March 18, 2024
An Israeli man walks past an electoral billboard bearing portraits of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flanked by extreme right politicians Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Michael Ben Ari, with a caption in Hebrew reading "Kahana Lives" in a reference to a banned ultranationalist party in the 1994, in Jerusalem, on March 29, 2019. - Israeli general elections will be held on April 9, 2019. (Photo by Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images)
The Israeli government’s “solution” to
the Palestinian problem – eviction or destruction and colonization of what’s
left of Palestinian land – did not begin after the October 7th Hamas raid. A
November 22, 2023, article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz headline reads,
“Netanyahu Ignored All the Warnings
and Looming Threats. He’s Primarily Responsible for the Calamity
Instead of dealing with the clear
warnings he was given, the Israeli prime minister focused on crushing
democracy, establishing his status as the supreme ruler and transferring
resources to the ultra-Orthodox and the settlements
The article notes, “There’s no better
proof of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s responsibility for the disaster
suffered by Israel on October 7 than the letters of warning sent to him by the
head of the Military Intelligence research division, Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, in
March and July.”
For many decades Israeli politicians
have been working toward the goal of establishing what they call “Eretz Israel”
or “The Greater Land of Israel” – a greater Israel composed of all of the
Palestine mandate “from the Sea to the River Jordan” (their words). After the
partition of Palestine under UN auspices in 1948, Israel has expanded its
territory, by military and non-military means, and now comprises 78% of what
was once Palestine, plus Syria’s Golan Heights.
There is a clear historical record of
deliberate displacement documented by many scholars, including the book,
“Plowshares into Swords: From Zionism to Israel,” (Verso, 2008) by Princeton
Professor Arno Mayer. Coming off the horrors of Russian pogroms and Nazi
genocide, the early Founders of the Israeli state were in no mood to respect
the rights of the indigenous Palestinians.
It took an American-born Prime
Minister of Israel, Golda Meir (1969-1974), to speak the ultimate antisemitism
against the Arabs of Palestine, declaring “There is no such thing as a
Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their
country. They didn’t exist.”
Other Israeli leaders before and after
Golda Meir were brutally frank about what they were making happen on the
ground. Israel’s lead Founder, David Ben-Gurion, in 1937 wrote in a letter to
his son, “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…” A year later he said
in a speech, “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves… 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. …” Many years
later, in the 1980s, Ben-Gurion renewed his candor: “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?”
In 1979, Israeli war hero, top general
Moshe Dayan, recognized that “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab
villages.” After naming a number of them, he added “There is not a single place
built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” Speaking to
Jewish settlers, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in 1988 warned
resistors, meaning Palestinians would be crushed “like grasshoppers” and their
“head smashed against the boulders and walls.”
Other Israeli Prime Ministers –
Menachem Begin (1977-1983), Ariel Sharon (2001-2006) and the incumbent Benjamin
Netanyahu have expressed similar assertions of the need to expel the
Palestinians, as they have repressed and impoverished them in the Occupied
Territories. Now, Netanyahu wants to push Palestinians out of Gaza entirely, if
he can, into Egypt and Jordan.
Prime Minister Ehud Barak (1999-2001),
responding to a columnist asking what he would have done if he had been born a
Palestinian, frankly replied “I would have joined a terrorist organization.”
When it comes to “terrorism,”— defined
as violence against civilians for political purposes—Palestinians have lost
over 400 times more innocent lives than have innocent Israelis over the
decades. Israeli state terror against Gaza’s (starving, sick and dying)
civilians, mostly children and women, is manifesting itself daily with vast
supplies of American weaponry and diplomatic cover.
To Israeli hardliners, countered by
numerous courageous Israeli human rights organizations, Palestinian lives are
valued beneath “cockroaches” and “snakes,” antisemitic rants against Arabs flow
through the Israeli media. One Rabbi who eulogized American-born Baruch
Goldstein’s 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians killed and 150 others injured who
were praying in Hebron’s al-Ibrahimi Mosque, declared “One million Arabs are
not worth a Jewish fingernail.”
Israeli politicians have an
encompassing reason why they believe they can get away with all kinds of
violations of international law in their oppression of Palestinians and, in
recent years, routine bombings and incursions into neighboring countries too weak
to respond. That reason is the U.S. government. The U.S. is a lawless Empire
bombing and invading where it wants, without Congressional declarations of war
and in violation of federal and international laws.
In 2001, the BBC reported that
Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, said, that “Israel may have the right to
put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish
people and the State of Israel on trial.”
That same year, P.M. Sharon declared
what Israel’s prime ministers, before and since, have striven for regarding
Congress and the White House when he told former P.M. Shimon Peres (1984-1986),
as reported on Kol Yisrael radio: “Every time we do something you tell me
Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very
clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people
control America, and the Americans know it.”
Such imperiousness and violent racist
remarks against Palestinians are reflected in Israeli leaders and
opinion-shapers who call Palestinians “beasts,” “animals,” “subhuman,”
“crocodiles,” “vermin,” and worse. With such vile pejoratives, it was easy for Eli
Yishai, Israeli Interior Minister to say in 2012: “The goal of the operation
[Operation Pillar of Defense] is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages…”
Actually, the Palestinians have one of
the highest literacy rates – 97 percent – in the world. Under dire conditions,
they have accomplished farmers, physicians, scientists, engineers, poets,
musicians, novelists, artists, and a deep entrepreneurial tradition carried on
by the Palestinian diaspora around the world.
It is no accident that Israeli bombers
directly target Palestinian cultural and educational institutions in their
recurrent assaults on Gaza.
Israeli militarists have to degrade
all Palestinians (3.2 million in the West Bank and 2.3 million in the Gaza
Strip) to expel them from their ancestral lands and in so doing violently
reveal the “other antisemitism” that most of the media has ignored. (See the
“Anti-Semitism Against Arab and Jewish Americans” speech by Jim Zogby and
DebatingTaboos.org).
Degrading rhetoric makes it easier for
Israel to reject outright, a 2002 peace proposal for a two-state solution by
the 22 countries of the Arab League that is still on the table.
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