From here.
The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz interviewed Benny Morris, one of the Israeli “new historians” who in the 1980s used Zionist sources to validate Palestinian accounts of the Nakba – the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 during which Zionist militias perpetrated rapes, arbitrary murders and dozens of massacres.
Morris explained that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister – like Meir, a pillar of the nominally secular, left-wing Labor Party – personally directed the deliberate “transfer” of the Palestinian people from much of their homeland.
“Ben-Gurion was a transferist,” Morris explained. “He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.”
“I don’t hear you condemning him,” the Haaretz interviewer told Morris.
“Ben-Gurion was right,” Morris responded. “If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.”
But for Morris, Ben-Gurion’s mistake is that he did not do enough ethnic cleansing.
“If he [Ben-Gurion] was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job,” Morris asserted.
“I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types,” Morris said. “But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country – the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River.”
“It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake,” Morris added. “If he had carried out a full expulsion – rather than a partial one – he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations.”
No one who calls themselves a Zionist, whether on the “left” or the far-right, can fundamentally disagree with Morris.
That’s why no one who calls themselves a Zionist supports the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
I’m strongly anti-Israel and I think the Zionist project needs to be halted and eventually disbanded in its hardcore form. I don’t have issue with a moderate Zionism that simply says that Jews can go live in Israel and its a Jewish homeland but they don’t have a right to uproot or discriminate against the Arabs. This is not a common form of Zionism as all existing forms boil down to uprooting the Arabs and having Jews take their place.
Morris is said to be genocidal in this question. Be that as it may, I can’t argue that he’s wrong. If Ben-Gurion would have ethnically cleansed all of the Arabs in Israel and conquered the West Bank from Jordan and uprooted all of the Arabs from there too, this would have solved a lot of the Arab problem at least on a local level.
There would still be Palestinian guerrillas infiltrating Israel from Jordan, the Sinai, Syria, and Lebanon, but these borders are presently well protected and infiltration are rare. All of the Arab-Israeli wars would still probably have ensued because these were launched from countries outside of Israel like Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. Ugly and even evil conclusions aren’t necessarily false on their face. They may be correct and still morally wrong. People don’t seem to get that.
The article is via Electric Intifada. I don’t mind these guys. They call for a one-state solution. I’d like to point out that none of the armed groups seem to be calling for this other than the PFLP and the DFLP.
The Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade is the illegal armed wing of Fatah. Fatah gave up its weapons and became a political party. It now ruled the West Bank. Fatah is on record as supporting a two state solution, as is the DFLP. Off the record, Fatah officials say they support a two state solution as an initial positive step in resolving the Palestinian Question, so it seems like they don’t see two states as an end but more of a starting point.
The AAMB is made up of Fatah members who rejected the disarmament and took up arms. The Fatah party doesn’t really help this group at all, that is the political party no longer has an official armed wing that it supports. However, the AAMB makes a lot of anti-Semitic statements along the line that followers of the Jewish religion have no place in their country.
The position of Hamas on the Jews in Palestine is unknown, as is that of Islamic Jihad. 10 years ago, an IJ leader said the Jews could say but they would have to live under Islamic law. Two years ago a top Hamas leader stated that Jews have always lived in Palestine with Arabs, and the presence of Jews in Palestine per se was not an issue.
Nevertheless, the position of the PFLP bases I read is that all the Jews need to leave. I strongly oppose this position.
One Palestinian on Twitter recently said that realistically after a referendum and a single state was created in Palestine (including Israel), 90
The Jews lie when they say there are no Jews in the West Bank. There are 550 Samaritans residing in the West Bank and they cause absolutely zero problems nor is there a single dram of oppression or discrimination against them. Although the question is controversial the best analysis of these people is that they are indeed Jews, albeit of an odd variety. They are very religious people akin to religious Arabs, so the two group share a strong religious view.
I spoke to an Orthodox Jew once who supported Israel. The conversation went on for a bit until he told me that he could live with Hamas as they were just as religious as he and his fellow Orthodox. The idea was that two extremely religious groups could live together due to their passionate religiosity. That hasn’t worked out real well in India though, nor did it work in Yemen. He said his real enemies were secular Jews and that Hamas was a potential ally!
