The HyperTexts

Zionist Quotes

The majority of these racist quotes by Israeli prime ministers, presidents and other prominent Israeli leaders are well-documented and have appeared in leading Israeli newspapers, in books written by Jewish historians that were published by Israeli and other reputable book publishers, and in dairies kept by the leaders themselves that are3 now housed in the the Zionist archives in Jerusalem. If you would like to know what the great Jewish intellectuals Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud thought about the conflict in Palestine, and what Mahatma Gandhi observed, there are links at the bottom of this page where you can study their far superior ideas about peace and how it can be achieved.

What would the Jews of the world say if American presidents called American Jews "crocodiles," "grasshoppers," "cockroaches" and "beasts walking on two legs" while publicly formulating and religiously following an IRON WALL plan to deprive Jews of employment, to rob them of their property, and then force them to flee, destitute, to other countries? Of course the Jews of the world would call this the beginning phase of another Holocaust, and of course they would be correct. But these are things Israeli prime ministers and other prominent Israelis have said, publicly, about Palestinians, and this has been their policy toward Palestinians for the better part of a century. So why is there such astounding silence when Israel not only implements its original plan, but now murders women and children in Gaza when Palestinians protest the constant and brutal abuses they suffer? Please consider ...

"The Palestinians are like crocodiles."—Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2000

"They are beasts walking on two legs."—Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in a speech to the Knesset, New Statesman, June 25, 1982

"They are as grasshoppers in our sight."—Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (multiple quotes, two to follow)

Palestinian rioters would be crushed "like grasshoppers."—Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, New York Times, April 1, 1988 (and why were they rioting?)

"We say to them from the heights of this mountain and from the perspective of thousands of years of history that they are like grasshoppers compared to us."—Shamir, New York Times, April 1, 1988 (again, why were they rioting?)

"We shall use the ultimate force until Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours."—Deputy Prime Minister Rafael Eitan

"[When we build settlements] Arabs will only be able to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle."—Deputy Prime Minister Rafael Eitan

"All of the land of Israel is ours."—Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (no need to share the land with the insects, evidently)

"We shall reduce the Palestinians to a community of woodcutters and waiters."—Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, 1960, The Arabs in Israel

"There is a huge gap between us and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience.—President Moshe Katsav, Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001

"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."—Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, New York Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1

"It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones."—Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Ha'aretz, April 12, 2001

"There is no such thing as a Palestinian."—Prime Minister Golda Meir, The Sunday Times, June 15, 1969 (later parroted by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum)

"It is not as though there was a Palestinian people ... and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them ... they did not exist."—Prime Minister Golda Meir, The Sunday Times, June 15, 1969

"How can we return the held territories? There is nobody to return them to."—Prime Minister Golda Meir, March 8, 1969

"There are no two peoples here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population. There is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation. They only call themselves a people in order to fight the Jews."—Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Maariv interview, April 3, 2009

The Nazis considered themselves to be Aryan supermen who were vastly superior to the Jews. To racist Nazis, the Jews were "not a people," not really human. Above, we see prominent Zionists saying the same things about Palestinians. In the United States we have white supremacists who consider themselves vastly superior to people with darker skin. Is it not beyond obvious from the quotes above that Israel is being led and guided by racists with a similar "superman" mentality?

The racist quotations to follow, made by Zionist leaders, including eleven prime ministers of Israel, leave no doubt that their goal from the very beginning was to "transfer" (ethnically cleanse) Palestinians and "appropriate" (steal) their land. While the stolen land may be "free" to Israeli robber barons, it has been very costly to Palestinians, Americans and the world, because the Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe") led directly to 9-11 and thus to two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We know this because the FBI interrogated a number of the men who planned and carried out the 9-11 attacks. When asked what motivated the attackers, under oath at the 9-11 Commission hearings, FBI special agent James Fitzgerald replied: “They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the U.S.” Why would they focus their anger on the U.S.? Obviously, because the American government supports repressive regimes like Israel's with mega-billions in cash and advanced weapons. Do you think those who accuse the U.S. have their facts wrong? Well, think again, because the U.S. government has a long, bloody history of supporting murderous thugs like the Shah of Iran, Suharto, Augusto Pinochet, Papa Doc, Baby Doc and Saddam Hussein.

compiled by Michael R. Burch, an editor, translator and publisher of Holocaust and Nakba poetry

I lived as best I could, and then I died.
Be careful where you step: the grave is wide.
—Michael R. Burch, "Epitaph for a Palestinian Child"

Moshe Sharett, Israel's second Prime Minister, explained why brutal and murderous Israeli military campaigns like Operation Cast Lead, Operation Pillar of Defense and Operation Protective Edge are doomed to fail, when he asked rhetorically:

"Do people consider that when military reactions outstrip in their severity the events that caused them, grave processes are set in motion which widen the gulf and thrust our neighbors into the extremist camp? How can this deterioration be halted?"—Prime Minister Moshe Sharett ["Sharett’s Lecture at Beit Berl," October 2, 1957, published by The Jerusalem Post, October 18, 1966]

Thus, Sharett anticipated that Israel's dogma of the brutal IRON WALL would lead to militant resistant groups like the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah. And of course he was correct.

The answer to Sharett's question is surprisingly simple: first stop stealing your neighbors' land, if you want peace, since stealing their land requires a bloody military occupation, which makes it a war crime. Another Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, admitted the root problem:

"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."—Prime Minister Ariel Sharon [CNN, May 26, 2003]

Yes, and with 9-11 and the two bloody, trillion-dollar, unwinnable wars it produced, Israel's military occupation of the Palestinians has become a terrible thing for Americans, Afghanis, Iraqis, and the world.

So why doesn't Israel take the first step required for peace, and stop robbing Palestinians of their ever-dwindling land? Perhaps because the transfer of Palestinian land into Jewish hands is a core belief of Israel's national ideology, Zionism. On this page, you will find hundreds of quotations which confirm that expansion of the Jewish state by stealing Palestinian land has been the primary goal of political Zionism for more than a century. Early Zionist leaders like Theodr Herzl, Ze'ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion were very clear about their intention to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and acquire their land (a process that still continues in the West Bank today via euphemistic "settlement expansion" which has resulted in the destruction of more than 20,000 Palestinian homes and millions of olive trees). In the following quotations provided by Jewish historians, major Israeli newspapers, the published diaries of Zionist leaders, and other reputable sources, please keep in mind that when the terms "transfer," "eviction" and "removal" are used, the Zionists are talking about compulsory population transfer, or ethnic cleansing, a crime against peace and humanity. When the term "expropriation" is used, it means the theft of Palestinian land via superior firepower, which is armed robbery and fascism.

If you object to my use of the term "fascism" please consider that Albert Einstein and 27 other Jewish intellectuals compared Meachem Begin and the militant Zionists to European fascists (i.e., the Nazis and their allies) in their 1948 open letter to the New York Times.

When the right of return is allowed for Jews but denied to Palestinians, this dooms the victims of ethnic cleansing to remain stateless, rightless refugees forever. Honest Jews have admitted the horror of what Israeli Jews did—not only to Palestinian refugees—but to Palestinians who were not evicted: "Do we sin only against the refugees? Do we not treat the Arabs who remain as second-class citizens? Did a single Jewish farmer raise his hand in the Parliament in opposition to a law that deprived Arab peasants of their land? ... How lonely, in the city of Jerusalem, sits the Jewish conscience."—Moshe Smilansky ["Zion and the Jewish National Idea" published in the Menorah Journal, Volume XVI, 1958]

We can find the genesis of the problem in an 1895 diary entry of Theodr Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Herzl's diary has been published, and he was clearly writing a recipe for ethnic cleansing, long before the Holocaust or any major acts of Arab violence against Jews in Palestine:

"[We Zionists will] spirit the penniless population across the border [of the Jewish state] by denying it employment ... Both the process of expropriation [theft of land via deflation of its value] and the removal [ethnic cleansing] of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."—Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the planned expulsion of native people [from Herzl's since-published diary, in an entry dated June 12, 1895]

Obviously, there is no need to be discrete and circumspect when people are doing good or acceptable things! And please consider what would happen if American Christians suggested the horrendous idea that they would get rid of American Jews by denying them employment, buying their property at fire-sale prices, then shipping them off, destitute paupers, to other countries. All the Jews of world would be horrified, and rightly so. They would call it the first stage of a new Holocaust, and they would be correct.

Here are other Zionist leaders who clearly advocated ethnic cleansing, without bothering to be discrete or circumspect. And they did what they said: in one of its first acts as a nation in 1948, Israel created a Transfer Committee to supervise the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The director of the Transfer Committee was Yosef (Joseph) Weitz, who also kept a diary, so we know what he was thinking and doing, in his own words. And his words are chilling:

"It is our right to TRANSFER the Palestinians!"—Transfer Committee director Yosef (Joseph) Weitz [from his published diary in five volumes, located in the Zionist archives in Jerusalem]
"We must work out a secret plan based on the removal of the Arabs ... [and] include it in American political circles."—Weitz [ibid]
"There is no other way than to TRANSFER the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them."—Weitz [ibid]
"Not one village, not one [Arab] tribe should be left."—Weitz [ibid]
"If the Arabs leave, the country will become wide and spacious for us [Jews]."—Weitz [ibid]
"Only after this TRANSFER will the country be able to absorb millions of our [Jewish] brothers."—Weitz [ibid]
"The TRANSFER of Arabs from the Jewish state [serves two aims]: to diminish the Arab population and release Arab land to Jews."—Weitz [ibid]

Weitz got most of his racist wish, but it seems someone in the chain of command above him settled on allowing a 20% Arab minority to remain within the borders of Israel. Most of the rest became homeless, stateless, destitute vagabonds, and many children died premature deaths, for instance on the Lydda Death March.  — and each of those deaths was a war crime

If the lives, health and happiness of millions of Palestinian and Jewish children were not at stake, it would be amusing to ask why Israel's apologists object to someone like me citing statements taken directly from diaries written by prominent Zionists that have been published by Israeli book publishers, cited in Israeli newspapers, and housed in the Zionist archives. Not so long ago, millions of Germans lived in denial of the Holocaust. It seems to me that we are seeing a similar form of denial today, when millions of Israeli Jews apparently cannot admit that their leaders were enthusiastic fans of population transfer (ethnic cleansing) and even said Hitler gave it a "good name" in the world!

In any case, these are grotesque statements, and if any American said such things about ethnically cleansing American Jews, he/she would be forced to resign and would never win an election. But in Israel, people who make such grotesque statements occupy the highest offices, including those of prime minister and president.

Israel's system of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and brutal repression of Palestinians begins with the "Iron Wall" dogma of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, as explained by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said, “We all grew up as faithful to the doctrine of Jabotinsky." Jabotinsky was the spiritual father of the Likud, and he was a staunch advocate of "transfer" or ethnic cleansing.

"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."—Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, as published in the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989

Netanyahu has also been accused of assassinating Hamas officials who tried to negotiate peace with Israel.

Other Israeli prime ministers have agreed that the IRON WALL dogma rules their minds and thoughts, even as it rules so brutally over Palestinians:

"The deterrent power, or in Jabotinsky's language THE IRON WALL, was intended to convince the Arabs that they would not be able to get rid of the sovereign Jewish presence in the Land of Israel."—Menachem Begin (Iron Wall, p. 354)

In 1923, radical Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky—spiritual father of the Likud, and Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Bibi Netanyahu—wrote that the "sole way" for Jews to deal with Arabs in Palestine was through "total avoidance of all attempts to arrive at a settlement," which Jabotinsky euphemistically termed the "Iron Wall" approach. Not coincidentally, a picture of Jabotinsky graced Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's desk.—The Village Voice, "Death Wish in the Holy Land," Dec. 12, 2001

Here is what Jabotinsky said about the IRON WALL himself:

"The Islamic soul must be broomed [swept, ethnically cleansed] out of Eretz-Yisrael."—Ze'ev Jabotinsky, spiritual father of the Likud [One Palestine Complete, p. 151]
"Settlement can thus develop under the protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an IRON WALL which they will be powerless to break down."—Jabotinsky [Ha'aretz Daily, 1923]
"We all [i.e., Zionists of all stripes] demand that there should be an IRON WALL."—Jabotinsky ["The Iron Wall" in Razsviet, April 11, 1923]
"And we are all of us, without any exception, demanding day after day that this outside Power [Great Britain], should carry out this task vigorously and with determination."—Jabotinsky [ibid]
"There is no justice, no law, and no God in heaven, only a single law which decides and supersedes all—[Jewish] settlement [of the land]."—Jabotinsky [Righteous Victims, p. 108]
"Arabs must make room for Jews. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to TRANSFER the Palestinians."—Jabotinsky [Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 29]
"Hitler—odious as he is to us—has given this idea [TRANSFER, ethnic cleansing] a good name in the world.—Jabotinsky [One Palestine Complete, p. 407]

With the two quotes above, Jabotinsky advocated the emulation of Stalin's 1941 ethnic cleansing of the "Baltic peoples" in which over 40,000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were forcibly transferred and less than half survived, and of Hitler's ethnic cleansing of Jews, Gypsies and other "undesirable" people, which also resulted in a massive death rate, even before the mass killings began. Such massive deportations cannot take place without many unjust, premature deaths, so in effect this was a call for serial murder.

"If we desire that Israel should become and remain a Jewish State, we must first of all create a Jewish majority [by expelling Arabs.]"—Jabotinsky [The Ideology of Betar]
"Colonisation carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab."—Jabotinsky ["The Iron Wall" in Razsviet, April 11, 1923]

Jabotinsky's remark about "the only possible explanation" of Zionist colonization being "clear as daylight" to every Jew and Arab is an important observation. What we typically hear from Israel's apologists is that Zionists had "good intentions" and Arabs resisted those "good intentions" out of hatred, and thus Arab resistance was unwarranted. But Jabotinsky was honest about the intentions of Zionists to colonize Palestine. They knew what that meant for Palestinian Arabs, and so did the Arabs. It meant they would suffer what Native Americans suffered at the hands of white settlers. It meant the loss of their land, their homes, their rights, their dignity and their culture. And all those things have happened to Palestinians at the hands of Israeli Jews, so they weren't just dreaming up irrational things to fear. Their fears were well-founded.

Similar pro-expulsion mantras can be heard on the lips of other Zionist leaders ...

"There is no Zionism, colonization, or Jewish state without the EVICTION of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."—Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
"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.—Sharon [New York Times, 1998]

"The interests of security demand that we get rid of them."—Prime Minister Moshe Sharett [1949, The First Israelis, p. 28]
"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."—Sharett [Righteous Victims, p. 91]
"TRANSFER [ethnic cleansing] could be the crowning achievement, the final stage in the development of [Zionist] policy."—Sharett [Righteous Victims, p. 254]
"We are equally determined to explore all possibilities of getting rid, once and for all, of the huge Arab minority."—Sharett
"The most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine, in a way more spectacular than the creation of the Jewish state, is the wholesale evacuation of its [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 Palestinians], are so far-reaching, as to take one's breath away. The reversion of the status quo ante is unthinkable."—Sharett [1949, The First Israelis, p. 29]

"We'll deprive Gaza of water, and the Arabs will leave."—Prime Minister Levi Eshkol [Haaretz, 17 November 2017]
"I want them all to go, even if they go to the moon!"—Eshkol

"[Land is acquired] by force—that is, by CONQUEST in war, or in other words, by ROBBING land from its owner."—Menachem Ussishkin [Righteous Victims, p. 38]
"If there are other inhabitants there, they must be TRANSFERRED to some other place."—Ussishkin [ibid, p. 141]
"We must take over the land. We have a great and NOBLER ideal than preserving several hundred thousands of [Palestinian] Arabs fellahin [peasants]."—Ussishkin [ibid, p. 141]
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.—Ussishkin [Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 51]
"About transferring sixty thousand Arab families ... It is most moral."—Ussishkin [ibid, p. 37]

"Zionism is a TRANSFER of the Jews."—David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister [Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 59]
"Regarding the TRANSFER of the Arabs, this is much easier than any other TRANSFER."—Ben-Gurion [Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 59]
"The compulsory TRANSFER of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own feet during the days of the First and Second Temple – a Galilee free from Arab population ... We must prepare ourselves to carry out [this transfer]."— Ben-Gurion diary entry dated 12 July 1937, also cited in Righteous Victims, p. 142
"With compulsory TRANSFER we will have a vast area ... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it."—Ben-Gurion [ibid, p. 144]
"It is impossible to imagine general EVACUATION without compulsion, and brutal compulsion."—Ben-Gurion [Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 129]
"[Palestinian Arab] villages inside the Jewish state that resist should be destroyed .... and their inhabitants expelled beyond the borders of the Jewish state." [ibid, p. 178]
"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 [The Birth of Israel, p.22, Simha Flapan]
"Let us not ignore the truth ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves ... The country is theirs because they inhabit it ... Behind the terrorism [by the Palestinians] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice." — Ben-Gurion [from his address at the Mapai Political Committee, June 7, 1938, as quoted in Noam Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle and Simha Flapan’s Zionism and the Palestinians]

The statements above are confirmed by another Israeli prime minister, in this excerpt from Yitzhak Rabin’s memoirs about Ben-Gurion: "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. [Yigal] 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!’”—from Yitzhak Rabin’s memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979; this is Rabin’s description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet)

"Before the founding of the state ... our main interest was self-defense ... But now the issue at hand is conquest, not self-defense."—Ben-Gurion [1949, The First Israelis, p. 6]
"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria."—Ben-Gurion
"We must do everything to ensure they [ethnically cleansed Palestinian refugees] never return."—Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, p. 157
"I believe we should prevent their return."—Ben-Gurion [during a cabinet meeting on June 16, 1948]
"There are two issues here: sovereignty and the REMOVAL of a certain number of Arabs, and we must insist on both of them."—Ben-Gurion [Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 117]
"Ben-Gurion was prepared to accept the [partition] ... on two conditions: [Jewish] sovereignty and compulsory TRANSFER."—Yosef Bankover [ibid, p. 70]
"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."—Ben-Gurion [Righteous Victims, p. 143]

The last three statements illustrate two important Zionist ideas: Jewish rule and ethnic cleansing of the Arabs to create an artificial Jewish majority. David Ben-Gurion was Israel's George Washington and its first Prime Minister. If we want to understand why the government of Israel ordered hundreds of Palestinian villages and thousands of individual homes to be destroyed in 1948, leaving around 750,000 Palestinian farmers and their families homeless, destitute refugees, we need look no further than the quotes above. The question is not why the Palestinians fled. People often flee wars and natural disasters. The question is why their houses were destroyed and they were not allowed to return when the fighting was over and Israel's borders were secure. The answer is that the men in power had long planned to "transfer" the Palestinians in order to "purify" the land for the Jews they deemed to be "superior" to Arabs. Zionist leaders like Menachem Begin were racists, fascists and religious fanatics, as Albert Einstein and 27 other Jewish intellectuals pointed out in their open letter to the New York Times in 1948.

Why is Israel constantly at odds with its neighbors? Is it because Arabs irrationally "hate" Jews? No, it's because they hate what Israeli Jews have done to their Palestinian brothers and sisters, who have been victims of Israeli racism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing since the Nakba ("Catastrophe") began in 1948. The racism of some of Israel's most prominent leaders is self-evident in the following quotations:

Israel's Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in an interview that every Palestinian is a target for the army's snipers, even women and children: "It has to be understood that there are no innocent people in Gaza."
"There is no such thing as a Palestinian."—Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, The Sunday Times, 15 June 1969 (later parroted by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum)
"It is not as though there was a Palestinian people ... and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them ... they did not exist."—Meir, The Sunday Times, 15 June 1969
"How can we return the held territories? There is nobody to return them to."—Meir
"Anyone who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back ... It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen."—Meir
"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more."—Ehud Barak, prime minister of Israel at the time, stated on August 28, 2000 and reported in the Jerusalem Post on August 30, 2000
"We shall reduce the Palestinians to a community of woodcutters and waiters."—Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."—Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts" in the New Statesman, June 25, 1982 (see footnote)
"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized ... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever." (Iron Wall p. 25 and Simha Flapan p. 32) Menachem Begin, speaking one day after the UN partition plan was ratified.
"I believed and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land."—Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
"They are as grasshoppers in our sight."—Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir
Palestinian rioters would be crushed "like grasshoppers."—Yitzhak Shamir, New York Times, April 1, 1988 (and why were they rioting?)
"We say to them from the heights of this mountain and from the perspective of thousands of years of history that they are like grasshoppers compared to us."—Shamir, New York Times, April 1, 1988 (again, why were they rioting?)
"All of the land of Israel is ours."—Shamir (no need to share the land with the insects, evidently)

Note: "[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs." Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin said this during a speech to the Knesset, as cited by Amnon Kapeliouk in his article "Begin and the Beasts" in the New Statesman, June 25, 1982. There is some debate about whether Begin was referring to all Palestinians, or only to Palestinian terrorists. But it hardly matters, since Begin himself was the preeminent terrorist in the Middle East, as pointed out in Albert Einstein's 1948 Letter to the New York Times. Only a racist would claim that it's wrong for people of other races or ethnicities to do things he does himself and orders his underlings to do. Begin and his mob wantonly murdered Arabs, British civilians, and even Jews who preferred peace to war. If terrorists are beasts walking on two legs, then Israel has had such beasts for prime ministers, and more than one, since Ehud Barak was a cross-dressing assassin who participated in a raid in which Lebanese civilians and policemen were murdered.

Yitzhak Rabin was a warmonger who as Israel's chief of staff planned the 1967 attack on Egypt. Rabin admitted to Le Monde in a February 1968 interview: "We knew that Nasser did not intend to attack." Rabin's account has been verified by Israeli generals, including Matti Peled:

"The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war."—Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972

Yitzhak Rabin was also an ethnic cleanser of the children of Lydda. Rabin signed an expulsion order which stated: "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age." Thus 50,000 to 70,000 Palestinians were forced to leave Lydda, including multitudes of children, and an estimated 500 Palestinians died on the subsequent Lydda Death March. Within three days the Palestinian city of Lydda no longer existed.

The quotes above sound like Nazis talking about Jews, before and during the Holocaust. And these are prime ministers of Israel talking! Unfortunately American politicians who claim to believe in equal rights and justice for all human beings all too often ignore the right of millions of completely innocent Palestinian children and their mothers to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

You may also want to read and consider Israeli Prime Ministers who were Terrorists and Does Israel Really Want Peace?

As Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectuals pointed out in their open letter to the New York Times in 1948, the Zionist leaders had adopted the methods of the Nazis and other European fascists. So it is no wonder that Israel has never enjoyed real, lasting peace. And today the United States is also unable to find real, lasting peace because American politicians refuse to require Israel to act like a civilized nation. Instead, they provide Israel with billions of dollars in "loans" (none of which have ever been repaid) and advanced weapons, which Israel then uses to steal even more land and water from Palestinian farmers and their families. How does this take place?

"We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."—Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.

While this may be hard for freedom-loving, independent-minded Americans to believe, as the saying goes, the "proof is in the pudding." Recently, H.R. 4133 passed a deeply divided Congress by the stunning vote of 411 to 2. The bill gives Israel everything it needs to attack Iran, including refueling tankers, special munitions (i.e., bunker-busting bombs) and unlimited sums of money to finance the war and maintain Israel's military supremacy in the Middle East. H.R. 4133 strongly suggests that Sharon was speaking the truth.

"There is a huge gap between us and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience.—President Moshe Katsav, Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
"We [Jews] can be the vanguard of culture against [Arab] barbarianism."—Theodore Herzl
"[Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags."—Ze'ev Jabotinsky
"[Gaza will suffer] a bigger Shoah [Holocaust]"—Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, shortly before Israel used white phosphorous on Gaza
"We shall use the ultimate force until Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours."—Deputy Prime Minister Rafael Eitan
"[When we build settlements] Arabs will only be able to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle."—Eitan
"We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones."—Rabbi Ovadia Yosef
"The killing [of Palestinians] is a good deed, and Jews should have no compunction about it."—Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg

Ethnic cleansing is a terrible crime against peace and humanity. When people are made homeless, many of them will die of exposure, disease, starvation, and crime on the road. Zionists who advocated ethnic cleansing were clearly sentencing many innocent people to lives of suffering and premature deaths. To cause the premature death of an innocent person is murder. To target a large group of people for premeditated murder is genocide. Herzl's original plan was economic ethnic cleansing, but is a slow, agonizing death in any way "better" than a quick death? One might suggest that his method was less humane for many victims than a war in which the victims at least could see the enemy and fight back. But in any case, the militant Zionists chose to speed up the process of ethnic cleansing by using brute force (the Iron Wall).

"We [Zionists] all applaud, day and night, the IRON WALL."—Ze'ev Jabotinsky, spiritual father of the Likud
"This IRON WALL is our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy."—Jabotinsky
"Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population."—Jabotinsky
"Zionism is a colonizing adventure and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces."—Jabotinsky
"The Arab is culturally backward ... his instinctive patriotism ... cannot be bought, it can only be curbed [by] major force."—Jabotinsky
"There is no justice, no law, no God in heaven; only a single law which decides and supersedes all: [Jewish] settlement [of the land]."—Jabotinsky
"I devote my life to the rebirth of the Jewish State, with a Jewish majority, on both sides of the Jordan."—Jabotinsky
"Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea [ethnic cleansing] a good name in the world."—Jabotinsky

The last statement is stunning. Did Hitler give ethnic cleansing a "good name" when ethnic cleansing of German Jews was the first stage of the Holocaust?

Ze'ev Jabotinsky was the spiritual father of Herut and Likud, and of racist, fascist Israeli prime ministers like Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and Bibi Netanyahu. Jabotinsky did not agree with Herzl that the Palestinians could be ethnically cleansed via economic methods alone. His "updated" version Zionism depended on military superiority over Arabs, and brute force. The idea that "might is right" and that the stronger people can have their way with weaker people is the hallmark of fascism. Hitler and the Nazis said the same things about Jews, Gypsies and Slavs.

In 1977 Nahum Goldmann, founder and president of the World Jewish Congress and a president of the World Zionist Organization, said: “Israel has never presented the Arabs with a single peace plan. She has rejected every settlement plan devised by her friends and by her enemies. She has seemingly no other objective than to preserve the status quo while adding territory piece by piece.”

As we can see, the Zionists were often brutally honest about their intentions. Just as American white supremacists didn't see anything wrong with robbing darker-skinned people of their land, water, homes, freedom and rights ... even so Jewish supremacists didn't see anything "wrong" with robbing Palestinians of their land, water, homes, freedom and rights.

"The [Palestinian] Arabs do not want us because we want to be the rulers."—Menachem Ussishkin
"Eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories."—General Eitan Ben Elyahu
"The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its existence is only bluff."—General Matityahu Peled
"We enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands ..."—Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair
"The tendency toward conflict is in the essence of the Arab."—Benzion Netanyahu, Maariv interview, April 3, 2009
"[The Arab's] existence is one of perpetual war."—Netanyahu [ibid]
"There are no two peoples here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population. There is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation. They only call themselves a people in order to fight the Jews."—Netanyahu [ibid]
"[Arabs] won’t be able to exist, and they will run away from here. But it all depends on the war, and whether we will win the battles with them."—Netanyahu [ibid]
"[Arabs] won’t be able to face war with us, which will include withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more."—Netanyahu [ibid]
"We should conquer any disputed territory in the Land of Israel. Conquer and hold it, even if it brings us years of war."—Netanyahu [ibid]
"[Operation Cast Lead was] not enough. It’s possible that we should have hit harder."—Netanyahu [ibid]

The last statement is very important because it echoes what Herzl said in 1895 about getting rid of the poor. And we can see Netanyahu's updated plan in effect in Gaza, where Palestinian children cannot attend the best schools even if they win scholarships, and where the electricity is often cut off deliberately for long periods of time.

Moshe Dayan, Israel's most famous general and defense minister, was very candid about the real intentions and methods of the Zionists:

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.—Moshe Dayan, 1956

We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here ... Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist ... There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.—Moshe Dayan, from an address given to Technion University students (March 19, 1969), a transcription of which appeared in Ha'aretz (April 4, 1969)

Another high-ranking Israeli military expert agreed with Dayan:

"Because we took the land this gives us the image of being bad, of being aggressive. The Jews always considered that the land belonged to them, but in fact it belonged to the Arabs. I would go further: I would say the original source of this conflict lies with Israel, with the Jews—and you can quote me." (Yehoshofat Harkabi, former Israeli Chief of Military Intelligence, in "Peace Won't be a Plane Ticket to Cairo," International Armed Forces Journal, October 1973, p.30)


If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.—Moshe Dayan, as quoted in Newsweek (October 17, 1977)

In two cases I did not fulfill my role as defense minister, in that I did not stop things that I was sure should have been stopped.—Moshe Dayan, on not stopping the construction of Israeli settlements on the Golan Heights and in Hebron, in a 1976 interview with Rami Tal, as quoted in Associated Press reports (May 11, 1997)

Along the Syria border there were no farms and no refugee camps; there was only the Syrian army ... The kibbutzim saw the good agricultural land ... and they dreamed about it ... They didn't even try to hide their greed for the land ... We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was ...The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.— Moshe Dayan, on pre-1967 clashes with the Syrians, in a 1976 interview with Rami Tal, as quoted in The New York Times and Associated Press reports (May 11, 1997)

Using the moral yardstick mentioned by [Moshe Sharett], I must ask: Are [we justified] in opening fire on the 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 Arabs who cross the line ... will this stand up to moral review? Arabs cross to collect the grain that they left in the abandoned 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.—Moshe Dayan, on the anti-infiltration policy against Palestinian refugees in the early 1950s

The only method that proved effective, not justified or moral but effective, when Arabs plant mines on our side [is 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 Transjordanian 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.—Moshe Dayan

All that is required is to find an officer, even a captain would do, to win his heart or buy him with money to get him to agreed to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place. While trying to work out a plan to internally destabilize Lebanon in favor of a Christian-Maronite government.—Moshe Dayan

A new State of Israel with broad frontiers, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israel Government extending from the Jordan to the Suez Canal.—Moshe Dayan, a statement made in April 1973 from the peaks of Masada

During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road.—Moshe Dayan, Ma'ariv, 7 July 1968

Moshe Dayan unfolded one plan after another for direct action. The first — what should be done to force open blockade of the Gulf of Eilat. A ship flying the Israeli flag should be sent, and if the Egyptians bomb it, we should bomb the Egyptian base from the air, or conquer Ras al-Naqb, or open our way south of Gaza Strip to the coast. There was a general uproar. I asked Moshe: Do you realize that this would mean war with Egypt?, he said: Of course.—Moshe Sharett, as quoted in Iron Wall (1999) by Avi Shlaim, on a suggestion in the mid-1950s to lure Egypt into a war to neutralize the modernization of its army

Moshe Dayan saw no need for American guarantees of Israel's security and strongly opposed America's conditions i.e. that Israel forswear territorial expansion and military retaliation. In an informal talk with the ambassadors to Washington, London, and Paris, Dayan describe military retaliations as a "life drug" to the Israel Army. First, it obliged the Arab governments to take drastic measures to protect their borders. Second, and this was the essence, it enabled the Israeli government to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and the army. Gideaon Rafael, also present at the meeting with Dayan, remarked to Moshe Sharett: "This is how fascism began in Italy and Germany!"—Iron Wall (1999) by Avi Shlaim

Rocking the boat is his favorite tactic, not to overturn it, but to sway it sufficiently for the helmsman to lose his grip or for some of its unwanted passengers to fall overboard.—Ambassador Gideon Rafael, about Dayan

The disciples of Herzl and Jabotinsky firmly believed in their "right" to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and rob them of their land, homes, property, water, natural resources, human rights and freedom. The only real difference of opinion was about the methods to be used. Herzl favored being circumspect and discreet, operating in the shadows and using Jewish money and global political influence to rob the Palestinians of their jobs and ability to make money, after which they would be forced to leave the Jewish state, surrendering the land they could not afford to rent. Jabotinsky disagreed, saying that the Zionists should use superior firepower to take whatever they wanted, then continually crush the will and spirit of the Palestinians. This has been Israel's modus operandi since the day Israel became a state.

Mother Israel Speaks ... Like a Racist

In an interview with the Sunday Times published on June 15, 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, "It is not as though there was a Palestinian people ... and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them ... they did not exist." (Also reported in the Washington Post, June 16, 1969)

A few months earlier Meir (known as "Mother Israel") had asked rhetorically, "How can we return the held territories? There is nobody to return them to." (March 8, 1969). Her incredibly racist comment has recently been repeated by American presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Now please suppose that you were a Palestinian child, facing the accumulated might, hypocrisy and zealous fury of Israel and the United States: ... how would you feel? Wouldn't it be terrifying to hear the leaders of nuclear-armed nations calmly suggesting that you don't exist, or at least not in the same way that other people exist?

Perhaps now we can understand why so many Palestinian children feel a sense of overwhelming despair, and why some of them sometimes blow themselves and other people to pieces. We can also understand why great humanitarians like Albert Einstein (a Jew), Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky (a Jew), and Norman Finkelstein (a Jew) have been harshly, sternly and publicly critical of Israeli racism against Palestinians. Why do the leaders of Israel sound like the Grand Wizards of the KKK when they talk about Palestinian children?

Bigotry, the Sacred Disease

The problem with Golda Meir's hideous statements above, and with hundreds of similar statements by high-ranking Israelis, is obvious: bigotry. Heraclitus called bigotry the "sacred disease." Israel has turned bigotry into a state religion which now threatens not only Palestinian children, but Jewish and American children as well. Americans, by acquiescing to demands that they consider only the rights of Jews while ignoring the self-evident rights of Palestinians, have endangered American children.

"Every time we do something you tell me America 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."
—Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio

"You cannot define the loss of human life in terms of the number of Israelis killed by brutal, savage, inexcusable Palestinian terror. And it does take place. The fact of the matter is that three times as many Palestinians have been killed, and a relatively small number of them were really militants. Most were civilians. Some hundreds of children." —Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter

"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
—Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, as published in the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989

In 1923, radical Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky—spiritual father of the Likud, and Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Bibi Netanyahu—wrote that the "sole way" for Jews to deal with Arabs in Palestine was through "total avoidance of all attempts to arrive at a settlement," which Jabotinsky euphemistically termed the "iron wall" approach. Not coincidentally, a picture of Jabotinsky graced Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's desk. Source: The Village Voice, "Death Wish in the Holy Land," Dec. 12, 2001

During a sermon preceding the 2001 Passover holiday, the influential Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef exclaimed: "May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them." He added: "It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones." Source: Ha'aretz April 12, 2001

"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."—Rafael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, quoted in Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983, and The New York Times, April 14, 1983.

"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."—Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts" in the New Statesman, June 25, 1982

"We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return."—Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, July 18, 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's "Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet," Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.

"We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters."—Uri Lubrani, Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs. Source: "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas

"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more."—Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel, August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000.

"...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish ... with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary."—Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From "Israel: an Apartheid State" by Uri Davis, p. 5

"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."—Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998

"Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment ... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."—Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, in his diary, June 12, 1895 entry

Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, head of the Kever Yossev Yeshiva (school of Talmud) in Nablus stated, "The blood of the Jewish people is loved by the Lord; it is therefore redder and their life is preferable." Ginsburg declares in Baruch Hagever that what Baruch Goldstein did in murdering 29 unarmed Palestinian civilians at their house of worship constitutes, "a fulfillment of a number of commands of Jewish religious law ... Among his (Goldstein's) good deeds, as enumerated, are ... taking revenge on non-Jews, extermination of the non-Jews who are from the seed of Amalek ... and the sanctification of the Holy Name. The murders have led, in the rabbi's opinion, to clear knowledge among the Jews that "the life of a Jew is preferable to the life of a non-Jew..."

The Israeli Chief Rabbi of the Sephardim, Eliahu Bakshi Doron, in a radio broadcast on Tuesday, July 9, 1996, praised the Biblical figure Phinehas for having killed the Israelite Zimri, because Zimri had sex with a Midianite woman. Rabbi Doron said that Phinehas had committed a "pure" act. He then referred to Zimri as "the first reform Jew."

"Foreign Minister Shimon Peres is very worried about the expected international reaction as soon as the world learns the details of the tough battle in the Jenin refugee camp." It added that Israeli Defense Force (IDF) officers have similar worries: "The bulldozers are simply 'shaving' the homes and causing terrible destruction. When the world sees the pictures of what we have done there, it will do us immense damage."
—April 9th, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz

"Every time we do something you tell me America 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."
— Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.

Ben-Gurion stated in 1937, during the Arab revolt: "This is a national war declared upon us by the Arabs. ... This is an active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews. ...But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves."

"A partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning. I am certain that we can not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country and the region."
—David Ben Gurion, in a letter to his son, 1937

"There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left."
—Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department, which was responsible for the organization of settlements in Palestine, 1940

"The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria and Lebanon."
—Rabbi Fischmann, a member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, in his testimony to the U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry, 1947

"Before (the Palestinians') very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they and their ancestors have lived. We are the generation of colonizers and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a house."
—Moshe Dayan

"I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism."
—Moshe Sharett, Israel's first Foreign Minister and later Prime Minister (p.51, Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel, 1987)

"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"

"There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary."—Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.

NOTE: I suspect the racist "quota" was settled upon as 20 percent.

Yigal Allon described the affect of psychological warfare on the Palestinian Arabs in the Galilee panhandle during the 1948 war and explained why Zionist apologists are incorrect when they say Arab armies persuaded Palestinians to flee their homes: "We had ONLY five days left . . . until 15 May [1948]. We regarded it as imperative to CLEANSE [Palestinians from] the interior of the Galilee and create JEWISH territorial continuity in the whole of the Upper Galilee. The protracted battles reduced our forces, and we faced major tasks in blocking invasion routes. We, therefore, looked for a means that would not oblige us to use force to DRIVE OUT tens of thousands of [Palestinians] left in the Galilee ... We tried to utilize a stratagem that exploited the defeat in Safad and in areas cleared by [Operation] Broom: a stratagem that WORKED WONDERFULLY. 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 ... and we were able to deploy ourselves in face of the [prospective] invaders along the borders, without fear for our rear." (Benny Morris, p. 122)

Allon saw the ethnic cleansing of immense numbers of civilians as a very good thing, noting of the cleansing of Lydda and Ramle that the homeless, destitute refugees "clogged the routes of the advance of the [Transjordan Arab] Legion and had foisted upon the Arab economy the problem of "maintaining another 45,000 souls ... Moreover, the phenomenon of the flight of tens of thousands will no doubt cause demoralsation in every Arab area [the refugees] reach ... This victory will yet have great effect on other sectors." (Benny Morris, p. 211 & Israel: A History, p. 218)

Meir Ya'ari, criticized Allon's use of tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees to achieve a military strategic goals, saying: "Many of us are LOSING their [human] image ... How easily they speak of how it is possible and permissible to take women, children, and old men and to fill the road with them because such is the imperative of strategy. And this we say, the members of Hashomer Hatzair, who remember who used this means against our people during the Second World] war ... I am appalled." (Benny Morris, p. 211)

But Yigal Allon apparently did not think ethnically cleanings 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 was extreme enough, writing in an article published just before the outbreak of the 1967 war: "[In] a new war, we must avoid the HISTORIC MISTAKE of the War of Independence [the 1948 war] ... and MUST NOT cease fighting until we achieve total victory, the territorial fulfillment of the Land Of Israel." (Righteous Victims, p. 321)

Chaim Weizmann, Israel's First President

Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) was a Russia-born Jew. In 1904 he emigrated to England. During WWI, he developed a method of producing acetone, which was required for the production of artillery shells. This earned him favor with the British government. In 1917 he helped secure the promise of the British government to create a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine (the Balfour Declaration). Along with Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann was one of the "big three" responsible for making political Zionism a reality. Weizmann was a charismatic, persuasive speaker who became the first president of Israel.

But Weizmann sometimes sounded like Hitler:

"We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not ...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)

In 1914, Weizmann lied, saying Palestine was "a country without people" when in fact hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lived there:

"In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite this people with this country? The owners of the country [the Ottoman Turks] must, therefore, be persuaded and conceived that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the [Jewish] people and for the country, but also for themselves." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 6)

Other Zionists like Golda Meir would also claim that the Palestinians didn’t really exist, were not a people, did not constitute a nation, etc. They sounded like Nazis who denied the humanity of Jews.

Weizmann described the Palestinian people as inhuman steppingstones:

"the rocks of Judea ... obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 17)

Zionists often use such dehumanizing language, referring to Palestinians as: dirty, unclean, primitive, uncultured, naive, ignorant, savage, a "demographic problem," and as "ticking time bombs" (because they might have babies and outnumber Jews), etc.

Weizmann visited Jerusalem in late 1918, and described the ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhoods to his wife:

"There's nothing more humiliating than 'our' Jerusalem. Anything that could be done to desecrate and defile the sacred has been done. It is impossible to imagine so much falsehood, blasphemy, greed, so many lies. It's such an accursed city, there's nothing there, no creature comforts ... [It] hasn't a single clean and comfortable apartment." (One Palestine Complete, p. 71)

So it seems Jewish "superiority" was just a racial myth, as racial superiority invariably is. Also in 1918 Weizmann condescendingly criticized Arabs for believing in what actually ended up happening to them:

"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)

The Zionists seemed to be blind to their own racism. They admitted that the Jews were far from "superior," then looked down their snooty noses at Arabs who were smart enough to figure out what the Zionists were actually up to. In 1919 at the peace conference at Versailles, Weizmann proved Arabs were correct in their assumptions, saying:

"the country [Palestine] should be Jewish in the same way that France is French and Britain is British." (One Palestine Complete, p. 117)

Weizmann repeated the same idea to the English Zionist Federation on September 19, 1919:

"By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 41)

But in the early 1900s, Zionism was not popular with most Jews; it was the dream of small numbers of zealots who often emulated the philosophy, stratagems and methods of Hitler:

"The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was built on air ... every day and every hour of these last ten years, when opening the newspapers, I thought: Whence will the next blow come? I trembled lest the British Government would call me and ask: 'Tell us, what is this Zionist Organization? Where are they, your Zionists?' ... The Jews, they knew, were against us [the Zionists]; we stood alone on a little island, a tiny group of Jews with a foreign past." (UN: The Origins And Evolution Of The Palestine Problem, section V)

The Holocaust changed things, and understandably so. But it was the Zionists who insisted that Jews not only resettle in Palestine, but drive out the Palestinians and seize control of the region. On May 25, 1942, Weizmann said:

"Palestine alone could absorb and provide for the homeless and the stateless Jews uprooted by the war. It [has galvanized] all the sympathy of the world for the martyrdom of the Jews ... the Zionists reject all schemes to resettle these victims elsewhere—in Germany, or Poland, or in sparsely populated regions such as Madagascar." [It was Hitler who had first suggested Madagascar as a place where the Jews of Europe might be sent, before writing off the idea as infeasible and coming up with his horrendous "final solution."] (Israel: A History, p. 113)

So, in effect, the Zionists used the Holocaust to provide the "warm bodies" needed for a Jewish state. To be fair, it was going to be very difficult for most of the Jewish refugees, no matter where they went. And there were millions of non-Jewish displaced persons as well. Their suffering is often forgotten, but shouldn't be. The problem was not that the world was insensitive to the plight of Jews and other displaced persons. The problem was that the world was recovering from a world war that had left perhaps 70 million people dead, millions more displaced, and much of Europe and Russia a mass of smoking ruins. But the Zionists put their racist agenda on a pedestal, and thus created tremendous suffering for Jews and Arabs alike. Nothing mandated Jewish refugees seizing control of the regions that granted them safe harbor. Only Palestine suffered that fate. Everywhere else they went the Jews became democrats who asked for equal rights, and increasingly received them. But they were unwilling to settle for democracy in Palestine; thus to the rest of the world they seem hypocritical. If they want equal rights for themselves, how can they deny equal rights to other people? Is that fair?

Weizmann tried to extend Zionist colonization beyond British Mandated Palestine. In 1934 he tried to interest the French Mandate authorities in a Jewish settlement plan for Syria and Lebanon. Similar ideas were also proposed by Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan. (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 47)

Weizmann informed the Peel Commission of his expansionist vision in 1937:

"We shall spread in the whole country in the course of time ... this is only an arrangement for the next 25 to 30 years." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 62)

Weizmann fantasized about Palestinians leaving voluntarily, writing in a letter dated April 28, 1939 to the American Zionist Solomon Goldman:

"The realization of this project [a land purchase] 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 Arabs were to emigrate peacefully of their own volition, which no doubt would be followed by others." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 167)

On July 8, 1947, Weizmann described how stateless Jews felt, to UNSCOP (the UN Special Committee On Palestine):

"We ask today: 'What are the Poles? What are the French? What are the Swiss?' When that is asked, everyone points to a country, to certain institution, to parliamentary institution, and the man in the street will know exactly what it is. He has a passport. If you ask what is a Jew is—well, he is a man who has to offer a long explanation for his existence, and any person who has to offer an explanation as to what he is, is always suspect—and from suspicion there is only one step to hatred or contempt." (Israel: A History, p. 147)

But of course this is how stateless, dispossessed Palestinians feel today. Why should we elevate the needs, desires and feelings of Jews above those of Palestinians?

By war's end in 1949, Chaim Weizmann was ecstatic to see the long-anticipated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians a reality:

"a miraculous clearing of the land: the miraculous simplification of Israel's task." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 175)

What sort of man speaks of the ethnic cleansing and murders of human beings—including women and children—as the "simplification" of a task? What does that sound like, but the cold hard "math" of Hitler & Company? How can ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide be called "miraculous"?

The Elders

Here are the opinions of the Elders of the human race:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."—Thomas Jefferson
"Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"The cause of unrest in Palestine, the only cause, arises from the Zionist movement ..."—Winston Churchill
"A Zionist state in Palestine can only be installed and maintained by force and we should not be a party to it."—Franklin Roosevelt
"I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state."—Albert Einstein
"What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct."—Mahatma Gandhi
"I have no doubt that they [the Jews] are going about it the wrong way."—Mahatma Gandhi
"... they are ... despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them."—Mahatma Gandhi
"I wish they had chosen non-violence ... but according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds."—Mahatma Gandhi

Why American children are endangered, and all the children of the world

Golda Meir said that Israel is above the law:

"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."

But please consider what Golda Meir's racism, fascism and fanaticism may mean for the world's children, as evidenced in this exchange with Alan Hart, the author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews:

Hart: "I recall the words spoken to me many years ago by Golda Meir, Mother Israel, when she was prime minister. At a point during an interview I did with her for the BBC’s Panorama programme, I interrupted her to ask, “Prime Minister, I want to be sure I understand what you’re saying … You are saying that if Israel was ever in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it?"

Meir "without the shortest of pauses for reflection, and in the gravel voice that could charm or intimidate American Presidents according to need" replied: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Hart: "Within an hour of that interview being transmitted at eight o’clock on a Monday evening, The Times (pre-Murdoch and not then a cheerleader for Zionism) had changed its lead editorial. Its new editorial quoted what Golda had said to me, [adding] its own opinion: 'We had better believe her.' I did, and still do."

Should we believe Alan Hart? I, for one, do. I remember reading Robert Fisk's book The Great War for Civilisation with a sense of growing horror. In it, Fisk mentioned seeing high-ranking American diplomats like Colin Powell and Madeline Albright acting deferentially, even fearfully, around Israeli politicians. Considering the normal operating mode of American politicians—hubris—that seems hard to believe, unless Israel has been threatening to use nuclear weapons. When I put two and two together, it seems to me that Israel has told the United States, "Unless we are allowed to have our way with Palestinians, and the world acquiesces to our brutal, unjust treatment of them, we are willing to unleash a nuclear Armageddon on the world."

This reminds me of something said by Chaim Weizmann much earlier:

"We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not ...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920).

Does this mean Israel can hold the entire world hostage? No, I believe there is a peaceful, nonviolent solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Please allow me to explain ...

How soon they forget

"Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation?
Have they forgotten the collective punishment,
the home demolitions,
in their own history so soon?
Have they turned their backs
on their profound and noble religious traditions?"
—Desmond Tutu

A Simple Program for Peace

All too often the people on one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict bitterly criticize people on the other side, and nothing good results. My goal is not to condemn anyone for the sake of condemnation, nor is it to win an argument; my goal is to find a positive, peaceful solution. Yes, I believe Israel and the United States need to cure themselves of the sacred disease of bigotry, and I convinced that doing so requires honesty rather than hypocrisy. But I believe positive change is possible, so please allow me to present my "simple program for peace." Hopefully this will persuade you that, while I strongly oppose what Israel and the United States have done in the past, and continue to do in the present, I am not here to merely vent. And please keep in mind that "simple" does not mean "easy." Here's the plan:

•Israelis and Americans need to be honest about what really happened to the Palestinians: the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba. The Nakba (Arabic for "Catastrophe") has been ongoing since 1948; thus entire generations of Palestinian children have been born and lived (and now many of those children have died) without having ever drawn a free breath. How would we feel, if this was the case for our children?

• Israel needs to unconditionally grant Palestinians equal rights and the protection of fair (nonracist) laws and courts. Why? Because every human child is self-evidently entitled to equal rights and justice, and on this planet justice requires fair laws and courts. There can never be racial peace where there is racial injustice, so establishing fair laws and courts is absolutely necessary if Israel wants peace, and if Americans want to avoid more events like 9-11 and more unwinnable wars abroad.

• Americans must understand that it is not "unfair" to require Israeli Jews to do what Americans did themselves, when the United States finally abandoned government-sanctioned racism in the form of Jim Crow laws and kangaroo courts.

• Because Israel's leader seem to be either unwilling or unable to "pull the trigger" and treat Palestinians as human beings with fully equal rights, they need encouragement from the United States and the world to start moving in the right direction. Fortunately, there is a simple way for the world to encourage Israel to take the all-important first step of treating everyone as equals. The solution is a new UN resolution based on the American Creed of equal rights and justice for all human beings. No American president can veto the American Creed, so this new UN resolution should pass, where so many others have been short-circuited. Such a resolution backed by economic sanctions (which will hopefully not be needed, once Israel reads "the writing on the wall") will force Israel to either make the Palestinians full citizens of a single state, or grant them independence. If you don't understand why this plan will work, please check out the Burch-Elberry Peace Initiative for more details.

The "logic" of racism, fascism and fanaticism

Now, getting back to Golda Meir's idea that Palestinians are nobodies who never really existed: something is obviously wrong with her "logic," if we can call it that. If the Palestinians didn't exist, it makes no sense to say that they weren't thrown out and that their country wasn't taken from them. If there never were beings called Martians, would it make any sense for me to say, "Martians never did exist, and by the way I didn't throw them out in order to steal their planet"? Of course not. Golda Meir was obviously lying, for a specific purpose, or she was trying to rationalize something that seems utterly alien to those of us who believe that all earth's children are created equal. Having read her autobiography, a book written about her by her son, a number of other books in which she played important roles, and hundreds of other books and articles about Israel, Palestine, Zionism and the history of the Middle East, I believe I know enough to suggest that she was rationalizing. What she really meant probably goes something like this: "We Jews have a long, glorious history as a civilization with a superior culture. But the Palestinians are just a disorganized rabble with an inferior culture, so we don't consider them to be our equals, or even close. Therefore, because they are not really a 'people' compared to us, we have the right to take their land by force, evict them, and keep them from ever returning. Their suffering means little or nothing, compared to our achievements, since we are a 'people' and they are not."

In other words, she was a racist and a  fascist.

And unfortunately most of the other leaders of Israel since its rebirth as a nation in 1948 have also been fascists. I can prove this quite easily, simply by quoting what they said, discussing what they did, and showing how their words and deeds meshed, and betrayed them as racists and fascists. How do know that Hitler was a fascist? All we have to do is read what he said and consider what he did. Hitler was a racist and a fascist because he believed Aryans were "superior" to all other races, and that because they were "superior" they were entitled to seize lebensraum ("living room") from other races, using any degree of force and brutality necessary, even against women and children. Although Hitler did not plan to commit genocide at first, in the end he realized that the Jews had nowhere to go, and that it was going to be very expensive to keep millions of them alive perpetually. Hence, his horrendous "final solution." But it all began with the same utterly alien idea that Golda Meir expressed above: that people of other races were "nobodies" who didn't really "exist" or "matter" because they fell far short of the "glory" of the "Master Race."

What does Israeli fascism mean, for the Children of Gaza?

What does Israeli fascism mean for the children of Gaza and Occupied Palestine, as Israel takes more and more of their land and they, too, have nowhere else to go? I believe the end result will inevitably be the same: genocide, extermination ... unless the world acts to keep it from happening.

Does this mean that Israel is beyond hope? No. Please consider Germany at the end of World War II. Millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and other "undesirables" had been murdered during the Holocaust. Perhaps 70 million people had died worldwide. Much of Germany lay in smoldering ruins. But after the Allies forced Germany to establish fair laws and courts, a new Germany soon emerged from the rubble. The people were the same. Many Jews continued to live in Germany, and there was no sudden outpouring of affection between them and Germans. Far from it. (Most of the Jewish Holocaust survivors I've talked to have great disdain for the Germans, to this day.) What saved Germany and allowed a new Germany to emerge was not a sudden change of human hearts, but a far better and fairer form of government based on the idea that all human beings are equal, and thus deserve the protections of fair laws and courts.

Does it bother me that Golda Meir spoke like a fascist? Yes, it does. Does it bother me that so many other high-ranking Israelis sound and act like fascists? Yes, it does. But I know that America has its share of fascists, and yet they are virtually powerless. Why? Because if they break the law, they go to jail and/or pay fines and civil damages. While no one can change the prejudices of another person's heart, a decent system of government can protect people from those prejudices.

And I also know something else that I consider very promising: when Golda Meir lived in the United States she was a firm believer in democracy; furthermore, when Israeli Jews come to the United States they almost invariably become firm, even devout, believers in equal rights for all human beings. While they may seem terribly hypocritical today, there is hope. The hope is that Israel will adopt a far better, fairer form of government. The day Israel establishes fair laws and courts, its terrible problems with racial injustice and violence will begin to ameliorate, as was the case in Germany after WWII and in the United States once its Jim Crow laws and kangaroo courts were finally laid to rest by the reforms of the American Civil Rights Movement.

And finally, not being a racist, I know there are many Jews of good conscience who do not support the racism, fascism and fanaticism of Israel's current government. We have to remember that the United States was far from a true democracy for most of its existence, as it denied equal rights to women, blacks and other minorities. Even today the United States still has not granted fully equal rights to non-heterosexuals. But the United States has made considerable progress since the American Civil Rights Movement of the mid 1900s. This implies that Israel can also make considerable progress in a relatively short period of time, if only it will establish equal rights and the protection of fair laws and courts for everyone. The Burch-Elberry Peace Initiative explains how this can be accomplished.

But what about Israel today, and this modern Trail of Tears?

"I equated the ejection of Palestinians
from their previous homes within the State of Israel
to the forcing of Lower Creek Indians
from the Georgia land where our family farm was now located;
they had been moved west to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears
to make room for our white ancestors."
—Jimmy Carter

Israel's hypocrisy is a very real problem. According to Golda Meir's reprehensible "logic," Germans had the right to confiscate the land, houses and property of Jews, to sweep them into squalid ghettos and concentration camps, and to keep them from ever returning to "polite society," simply by claiming that German civilization and culture were "superior" to Jewish civilization and culture.

"As to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza ...
the so-called 'Palestinian autonomous areas' are bantustans.
These are restricted entities
within the power structure of the Israeli apartheid system."
—Nelson Mandela

Of course Jews insist that what the Nazis did to them during the Holocaust was wrong, and of course they are absolutely correct to do so. But it seems that many Jews want to have their cake and eat other people's cake too. Whenever anti-Semitism is practiced against Jews, they insist that anti-Semitism is wrong. (I agree.) But whenever they practice anti-Semitism against Arabs, they try to justify their reprehensible behavior by falling back on the grotesque logic of Hitler and the Nazis. (I disagree.) Obviously Hitler was either wrong or right, and today everyone who's not a racist and a fascist knows he was wrong. But isn't it passing strange that enough Jews agree with Hitler to keep Palestinians in chains, and the world on the brink of World War III?

On a Christmas visit to Jerusalem in 1989,
Desmond Tutu said that if the colors and names were changed
"a description of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank
could describe events in South Africa."
He also said that he was "very deeply distressed"
by his visit to the Holy Land,
because "it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa."
He made similar comments in 2002,
speaking of "the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks,
suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about."
—Desmond Tutu

If a Jewish professor anywhere in the world is slighted, legions of Jewish activists fire off aggrieved emails about the evils and dangers of anti-Semitism. (Well and good.) But if Jewish "settlers" and the Israeli military practice anti-Semitism against little Palestinian schoolgirls, spitting on them and cursing them as they trudge their way to kindergarten, somehow that doesn't "count." (Why?)

It bothers me greatly to think of little children being shamed and humiliated by adults. My business partner is a fine young black man. When I made him a partner in the business I own, he told me an illuminating story. He said that when his father was a little boy growing up in Mississippi, he was commanded to call little white boys "Sir." I have never forgotten that story, and I think about it often. When I learned that Jewish robber barons were insulting, spitting on and sometimes abusing Palestinian children on their way to school, I thought of the dark days of racism in the South, when little black boys and girls had to face the bigotry of white adults. How do such things make you feel?

If such things don't bother you, I fear we are of two different species. If they do bother you ― if they bother you a lot, as they do me ― then please keep in mind my idea about a new UN resolution based on the American Creed of equal rights and justice for all human beings. All children who are abused, shamed and humiliated by adult bigots need and deserve the protections of fair laws and courts.

Don't you agree?

Israeli racism and hypocrisy

Here's another racist remark by Golda Meir: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." (As quoted in Media Bias and the Middle East by Paul Carlson, p. 10, and The Agony of the Promised Land by Joshua Levy, p. 187)

The racist assumptions here are that Jews love their children, that Palestinians don't, and that Palestinian resistance to Jewish domination is based on racial "hatred" rather than on the honest, loving desire of Palestinians for their children to experience the freedom Americans value so highly. But of course the American Founding Fathers rebelled against and forcefully resisted the British monarchy, imperiling their children. Did this mean the American Founding Fathers were inferior beings who didn't love their children? Or does it suggest that imperialist regimes like those of King George and Golda Meir make it very difficult for parents to raise their children, since they force them to choose between raising their children as serfs or imperiling their lives?

Once again Golda Meir's words betray her racism, her fascism and her fanaticism. And once again they also betray her hypocrisy, and Israel's hypocrisy, because Meir and other high-ranking Zionists clearly ascribed a much higher value to creating a Jewish state than they did to the welfare and happiness of the children of Israel. Please consider the evidence below, which I turned up during my research for this article. I was born in 1958, so on a whim I decided to see what Golda Meir was up to in 1958. To my surprise, when I did a Google search for "Golda Meir 1958" the top four stories, according to Google, were about Golda Meir preventing sick and disabled Jews from emigrating to Israel! Like Hitler, it seems she only valued Jews who were able to work for a fascist state that valued their productivity over their humanity. The Jews who unable to work, including children, could either languish, rot, or die. Here's an article on the subject, by one of Israel's leading newspapers, followed by commentary from other sources:

Golda Meir told Poland: Don't send sick or disabled Jews to Israel!

Haaretz
December 9, 2009
by Lily Galili, Haaretz Correspondent

In 1958, then-foreign minister Golda Meir raised the possibility of preventing handicapped and sick Polish Jews from immigrating to Israel, a recently discovered Foreign Ministry document has revealed.

"A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah [the immigration of Jews to Palestine], because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration," read the document, written by Meir to Israel's ambassador to Poland, Katriel Katz.

The letter, marked "top secret" and written in April 1958, shortly after Meir became foreign minister, was uncovered by Prof. Szymon Rudnicki, a Polish historian at the University of Warsaw. In recent years, Rudnicki has been researching documents shedding light on Israeli-Polish relations between 1945 and 1967.

The document had not been known to exist before this time, and scholars of the mass immigration from Poland to Israel that took place from 1956 to 1958 were unaware of Israel's intent to impose a selection process on Jews leaving Poland [most of whom were] survivors of the Holocaust and its death camps.

The "coordination committee" Meir refers to was a joint panel consisting of representatives of the government and the Jewish Agency.

Rudnicki's study, undertaken together with Israeli scholars headed by Prof. Marcos Silber of the University of Haifa, has already been published in a book in Polish.

The Hebrew version of the book will be published in a few months. However, the document containing the suggestion about the selection process does not appear in the book because it did not impact relations between the two countries.

"Although there are numerous documents on the issue of immigration, we did not find in the archives of Israel or Poland—where they also opened the party archive for us—any response to this request by Golda to the ambassador in Poland," Rudnicki told Haaretz. "In this respect, the document remains an internal matter of Israel," he said. However, Rudnicki concedes that the content of the document surprised him as a scholar and a Jew.

"This is a very cynical document," he said. "It is known that Golda was a brutal politician who defended interests more than people."

[But as we shall see, this fascist, Stalinistic preference for the needs of the state over the happiness of individuals lies at the core of Zionism.]

Commentary from other sources

Israel's George Washington, David Ben-Gurion, also ranked the goals of Zionism and a fascist state far above the lives and happiness of Jewish children, saying: "If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel." (Quoted on pp 855-56 of Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion)

"Golda Meir struck me as a very impressive and persuasive personality, though she has shown little or no understanding for the Arabs of Palestine or for the justice of their demands. She has always talked a great deal about the 'historical and spiritual rights of the Jews', but it is difficult to accept the validity of 'historic rights' which can only be achieved at the expense of people who have been living in the same place for 2,000 years. The principle which she applies on behalf of the Jews, and by which she justifies the expulsion of the Palestinians, would, if applied elsewhere, reduce the world to a state of total chaos." (General Odd Bull, former Chief of Staff of UNTSO, War and Peace in the Middle East, p.42)

There will be those who are shocked at the revelation that Golda Meir, whose grandmotherly appearance belied a cold and cynical persona, told Poland under the Stalinists not to send sick or disabled Jews to the 'Jewish State'. My friend Mark Elf, of Jews sans frontieres [Jews without borders] attributes this to eugenicism and he is right. But that is not the whole story. Throughout the Nazi era a policy of selectivity operated. Rescuing the elite at the expense of the masses. Israel only wanted, as Arthur Ruppin put it, the cream of the Jewish Diaspora. 'Good human material' no less. Golda Meir's attitude to the sick and disabled was little different from that of Hitler, who described them as being 'useless mouths' who were to be 'awarded' a merciful death ... [it was] Meir who launched the Zionist counteroffensive at the 1938 Evian Conference. This conference was designed to put a gloss and halo around the Western countries in their refusal to admit the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. The Zionists were outraged that they weren't invited as representatives of the Jews, despite being a tiny minority at that time. They were also worried—what if countries do accept refugees: won't that negate the need for a Jewish State? They needn't have worried because no country bar tiny San Domingo agreed to accept any more refugees. San Domingo agreed to admit 100,000 Jews and that sent the Zionists into a panic. Their 'logic' being that if countries other than Palestine could save Jews from Hitler, why bother building up a Jewish state. Good question, so they set about ensuring that no country would take Jewish refugees! They call it 'cruel Zionism' because they can be as cruel to Jews as to Arabs when the mood takes them. And just as in Argentina they didn't want the 'wrong sort' of Jews, so too in Israel. (Tony Greenstein, writing on his blog, December 10, 2009)

Yosef Grodzinsky, professor of Psychology at Tel Aviv University, and Professor and Canada Research chair in NeuroLinguistics at McGill University, sheds light on the Zionist preference for 'good human material', in an illuminating interview with Chris Spannos:

Spannos: Maybe you could begin by summarizing the reasoning underlying the belief that Zionism and its product—the state of Israel—is the ultimate manifestation of Jewish identity? Where does this reasoning come from?

Grodzinsky: Zionist discussions of Jewish identity frequently question the nature of Jewish existence in Diaspora, and its feasibility. Can a Jewish national identity survive without a designated territory, and independent of Zionism? Does it require a national language (and if so, should it be Hebrew)? Must a Jew be religiously Jewish? The Zionist outlook on these questions has always been crystal clear: Jewish nationalism is Zionism; Hebrew is the national language, a Jew is a member of the Jewish religion. Fritz (Yitzhak) Baer, doyen of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, helped shape this view, which was then espoused by the Zionist leadership. In The Galut [State of Exile], he wrote in the 1930s ... [that] since the Jews manifest a national unity, even in a higher sense than the other nations, it is necessary that they return to a state of actual unity. Baer's clear world view had immense influence on the thinking of leaders and activists, especially on David Ben-Gurion, prominent leader and Israel's first prime minister. Interestingly, while these positions date back to the origins of the Zionist movement, looking at current Zionist thought, it has remained the same.

Spannos: Many Diaspora Jews recognize a radically different view acknowledging a diversity of outcomes for Jewish identity. Could you elaborate on this view and its origins?

Grodzinsky: Diaspora Jews, especially those in the West who had more freedom of movement than others, tended to acknowledge the multiplicity of future plans for Jews, which to them legitimized multiple Jewish agendas. I mean, their existence was the very proof that such agendas were feasible. Salo Baron of Columbia University, the first professor of Jewish Studies at an American university, presented a view radically different from Baer's, his contemporary. To Baron, Jewish ideology and politics correlated with migration patterns and residential loci, in a way that did not deprive a Jew of a national identity: One essential symptom of Jewish history, which appears to be of particular significance nowadays, is that the life of the Jewish people more or less regularly takes place in worlds set apart from one another. The Baer/Baron debate, then, revolved around issues of unity versus diversity of Jewish fates, choices, and identities. Little, if any, residue of this debate still exists, unfortunately. This is due, in part, to the Holocaust (as will become clear below), but also thanks to a remarkable propaganda success of the Zionists, who have made world Jewry align with their view. Question the singularity of the State of Israel as the ultimate expression of Jewish nationalism, and you risk being accused of anti-Semitism; do so as a Jew, and you should expect to be dubbed a self-hater.

Spannos: How did the Holocaust impact this debate?

Grodzinsky: The Holocaust put an end to the intense debate regarding the relationship between the Jew and the forming Zionist entity. In its shadow, it has often been said, Jews could no longer be safe anywhere but in Eretz Yisrael, their homeland. Jews, on this view, should either live in the Jewish national home in Palestine, or support it vigorously, because it is their fallback option, should all hell break loose. I have been hearing the rhetoric about Israel's role as a "safe haven" for Jews in danger since my childhood; rarely have I heard the opposite position, one that's in fact valid today, to my mind: that the State of Israel and its actions actually put world Jewry at risk.

Spannos: Zionist organizers frequently used the callous phrase chomer 'enoshi tov, or "good human material". What does this phrase say about how Zionists viewed Jews in the Displaced Persons (DP) Camps? Why was this population so important for the Zionists?

Grodzinsky: We are now moving to my book, whose Hebrew version is titled chomer 'enoshi tov. I was interested in the relationship between Jews and Zionists at times of crisis, and focused on Jewish survivors in post-war Germany on Displaced Persons (DP) camps that the US Army and the UN set up after the War, to assemble and care for millions of civilian victims of the Nazi regime. Jews were quickly put in separate camps, and became the miserable dwellers of the Jewish DP camps, the main location of my story. I went there (I mean, to archival material about these places) in order to see what the Zionists, by now close to accomplishing their goal and establishing an independent Jewish state, did to help Jews in need. Jerusalem dispatched hundreds of trained envoys to post-war Europe. What did they want and do? Their goal was openly stated, expressed by Ben-Gurion: to populate Palestine with multitudes of Jews. This translated into a plan to bring all the survivors to Palestine. Hence, survivors seeking Palestine immigration were dubbed "good material," whereas the others were viewed as weaklings. Here's an example: "The camps now house just the remainder of Sheâerit ha-pleyta [The Surviving Remnant]. The pioneering human material, that with human, Zionist awareness, has already left the camps on its way to Palestine through a variety of routes. What has now remained is that stuff that is glued to the old soil, like the remains of a meal stuck to the bottom of a burnt pot, which must be scrubbed and removed. No attempt at convincing them can work: The homeland is on fire! Could a son not rush to save his home from the fire? These words reach their ears, but leave their hearts untouched." I read these documents, much to my amazement, in the correspondence between envoys in Germany and their Jerusalem leadership, housed in the Central Zionist Archives. Now, when you read such expressions, you can't help but be reminded of the objectionable phrase "human dust," used by General Patton in reference to Holocaust survivors. It was such expressions that gained him his notoriety as an anti-Semite, and ultimately led him to lose the command of the US Army in Germany late summer 1945. Zionist envoys, you see, were not anti-Semitic, of course; nor were they hateful. But as the text shows, their attitude towards the survivors did not regard their value as human beings who had just been through horrific suffering, humiliation, exploitation, and loss; rather, those who could help the Zionist endeavor in Palestine were 'good material,' whereas others, who sought to rebuild their lives elsewhere, were despised.

Spannos: How did Jews in the DP Camps feel about the creation of a Jewish state? What kind of discrepancy was there between how they felt and where they actually migrated over time?

Grodzinsky: The Zionist idea appealed to most Jewish survivors. Taking part in the Zionist plan was a totally different matter. Much to the chagrin of the Zionist organizers, the majority of the Jewish DPs were more interested in immigrating to the United States than to Palestine. America harbored promise, and thus Jewish survivors flocked to the American Zone of Germany in the hundreds of thousands, hoping to obtain a U.S. immigration visa. A demographic survey I conducted indicates that while almost all Jewish DPs said they wished to go to Palestine, only 40% actually moved to the Jewish state, with the rest dispersing to all parts of the West. Of these, about 120,000 went to the United States, once it opened its gates to DP immigration in late 1948.

Spannos: In your book you illustrate how, where there was a conflict between Zionist interests and the interests of Jews in DP camps, Zionist organizers, planners and activists put their interests before the well-being of the Jewish refugees. Let's look at your first illustration, the 1945 children's affair. What happened to Jewish children in DP camps during 1945?

Grodzinsky: It is important to see the utilitarian logic behind the Zionist stance: As the ultimate goal was to populate Palestine with multitudes of Jews, they tried to target weak Jewish populations. Strong communities were less interested in Palestine immigration: When things are good, as they were in America (relatively speaking, of course), why move to a war zone? Thus a decision was made to focus on the Jewish DP camps, and envoys were dispatched to Germany, driven by Ben-Gurion's vision to bring 250,000 survivors from Germany to Palestine. If this is the goal, then a Jew heading west is not an asset. This is why the Zionists objected to initiatives aimed at evacuating Jewish child survivors from Germany right after the war. This is a shocking affair. Several thousand sick, malnourished, and vulnerable orphans, still at great risk, were forced by the Zionists to stay in the camps, even though arrangements were made for them to arrive to safety in England and France. The rest of this tragedy constitutes chapter 4 of my book.

Spannos: Another illustration of Zionist self-interest over Jewish suffering post-holocaust is the 1948 compulsory draft of Jews, from DP camps, into the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). How did Zionists institutionalize forced conscription in the DP camps?

Grodzinsky: Indeed, the drive to bring Jewish DPs to Palestine reached its peak in 1948, when the end of the British Mandate over Palestine, and the subsequent declaration of statehood, led to a full-scale war. Serious manpower shortages led the Israelis to look for volunteers for the IDF in the DP camps. Survivors were reluctant: "We have already smelled fire," said many "let others smell it now." The failure to recruit volunteers led to a forced conscription, officially enacted on April 11th, 1948. It brought 7,800 new draftees to Palestine, a significant addition to the fighting army. I recognize that the thought of a Zionist forced conscription in the U.S. controlled zone of Germany sounds insane. Yet it actually happened, as massive documentation I discovered in the Jewish DP archives in New York and Tel Aviv indicates: The American military government quite generously let the DPs run their camps as almost fully autonomous localities; Zionist survivors, together with envoys from Palestine, organized and took control of these camps early on, as I detail in the book. When the time came, they could exercise this control, sending holocaust survivors to fight in a land they had never seen, whose language they did not speak, and most importantly, for a cause they did not necessarily support.

Spannos: I understand that the Zionists at times even resorted to using violent methods against Jews in DP camps for the purposes of conscription. What did this look like?

Grodzinsky: Yes, violent methods were used when necessary. I was shocked to find eviction orders issues to draft deserters, fines, other punishments, and in some instances, even physical beatings. Most important, to my mind, is not the violence itself but the coercion, And the irony: The very movement that was created to bring deliverance to the Jews now took possession of Jewish national identity, and in its name expropriated the rights of the people, so that its own needs could be served. Thus, while the establishment of the state was predicated on a conflict with the Arabs over territory, it also led to a conflict with Jews over people. Much has been written on the former, less on the latter. My book is an attempt to fill this gap by focusing a critical lens on the actions of the pre-state Zionist movement. As I was writing it, I tried to give a voice to simple, ordinary Jews, whose suffering as they were ground by the mills of big ideas is rarely discussed. I sought to emphasize the fate of regular individuals, whose life stories form a rich web of alternative Jewish paths.

Spannos: You write that "If we would like to see the gravity of the problem, and also try to connect it to our present day existence, it is important to understand what in the eyes of the Zionists legitimized the conscription of Jews in Europe to the Israeli army." How did they legitimize it and how was it made possible that it—historically—was able to make sense to them?

Grodzinsky: We can perhaps end this interview where we started: The feeling among Zionists that they have the fate of all Jews in their possession. As rabbi Michael Lerner, in his preface to my book, puts it "Zionist arrogance did not start with the Palestinians." Primo Levi, in his book The Truce tells about a post-war incident where Zionists hooked up an extra car to a train he was riding on his long way home from Auschwitz. They were focused, self-assured, confident, he writes. They did not ask anyone whether they could connect their car to the train, "they just did it." Many good things happen in this way. But not always. Regarding Holocaust survivors, the Zionists were focused, clear-headed, with a coherent plan. That's no small matter. Yet this self-assurance "ever so familiar to many a reader I'm sure" â has also led to much suffering and destruction.

Israeli Prime Ministers constantly mislead the American public

In her autobiography, Golda Meir paints herself as a "mother" to the Palestinian people, never mentioning the destruction of their homes and villages. But of course she knew the terrible truth, having said in a rare moment of clarity:

"It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]'. (As acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department, she had visited Arab Haifa and reported back to the Jewish Agency Executive on May 6, 1948; from "The birth of the Palestinian Refuge problem revisited" by Benny Morris, p. 309)

The American public has been deceived, over and over again, by the Prime Ministers of Israel and other high-ranking Israelis. They tell us they want "peace" when what they really want is the American money, weapons and influence that allow them to continue the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, the theft of their land, and the creation of a fascist state that puts "achievements" above human happiness.

Jewish hypocrisy mounts to the skies

"What do you gain, Soviet Union, from this miserable policy? Where is your decency? Would it be a disgrace for you to give up this battle? (Golda Meir, on the suppression of freedom of Jews in the USSR to the World Conference on Soviet Jewry, Brussels, published in the New York Times, 2-20-1976)

But what about the miserable polices of Israel, its lack of decency, and its disgraceful treatment of Palestinian women and children? Why is the pot calling the kettle black?

Serfs and slaves always rebel: hence, 9-11

But why are we are seeing the same sort of racism at work in Israel today that once caused so much suffering for Jewish children during the Holocaust? According to pro-Israeli propagandists, I should say "Never again!" to every act of anti-Semitism against Jews, but I should either wink at or turn my back on acts of Jewish anti-Semitism against Palestinians. (Why?)

" . . . if you follow the polls in Israel for the last 30 or 40 years,
you clearly find a vulgar racism that includes a third of the population
who openly declare themselves to be racist.
This racism is of the nature of "I hate Arabs" and "I wish Arabs would be dead".
If you also follow the judicial system in Israel
you will see there is discrimination against Palestinians,
and if you further consider the 1967 occupied territories
you will find there are already two judicial systems in operation
that represent two different approaches to human life:
one for Palestinian life and the other for Jewish life.
Additionally there are two different approaches to property and to land.
Palestinian property is not recognised as private property
because it can be confiscated.
—Nelson Mandela

The leaders of Israel and their legions of apologists and propagandists helped bring about 9-11 and two terrible wars, by constantly demanding that Americans support Israel, when Israel is literally crushing the life from millions of Palestinians. Have some Muslim men reacted with violence? Yes, they have. But what would we say about a slave who saw his wife and children being treated like animals, if he rose up against his "masters"? Would we be shocked if he resorted to violence? Of course not. And we must keep in mind that, according to the American Declaration of Independence, it is not a crime to break an illegal law created by an unjust government; rather, it is the right and duty of men to rise up and forcefully overthrow anyone who deprives them of their self-evident rights. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were rich aristocrats whose living conditions were far better than those of most Palestinians today. They claimed the right to rise up and kill their English overlords, as long as those overlords denied them equal rights and representative government. So according to the American Founding Fathers, unless Israel grants Palestinians either fully equal rights or independence, they have the right and duty to rebel.

Israel's racial discrimination is daily life of most Palestinians.
Since Israel is a Jewish state, Israeli Jews are able to accrue special rights
which non-Jews cannot do.
Palestinian Arabs have no place in a "Jewish" state.
Apartheid is a crime against humanity.
Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property.
It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality.
It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians,
contrary to the rules of international law.
It has, in particular, waged war against a civilian population,
in particular children.
—Nelson Mandela

The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against their Nazi overlords. The Nazis had created "laws" they expected the Jews to obey, but those laws were racist and therefore illegal. Americans understand the right of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto to rise up against their Nazi overlords. Americans also understand the right of black slaves to disobey the racist, illegal "laws" of their white "masters." Americans also understand that it was the racist, illegal "laws" of the white settlers that caused Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to go on the warpath. Today Americans freely admit that it was Andrew Jackson who was wrong, and Sitting Bull who was right when he hoped for peace but chose the path of war when a racist white government proved it didn't want "peace," but to continually steal land from Indians, by breaking treaty after treaty.

So Americans should be able to understand the predicament of the Palestinians today, since they are experiencing very similar injustices at the hands of the governments of Israel and the United States.

American hypocrisy compounds Israeli hypocrisy

In their slavish obedience to Israel's demands for "support," Americans have also become raging hypocrites, by claiming rights for themselves which they deny to Palestinians. What would George Washington & Co. have done, if they were Palestinians and Americans were trying to dictate their fates from across a vast ocean? I have no doubt that Washington & Co. would have fired salvo after salvo at the agents of the distant tyrannical government attempting to rule them from afar. If we had asked them why they were attacking us, they would have said, "Because you either have to give us equal rights and representative government, or you have to grant us independence. Until you do, you are imperialists and we have the right and duty to kill you."

If we believe our Founding Fathers, and have no wish to be imperialists because being imperialists brings down the wrath of other people on our hubristic heads, we need to avoid repeating the mistakes of the British monarchy. And Israel also needs to stop constantly repeating King George's mistake. King George could have avoided fighting the Revolutionary War by doing one of two eminently sensible things: (1) He could have treated the Americans as equals, or (2) he could have granted them independence.

King George's mistake was electing to employ force because he wanted to impose his will on people who refused to be his lapdogs. Now Palestinians have informed Israel and the United States that they are no one's lapdogs. According to our own Declaration of Independence, we should inform Israel that it's time to make the Palestinians fully equal citizens, or to grant them their independence. The only other possibility is war, but why should the United States participate in a war in which it has nothing to gain and everything to lose?

Washington and Jefferson advised Americans to avoid costly entanglements with other nations. The costliest entanglement of all time would no doubt be a major war in the Middle East, since there are 1.5 billion Muslims today and it would be mind-bogglingly expensive to defeat them. But why should we try? We have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Is there any doubt what Washington and Jefferson would advise? Why are we fighting on the side of the imperialists, against the democrats? It makes no sense.

But then there is no reason for Israel to fight, either. Israel has simply refused to do what everyone knows must be done. Why? Because it has decided to steal land it doesn't even need, for ideological (fascist) purposes. But why should Americans pay for such a program with our money and lives? The cost to date has been beyond enormous: 9-11, two wars, multitudes of lives lost, huge sums of money flushed down the drain, with nothing at all to show for any of it. How did this come about? Let's go back to the origins of the crisis ...

"There could be no greater calamity
than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people.
Despite the great wrong that has been done us,
we must strive for a just and lasting compromise with the Arab people ...
Let us recall that in former times
no people lived in greater friendship with us
than the ancestors of these Arabs."
—Albert Einstein

The origin of the conflict: Jewish racism against Palestinians

Golda Meir was wrong. Obviously, there was a Palestinian people, and today there undeniably still are millions of Palestinians, many of them innocent children living in very dire straits inside the walled ghetto of Gaza, under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and in squalid refugee camps scattered across the Middle East (to understand the horror, younger readers might conjure up images of the movie District 9). And of course today almost no one who knows anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict denies that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their land during the Nakba ("Catastrophe") of 1948, to Jews intent on creating a Jewish state in Palestine.

"Israel should withdraw from all the areas
which it won from the Arabs in 1967,
and in particular Israel should withdraw completely
from the Golan Heights,
from south Lebanon
and from the West Bank."
—Nelson Mandela,

But how did it start? How did someone like Golda Meir, a mother as well as a Prime Minister, come to dehumanize Palestinian children? Why did she lie, or seem to lie, to the British and American publics? And what was her purpose, since no sane person lies without a reason? And how is it possible that so many other high-ranking Israeli Jews have said things just as horrible, and worse? If American politicians utter ethnic slurs, they get reprimanded or fired. Hell, sportscasters get fired in the United States for making racist remarks. So how is it possible that Israeli politicians get away with calling Palestinians "nonexistent," "grasshoppers," "cockroaches," etc.? Can the old saw that "where's there smoke, there's fire" apply in this case? Is Israel is a bastion of racial prejudice, like Nazi Germany?

Israel must "strive for peace based on justice,
based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories,
and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state
on those territories side by side with Israel,
both with secure borders."
—Desmond Tutu

But then why is the government of the United States providing Israel with hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of financial aid and advanced weapons? Shouldn't we tell Israeli Jews to act like civilized human beings, if they want our friendship, support, money, political influence and military hardware?

As Ron Paul has pointed out, Americans are morally responsible for what we do with our money. We are also morally responsible for what we do with our weapons. If I give a gun to a known pedophile and he uses it to rape a child, I am at best an idiot, if not his accomplice. If we give money and weapons to racists intent on inflicting massive suffering on the people they despise ― millions of them women and children who have never hurt a fly ― what does that say about us as a nation and as a people?

The study of history can be both fascinating and frightening, especially when we see history repeating itself in terrible ways. Today we all understand Adolf Hitler's horrendous "final solution" for the children of Auschwitz: extermination. But have we ever bothered to ask ourselves about the likely fate of the children of Gaza, unless the world acts to save them? And how many people are aware of the many disturbing parallels between Adolf Hitler and Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism and thus of the modern nation of Israel? Does what Golda Meir said about Palestinian children ― that they don't exist ― relate to the twisted "logic" of Hitler and Herzl?

Yes, I believe it does. This letter by Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectuals to the New York Times, published on December 4, 1948, discusses the fascist leanings of the nascent state of Israel. Einstein pointed out that Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel, was the leader of a racist, terrorist right-wing organization similar in disturbing ways to the Nazi party:

"Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the 'Freedom Party' ... a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist right-wing chauvinist organization in Palestine.

The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who opposed fascism throughout the world, if currently informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents ... A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin ... this incident exemplified the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other fascist parties, they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions.

The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine, bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike) and misrepresentation are means, and a 'Leader State' is the goal.

In the light of the foregoing consideration, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel of support to Begin. The undersigned therefore take the means publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party, and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism." [pp. 352-353]

A scanned image of this letter is available at this link.

Einstein's support for a Jewish presence in Palestine clearly did not extend to Jews seizing control of the region and subduing or displacing Arabs. His dream was always of a form of Judaism based on the teachings of Hebrew prophets who called for chesed [mercy, compassion, lovingkindness] and social justice. As he saw the nature of the Jewish state that emerged, Einstein distanced himself from the racism, nationalism and militarism which soon became its watchwords.

Einstein considered the message of the prophets to be the living, beating heart of Judaism, saying: "The Zionist goal gives us an actual opportunity to put into practice, through a viable solution of the Jewish-Arab problem, those principles of tolerance and justice that we owe primarily to our prophets. I am convinced that the living transmission of those principles is the most important thing in Judaism." He also said: "To be a Jew, after all, means first of all, to acknowledge and follow in practice those fundamentals in humaneness laid down in the Bible: fundamentals without which no sound and happy community of men can exist."

He also said: "I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from practical consideration, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the ideas of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain, especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state. We are no longer the Jews of the Maccabee period. A return to a nation in the political sense of the word would be equivalent to turning away from the spiritualization of our community which we owe to the genius of our prophets."

Voices of Reason: an Eye for an Eyelash?

Before we study the origins of the Jewish anti-Semitism against Arabs, let's first consider these voices of reason:

Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at the University of Oxford: "The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash." ("How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe," The Guardian, January 7, 2009)

Shlaim again: "It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law." ("How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe," The Guardian, January 7, 2009)

Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, one of two foreign doctors working at Gaza's biggest hospital, al-Shifa, told CBS News: "I've seen one military person among the hundreds that we have seen and treated. So anyone who tries to portray this as sort of a 'clean war' against another army are lying. This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza and we can prove that with the numbers." (CBS News, January 5, 2009)

[I have read a number of reports by Israeli soldiers who said they never saw an enemy combatant during the invasion of Gaza. If there had been any major resistance, there would have been large numbers of dead Israeli soldiers. But there were only 13 Israeli deaths, compared to around 1,400 Palestinian deaths. More than 300 of the Palestinian dead were children. Once again the numbers don't lie: it was a massacre.]

Al Haq, a Palestinian legal rights group, reports that 80 per cent of Palestinian fatalities have been civilians. According to figures cited by the World Health Organization, at least 40 per cent have been children. (Jonathan Cook, "Civilian death toll spurs legal action," The National, January 9, 2009)

"Even the death toll cited above does little to communicate the true one-sidedness of the wider violence, injustice and cruelty. One hardly knows where to begin. For example, largely unmentioned by the media, prior to the latest invasion, 14 Israelis had been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from Gaza over the last seven years as against 5,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks." (Seumas Milne, "Israel's onslaught on Gaza is a crime that cannot succeed," The Guardian, December 30, 2008)

[Also, it's important to note that the rocket firings are not entirely without reason. For more than sixty years Israel has denied Palestinians their self-evident rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If Israel had treated American women and children with such disregard, and had inflicted so much suffering on them, American men would be raining down missiles on Tel Aviv. So why not be honest, and admit that men of all races and creeds will "fight fire with fire" when their loved ones are made to suffer unjustly?]

Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) characterized the death toll as reaching "alarming proportions" and indicative of "extreme violence indiscriminately affecting civilians."

But don't the Jews own all the land and have the right to impose their will on Palestinians?

In the midst of so much carnage is there any rational, legal or moral basis for Jews to claim they "own" all the land? Here are comments on the matter by H. G. Wells, Gandhi, Churchill, FDR, and other luminaries:

"If it is proper to 'reconstitute' a Jewish State which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there." (H. G. Wells, quoted by Frank C. Sakran in Palestine Dilemma, p. 204)

"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English, or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct." (Mahatma Gandhi, Tendulkar, Mahatma, Vol. IV, 1938, p. 312)

"The Arabs of Palestine used to have the same rights over Palestinian territory as the French exercise in France and the English in England. These rights have been violated without any provocation on their part. There is no evading this simple fact." (Maxime Rodinson, Israel and the Arabs, 1968)

"We Germans feel that the Palestinian people are entitled to self-determination as much as any other people in the world, as much as we Germans." (Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, speaking at a press conference in Cairo on December 28, 1977)

"The cause of unrest in Palestine, and the only cause, arises from the Zionist movement, and from our promises and pledges in regard to it." (Winston Churchill, House of Commons, June 14, 1921)

"A Zionist state in Palestine can only be installed and maintained by force and we should not be a party to it..." (President Franklin Roosevelt, 5 March 1945, Department of State's Foreign Relations, Volume III)

"Because we took the land this gives us the image of being bad, of being aggressive. The Jews always considered that the land belonged to them, but in fact it belonged to the Arabs. I would go further: I would say the original source of this conflict lies with Israel, with the Jews—and you can quote me." (Yehoshofat Harkabi, former Israeli Chief of Military Intelligence, in "Peace Won't be a Plane Ticket to Cairo," International Armed Forces Journal, October 1973, p.30)

"The Palestinians had lived in the country since the dawn of history ... They are the earliest and the original inhabitants of Palestine. The Palestinians of today are the descendants of the Canaanites, the Philistines, and the other early tribes which inhabited the country." (Henry Cattan, Palestine and International Law, p. 13)

"If the views of the advanced Zionists prevail there is trouble ahead. Many, very many, intelligent and informed Jews admit this. It is conceded that the present inhabitants of Palestine have occupied their lands for centuries; indeed, some of the Syrian communities claim descent from the Hittites who were in possession at the dawn of history. Be that as it may, all who know the situation from actual contact and not from propaganda leaflets admit that these people have dwelt in their present homes for two thousand years, that the occupancy of the Jews does not go back to immemorial times, and that their sojourn before the Dispersion was brief. Why should these 'old settlers' be expelled, they ask, to make room for newcomers?" (Stephen Bonsal, Suitors and Suppliants at Versailles, p. 45)

"...the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a 'right' to Palestine based on an occupation of two thousand years ago, can hardly be seriously considered." (Report of the King-Crane Commission, August, 1919)

"Palestine is not the original home of the Jews. It was acquired by them after a ruthless conquest, and they have never occupied the whole of it, which they now openly demand. They have no more valid claim to Palestine than the descendants of the ancient Romans have to this country. The Romans occupied Britain as long as the Israelites occupied Palestine, and they left behind them in this country far more valuable and useful work. "If we are going to admit claims based on conquest thousands of years ago, the whole world will have to be turned upside down..." (Lord Sydenham, Hansard, House of Lords, June 21, 1922)

"I believe it was the intention of the Zionists, right from the beginning, to dispossess the Palestinians from their homes, and I believe the British Government was aware of this." (Arnold Toynbee, in the introduction to an address by Sir John Richmond at a meeting in the House of Commons, London, May 27, 1971)

"...the extent to which the refugees were savagely driven out by the Israelis as a part of a deliberate master plan has been insufficiently recognized." (John H. Davis, Commissioner-General of UNRWA 1959-63, The Evasive Peace, p. 57)

"Jewish terrorism ... in such savage massacres as Deir Yassin ... 'encouraged' Arabs to leave the areas the Jews wished to take over for strategic or demographic reasons. They tried to make as much of Israel as free of Arabs as possible." (I. F. Stone, New York Review of Books, August 3, 1967)

"The Jewish combatants there and elsewhere made skillful use of psychological warfare to break their opponents' morale, and the effect upon the civilians was only what was to be expected. At a later stage, the Israeli armed forces did not confine their pressure on the Arab civilian population to playing upon their fears. They forcibly expelled them: for example, the population of 'Akka (including refugees from Haifa) in May; the population of Lydda and Ramleh (including refugees from Jaff) in July; and the population of Beersheba and Western Galilée in October." (George Kirk, The Middle East 1945-50, p. 264)

"The Zionist version of the Palestinian exodus is a myth manufactured after the cataclysm took place. If the Zionists could show that the refugees had really fled without cause, at the express instructions of their own politicians, they would greatly erode the world's sympathy for their plight—and, in consequence, the pressure on themselves to allow them to return. Thus in public speeches and scholarly-looking pamphlets they peddled this myth the world over. It was not until 1959 that the Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi, exposed it for what it is. His painstaking researches were independently corroborated by an Irish scholar, Erskine Childers, two years later. Together, they demonstrated that the myth was not just a gross misrepresentation of accepted or even plausible facts; the very 'facts' themselves had been invented. Orders for the evacuation of the civilian population had not simply been issued, the Zionists said, they had been broadcast over Arab radio stations. One had come from the Mufti himself. This was the cornerstone of the Zionist case. Yet when these two scholars took the trouble to examine the record—to go through the specially opened archives of Arab governments, contemporary Arabic newspapers and the radio monitoring reports of both the BBC and the CIA—they found that no such orders had been issued, let alone broadcast, and that when challenged to produce chapter-and-verse evidence, the date and origin of just one such order, the Zionists, with all the apparatus of the State of Israel now at their disposal, were quite unable to do so. They found, on the contrary, that Arab and Palestinian authorities had repeatedly called on the people to stay put and the Arab radio services had consistently belittled the true extent of Zionist atrocities." (David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, pp. 136-7)

But even if Palestinians fled their homes voluntarily, there still was no reason non-combatants should have been prevented from returning once the hostilities were over. And there was certainly no "need" for their homes and villages to be destroyed. It takes a considerable amount of planning and execution to destroy hundreds of villages, so the best argument that this was the plan is the fact that it happened.

"It seemed to me to be symptomatic of a certain blindness to the human reactions of others that so many Israelis professed not to understand why the Arabs who had been driven from their lands should continue to hate and try to injure those who had driven them out." (General E.L.M. Burns, Chief of Staff of UNTSO, Between Arab and Israeli, p. 162)

"It is my considered opinion that the State of Israel is a racist state in the full meaning of this term: In this state people are discriminated against, in the most permanent and legal way and in the most important areas of life, only because of their origin. This racist discrimination began in Zionism and is carried out today mainly in co-operation with the institutions of the Zionist movement." (Dr. Israel Shahak, "The Racist Nature of Zionism and of the Zionist State of Israel", Pi-Ha'aton (the weekly newspaper of the students of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), November 5, 1975)

"Israel has gradually become a more and more openly racist country. Anyone not Jewish is at best second-class in Israel." (Maxim Ghilan, 1974, How Israel Lost Its Soul, Pelican Books, London)
 
"...Now in the State of Israel, those who are tempted along the hallucinatory path of power and conquest have to justify their course by calling on the same devils who, in the Diaspora, were directed against themselves." (Maxim Ghilan, 1974, How Israel Lost Its Soul, Pelican Books, London)
 
"—The State of Israel is presented, both at home and abroad, as the embodiment of social democracy, a mixture of all that is good in capitalism and in socialism, the original, the archetypal Welfare State. This suggestion is, of course, a lie." (Maxim Ghilan, 1974, How Israel Lost Its Soul, Pelican Books, London)
 
"...Israeli society is basically a settlers' society. It does not primarily concern itself with the "Indians" or "Niggers" of the land. Its first priority is the creation of a united economic establishment for the Jewish Israelis. Only then does it concern itself (almost as an afterthought) with the captive Palestinians." (Maxim Ghilan, 1974, How Israel Lost Its Soul, Pelican Books, London)

Related Links

Einstein on Palestine ... Why did Albert Einstein turn down the presidency of Israel, and what did the great Jewish intellectual, peace activist, pacifist and humanitarian have to say about the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs?

Einstein denied any superior rights for Jews, calling for "complete equality" for Palestinians, saying: "The most important aspect of our policy must be our ever-present, manifest desire to institute complete equality for the Arab citizens living in our midst ... The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people." Only cooperation with Arabs, led by "educated, spiritually alert" Jewish workers, he wrote, "can create a dignified and safe life." He also said, "What saddens me is less the fact that the Jews are not smart enough to understand this, but rather, that they are not smart enough to want it."

Sigmund Freud on Palestine ... Why did Sigmund Freud, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of all time, reject political Zionism?

I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. ― Sigmund Freud

Mohandas Gandhi on Palestine ... What did Gandhi say about Palestine and the conflict between Jews and Arabs? What would have had said if he had seen the terrible suffering of the children of Gaza today?

If we are to have real peace in the world,
we will have to begin with the children.
―Mohandas Gandhi.

Jimmy Carter ... "Israeli policy is to confiscate Palestinian territory."

Christians may want to consider the ethical questions What does the Bible say? What would Jesus do?

Albert Einstein's 1948 Letter to the New York Times  ... In this landmark letter, Albert Einstein and 27 other leading Jewish intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt and Sidney Hook, explained to Americans and the larger world that militant Zionist leaders like Menachem Begin (a future prime minister of Israel) were racists, fascists, terrorists and religious fanatics.

A scanned image of this letter is available at this link.

There is a path to peace through justice: The Burch-Elberry Peace Initiative

Why Israel is Wrong: Evidence for and the Case against Israel’s Racism, Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing

Does Israel Really Want Peace?

Israeli Prime Ministers who were Terrorists

The HyperTexts