The idea of Israel has been based on killing, dispossessing and exiling all the non-Jews from the land given to them by God Almighty. David Ben-Gurion, the primary national founder and first prime minister of Israel, laid the foundation stone of what he used to call \u201cEretz Israel\u201d (land given to Jews, Israel meaning the descendants of the tribes established by the sons of Jacob, the Jewish people), not on peaceful coexistence but on the idea of cleansing it from the \u201cenemy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born in Pionsk, Poland, to Jewish parents, Ben Gr\u00fcn immigrated to the Palestine region of the Ottoman Empire in 1906. Adopting the name of Ben-Gurion in 1909, as a major Zionist leader and the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, he never minced his words about the ownership of the \u201cEretz Israel.\u201d In his early directives and instructions, he unashamedly used the word \u201ctihur\u201d (Hebrew word for cleaning, as in Arabic \u201ctahir\u201d), \u201cnikkuy\u201d (emptying), and \u201cjihad\u201d (as in Arabic \u201cjihad,\u201d meaning struggle or effort) as the main objective of his de-Arabization of Palestine.<\/p>\n
For instance in his order for Operation Kippa (meaning \u201csummit\u201d as the aim of their struggle, but also “skullcap” in Hebrew) he despicably ordered his occupation brigades \u201ctheir assault should aim: \u201cKilling the enemy political leadership mukhtars\u201d (the village aldermen as in Turkish \u201cmuhtar\u201d), killing the inciters and their financial supporters and killing those villagers who joined assault against Jews during the British Mandatory System in Palestine.<\/p>\n
If you look at Israeli historian and political scientist Ilan Pappe\u2019s excellent compilation of Zionists\u2019 atrocities before and after the creation of the State of Israel, you will have a clear picture of those foundation principles of Israel displayed in official documents and diaries. It has never been about creating a democratic, multiethnic and multireligious country; they intended to erect an ethno-religious state based on an ideology.<\/p>\n
In the late 1800s, the Zionist ideology called for a Jewish state to be established in Palestine, and Theodor Herzl, the Budapest native and early adopter of the idea to create a Jewish-only land, requested an audience with Sultan Abd\u00fclhamid II. The Sultan, well-versed in the Zionist literature filled with the \u201cJudaization\u201d narrative, simply declined the request. Then Herzl offered to pay the Ottomans’ foreign debts and to provide propaganda for the Ottoman Sultan in Europe in exchange for opening Palestinian lands to Jewish settlement and transferring governance to the Jewish people, but to no avail! Instead, Abd\u00fclhamid took a series of precautions to reverse the plan. But he was dethroned by the Young Turks, who had withdrawn the Ottoman soldiers from Palestine and opened the entire country to the Zionist settlement.<\/p>\n
Ben Gurion knew the ultimate aim of Zionists in Palestine: Muslims and Christians should be expelled from the Holy Land (that is, Eretz Israel) and they would never come back to their homes, after all, \u201cthe old will die and the young will forget.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Muslim regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai,\u201d he wrote in May 1948, to the General Staff. (From Ben-Gurion, a Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.)<\/p>\n
Yet, the requirements of international relations, especially the U.S. replacing the British in global politics after World War II, the Palestinian Christians were not treated as \u201cenemies\u201d in Ben-Gurion\u2019s directives. Also, the Druze were treated as a tool to be wedged in Muslim villages.<\/p>\n
No matter, fire or cease-fire!<\/p>\n
From Dec. 11, 1947, when the British government declared that the Mandate in Palestine would end, to the official declaration of the foundation of Israel on May 14, 1948, there were 11 cease-fires and truces arranged through the United Nations. If you follow Ilan Pappe\u2019s narrative, you\u2019ll see that none of them stopped Ben-Gurion\u2019s battalions\u2019 ethnic cleansing and destruction of Arab villages:<\/p>\n
\u201cBy 8 July 1948, the first truce had come to an end. It took the U.N. mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, ten days to negotiate another one, which came into effect on 18 July. As we have seen, 15 May 1948 may have been a very significant date for the ‘real war’ between Israel and the Arab armies, but it was totally insignificant for the ethnic cleansing operations. During the two periods of truce, they expelled altogether 70,000 people, and again after the second truce, they resumed the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestine with huge operations of uprooting, deportation and depopulation in both the south and the north of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
After long months of atrocities and occupation of the Palestinian lands partitioned to Arabs by Ben-Gurion\u2019s militia, and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their villages and towns, the League of Arab States\u2019 five members: Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria sent 26,000 soldiers, without enough arms and transportation, to the Palestinians help, which resulted in a catastrophe for the Arabs: By the end of the war, Israel controlled all of the area that the U.N. had proposed for a Jewish state, as well as almost 60% the area proposed for an Arab state.<\/p>\n
The U.N. \u201cpeace\u201d plan had resulted in people being intimidated and terrorized by psychological warfare, heavy shelling of civilian populations, expulsions, seeing relatives being executed, and wives and daughters abused, robbed, and in several cases, raped.<\/p>\n
United Nations emissary Count Folke Bernadotte had arrived in Palestine on May 20 and dared to put forward a proposal to re-divide the country in half and unconditional return of all the refugees. He had already called for the refugees\u2019 repatriation during the first truce (using their basic human right to return), which had been ignored. When he repeated his recommendation in the final report he submitted to the U.N., he was assassinated by Ben-Gurion\u2019s militia.<\/p>\n
As president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Bernadotte had been instrumental in saving Jews from the Nazis during World War II, and this was why the Israeli government had agreed to his appointment as a U.N. mediator; they had not expected him to try to do for the Palestinians what he had done for the Jews only a few years before.<\/p>\n
When Count Bernadotte was killed, Ben-Gurion\u2019s army had lost the Gaza Strip to Egypt and the East of Jerusalem and some parts of the West Bank to Jordan; and he had to sign armistice agreements with Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. But as Israel was about to send teams to the cease-fire talks, Yigal Allon, a commander of the Palmach Militia and later a general in the Israeli Defense Forces, proposed an offensive to conquer the West Bank up to the Jordan River. He thought his forces could do it, but Ben-Gurion refused, thinking that the job required the promised delivery of the \u201ccommunist ammunition support\u201d from the Soviet Union, 25 war aircraft from Czechoslovakia, and more airplanes to be smuggled out of South Africa.<\/p>\n
Ben-Gurion knew, with armistice or not, as soon as he replenished his war capacity, he\u2019d continue his cleaning job. It happened as he expected. Thanks to the \u201cCommunist Zionists,\u201d four Czech aircraft were disassembled and delivered on a cargo plane; and Ben-Gurion violated the 1949 Armistice Agreement by invading the Gaza Strip and later Egypt and occupying the Sinai Peninsula. He also sent two brigades to Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba, which they took with no resistance on March 10.<\/p>\n
Professor Noam Chomsky narrates a story about this violation of the cease-fire in his book titled \u201cFateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians\u201d:<\/p>\n
\u201cShortly after, Ben-Gurion was touring the border with a young general, whom he asked, \u2018How would you take those hills?\u2019 pointing to the Mountains of Edom beyond the Jordanian border. The general made some suggestions and then said, \u2018Why do you ask? Do you want to conquer those hills?\u2019 Ben-Gurion responded: \u2018I? No. But you will conquer them.\u2019 He also maintained what his official biographer calls \u2018his dream of annexing the Sinai Peninsula.\u2019 After the 1956 conquest of the Sinai, Ben-Gurion announced the founding of \u2018the Third Kingdom of Israel,\u2019 and informed the Knesset that \u2018Our army did not infringe on Egyptian territory… Our operations were restricted to the Sinai Peninsula alone.’\u201d<\/p>\n
Bloody history<\/p>\n