Archive article: https://archive.ph/LJPiZ
A new survey showing that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the expulsion of Gazans was met with disbelief among those who stubbornly believe that the extremists are outliers. But these trends are as consistent as they are shocking
You don’t need Aljazeera to know the truth, just read what Zionist wrote and said themselves. The following is a quote by Jabotinsky:
“[It is the] iron law of every colonizing movement, a law which knows of no exceptions, a law which existed in all times and under all circumstances. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else – or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempts to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not “difficult”, not “dangerous” but IMPOSSIBLE! … Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonialization.”
As quoted by Lenni Brenner, in The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (1984), where the quotation is cited as being from “The Iron Law”
There’s more quotes by other Zionists that make no doubt that Israelis are the aggressors and Palestinians are the victims. There’s no two sides to colonialism and ethnic cleansing.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenni_Brenner
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze'ev_Jabotinsky#Early_life
Yeah, I don’t care what some activist who has clear biases wrote about some other activist who also has clear biases but in the other direction . We’re talking about isn’t about ideology, but how the actual history unfolded, what events ended up taking place, and how those events lead us to today. My point is that the actual history that took place is beyond of the scope of ideological framing. The reality is more complex then you give it credit.
Would you rather read it from a Zionist? How do you feel about the first Israeli prime minister?
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” David Ben-Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.
One more by the same person:
“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. … Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice.” — David Ben Gurion. Quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.
And fuck him, all I am saying is that the history that led up today is more complex than you people are making it out to be. From Israel’s foundation until today, there is a lot that happened that wasn’t foreseen by this guy or anybody. It’s like how the US was founded similar principles but ended up being something that’s vastly different from it’s founders imagined, the same goes for other places like Turkey or New Zealand or Brazil or even Palestine. You can’t boil down one of the world’s oldest regions with the richest history during one it’s most turbulent times to a narrative made by western activists who boil down everything to “this side good that side bad lol”, that’s ignorance.
The ridiculous thing is that by acknowledging you have no idea how foundational Jabotinsky was to the genesis of the state of israel, you’ve revealed how little of the history you actually know and understand.
There is a direct line from Jabotinsky and Irgun to Menachem Begin, a former prime minister who was a member of Irgun and who later founded Herut, which eventually transformed into Likud, which is literally the current ruling party of the state with Netanyahu at its helm.
These are not fringe figures, revisionist zionism has been the dominant tendency for decades by this point, though it has intensified and become even more vicious and genocidal as the war on terror gave them ample cover and support for their brutality.
You insist it is complicated but clearly have no idea how uncomplicated it really is. The first zionist congress was in 1897, and the zionist occupation of Palestine began shortly after. Colonization started at a trickle but ramped up during the british mandate period. By the time israel declared independence, it had already been engaging in ethnic cleansing campaigns and massacres for years.
Do you not understand that israelis today very literally live in stolen homes, and are in the process of actively stealing and demolishing homes throughout the entire region? Every week more people have their homes and crops taken or destroyed by settlers, settlers who poison their livestock and take chainsaws to olive groves that have existed for centuries. Settlers who routinely attack and terrorize Palestinians under the watchful eyes of the occupation forces, who will step in to detain or murder Palestinians that resist in any capacity. Settler who have planted millions of european trees over the ruins of Palestinian villages to try to cover their crimes.
It has never not been a settler colonial project in service of creating an ethnostate. It has never not been rooted in violent dispossession and ethnic cleansing. There have been figures and groups that sought to soften the brutality, some early on that even had more of a vision of peaceful coexistance with the indigenous population, but that has never been a real manifestation of the zionist project.
While all history has complexity and nuance, it is not so complicated that we can’t see a very clear and consistent aggressor and occupier, alongside resistance to it which has been routinely portrayed as somehow unjustified. If you really think it’s complicated, I’d wager you’ve literally never even attempted to understand the history from the perspective of Palestinians. If you had, you wouldn’t be saying any of this shit. Do yourself a favor and learn so you stop being a part of the problem.
And I’ll say it again, you’re not speaking history, you’re speaking narrative and ideology. You don’t seem to understand that it doesn’t matter what the founding ideology is, what matters is what actually happened. The fact that you think you can boil this conflict down to “good vs bad” shows that your ignorance on the subject. There are a lot of conflicts in history that could be that simple, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a good example, but this is not one of those conflicts.
History is meant to be something that’s factual, because you’re retelling what happened. You’re not supposed to be taking sides and digest information from the perspective of a side, that defeats the whole purpose of being objective.
I’ll give you an example, during the 20th century, around 1 million Jews in the muslim world were forced out from their countries for no other reason than being Jewish. These people didn’t do anything wrong, they had nothing to do with the creation of Israel but they found themselves stripped of their property, communities (some of which are thousands of years old) and were forced to go there as that was the only place that would accept them. These people are as much victims as the victims of the Nakba, except this was even larger in scale… yet people like you don’t even acknowledge it’s existence.
Here’s another example, before the creation of Israel and Palestine, the British Mandate had a population of around 750k in the 1920s, and around 10% of those were Jewish. Those Jews were very religious, as opposed to many zionist Jews that migrated there. These Jews were vocal against the creation of Israel, but they became citizens anyway when Israel was established. Those Jews also happen to be from sects that have consistently had the highest birthrates over the decades, and so their descendants today can trace their roots back for thousands of years having never left the region. These people clearly don’t fit the narrative you are trying to paint, but again, you don’t acknowledge their existence.
Here’s yet another example, the Palestinian national identity formed around in the 1920s and 1930s, around the same time the Israeli national identity formed, and both became official after the 1947 partition plan. Prior to the British Mandate, there was no such thing as a Palestinian nation. The term “Palestine” was a colloquial one that loosely referred to the region that made up the “holy land”. The borders and identity that we associate with Palestine today didn’t exist during the Ottoman period, these are literally British inventions. The region was divided differently and the people there saw themselves differently. The region was filled with Turks, Jews, Christians, Arabs, and bunch of other ethnic and religious groups. They all saw themselves as natives to the region and they primarily identified with their ethnic/religious group first and then as Ottoman second. The same applies to Mamluks before the Ottoman Empire. In this case, the Arabs in the region saw themselves as a part of al bilad al sham (the Levant or greater Syria) which was a part of al ummah al arrabiya (the Arab nation). This is because until the British and the French drew random borders, the Arab world saw itself as a single nation. When people talk about the native nation of Palestine, they have no idea what they’re talking about.
I could keep going, but you get the idea. Like I said, it doesn’t matter how something was intended to happen, what matters was what actually happened. These are all events things that were not foreseen by Zionist philosophers living in god knows where. This is precisely why you can’t develop narratives based on narratives, what you will end up with is a distorted image of reality. I agree with you that what the Israeli government today is doing in Gaza and the West Bank is reprehensible and I agree with you that Zionist philosophers were pro-colonialism, but what I am saying is that only using these two points of the regions history or using a single perspective (especially a biased one) will blind to everything else that happened.
If you would like something to read, a good and free place to start would be this chapter of israeli historian Avi Shlaim’s book “Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine”, which is publicly available right here.
Some relevant excerpts about Jabotinsky specifically:
and later