematical conjecture.
The question that is begged here is: Was it the Almighty’s miracle or not?
-Israel Zangwill was a British author at the forefront of cultural Zionism during the 19th century, was a close associate of Theodor Herzl and one of the earliest organizers of the Zionist movement in Britain who had visited Palestine in 1897 and came face-to-face with the demographic reality, stated:
“Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two souls to the square mile, and not 25% of them Jews ….. [We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 7- 10, and Righteous Victims, p. 140)
-In a public meeting in 1919 Zangwill made a remark about the Palestinian Arabs:
“many are semi-nomad, they have given nothing to Palestine and are not entitled to the rules of democracy.”(Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 14)
-The socialist Zionist Hahman Syrkin, the ideological founder of Socialist Zionism, proposed in pamphlet entitled “The Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State” which was published in 1898 that:
“Palestine thinly populated, in which the Jews constituted today 10 percent of the population, must be evacuated for the Jews.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 11)
-In October 1882, Validimir Dubnow, one of the earliest Zionist pioneers in Palestine, wrote to his brother articulating the ultimate goals of the Zionist movement:
“The ultimate goal . . . is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years. . . . The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland.“(Righteous Victims,p. 49)
-In October 1882 Ben-Yehuda and Yehiel Michal Pines, few of the earliest Zionist pioneers in Palestine, wrote describing the indigenous Palestinians:
“. . . There are now only five hundred [thousand] Arabs, who are not very strong, and from whom we shall easily take away the country if only we do it through stratagems [and] without drawing upon us their hostility before we become the strong and papules ones.” (Righteous Victims,p. 49)
-While the Zionist leadership was discussing the morality of “transferring” the Palestinian people in December 1918, Yitzhak Avigdor Wilkansky, a Zionist agronomist and advisor at the Palestine Office in JAFFA, felt that, for practical reasons, it was:
“Impossible to evict the fellahin [Palestinian Arab peasants], even if we wanted to. Nevertheless, if it were possible, I would commit an injustice towards the [Palestinian] Arabs. There are those among us who are opposed to this form the point of view of supreme righteousness and morality. . . [But] when you enter into the midst of the Arab nation and do not allow it to unit, here too you are taking its life. . . . Why don’t our moralists dwell on this point? We must be either complete vegetarians or meat eaters: not one-half, one-third, or one-quarter vegetarian.” (Righteous Victims, p. 140-141 & America And The Founding Of Israel, p. 71)
-In 1919 Lord Balfour, the father of the Balfour Declaration, justified the usurpation of Palestinians right of self determination as the following:*
“Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder important then the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 [Palestinian] Arabs who now inhabit the ancient land.” (Righteous Victims,p. 75)
-In 1916 Lord Balfour declared that he is a “Zionist” during a British Cabinet meeting. In an encounter between Weizmann and Balfour:
“[Weizmann] laid out his much repeated argument — that Zionists and British interests are IDENTICAL. The Zionist movement spoke, Weizmann said, with the vocabulary of modern statesmanship, but was fueled by a deep religious consciousness. Balfour, himself a modern statesman, also CONSIDERED Zionism as an inherent part of his Christian faith. . . . Soon after, Balfour declared in a cabinet meeting, I AM A ZIONIST.” (One Palestine Complete, p. 41)
-As early as October 25, 1919 Winston Churchill predicted that Zionism implied the clearing of the indigenous population, he wrote:
“there are the Jews, whom we are PLEDGED to introduce into Palestine, and who take it for GRANTED the the local [Palestinian] population will be CLEARED out to suit their convenience.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians,p. 15)
-In March 1921 Winston Churchill, a life long Zionist, ASSURED Arabs that Jews WOULD NOT dispossess them one day:
“It is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national center and a national home and be reunited and where else but in Palestine with which for 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? We think it will be good for the world, good for the British Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine. . . . They shall share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.” (Righteous Victims,p. 99)
-And also in 1921 Churchill assured the Palestinian delegation headed by Kathim al Huseini the Palestinian rights will be preserved:
“[The Jews would not] take any man’s lands. They CANNOT dispossess any man of his RIGHTS or his PROPERTY. . . . There is room for all.” (Righteous Victims, p. 100)
-And in October 1941, Churchill wrote in a secret Cabinet minute in support of partition Palestine into two state (in defiance of the 1939 White Paper):
“I may say at once that if Britain and the United States emerged victorious from the war, the creation of a GREAT JEWISH STATE in Palestine inhabited by MILLIONS OF JEWS will be one of the LEADING FEATURES of the peace conference discussions.” (Righteous Victims,p. 167-168)
-In April 1943 Churchill said in defiance to the British 1939 White Paper:
“I CANNOT agree that the White Paper is the firmly established policy of the present Government. I have always regarded it as a gross breach of faith committed by the Chamberlain Government in respect of obligations to which I personally was a party.” (Righteous Victims,p. 166)
-On 12 January 1944 Churchill wrote to his senior War Cabinet colleagues in defiance of the British 1939 White Paper:
“Some form of partition is the ONLY solution.” and thirteen days later he informed the Chief of Staff Committee: “OBVIOUSLY we shall not proceed with ANY FORM of partition which Jews to do not support.” (Israel:A History, p. 116)
-In 1938 Berl Katzneslon, the influential Mapai leader, stated his opinion of the demographic make up of the Jewish states upon the implementation of the partition proposed by the Peel Commission:
“There is the question of how the army, the police, and the civil service will function and how a state can be run if part of its population is disloyal …..[and the Palestinian Arabs will get equal rights as Jews] … only a small minority of [the Palestinian] Arabs will remain in the country.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians,p. 115)
On August 14, 1948 Yigael Yadin (1917-1985, he was one of the founding members of the Haganah and Israel’s chief of staff between 1948-1951) wrote Moshe Sharett advocating a non-return policy for the Palestinian refugees based on political and military reasons, he wrote:
“Because of the spread of diseases among the [Palestinian] Arab refugees, I propose that [we] declare a quarantine on all our conquered areas. We will thus be able to more strongly oppose the demand for the return of the [Palestinian] Arab refugees and all infiltration by [Palestinian] Arabs [back] into the abandoned villages—in addition to our opposition [to the return] on understandable military and political ground.” (Benny Morris, p. 139-140)
-Yigal Allon, commander, Palmach (elite force of Zionist militia Haganah) (1945-1948), Lieutenant General, Israeli army (1948-1949):
“The confidence of thousands of Arabs of the Hula [Valley] was shaken…We had only five days left…until 15 May [1948]. We regarded it as imperative to cleanse the interior of the Galilee and create Jewish territorial continuity in the whole of the Upper Galilee…I gathered the Jewish mukhtars [Kibbutz chiefs], who had ties with the different Arab villages, and I asked them to whisper in the ears of several Arabs that a giant Jewish reinforcement had reached the Galilee and were about to clean out the villages of Hula, [and] to advise them as friends, to flee while they could. And rumour spread throughout Hula that the time had come to flee. The flight encompassed tens of thousands. The stratagem fully achieved its objective.” (from The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 122)
-At the start of the First Truce (June 11 – July 8) during the 1948 war, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Department noted the Arab leaders’ calls for the return to Palestine of 300,000 Palestinian refugees. It also noted the trickle of Palestinian refugees “infiltrating” back to their villages. The Department conjectured that a major reason for this return of Palestinians was their desire:
“to harvest the [summer] crops. . . The [Palestinian] Arabs in their places of wandering are suffering from real hunger.” But this harvest-geared return, the department warned, could “in time bring in its wake [Palestinian Arab re-]settlement in the villages, something which might seriously endanger many of the achievements we accomplished during the first six months of the war. It is not for nothing that Arabs spokesmen are . . . demanding the return . . [of the Palestinian refugees], because this would not only ease their burden but would weigh us down considerably.” (Benny Morris, p. 140)
-Prior to the start of Operation Hiram in northern Palestine in October 1948, the Foreign Ministry advised the Israeli Army to make sure that the Galilee should be as clear as possible of Palestinian Arabs, and Christian Palestinians should be favored upon deciding whether to expel or not to expel Palestinians from the area, the report stated:
“to try during conquest [to make sure] that no [Palestinian] Arabs inhabitants remain in the Galilee and certainly that no refugees from other places remains there. Truth to tell, concerning the attitude to the Christian[Palestinian Arabs] and the problem of whether to discriminate in their favor and to leave them in their villages, clear instructions were not given [by us?] and we did not express an opinion.”(Benny Morris, p. 226)
-As Operation Hiram was being concluded in late October 1948, some internal Palestinian refugees remained in al-Rama, east of Acre. A former resident of Ghuwayr Abu Shusha (north of Tiberias) described his experience of being ethnically cleansed to Lebanon as the following:
“The people in AlRamla were ordered to assemble at the centre of the village. A Jewish soldier stood on top of a rise and addressed us. He ordered the [Palestinian] Druze present . . . to go back to their homes. . . . Then he ordered the rest of us to leave to Lebanon. . . Although I was given a permission to stay by my friend, Abu Musa [a Local Israeli Jewish officer], I could not remain without the rest of my tribe [or hamula in Arabic] who were forced to flee.” Unlike the Ar Rama Palestinian Christian community, these non-resident did not remain but moved off to Lebanon. (Benny Morris, p. 227)
-Similarly, a Palestinian refugee from Sha’ab (east of Acre) described his experience as the following:
“The Jews grouped us with the other [Palestinian Arab] villagers, separating us from women. We remained all day in the village [al-Bi’na] courtyard . . we were thirsty and hungry.” Two Palestinian villagers, he recalled, were taken aside and shot dead, and the other Palestinian refugees were robbed from their valuables. Some “200” men were selected and driven off, presumably to a POW camp. The refugee went on to say: “It was almost night . . . [The] al-Bi’na mukhtar asked the Jews to permit us to stay overnight . . . rather than travel [northwards] at night with our old men, women, and children. The Jews rejected the mukhtar’s request and gave us [i.e., the refugees] half an hour to leave . . . When half an hour passed, the Jews began to shoot in the air . . . they injured my nine-year old son in the knee. We walked a few hours until we reached Sajur . . . We were terrified, the road was full of people in every direction you looked . . . all in a hurry to get to Lebanon.” A few days later, after a brief stay in the Palestinian Druze village of Beit Jann, they reached Lebanon. (Benny Morris, p. 227-8)
-As the Israeli Army was entering Eilabun (Palestinian Maronite Christian village) on October 30, 1948, the soldiers went on rampage in the village looting Palestinians properties. In a letter dated January 21st, 1949 sent to the Israeli Minority Affair Ministry by Faraj Diab Surur, the Eilabun’s Mukhtar, along with other village notables described the looting and the ethnic cleansing of their village by the Israeli soldiers as the following:
“When the [Israeli] commander selected 12 youngsters (shabab) and sent them to another place, then he ordered that the assembled inhabitants to be led to [al-]Maghar and the priest asked him to leave the women and babies and to take only men, but he refused, and led the assembled inhabitants—some 800 in number— to [al-]Maghar preceded by military vehicles. . . . He himself stayed on with another two soldiers until they killed the 12 youngsters in the streets of the village and then they joined the army going to [al-]Maghar. He led them to [al-]Frarradiya. When they reached Kafr ‘Inan they were joined by an armored car that fired upon them [refugees] . . . killing one of the old men, Sam’an ash Shufani, 60 years old, and injured three women . . . At [al-]Frarradiya [the Israeli soldiers] robbed the inhabitants of IL 500 and the women of their Jewelry, and took 42 youngsters and sent them to a detention camp, and the rest the next day were led to Meirun, and afterward to the Lebanon borders. During this whole time they were given food only once. Imagine then how the babies screamed and the cries of the pregnant and weaning mothers.”
Subsequently, the Israeli Army looted the Palestinian Maronite village of Eilabun. In early 1949, many of these refugees were allowed back to their homes after relentless lobbying by Aharon Cizling (the Israeli Agriculture Minister) in the Israeli Cabinet. It is worth noting that these returnees were among the few hundreds to be allowed back to their homes, farms, and businesses, however, the mass majority of the Palestinian people are still dispossessed and homeless since the 1948 war. (Benny Morris, p. 229-230)
-As the Israelis rampaged the friendly Palestinian village of Huj (northeast of Gaza), Yitzhak Avira (an old-time Haganah Intelligence Service officer) registered a complaint against the continued destruction of the village. He wrote Ezra Danin (a member of the 1st and 2nd Transfer Committees and a Haganah Intelligence Officer) on August 16, 1948 that:
“recently a view has come to prevail among us that the [Palestinian] Arabs are nothing. Every [Palestinian] Arab is a murderer, all of them should be slaughtered, all the [Palestinian] villages that are conquered should be burned . . . I . . . see a danger in the prevalence of an attitude that everything of theirs should be murdered, destroyed, and made to vanish.”
Danin Answered: “War is complicated and lacking in sentimentality. If the commanders believe that by destruction, murder, and human suffering they will reach their goal more quickly—I would not stand in their way. If we do not hurry up and do [things]—our enemies will do these things to us.” (Benny Morris, p. 167)
It is worth noting that Palestinian inhabitants of Huj had collaborated openly with the Haganah and the Israeli Army before and during the 1948 war, however, such good will did not save them from being ethnically cleansed. Similarly, Zarnuqa (the hometown of the Islamic Jihad founder Fathi al-Shikaki) inhabitants had a comparable experience with the Israelis, and paid the price of their collaboration by being driven out of their village under the threat of the gun towards neighboring Yibna. Sadly, Yibna’s people, who were not yet occupied, drove them back to Israeli occupied Zarnuqa, so they became unwanted people by both sides camping in the wadis between the two towns. This is a typical story of collaborators who outlive their usefulness. (Benny Morris, p. 127)
As the Israeli soldiers were occupying the al-Dawayima (northwest of Hebron), the soldiers perpetrated a mostly unknown massacre on October 28-29, 1948. According the Shabtai Kaplan, a MAPAM party member(Mapam was a Zionist left-wing political party in Israel. The party is one of the ancestors of the modern-day Meretz party) and eyewitness accounts, he describe the atrocity to Al Hamishmar editor as the following:
“The first wave of conquerors [89th Battalion of the 8th Brigade] killed about 80-100 [male Palestinian] Arabs, women and children.The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks.There was no a house without dead,”Kaplan wrote. Kaplan’s informant , who arrived immediately afterwards in the second wave, reported that the [Palestinian] Arab men and women who remained were then closed off in the houses “without food and water.”Sappers arrived to blow up the the houses. “One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house . . . and to blow up the house with them. The sapper refused . . . The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a [Palestinian] woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clean the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby.” The soldier witness, according to Kaplan, said that “cultured officers . . . had turned into base murderers and this not in the heat of the battle . . . but out of system of expulsion and destruction. The less [Palestinian] Arabs remained–the better. This principle is the political motor of the expulsion and atrocities.”
Kaplan understood that MAPAM in this respect was in bind. The matter could not be publicized; it would harm the Stateand MAPAM would be lambasted for it.(Benny Morris, p. 222-3)
The village mukhtar Hassan Mahmoud Ihdeib, in a sworn statement, estimated the number of victims as 145. On making a census, it emerged that 455 persons were missing, 280 men, and the remainder women and children.
Morris has estimated “hundreds” of people were killed, he also reports on the IDF investigation, which concluded around 100 villagers had been killed. Isser Be’eri, the commander of the IDF intelligence service, who conducted an independent investigation, concluded that 80 people had been killed during the occupation of Al-Dawayima and that 22 had been captured and executed subsequently. Be’eri recommended prosecution of the platoon OC, who had confessed to the massacre, but notwithstanding his recommendations no one was put on trial or punished.
On 14 November the Israeli cabinet instructed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to also launch an investigation. Its findings remain SECRET.
The reason why so little is known about this massacre which, in many respects, was more brutal than the Deir Yassin massacre, is because the Arab Legion feared that if the news was allowed to spread, it would have the same effect on the morale of the peasantry that Deir Yassin had, namely to cause another flow of Arab refugees.
-The Israeli Operation Command for the Northern Front Carmel described the flight of the Palestinian refugees into Lebanon (soon after the concluding of Operation Hiram) as the following:
“They abandoned the villages of their birth and that of their ancestors an go into exile . . . Women, children, babies, donkeys — everything moves, in silence and grief, northwards, without looking to right or left. Wife does not find her husband and child does not find his father . . . no one knows the goal of his trek. Many possessions are scattered by the paths; the more the refugees walk, the more tired they grow — and they throw away what they had tried to save on their way into exile. Suddenly, every object seems to them petty, superfluous, unimportant as against chasing fear and the urge to save life and limb.
I saw a boy aged eight walking northwards pushing along two assess in front of him. His father and brother had died in the battle and his mother was lost. I saw a woman holding a two week-old baby in her arm and a baby two years old in her left arm and a four-year-old girl following in her wake, clutching at her dress.
[Near Sa’sa’ northwest of Safad,] I saw suddenly by the roadside a tall man, bent over, scarping with his fingernails in the hard, rocky soil. I stopped. I saw a small hollow in the ground, dug out by hand, with fingernails, under an olive tree. The man laid down the body of a baby who had died in the arms of his mother, and covered it with soil and small stones.” Near Tarshiha [northeast of Acre], Carmel saw a 16-year-old youth “sitting by the roadside, naked as the day he was born and smiling at our passing car.” Carmel described how some of the Israeli soldiers, regarding the [Palestinian] refugee columns with astonishment and shock and “with great sadness,” went down into the wadis and gave the [Palestinian] refugees bread and tea. ” I knew [of] a unit in which no soldier ate anything that day because all [the food] sent it by the company kitchen was taken down to the wadi.” (Benny Morris, p. 231-2)
Galilee October 1948, Ethnically Cleansed Palestinians on their way to Lebanon
-An officer of the police national headquarters, who had visited the villages of Elabun and Mrar (in the Galilee) in November 1948, reported:
“All the inhabitants of Elabun were deported, except for four villagers who are Greek Orthodox, and a small number of old people and children. The total number of inhabitants left in the village is 52. The priests complained bitterly about the expulsion of the villagers and demanded their return. . . . In Mrar, most of the inhabitants remained, except for many of the Muslims.” (1949,The First Israelis, p. 28)
-On May 10, 1948, Aharon Cohen, the director during the war of the Arab Department of the newly formed MAPAM party, wrote in a memorandum to the party’s Political Committee:
“There is a reason to believe that what is being done . . . is being done out of certain political objectives and not only out of military necessities, as they claim sometimes. In fact, the transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the boundaries of the Jewish state is being implemented . . . the evacuation/clearing out of [Palestinian] Arab villages is not always done out of military necessity. The complete destruction of the villages is not always done only because there are no sufficient forces to maintain a garrison.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 181)
On July 24 the Mapai Center held a full-scale debate regarding the Palestinian Arab question against the background of the ethnic cleansing of Ramla and Lydda. The majority apparently backed Ben-Gurion’s policies of population transfer or ethnic cleansing. Shlomo Lavi, one of the influential leaders of the Mapai party, said that:
“the … transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs out of the country in my eyes is one of the most just, moral and correct that can be done. I have thought of this for many years.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 192)
This was seconded by Avraham Katznelson, another influential Mapai leader, who also said:
“more moral, from the viewpoint of universal human ethics, than the emptying of the Jewish state of the [Palestinian] Arabs and their transfer elsewhere …. This requires [the use of] force.”(Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 192)
-In an interview with the the Sunday Times Golda Meir, Israel’s Prime Minister between 1969-1974, stated in June 1969:
“It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them, they did not exist.” (Iron Wall,p. 311)
-Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel wrote in his diary soon after the occupation of Lydda and al Ramla on July 10th-11th, 1948:
“After attacking Lydda [later called Lod] and then Ramla, …. What would they do with the 50,000 civilians living in the two cities ….. Not even Ben-Gurion could offer a solution …. and during the discussion at operation headquarters, he [Ben-Gurion] remained silent, as was his habit in such situations. Clearly, we could not leave [Lydda’s] hostile and armed populace in our rear, where it could endanger the supply route [to the troops who were] advancing eastward. Ben Gurion would repeat the question: What is to be done with the population?, waving his hand in a gesture which said: Drive them out! [garesh otem in Hebrew]. ‘Driving out’ is a term with a harsh ring,…. Psychologically, this was on of the most difficult actions we undertook”. (Soldier Of Peace, p. 140-141 & Benny Morris, p. 207).
Later, Rabin underlined the cruelty of the operation as mirrored in the reaction of his soldiers. He stated during an interview (which is still censored in Israeli publications to this day) with David Shipler from the New York Times on October 22, 1979:
“Great Suffering was inflicted upon the men taking part in the eviction action [They] included youth movement graduates who had been inculcated with values such as international brotherhood and humaneness. The eviction action went beyond the concepts they were used to. There were some fellows who refused to take part. . . Prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action. . . to explain why we were obliged to undertake such a harsh and cruel action.” (Simha Flapan, p. 101)
It should be noted that Peaceful Rabin adopted the Bone breaking policy of Palestinian civilians including children during the first Intifada:
Just before the 1948 war, the residents of the twin cities, Lydda and al-Ramla, almost constituted 20% of the total urban population in central Palestine, inclusive of Tel-Aviv. Currently, the former residents and their descendents number at least a half a million, who mostly live in deplorable refugee camps in and around Amman (Jordan) and Ramallah (the occupied West Bank) for example. According to Rabin, the decision to ethnically cleanse the twin cities was an agonizing decision, however, his guilty conscious did not stop him from placing a similar order against three nearby villages (‘Imwas, Yalu, and Bayt Nuba ) 19 years later.The exodus from Lydda and al- Ramla was portrayed firsthand by Ismail Shammout, the renowned Palestinians artist from Lydda itself. What basically happened is upon Lydda’s and Ramla’s occupation on July 11-12, 1948, the Israelis were surprised to find that over 60,000 Palestinian civilians didn’t flee their homes. Subsequently, Ben Gurion ordered the wholesale expulsion of all civilians (including men, women, children, and old people), in the middle of the hot Mediterranean summer.The orders to ethnically cleanse both cities were signed by the future Prime Minister of Israel, by Yitzhak Rabin. Many of the refugees died (400+ according to the Palestinian historian ‘Aref al-‘Aref) from thirst, hunger, and heat exhaustion after being stripped of their valuables on their way out by the Israeli soldiers. It should be noted that the Zionist account of this war crime was intentionally suppressed until Yitzhak Rabin reported it in his biography and in a New York Times interview (which was censored in Israel at the time), however, it was later confirmed in the declassified Israeli and Zionist archives.
Israel Bars Rabin From Relating ‘48 Eviction of Arabs by David shipler: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/23/archives/israel-bars-rabin-from-relating-48-eviction-of-arabs-sympathy-for.html
The exodus out of Lydda, July 1948.
Excerpts of benevolent Zionists from: A Historical Survey of Proposals to Transfer Arabs from Palestine 1895 – 1947 by Chaim SIMONS (also a Zionist)
-Arthur Ruppin was among the founders of the Brit Shalom peace movement, he eventually became convinced that only an independent Jewish state would be possible, and he believed that the way to bring about that state was through continued settlement. He headed the Jewish Agency between 1933 and 1935, and helped to settle the large numbers of Jewish immigrants from Germany who came in that period. Ruppin died in 1943. He wrote in 1913:
“Land is the most necessary thing for establishing roots in Palestine. Since there are hardly any more arable unsettled lands. . . . we are bound in each case. . . to remove the peasants who cultivate the land.” (Righteous Victims, p. 61)
-Arthur Ruppin expressed his belief in the power of “transfer” to realize Zionism in practice as follows:
“I do not believe in the TRANSFER of an individual. I believe in the TRANSFER of entire villages.” (One Palestine Complete, p. 405)
-In 1930, Arthur Ruppin stated that the dispossession and displacement of the Palestinian Arabs was inevitable if Zionism was to become a reality. He wrote:
“[Palestinian dispossession is inevitable because] land is the vital condition for our settlement in Palestine. But since there is hardly any land which is worth cultivating that is not already being cultivated, it is found that whatever we purchase land and settle it, by necessity its present cultivators are turned away . . . In the future it will be much more difficult to purchase land, as sparsely populated land hardly exists. What remains is densely [Palestinian Arab] populated land.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians,p.11)
-Arthur Ruppin, stated that he:
“had come to the conviction and conclusion that there is no way of reaching a peace agreement with the [Palestinian] Arabs without abandoning our fundamental demands.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians,p. 52)
It should be noted that Ruppin believed that realization of Zionism required “racial purity” of Jews and was inspired by works of anti-semitic thinkers, including some Nazis.Ruppin personally met Hans F. K. Günther, one of many racist thinkers who greatly influenced Nazism.
Ruppin believed in numerous “Jewish types,” performed skull measurements and believed Ashkenazi Jews were made of various racial subclasses, according to nasal structure. He distinguished between “Racial Jews” and “Jewish types”, and believed Ashkenazi Jews to be superior to Yemeni Jews. His concepts included dividing Jews into “white, black and yellow” metaracial categories.
Ruppin wrote that Jewish race should be “purified”, and he stated that “only the racially pure come to the land.” After becoming head of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency for Israel), he argued against immigration of Ethiopian Jews because of their lack of “blood connection” and that Yemenite Jews should be limited to menial labor. Due to the Holocaust, historiography in Israel played down or ignored altogether this aspect of Ruppin’s life.
(–Tom Segev, The Makings of History / Revisiting Arthur Ruppin
–Steven E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (2007) 2018 p.125, n.19.
–Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership
–Israel’s Uncomfortable History of Racist Engineering Seth J. Frantzman April 21, 2014)
-Ze’ev Jabotinsky (Russian Jewish Revisionist Zionist leader, author, poet, orator, soldier, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa) stated in a letter to one of his Revisionist colleagues in the United States 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)
-Similar points to ethnic cleansing quotes like those made by many Zionist leaders , were made by Dr Yakov Thon, a founding member of the pacifist Brit Shalom, in 1937:
“Without transferring the Arab peasants to neighboring lands, we will not be able to bring into our future state a large new population. In short, without transfer there can be no Jewish immigration“(Palumbo, p.4)
Rafael Eitan, Israel Deputy Prime Minister(1996-1999), Minister of Agriculture(1990-1991,1996-1999),Minister of the Environment(1996-1999), Chief of Staff of the IDF(1978–1983) , he was the mastermind of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, was quoted the following year saying:
“WHEN WE HAVE settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”—Rafael Eitan, April 14, 1983.(BBC news,NY times, Irish times)
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel…Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”
Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983
Eitan was a supporter of the Israeli alliance with Apartheid-era South Africa. Eitan has been accused of expressing racist sentiments towards Arabs. Blacks in South Africa, he claimed:
“want to gain control over the white minority just like the Arabs here want to gain control over us. And we, like the white minority in South Africa, must act to prevent them from taking over”.
Israel’s Shady Arms Deal The Daily Beast, 22 June 2010 , McGreal, Chris (23 May 2010).
“Israel and apartheid: a marriage of convenience and military might”. The Guardian. Retrieved 23 April 2018.
It should be noted that Rafael Eitan , Ariel Sharon, Menachem begin(Israeli prime minister) and Yitzhak Shamir(Israeli foreign minister) were the masterminds of Sabra and shatila massacre in 1982, who used the Phalanges to commit such atrocity with the death of more than 3500 Palestinians and Lebanese , including innocent women and children.
A Historical Survey of Proposals to Transfer Arabs from Palestine 1895 – 1947 by Chaim SIMONS
-Israeli president Moshe Katsav(2000-2007): “There is a huge gap between us [Jews] and our enemies -not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbours here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.”—The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
-Yisrael Koenig, a member of the Alignment (then the ruling party), who served as the Northern District Commissioner of the Ministry of the Interior for 26 years , a high official in the Israeli Interior Ministry and is responsible for the treatment of Arabs in Israel:
“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.“—Israel Koenig, “The Koenig Memorandum”
-Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel (2001-2006):
”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.“(While addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party ,Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998)
“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.”(from Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998)
6) Why do Palestinians seek to destroy Israel’s ‘Jewish Character’ by insisting on their return to their homes in Israel?
If the implementation of UN GA Resolution 194 (which called for the return of the refugees) would make Israel a just and a fair state for all its citizens, regardless of their faith or race, then why should it be unacceptable? When South Africa abolished its Apartheid regime, the country became a just and fair country for all its citizens, and few people cared about the destruction of the “White character” of Pretoria.
The questions which should be asked are:
Are Israelis above the law?
Is it right for Israelis to be an exception to the rule?
Many Israelis and Zionists claim that there has to be an exception granted to the “Jewish people” based on the Biblical and historical Jewish background in Palestine (check the article here). However, Zionists disapprove the conduct of other countries when they exercise similar policies to empower a specific ethnic or religious group solely based on racial, religious, and historical backgrounds, especially when Jews are put at a disadvantage.
One of the core issues of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are the collective dispossession and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people over the past seven decades. It should be emphasized that the conflict would have been at the same level of intensity, even if both warring parties had been Muslims, Christians, or even Jewish.
The UN GA resolution 194 granted all Palestinian refugees the right to either return to their homes and receive compensation, or to be resettled in another country and receive compensation for their looted properties. Such a Right was granted by the international community to each and every single Palestinian refugee, and no politician has the right to make (or even waive) such a decision on their behalf. Some refugees may prefer to go back and live in peace among Israelis with full political rights (similar to the ones granted to black South Africans in Pretoria), and other refugees may happily prefer to put their lives together in places other than Palestine or Israel; again that is their decision, which no politician has the right to make on the refugees’ behalf.
One fact that is usually not mentioned in the Right of Return debate is that Israel was accepted in the United Nations conditionally, based on its implementation of all preceding UN resolutions concerning Palestine, including UN GA resolution 194 that called for the immediate return of all Palestinian refugees to their homes in Israel. This right is based on the same UN GA resolution which partitioned Palestine in November 1947 into two independent states, Palestinian and Israeli.
It’s often envisioned by many Israelis and Jews that the Right of Return would require many Israelis to be displaced. This could not be farther from the truth. The majority of Israelis are urban dwellers who are mostly concentrated in or near Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Haifa. Actually, Israel has the highest rate of urban dwellers of all industrial counties.
Israel’s Central Bureau Of Statistics
If we look at Israel’s demographic distribution we see that 78% of Israelis live in 14% of Israel, while 86% of Israel is being utilized by mostly bankrupt Kibbutz communal farms(The Return of the Refugees; the Key to Peace by Dr.Salman Abu Sitta )Many of the Palestinian refugees come from rural areas which are being utilized by under 200,000 Israelis, especially the areas in the Galilee and Negev. It’s utterly unfair to cram 3.7 million Palestinian refugees (out of 5.9 million refugees) in deplorable conditions, while an Israeli minority utilizes the land which the Palestinian refugees owned and farmed for centuries. It’s ironic that refugees are often separated only by barbed wire from their homes, farms, and businesses in Israel.
It’s hypocritical when many Israelis and Zionists speak from both sides of their mouths. From one side, they tell European Jewry that they can immigrate to the “Promised Land” after 2,000 years of “exile”, while the ethnically cleansed Palestinians, who STILL possess the keys and the deeds to their homes in Jaffa or Haifa, cannot return after only 73 years of forcible exile. It’s very sad that similar UN resolutions were forcibly enforced by military action against other countries, such as in the cases of Serbia and Iraq, while Israel was given the green light to loot Palestine and ethnically cleanse it of its indigenous people. (Check the article here for a sample of what has been looted and usurped from the Palestinian refugees.)
-OverDose
Lists and references
In addition to the references pointed out after and in the previous respective paragraphs, here are related references and articles that the reader can check for further validation :
1- Do Israeli Rights Conflict with the Palestinian Right of Return ? by Michael Kagan -Jewish self-determination cannot trump other human rights. The first section of this paper explored arguments that the Jewish collective right to form and maintain a Jewish state could negate the Palestinian refugee return. This argument does not seem sustainable in law, principally because self-determination cannot be achieved for one group by disenfranchising another. Israel can discriminate in its immigration laws, but not in laws dealing with returning refugees. If Palestinian refugees have a right to return, they cannot be legally prevented from doing so simply because it would change Israel’s demographic composition. The law of self-determination is flexible enough to accommodate this reality. For the purposes of self-determination, the “people” of Israel can include both current Israeli citizens, as well refugees who choose to return. Self-determination is inclusive, not exclusive.
Self-determination is a foundation for other rights, not a conflicting right. International law has long accepted that Jews are a people entitled to a homeland in what is now Israel. Refugee return need not threaten Jewish national life in Israel, but it would necessitate a re-definition of Israel as a “Jewish State.” Israeli sovereignty and Jewish sovereignty are not necessarily the same thing. The dominant Jewish demographic position in Israel is the artificial result of the fact that the Palestinian refugees have not returned home. Even without refugee return, Israel’s non-Jewish (largely Arab) population is already substantial. Today, Israel is an established sovereign state, but it is also a diverse state.
Refugee return and restitution must accommodate Israeli property and residential rights. Israelis have open to them a range of possible arguments to defend significant portions of their current property. Although refugee return and property restitution are linked, there are a number of potentially valid conflicting interests that individual Israelis may assert. Even if the State of Israel was wrong to take refugee property, individual Israelis who acquired it may have interests that the law will protect. This paper has not explored all of the complexities of property restitution, but it can at least be said that Israeli and Palestinian rights may be in genuine conflict in the area of private property. Israelis who acknowledge the justice of Palestinian refugees’ desire to return but who worry about the practical implementation would benefit from an expanded exploration of competing property claims. This would affect only specific pieces of property; refugees who come from undeveloped or sparsely populated areas of Israel would be able to return without obstacle.
Return arrangements should account for political, social and economic stability. Israel would have valid concerns that mass refugee return would generate tremendous upheaval. However, there is no basis in international law for this concern to negate the right of return entirely. Stability is a legitimate and necessary state concern, which could justify delaying or staging returns and restitution over time. Expertise gained from other large scale refugee repatriations would have obvious application in designing the modalities and logistics of refugee return. As in other post-conflict situations, refugee repatriation should be part of a wider effort at reconciliation. Since Israel has played a part in promoting ethnic tension between Jews and Palestinians, it cannot reflexively claim the existence of conflict as a reason to block non-Jewish refugee return. But if Israel plays a constructive and good faith role in reconciliation, the state will have every right to raise concerns about maintaining stability in the course of refugee return.
The right to return need not leave Israelis and Jews unprotected. It would be to the benefit of both Israelis and Palestinians to have greater focus on Israeli rights, especially private property rights, for two main reasons. First, full acceptance of the Palestinian right to return need not generate widespread fear of Jewish displacement. Israelis have a range of rights to assert that would either slow or in some cases prevent full return to refugees’ original homes. This will be of little comfort to those who ideologically insist on a Jewish state with a dominant Jewish majority. But the conflicting rights approach can address more practical Israeli interests. Second, addressing Israeli rights in the context of refugee return may have an important benefit in terms of reconciliation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described in terms of irreconcilable claims to self-determination. Zionists claim Israel as a Jewish state, Islamists claim historic Palestine as an Islamic state, Arab nationalists claim it as an Arab state, and so on. As noted above, the legal right of peoples to self-determination need not and legally cannot be expressed in such exclusivist terms. It is possible to acknowledge both the Palestinian right to return, as well as Israelis’ rights to property and homes. By acknowledging mutually legitimate rights, this approach should reduce fears that Palestinians assert a right to return in order to drive all Jews from Israel, as well as fears that Israelis resist the right to return in order to continue illegitimate colonization.
Do Israeli Rights Conflict with the Palestinian Right of Return
2- The Nakba flight and expulsion of the Palestinians
The Nakba flight and expulsion of the Palestinians
3- ZIONISM FACTS AND MYTHS
4- Zionist Myths: A Short History of the Colonization of Palestine
Zionist Myths: A Short History of the Colonization of Palestine
In 1967, the remainder of Palestine was invaded and occupied by the Zionists and another 350, 000 Palestinians were expelled or fled. In the 1970’s, the “Judaization of the Galilee” (the term Zionists use to describe the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from this area for exclusively Jewish settlement) followed the same pattern of settlement familiar throughout historic Palestine:
–the confiscation of agricultural and grazing land in the areas surrounding Palestinian population centers;
–the freezing of growth in Palestinian villages by denying building and planning rights;
–the systematic demolition of Palestinian homes and businesses
–planned Jewish settlement aimed at breaking up the territorial continuity of Palestinian areas;
–the denial of access to basic services such as water (the theft of that water)
–policies aimed at preventing Palestinian economic subsistence and forcing dependence on settlers.
Through the “peace negotiations” of Oslo, the Geneva Accords, and the Road Map, Zionists have pursued a policy of stealing more land and striking genuine resistance to colonial settlement with crushing force.
5- The catastrophe : How Palestine became Israel
The catastrophe : How Palestine became Israel
6- The negation of the existence of the Palestinian people and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The negation of the existence of the Palestinian people and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine
7- From the 1948 Nakba to the 1967 Naksa
From the 1948 Nakba to the 1967 Naksa
8- Palestine Right Of Return, Sacred, Legal, and Possible By Dr. Salman Abu Sitta
The Palestinian Holocaust is unsurpassed in history. For a country to be occupied, emptied of its people, its physical and cultural landmarks obliterated, its destruction hailed as a miraculous act of God, all done according to a premeditated plan, meticulously executed, internationally supported, and still maintained today, is no doubt the ugliest crime of modern times.
In the 1991 Gulf War and the Bosnian conflict, the international community exercised its duty to use all means to implement the Right of Return to the expelled refugees. It should do so again, as it has done in Kosovo. For real and lasting peace to prevail, the Right of Return must be implemented. The illusion that the military supremacy and violation of all norms of human rights, which have prevailed during the last 50 year [more than 70 now], can continue and gain permanence is dangerous and costly.
https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Right-Of-Return/index.html
9- The Feasibility of the Right of Return by Dr.Salman Abu Sitta
The Palestinians have no moral or legal obligation to accommodate Israelis at their own expense. By any standards, Israel has such an obligation–to correct the monumental injustice it has committed. Yet, the refugees’ return has no implications for Israel’s sovereignty. It has nothing to do with whether the Oslo Accords succeed or fail. It has nothing to do with settlements, boundaries, or even Jerusalem. The problems facing the proposal are, of course, clear. Israel will not allow it, at least at present, and can prevent it from taking place. Israel’s justification for this denial would be the need to protect its security and preserve its nature as a Jewish state.
However, Israeli Palestinians comprise 18 per cent of the population of Israel and 45 per cent of them are less than 20 years old, compared with 29 per cent of the Jewish population. This young community will eventually become a majority within the state if present trends continue–perhaps even within the next two decades. Israel would then have little choice but to accept them as full members of its polity, since subjugation or transfer would no longer be an internationally acceptable option. In that case, Israelis should, perhaps, face realicy and accept full partnership with Palestinians by allowing the refugees to return. It is the inevitable, democratic solution, even if it overturns the assumptions of Zionism which have ruled Israel for the past 50 years. Many Israelis themselves are already questioning the usefulness of Zionism in the fragmented mosaic that is Israel today.
https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/articles/1997/the-feasibility-of-the-right-of-return
10- The Implementation of the Right of Return By Dr.Salman Abu-Sitta
Both Israelis and Palestinians agree that there can be no peace without a resolution of the refugee problem,Israelis believe that they can extend and legalize their original ethnic cleansing operation. This is an illusion. The fact that all of their so-called “resettlement schemes” have been nipped in the bud by governments and people alike is proof enough of that.
The Israelis have no legal, ethical, practical, demographic or economic reason to persist in denying the refugees’ rights. Israel’s position is solely derived from racist policies, and as the only one left in the world to deny Palestinian refugees’ rights, is condemned by the rest of the world.
It is a matter of conjecture to estimate how many Israeli Jews would wish to live in a non-racist democratic country. Nor does anyone know how many would leave for fear of indictment of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But this is a fruitless exercise, since the principle of “universal jurisdiction” would chase them anywhere.
The price Israel has to pay for permanent peace is far less than imagined. In a land that is relatively underpopulated today in most parts, in which half its citizens are, on average, outside the country at any given time and where the appetite of its young people for war has waned considerably, peace – especially a peace that guarantees the rights of Jews and Palestinians under international law – should be highly desirable. All Israel has to do is become a truly democratic country for all its citizens and interpret its Law of Return to mean “right of return” on a legal, not a racist, basis. In its absorption capacity, it should give priority to those who are lawfully qualified to return, not those who bring seeds of conflict and war. Priority should be given to those who own, not those who conquer.
https://pij.org/articles/1217/the-implementation-of-the-right-of-return
11- The Right to Inheritance and to Return, Keys to Peace in Palestine By Ilan Pappe, Uri Davis , and Tamar Yaron
The “peace process” which culminated in the Oslo Accords in 1993 has failed to ignore two key issues: the nature of the State of Israel and that of the right of return of the Palestinians expelled in 1948. However, in 2005, a United Nations special rapporteur, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, defined “Principles” on the return of the housing of deportees or displaced. Precise and detailed, they deserve to be re-read in the light of the international community’s continuing passivity on Palestinian rights.
Zionist settlement colonialism was the result of European settlers escaping persecution from Europe and arriving at lands inhabited by other people which the settlers coveted as their new homelands. Their main obstacle on the way of creating a Europe away from Europe that had not want them was to remove the native population. The late scholar Patrick Wolfe attracted attention to the logics that inform settler colonial movement such as Zionism when they encounter an indigenous population. He asserted that in such a case they motivated by a logic he defined as that of “the elimination of the native”
The structural dispossession was not just an act of ethnic cleansing, but was also part of genocidal policies, pursued immediately after the end of the 1948 catastrophe (the Palestinian Nakba). It began with the official Israeli expropriation of the refugees’ assets and possessions by the “Absentees Property Law of 1950” and subsequent acts and legislations. Moreover, the authorities expelled additional Palestinian villages between 1948 and 1956, increasing by that the number of the refugees
12- The Palestinian right of return by war on want
Supporting the Palestinian right of return is an obligation for states, and a responsibility for solidarity movements. Supporting the right of return means supporting accountability and justice.
https://waronwant.org/news-analysis/palestinian-right-return
13- Palestinian Right of Return – Norman Finkelstein:
What I will not accept , is anybody telling the Palestinians as a precondition for negotiations , that they have to give up the right , that’s their Right!
Nobody has the right to tell the Palestinians they have no right
The official Israeli position of Ehud Barak in Camp David ,we will not accept any moral,legal or historical responsibility for what happened to the Palestinians … That’s a nonstarter
14- Ilan Pappe and Gideon Levy on the right of return of Palestinians to their homeland
Israel is built on the notion that it can accept many more millions, only if they are Jews . It’s not a question of capacity , it’s a question of ideology.To put it bluntly and simply , it’s a racist position derived from the settler Zionist colonial ideology which excludes the native population.
15- Noam Chomsky on right of return – A 2010 Conversation on Palestine Israel
16- Israel’s refusal to grant Palestinian refugees right to return has fuelled seven decades of suffering by Amnesty international
“More than 70 years after the conflict that followed Israel’s creation, the Palestinian refugees who were forced out of their homes and dispossessed of their land as a result continue to face the devastating consequences,”
There can be no lasting solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis until Israel respects Palestinian refugees’ right to return
said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
17- 70+ years of suffocation by Amnesty international
https://nakba.amnesty.org/en/chapters/west-bank-gaza/
18- Human Rights Watch Policy on the Right to Return
https://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/israel/return/
19- Do Palestinians Have A Right To Return? By AJ+
The right of return is one of the biggest sticking points in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. In 1948, the founding of Israel lead to the expulsion and dispossession of what is now the world’s biggest refugee population. Should they be allowed to return?
20- The Palestinian right of return in 2 minutes by refugee academy
21- How did the Nakba happen? | Al Jazeera English
70 years have passed since the Nakba, the “catastrophe” in Arabic, took place in Palestine in 1948.
In which more than 750,000 Palestinians were forcefully displaced from their homes and pushed into refugee camps in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and neighbouring countries.
22- Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe:
-Episode 1 | Featured Documentary:
“The Nakba did not begin in 1948. Its origins lie over two centuries ago….”
So begins this four-part series on the ‘nakba’, meaning the ‘catastrophe’, about the history of the Palestinian exodus that led to the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, and the establishment of the state of Israel.
This sweeping history starts back in 1799 with Napoleon’s attempted advance into Palestine to check British expansion and his appeal to the Jews of the world to reclaim their land in league with France.
The narrative moves through the 19th century and into the 20th century with the British Mandate in Palestine and comes right up to date in the 21st century and the ongoing ‘nakba’ on the ground.
For Palestinians, 1948 marks the ‘nakba’ or the ‘catastrophe’, when hundreds of thousands were forced out of their homes.
But for Israelis, the same year marks the creation of their own state.
This series attempts to present an understanding of the events of the past that are still shaping the present. This story starts in 1799, outside the walls of Acre in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, when an army under Napoleon Bonaparte besieged the city. It was all part of a campaign to defeat the Ottomans and establish a French presence in the region.
In search of allies, Napoleon issued a letter offering Palestine as a homeland to the Jews under French protection. He called on the Jews to ‘rise up’ against what he called their oppressors.
Napoleon’s appeal was widely publicised. But he was ultimately defeated. In Acre today, the only memory of him is a statue atop a hill overlooking the city.
Yet Napoleon’s project for a Jewish homeland in the region under a colonial protectorate did not die, 40 years later, the plan was revived but by the British.
-Episode 2 | Featured Documentary:
Arab, Israeli and Western intellectuals, historians and eye-witnesses provide the central narrative which is accompanied by archive material and documents, many only recently released for the first time.
On 19 April 1936, the Palestinians launched a national strike to protest against mass Jewish immigration and what they saw as Britain’s alliance with the Zionist movement.
The British responded with force. During the six months of the strike, over 190 Palestinians were killed and more than 800 wounded. Wary of popular revolt, Arab leaders advised the Palestinians to end the strike. Palestinian leaders bowed to pressure from the Arab heads of state and agreed to meet the British Royal Commission of Inquiry headed by Lord Peel.
In its report of July 1937, the Peel Commission recommended the partition of Palestine. Its report drew the frontiers of a Jewish state in one-third of Palestine, and an Arab state in the remaining two-thirds, to be merged with Transjordan.
A corridor of land from Jerusalem to Jaffa would remain under British mandate. The Commission also recommended transferring where necessary Palestinians from the lands allocated to the new Jewish state.
The Commission’s proposals were widely published and provoked heated debate.
As the Palestinian revolt continued, Britain’s response hardened. Between 1936 and 1937, the British killed over 1,000 Palestinians; 37 British military police and 69 Jews also died.
-Episode 3 | Featured Documentary:
Few Palestinians, if any, could have imagined they were to become victims of what would later be called “ethnic cleansing”.
After 30 years of British rule, the question of Palestine was referred to the United Nations, which had become the forum for conflict.
On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly met to devise a plan for the partition of Palestine. UN Resolution 181 divided Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem as an internationalised city.
The Jewish state was granted 56 percent of the land; the city of Jaffa was included as an enclave of the Arab state; and the land known today as the Gaza Strip was split from its surrounding agricultural regions.
But making the proposed Arab state all but proved impractical in the eyes of many Palestinians.
When the draft resolution was presented for voting, Arab newspapers ran a ‘name and shame’ list of the countries that voted for the UN partition plan, and Arab protesters took to the streets.
Following the partition resolution, Britain announced it would end its mandate in Palestine on 14 May 1948.
– Episode 4 | Featured Documentary:
In early 1948, Jewish paramilitary forces began to seize more land in Palestine. By the end of July, more than 400,000 Palestinians had been forced to flee their homes, and their plight as refugees had just begun.
In May of that year, Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte had been appointed as the UN Mediator in Palestine. His mission was to seek a peaceful settlement. The Count surveyed devastated Palestinian villages and visited refugee camps in both Palestine and Jordan. The scale of the humanitarian disaster became apparent, as he witnessed cramp living conditions, long queues for basic food and scarce medical aid.
Count Bernadotte was no stranger to human disaster; with the Red Cross he had rescued over 30,000 prisoners of war from Nazi concentration camps. Now he advocated the Palestinian’s right to return to their homes.
In a report dated 16 September 1948, he wrote:
“It would be an offence against the principles of elementary justice if these innocent victims were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.”
The Count’s first proposal argued for fixed boundaries through negotiation, an economic union between both states, and the return of Palestinian refugees – the proposal was turned down.
On 17 September, the day following his UN report, Count Bernadotte’s motorcade was ambushed in Jerusalem. He was shot at point blank range by members of the Jewish Stern gang.
The killing was approved by the three-man ‘center’ of Lehi: Yitzhak Yezernitsky (the future Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir), Nathan Friedmann (also called Natan Yellin-Mor) and Yisrael Eldad (also known as Scheib).
23- Gaza’s Great March of Return protests explained by Huthifa Fayyad
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/3/30/gazas-great-march-of-return-protests-explained
24- Palestinian refugees and the right of return by AFSC
https://www.afsc.org/resource/palestinian-refugees-and-right-return
25- A UNIQUE STRUGGLE: 10 FACTS ABOUT PALESTINE REFUGEES by Kristyn Rohrer
These 10 facts about Palestine refugees are by no means an exhaustive list, however, it offers insight into the current situation. Palestinians are the largest and longest-standing group of refugees in the world. Palestinian refugees have suffered for over six decades and will continue to suffer until their basic needs and rights are met.
https://borgenproject.org/palestine-refugees-10-facts/
26-FAQ on the Nakba: The Nakba and Palestinian Refugees Today
https://imeu.org/article/faq-on-the-nakba-the-nakba-and-palestinian-refugees-today
-Plan Dalet: Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing
https://imeu.org/article/plan-dalet
27- Palestinian refugee crisis: Longing for ‘right of return’ by Natasha Ghoneim
28-After 70 years, who are the Palestinian refugees? By Paul Adams
29-Observations on the Right of Return by Rashid Khalidi
Observations on the Right of Return by Rashid Khalidi
30-The June 1967 war and the Palestinian refugee problem by Tom Segev.
The June 1967 war and the Palestinian refugee problem by Tom Segev
Since the beginning of the Zionist movement, the hope of moving the Arabs of Palestine out of the country had been a constant. During British rule, Zionist leaders looked into various ways of paying them to move to distance provinces . Certainly, the flight and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arabs during the 1948 war and its aftermath—a “wholesale evacuation,” which Moshe Sharett described as “more wonderful than the creation of the Jewish state -went some way toward realizing this hope. There were diplomatic considerations, however. In 1949, Israel offered to readmit 100,000 refugees as part of a peace settlement, but the plan failed and Israel rescinded the offer. The UN demanded that Israel give the refugees a choice of returning to their homes or receiving compensation, but David Ben Gurion objected. “Everyone will want to come home and they will destroy us,” he said in 1961. This was the fear that dictated Israel’s position until the Six Day War. “We have nothing to give and nothing to concede,” Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told Jean Paul Sartre on the eve of the war.
Eshkol, Dayan, and the other partners in the blunder believed there was no reason to hurry. Lacking vision, courage, and compassion, captivated by the hallucinations of victory, they never accepted Israel’s role in the Palestinian tragedy. Or perhaps they simply did not have the courage to admit it; this was probably the main inhibition. And perhaps they truly believed that one day they would succeed in getting rid of them.
31- Archbishop Atallah Hanna Speaks on the Palestinian Right of Return
Archbishop Theodosios Atallah Hanna is a distinguished Arab nationalist and spiritual leader for Palestine. He is Archbishop of Sebastia from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. He is also the designated spokesperson for the Greek Orthodox Church for all of Palestine. The Archbishop is a member of the Arab Nationalist Congress as a representative of Palestine and has received numerous awards for his work to strengthen Arab unity and for being a powerful spokesperson for the Palestinian cause.
This inspiring and passionate speech on Palestinian rights was given at the Sixth International Annual Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim, California in May 2008 to mark the 60th Year of the Nakba and the Struggle to Return.
32- Critical Analysis Of The Birth Of The Palestinian Refugee Problem By the Israeli historian Benny Morris
https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story562.html
33- The expulsion of the Palestinians re-examined By the French newspaper Le Monde by Dominique Val
The actual text of Plan D leaves very little doubt as to the intentions of Ben Gurion and his friends. It spoke of “operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris), and especially of those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village, conducting a search inside it. In case of resistance, the armed force must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state” (“The Making…”, p. 92).
For their achievements, and despite their limitations, we should applaud the courage of Israel’s new historians. This is not just any old page of history on which they have worked to shed light. What they have opened to public view is the “original sin” of the state of Israel. Is it acceptable for the survivors of Hitler’s genocide to have the right to live in a state of their own, and for this right to exclude the right of the sons and daughters of Palestine to live similarly at peace in their own country? Fifty years after the event, the time is long overdue to bring an end to this logic that has generated so much war, and to find a way for the two peoples to coexist. At the same time, we should not draw a veil over the historical origins of the tragedy.
https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story674.html
34- Palestinian refugees’ ‘right of return’ could result in the demographic elimination of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’. Would you be concerned about that? By Henry Lowi
https://www.palestineremembered.com/Articles/General/Story1654.html
35- Will peace cost me my home? By Ghada Ageel
https://www.latimes.com/news/la-oe-ageel1dec01-story.html
36- The Palestinian Refugee Problem & the Right of Return By Baha Abushaqra
http://www.miftah.org/Doc/Factsheets/Other/Aug28b2k2.html
Aside from being a pressing humanitarian case, solving the Palestinian refugee problem is the true oft-shunned key to attaining justice and lasting peace in the Middle East. The Right of Return is inalienable and cannot be “negotiated” away in a manner contradictory to the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and UN resolutions. To do so would be perpetuation of inexcusable and unconscionable injustice.
It is a fact: if it weren’t for Zionism, for Israel, there would be no Palestinian refugee problem. Hence, today Jews have an indisputable moral responsibility to ending the Palestinian suffering. And, if the return is demographically feasible, why, then, could not Jews and Palestinians coexist as equals in a democratic pluralistic society in the Holy Land?
In the first Progress Report submitted by the UN-appointed Mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, the Mediator recognized the right of return as key to a resolution of the conflict in Palestine. Bernadotte wrote:
“No settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the homes from which he has been dislodged. It would be an offense against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the Right to Return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.”
(Count Bernadotte paid dearly for his conscientiousness –he was liquidated by Zionist terrorists in Jerusalem, on September 17, 1948.)
Golda Meir was gravely wrong and myopic to stack Israel over humanistic-Judaism, when she said, “we shall not let this happen.” She was a Zionist.
37- Twilight Zone / Non-Jews Need Not Apply by Gideon Levy
The right of return: The original owners of those houses, the Sephardic Community Committee, has this right forever. There is no judge in Jerusalem who can explain this double standard, this racist right of return for Jews only. Why is the Sephardic Community Committee allowed, and the committee of Palestinians not What are the tycoons and the politicians who stand behind this hostile takeover thinking to themselves? What is going through the minds of the judges who permitted it? And what about the policemen who violently evicted a sickly man in a wheelchair in the middle of the night, without even letting him remove the contents of his house? And what are the Jews now living in these stolen houses feeling?
https://www.haaretz.com/1.5075269
38- Jews in support of Palestinian Right of Return by Neturei Karta
39- Jews Commemorating Palestinian Nakba Day in NYC by Neturei Karta
41- 4 Jews Talk About the Palestinian Nakba on Israeli Independence Day by Jewish voice for peace (JVP)
43- How did Israel become a country? By TRT world
44- Israel-Palestine Part II: Where are we going? By TRT world
45- UK: Zionists disrupt and harass peaceful Nakba Day event in London by Ruptly
A rally organised by London Palestine Action to mark the 68th anniversary of the Nakba in Palestine, was met by a group of around 25 people from the UK zionist federation heckling the participants and screaming “terrorist” at them in London on Nakba Day, Sunday.
48- Israeli Palestinian conflict explained: an animated introduction to Israel and Palestine by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP):
Easy to understand, historically accurate mini- primer about why Israelis and Palestinians are fighting, why the US-backed peace process has been an impediment to peace, and what you can do to make a difference. This conflict is essentially about land and human rights, not religion and culture. Endorsed by Palestinian, Israeli and American scholars and peace activists.
Jewish Voice for Peace opposes anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab bigotry and oppression. JVP seeks an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; security and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians; a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on principles established in international law; an end to violence against civilians; and peace and justice for all peoples of the Middle East. Current mission statement adopted in 2009.
Jewish Voice for Peace is a diverse and democratic community of activists inspired by Jewish tradition to work together for peace, social justice, and human rights. We support the aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians for security and self determination.
51- For Palestinians, the Nakba is not history by Aziz abu Sarah
https://www.972mag.com/for-palestinians-the-nakba-is-not-history/
52-Palestinian right of return: The legal key to undoing the Zionist conquest by Joseph Massad
Palestinian right of return: The legal key to undoing the Zionist conquest by Joseph Massad
53- I’m sick of 63 Years of Nakba by Amandla Manasra
Our date is 73 years late,
We shall return
–OverDose