Zionist Leaders
David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion was the founding father of Israel. He was a leading Zionist leader and became Israel’s first Prime Minister. His policies and military actions during and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, including those related to Palestinian refugees, are seen by Palestinians as directly contributing to their displacement and the ongoing conflict.
David Ben-Gurion
We have taken their country
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
David Ben-Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.
We are the aggressors
“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. … Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice.”
David Ben Gurion. Quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.
We must expel the Arabs
“We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our disposal.”
5th October 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter to his 16 year old son Amos
Drive them out
“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population? Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’“
Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
Ethnic redistribution
“We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area….I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of the Arab population.”
Ben-Gurion, Behilahem Yisrael, Tel Aviv, Mapai Press, 1952, pp. 86-87
Palestinians should never return
“We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return.”
David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
We grabbed Zionism
Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary on 12 July 1937: “the compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the projected Jewish State…. We have to stick to this conclusion the same way we grabbed the Balfour Declaration, more than that, the same way we grabbed at Zionism itself.”
Ben-Gurion, Zichronot [Memoirs], Vol. 4, p. 299
Zionist aspirations
“We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today — but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concerns of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.”
P. 53, “The Birth of Israel, 1987” Simha Flapan
Ensuring ethnic control in Israel
“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 a million, including almost 40 percent 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 percent.”
Ben-Gurion in an address to the central committee of the Histadrut on 30 December 1947
Expand to the whole of Palestine
“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine“
Ben Gurion, p.22 “The Birth of Israel, 1987” Simha Flapan.
Zionism vs Saving Jewish Lives
“If I knew it was possible to save all the children in Germany by taking them to England, and only half of the children by taking them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second solution. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel.”
December 7, 1938, New York Times
Taking Palestinian Land
“The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside.”
7 June 1938 Address at the Mapai Political Committee
Expanding war to other Countries
“When we smash the [Arab] Legion’s strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo.”
May 1948, Ben-Gurion speaking to his General Staff, Times of Israel
Chaim Weizmann
Chaim Azriel Weizmann served as president of the Zionist Organization and later as the first president of Israel.
Arabs have no value
“The British told us that there are there some hundred thousand niggers [Hebrew: kushim, negroes] and for those there is no value.”
28, March 1914, In a speech delivered at a meeting of the French Zionist Federation, Paris, in Litvinoff (1983, paper 24: 115‒116).
Levi Eshkol
Eshkol was the third Israeli Prime Minister. His tenure saw the pivotal Six-Day War in 1967, resulting in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, significantly affecting Palestinian lives and regional dynamics. Despite having a reputation for being a liberal, Eshkol also advocated activity that falls under the definition of genocide.
Deprive Palestinians of Water
“We’ll Deprive Gaza of Water, and the Arabs Will Leave, Precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Gaza Strip”,
1967. Disclosed Secret Minutes from Israeli Security Cabinet. Haaretz
Send Palestinians to the Moon
“I want them all to go, even if they go to the moon”
1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev.
Golda Meir Quotes
Golda Meir was the fourth Israeli Prime Minister. Her term was marked by the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and an increase in Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, which exacerbated tensions with the Palestinian population.
Palestinians do not exist
“There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”
Sunday Times (15 June 1969) and The Washington Post (16 June 1969)
I carried a Palestinian passport
“When were Palestinians born? What was all of this area before the First World War when Britain got the Mandate over Palestine? What was Palestine, then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqian border. Eastern West Bank was Palestine. I am a Palestinian, from 1921 to 1948, I carried a Palestinian passport. There was no such thing in this area as Jews, and Arabs, and Palestinians, There were Jews and Arabs.”
Iron Lady of Israeli politics, Thames TV (1970)
Promise made by God Himself
“This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.”
Le Monde (15 October 1971)
No Arab Sovereignty
“Arab sovereignty in Jerusalem just cannot be. This city will not be divided — not half and half, not 60-40, not 75-25, nothing.”
Time (19 February 1973)
Menachem Begin
Menachem Begin (16 August 1913 – 9 March 1992) was the leader of the Irgun, later becoming the sixth Prime Minister of Israel. He was a significant figure in the development of Israel’s conservative Likud party.
There will never be a Palestinian state
“In Judea, Samaria and Gaza there will never be a Palestinian state”
New York Times, March 21, 1979.
Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon (26 February 1928 - 11 January 2014) was a major-general in the Israeli army, Israeli politician and Prime Minister 2001-2006. He is accused of overseeing a number of major massacres of Palestinians during his military and political career.
Qibya massacre
“I couldn’t believe my ears. As I went back over each step of the operation, I began to understand what must have happened. For years Israeli reprisal raids had never succeeded in doing more than blowing up a few outlying buildings, if that. Expecting the same, some Arab families must have stayed in their houses rather than running away. In those big stone houses […] some could easily have hidden in the cellars and back rooms, keeping quiet when the paratroopers went in to check and yell out a warning. The result was this tragedy that had happened.”
Ariel Sharon on the Qibya massacre in 1953. Warrior (1987)
Sabra and Shatila massacre
“So, we’ll kill them. They will not be left there. You are not going to save them. You are not going to save these groups of the international terrorism.. . If you don’t want the Lebanese to kill them, we will kill them.”
Anziska, Seth (17 September 2012).
Everything we take will stay ours
“Everybody has to move; run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”
Stated in 1998, New York Times
What is happening is an occupation
“You cannot like the word, but what is happening is an occupation — to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation. I believe that is a terrible thing for Israel and for the Palestinians.”