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S4 �Zionism:�Foundation & �Intentions��

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Historical Context

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Zionism, a form of Jewish nationalism, is the primary ideology that drove the establishment of Israel. Within the context of a set of major changes in the political, cultural, social landscape of Jewish life in Europe, Zionism began in the late 19th Century along with the general rise of nationalist movements and nation-state political forms. During this time, Jews in Europe experienced a sharp rise in violent antisemitism. While they had lived in Europe for centuries, Jewish people were fundamentally excluded from the ways European nations defined themselves. This resulted in violent, targeted, anti-Jewish massacres in Russia (known as pogroms); the development of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories (like Protocols of the Elders of Zion); and the re-emergence of antisemitic tropeslike blood libels, which claim that Jewish people use the blood of Christian children in rituals).

Some Jewish people responded to this antisemitism by attempting to assimilate into the European countries they lived in, which often proved impossible. Over 2.5 million Jewish people fled as refugees and migrated to the United States or other parts of Europe. Others, like the Bund, rejected the concept of nationalism altogether or turned to revolutionary socialism. And some, notably Theodore Herzl, considered the founder of Zionism, thought that Jews, who were often considered outsiders in the countries in which they lived, should have a state of their own. Herzl and other early Zionist thinkers were also very influenced by European settler colonial thinking, often explicitly making the case that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a European colony similar to the British presence in India.

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What is Zionism?

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“..effective political ideas like Zionism need to be examined historically in two ways: (1) genealogically, in order that their provenance, their kinship and descent, their affiliation both with other ideas and with political institutions may be demonstrated; (2) as practical systems for accumulation (of power, land, ideological legitimacy). Present political and cultural actualities make such an examination extraordinarily difficult, as much because Zionism in the advanced capitalist West has acquired for itself an almost unchallenged hegemony in liberal “establishment” discourse, as because in keeping with one of its central ideological characteristics Zionism had hidden, or caused to disappear, the literal historical ground of its growth, its political cost to the native inhabitants of Palestine, and its militancy oppressive discriminations between Jews and non-Jews.. The concealment by Zionism of its own history has by now therefore before become institutionalized, and not only in Israel. To bring out its history as in a sense it was exacted from Palestine and the Palestinians, these victims on whose suppression Zionism and Israel have depended, is thus a specific intellectual/political task, and an important part of the worldwide struggle against imperialism, against the techniques of secrecy and domination, ahistorical rhetoric, and (in the U.S. at least) against liberal hegemony.”

Edward Said

“Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims”, The Edward Said Reader, 1979

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“A remarkable number of Israel's supporters from across the political spectrum share a common and unshakable article of faith: that the Israel/Palestine conflict was avoidable and unnecessary. If the Arabs of Palestine had accepted Zionism 130 years ago, there would never have been, and would not now be, any cause for bloodshed. . . .”

“The pro-Israel camp often traces the history of the conflict to 1947, when the Arabs said No to the UN partition plan, or to 1948, when the Arab countries said No by launching a war against the recently declared Jewish state. The underlying assumption is that the Arabs had no good reason to reject Zionism or the idea of Jewish self-determination in Palestine: rather, their rejection is interpreted as a consequence of their inherent anti-Semitism, natural tendency toward violence, or self-destructive intransigence. . .”

“The Original No: Why the Arabs Rejected Zionism, and Why It Matters”

Middle East Policy Council, 2013

Natasha Gill

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Image description(s): The following slides depict iconic imagery and slogans undertaken by founding Zionist organizations. Here we see a 1919 fundraising poster from the Zionist Organization of America calling for $3M to build the Jewish homeland, with proceeds direted to the Palestine Restoration Fund. Source: Library of Congress

Additional Information:

World Zionist Organization Setting the Stage for a Jewish State in Palestine: The Zionist Organization was the most important and active body of international Zionism prior to 1948, uniting ideologically divergent and geographically dispersed activists in the cause of establishing a Jewish nationalist presence in Palestine. The Zionist Organization was the umbrella for all the crucial bodies that provided funding and land to early Zionist colonists, the most crucial being the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Jewish Colonial Trust. After the British Mandate was formalized in 1923, the British government designated the Zionist Organization’s subsidiary Palestine Zionist Executive to serve as the “Jewish Agency” described in Article 4 of the Mandate Charter as the body responsible for “advising and co-operating” with Britain on all matters that “may effect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine.”

The first Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, established the Zionist Organization as an umbrella organization to serve the interests of the Zionist movement. The Basel Program, adopted at the congress, set forth the goals of the organization: “the establishment of a publicly and legally secured home in Palestine for the Jewish people.” To attain this goal, the Basel Program enumerated four specific activities:

The appropriate promotion of colonizing Palestine with Jewish agriculturalists, artisans and tradesmen.
The organization and gathering of all Jews through suitable local and general institutions according to the laws of the various countries.
The promotion of Jewish national feeling and consciousness.
Preparatory steps for the attainment of such Government consent as is necessary in order to achieve the aim of Zionism.

Membership in the Zionist Organization was open to any individual or group that accepted the Basel Program and paid dues called the “Zionist shekel.” The organization’s full constitution was formulated at the third Zionist Congress in 1899. The constitution defined its operational structure, which consisted of a seven-member Smaller Actions Committee (whose chairman was also the president of the Zionist Congress) and thirty-seven-member Larger Actions Committee, composed of the leaders of various organizations in different countries. (This last body was expanded at subsequent Zionist Congresses.) Theodor Herzl was elected the Zionist Organization’s first president, serving in this role until his death in 1904.

The key practical problems facing the Zionist movement at the turn of the century were the lack of funding and access to land that were required to settle Jewish colonists in Palestine and the lack of official sanction from the state whose sovereignty extended over Palestine, namely the Ottoman Empire. In order to solve these problems, the Zionist Organization established several key subsidiary bodies. The second Zionist Congress of 1898 established the Jewish Colonial Trust to raise funds for the Zionist project and to serve as the Zionist Organization’s financial instrument. It was incorporated in London in 1899 and in 1902 it established its Palestinian subsidiary, the Anglo-Palestine Bank, opening its first branch in Jaffa in 1903. The Anglo-Palestine Bank supported Zionist land purchases, imports, and concessions, and it established a network of credit unions to provide Jewish colonists with long-term agricultural loans. During the Mandate, the Jewish Colonial Trust ceased to serve as a bank, becoming a holding company for Anglo-Palestine Bank shares. Keren Hayesod (The Foundation Fund), established at the 1920 conference of the Zionist Organization, served as the international fundraising arm of the Zionist movement.

To secure Jewish ownership of land, the Zionist Organization established the JNF at the fifth Zionist Congress in 1901. The JNF collected donations internationally to fund land purchases in Palestine. The JNF received its first parcel of land as a gift from a Russian Zionist landowner in 1903, and in the following years made its first purchases. In 1909, it played a key role in the establishment of Tel Aviv. By the end of the Mandate, JNF purchases amounted to relatively little (less than 4 percent) of the total lands of Palestine, but more than half of the lands held by Jews in Palestine. Through the JNF, the Zionist Organization played a crucial role in the settlement of Jewish immigrants in Palestine, providing land upon which Jewish colonists could live and work even if they did not have the resources (and few did) to purchase these lands or rent them on the open market. The JNF played another significant role after 1948, when it was allowed to purchase “absentees’ property”—lands ethnically cleansed of their Palestinian owners—from the state. In 1953, the JNF was reorganized as an Israeli company. In 1960, it was given a significant influence (nominating ten of twenty-two directors) in the newly-established Israel Land Administration, a government body tasked with managing all lands designated as state- or JNF-owned.

Having thus established the key institutions through which Zionists around the world could lend their support to building a Jewish national home in Palestine, the Zionist Organization set about turning this support into facts on the ground. In 1908, the Palestine Office opened in Jaffa as the operational branch of the Zionist Organization. Headed by Arthur Ruppin, the office presumed to represent Jewish immigrants to Palestine in dealing with the Ottoman state and coordinated land purchases with the JNF. With the outbreak of World War I and the signing of the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist Organization was able to solve the last of its key concerns: receiving state sanction for its colonizing efforts. In 1918, Chaim Weizmann—the influential president of the British Zionist Federation and later president of the Zionist Organization—formed the Zionist Commission, which was to study conditions in Palestine and report back to the British government, and set about restructuring the Palestine Office into departments (agriculture, settlement, education, land, finance, immigration, and statistics) that would allow it to build its parastate infrastructure on the ground in Palestine under British sponsorship. In 1921, the Zionist Commission was rebranded the Palestine Zionist Executive, and the British designated it the Jewish Agency described in the Mandate’s text.

Even after the Jewish Agency was expanded in 1929 to include non-Zionist Jewish representatives, the Executive of the Jewish Agency was nearly identical to that of the Zionist Organization. Thus, until the foundation of Israel in 1948, the Jewish Agency effectively operated as a Zionist parastate in Palestine in coordination with the Zionist Organization, which embodied the Zionist movement in its international scope. After 1948, the Zionist Organization continued through its institutions to support the immigration and settlement of Jews in Israel and, after 1967, the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In August 1951, the Zionist Organization held for the first time its Congress (the 23rd) in Jerusalem and redefined the aims of Zionism (the "Jerusalem Program") as being "the consolidation of the State of Israel; the ingathering of the exiles in the Land of Israel; and the fostering of the unity of the Jewish people.” The Knesset enacted a law in November 1952 recognizing the Organization as an “authorized agency” to continue operating in Israel for the absorption of immigrants and settlement of the country, and authorized it to enter into a Covenant with the government (signed in July 1954). Its subsidiary bodies, including Keren Hayesod, the Jewish National Fund, and the Anglo-Palestine Bank—renamed Bank Leumi and having initially served as Israel’s national bank until 1954—continue to function to this day as the conduits between Zionist organizations outside Israel and the ongoing colonial project of the state.

Source: Palestinian Journeys

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Image description: Two promotional posters created by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which was founded at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in order to play a primary role in acquiring land for European Jewish settlement in Palestine.

Left: Jewish National Fund (JNF in NYC) promotional poster, 1935. Designed by Mitchell Loeb

Right: Jewish National Fund (JNF in Jerusalem) promotional poster, 1950. Designed by Brigit Frank Porter

Source: Palestine Poster Archive

Additional Information:

Institute for Middle East Understanding: IMEU

Since it was established at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1901, the JNF has played a key role in the Zionist movement and subsequently the Israeli government’s dispossession of indigenous Palestinians in order to create and maintain a Jewish-majority state in their place. In its early years, it worked to acquire land for European Jewish colonists, often purchasing it from large landowners who lived abroad and dispossessing Palestinian peasant farmers in the process.

In August 1937, David Ben-Gurion, head of the Zionist colonial leadership in Palestine and Israel's first prime minister, alluded to the JNF’s role in dispossessing Palestinians while arguing in favor of larger-scale ethnic cleansing (‘transfer”) during a meeting of the Twentieth Zionist Congress in Zurich, Switzerland, stating: “You are no doubt aware of the JNF's activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin [peasants]... Jewish power [in Palestine], which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale."

In December 1940, Joseph Weitz, director of the JNF's Lands Department, wrote in his diary: “There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [Bedouin] tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.”

Following Israel's establishment on May 14, 1948, the new Israeli government set up an unofficial body, the "Transfer Committee," to oversee the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages or their repopulation with Jews and to prevent expelled Palestinians from returning to their homes. In a report presented to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion in June 1948, while hostilities were ongoing and the newly-established Israeli army was engaged in large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the three-man committee, which included the JNF's Weitz, called for the "destruction of villages as much as possible during military operations."

JNF fundraising abroad & planting trees to hide ethnic cleansing

Following the ethnic cleansing of between 750,000 and one million Palestinians and the systematic destruction of more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages during Israel’s establishment 1948-49, the JNF planted forests in many areas covering the ruins and evidence of the Palestinian Arab society that much of Israel is built over.
From its earliest days, the JNF raised money abroad with its “Blue Box” campaign, taking in huge sums in the US and other countries. In the US, the JNF is a registered 501(c)(3) charitable organization, meaning American taxpayers are subsidizing its activities in Palestine/Israel. In 2017, the JNF took in more than $72 million (USD) in tax-deductible contributions and grants in the US alone.

JNF role in Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinians today

Today, the quasi-governmental JNF, whose website declares it is “the caretaker of the land of Israel, on behalf of its owners - Jewish people everywhere,” continues to play an important role in the distribution of state lands and the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians inside Israel and in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Inside Israel

More than 80% of the land in Israel is state-owned and controlled by the Israel Land Authority and quasi-governmental agencies like the JNF. The JNF itself owns more than 10% of the land in Israel and systematically discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20% of the population, in its allocation. In 2004, following a Supreme Court petition challenging the discriminatory charter of the JNF, the ILA agreed to temporarily open JNF bids to any citizen of Israel, regardless of ethnicity, but if a non-Jewish citizen won the bid to the land, the ILA agreed to compensate the JNF with other equivalent state land. Together with Admissions Committees, the JNF and Israel's discriminatory land policies make it extremely difficult for Palestinian citizens of Israel to gain access state lands for residential, commercial, agricultural, or other uses.
In places like the Negev (Naqab to Palestinians) desert in southern Israel, the JNF has been working with the Israeli government to evict Palestinian Bedouin - who are Israeli citizens - and destroy their homes and communities. The village of al Araqeeb has been destroyed more than 100 times because it’s located on land that the JNF wants to plant trees on as part of it’s so-called “Ambassadors Forest.”

In the occupied Palestinian territories

In occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank, the JNF is also displacing Palestinians, often in cooperation with right-wing settler groups like Elad. Through subsidiary companies like Himnuta, which was established in 1938 to help get around institutional and legal restrictions on its activities, the JNF has acquired thousands of acres of Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and conducted numerous campaigns to evict Palestinians from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. Israeli governments have also frequently used Himnuta directly to purchase property in the occupied territories, without going through the JNF, which owns 99% of its shares. (For more, see fact sheet Elad, the Jewish National Fund & the US Taxpayer-Subsidized “Judaization” of Silwan.
Often, the JNF/Himnuta purchase Palestinian land at above-market prices through shady middlemen who don’t disclose to the Palestinian owners that Israeli settlers are the buyers and other means.
In 2011, a member of the JNF-USA’s board, Seth Morrison, resigned in protest over the JNF’s attempts to evict the Sumarin family from their home in Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem. Explaining his decision, Morrison wrote:
“[This] is not an isolated case. JNF has gained ownership of other Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and, in many instances, then transferred these properties through its subsidiaries to Elad, a settler organization whose purpose is to ‘Judaize’ East Jerusalem… the expulsion of the Sumarin family is a violation of human rights. But it is also part of the systematic transfer of Palestinian property to ideological settlers who wish to put facts on the ground that hinder a lasting peace agreement.”
Morrison also Noted that the JNF’s “initial response was to deny any involvement in the [Sumarin] eviction,” only admitting the truth when legal documents naming a JNF subsidiary as the initiator of the eviction proceedings became public.

Source: Zochrot

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B. Zionism & Israel’s� Founders

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"We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.” Diary entry, 1896

“You are being invited to help make history. This cannot frighten you, nor will you laugh at it. It is not in your accustomed line; it doesn’t involve Africa but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen but Jews. But had this been on your path, you would have done it by now. How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”

Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism

1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes, former

Prime Minister of Cape Colony (South Africa)

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“We pay close attention to all the affairs of our land, we discuss and debate everything, we praise and curse everything, but we forget one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it.”

“For many years we have heard that the number of inhabitants in Eretz Israel is six hundred thousand. If we assume this number is correct, and subtract the eighty thousand Jews, we find that in our land there are now more than half a million Arabs, of whom eighty percent live off the land and occupy all the areas suitable for farming without further improvement. The time has come to dismiss the discredited idea, spread among Zionists, that there is in Eretz Israel uncultivated land as a result of lack of working hands and the indifference of the inhabitants.

Yitzhak Epstein, Russian teacher, writer & early Zionist

“A Hidden Question”, published in 1907 in Ha-Shiloah

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“My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.”

“Zionist colonization … can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population — behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Russian Jewish Revisionist Zionist leader

“The Iron Wall”, 1923

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"We must expel Arabs and take their places...and, if we have to use force -not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places - then we have force at our disposal…Palestine is grossly under populated. It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit. There is no Arab immigration problem. There is no Arab exile. Arabs are not persecuted. They have a homeland, and it is vast.”

"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."

"After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the [Jewish] state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of the Palestine"

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister (1948-1953)

From Benny Morris’ “Righteous Victims”

From Simha Flapan’s “The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities”

In a letter to his son Amos, Oct 5, 1937

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"The confidence of thousands of Arabs of the Hula [Valley] was shaken...We had only five days left...until 15 May [1948]. We regarded it as imperative to cleanse the interior of the Galilee and create Jewish territorial continuity in the whole of the Upper Galilee...I gathered the Jewish mukhtars [Kibbutz chiefs], who had ties with the different Arab villages, and I asked them to whisper in the ears of several Arabs that a giant Jewish reinforcement had reached the Galilee and were about to clean out the villages of Hula, [and] to advise them as friends, to flee while they could. And rumour spread throughout Hula that the time had come to flee. The flight encompassed tens of thousands. The stratagem fully achieved its objective."

Yigal Allon, Palmach commander, IDF general, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Deputy Prime Minister

From Benny Morris’ “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem”

Yigal Allon and the Palmach’s Yiftach Brigade during operations in the Galilee. May, 1948 (source unknown).

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Yosef Weitz, Director, Jewish National Fund Land Settlement Committee (1932-1948)

"...the transfer of [Palestinian] Arab population from the area of the Jewish state does not serve only one aim--to diminish the Arab population. It also serves a second, no less important, aim which is to advocate land presently held and cultivated by the [Palestinian] Arabs and thus to release it for Jewish inhabitants."

"It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples...If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us...The only solution is a Land of Israel...without Arabs...There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Palestinian Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one tribe."

from Benny Morris’ “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem”

from Nur Masalha’s “Expulsion Of The Palestinians”

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“Other peoples have colonized great countries, rich countries. They found when they entered there backward populations. And they did for the backward populations what they did. I am not a historian, and I am not sitting in judgment on the colonizing activity of the various great nations which have colonized backward regions. But I would like to say that, as compared with the result of the colonizing activities of other peoples, our impact on the Arabs has not produced very much worse results than what has been produced by others in other countries.”

Chaim Weizmann, headed World Zionist Organization; first President of Israel

Statement made in July 1947 as part of UN General Assembly Meeting with Special Committee On Palestine

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How can we understand and think about these quotes juxtaposed with the Israeli claim that “Palestine was a land without a people for a people without land?”
How intentional was the process of colonization? What are some ways we see intentions in ideology as well as in practice?

Reflection Questions:

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Photo description: Here we see the former Palestinian village of Um al-Zinat, being established as the the Israeli settlement of Elyakim. Photo Credit: Teddy Brauner, Israeli Government Press Office (GPO), 1950

Additional Information:

See below for more on Umm al-Zinat before 1948, from Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains: the Palestinian villages occupied and depopulated by Israel in 1948:

“At 20.5 km distance from Haifa, the village stood on a rocky cliff on the southeastern section of Mount Carmel, and overlooked the bilad al-rawha'. A secondary road linked it to the coastal highway and to the Haifa-Jinin highway. Its name means 'source of adornments' in Arabic. In the late nineteenth century, Umm al-Zinat was among the ten largest villages in the district in terms of both population - 1,450 Muslims and 20 Christians - and land area. The village's layout resembled a tennis racquet, with a 'handle' extending towards the northeast. Its houses, built of masonry, were clustered together. A boys' elementary school was established in it in about 1888 under Ottoman rule.

The villagers drew water for domestic use from several wells. They depended for their livelihoods on agriculture and animal husbandry, growing grain, vegetables, and fruit trees. By 1943, they had planted about 1,834 dunums of olive trees, the largest unbroken expanse of olive trees in the district. Umm al-Zinat had four manual olive presses. There were traces in the village itself of earlier settlement; these took the form of the foundations of buildings, rock-cut tombs, and, in the eastern part of the village, a stone sarcophagus. One km south of the village was khirbat al-Haramis, where the ruins of an ancient but as yet undated village was found.

Occupation, Depopulation, and Israeli Settlements

In January 1948, an attack was carried out by a Zionist unit composed of ten militiamen who were dressed in British army uniforms, employing a tactic that was commonly used to gain entrance to Arab villages. The Palestinian newspaper Filastin reported that the raid occurred on the night of 19-20 January and was driven back; it did not mention any casualties.

In the aftermath of the fall of Haifa, in late April 1948, Haganah forces occupied a number of villages in the surrounding area during Operation Bi'ur Chametz (Passover Clearing). Umm al-Zinat was captured on 15 May by the Golani Brigade's Fourth Battalion, according to the official (Israeli) history of the ‘War of Independence’. The village was situated on what the Haganah considered its 'alternate supply route' to Haifa, since the coastal road was 'blocked' by a cluster of Palestinian villages (the Little Triangle) until the end of July. The New York Times quoted Haganah sources as saying on 15 May that they had taken 'several' Arab villages on the slopes of Mount Carmel and near 'Afula.

Zionists established the settlement of Elyaqim on the southern side of the village site in 1949. (pictured here)

The Village Today

The houses have been reduced to rubble, piles of which are scattered over the site. The site itself is overgrown with thorns, bushes, cactuses, and pomegranate and fig trees. There is also a small forest on part of the site. The village's cemetery is still visible. Part of the surrounding land is used by Israeli farmers as cattle pasture and is planted with fruit and olive trees.”

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Source: al-Khalidi, Walid (ed.). All that remains: the Palestinian villages occupied and depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington DC: 1992.

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C. “Justifying” the Nakba

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Benny Morris, Historian

“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”

“Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris”, Haaretz, Jan, 2004

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Facilitator Note: Despite the facts they uncover, one of these historians, Benny Morris ends up “justifying” the Nakba. Journalist Ari Shavit, who also justifies the Nakba in his writing, interviews Benny Morris, the researcher who is arguably the doyen of the new historians, regarding how one should understand the expulsions of Palestinians and the refusal to allow them to return to their homes after the end of the war.

Again, it is important to reiterate to participants that, unlike others of the new historians, both Morris (and Shavit) are revisionists who end up justifying Israel’s actions.

Reflection Question:

How do you respond to this quote and the thinking that justifies the expulsion of the Palestinian population and the refusal to allow them to return home?

Additional information

We include the interview of Morris by Shavit because it exemplifies a persistent, influential strain in liberal Zionist thinking that justifies the Nakba. However, the journalist was credibly accused of sexual harassment, which we absolutely condemn.

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1949

2014

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Facilitator Action: Guide a group discussion on what we have learned so far about Zionism: How do these readings support your thinking about the tangible consequences and impact of Zionism on the Palestinian people and Palestinian opposition?

Image descriptions: The displacement of Palestinians from their homes and lands is an ongoing feature of Zionism in practice, beginning with the founding of the state, through to today.

Left: Palestinians forced out of their homes in Iraq al-Manshiyya by the Israeli Army in 1949.

Photographer: Benno Rothenberg, Defense Establishment Archives

Right: 65 years later, we see the Idris family gathering their belongings after the Israeli Army demolished two of their homes in the West Bank city of Beit Hanina – January 27, 2014.

Photographer: Amer Aruri, B'Tselem

Additional information:

Although Iraq al-Manshiyya was allotted to the Arab state under the 1947 UN Partition Plan, it was captured by Israel's Alexandroni Brigade in October, 1948 from Egyptian forces in Operation Yoav. After Egypt and Israel negotiated an armistice agreement, which was mediated by the UN’s chief negotiator Ralph Bunche and guaranteed to the villagers safety and the right to remain in their village, the Israeli Army reneged on the agreement and expelled its inhabitants. (Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004), Cambridge University Press)

In 1954 the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Gat was established on top of Iraq al-Manshiyya, and in 1956 the settlement of Sde Moshe was established on the Eastern side of the village.

Today, there are approximately 24,000 refugees from Iraq al-Manshiyya, with the majority of them living in Jordan.

Here is a 2008 video of the village, featuring a shot of the Intel plant now located on village lands.

Source: Palestine Remembered

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Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of Finance, leader of Religious Zionist Party

Statement made in the Knesset, directed at Palestinian members. Oct 13, 2021, quoted in Times of Israel

“You’re here by mistake, it’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.”

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