"Herzl's vision of a national solution for European Jews was not original."
"This quasi-national scholastic, but by no means political, revolution was part of an exciting period of unprecedented Jewish cultural revivalism and renaissance. Its practitioners abandoned centuries of religious dogmatism for reason and science in search of solutions for the particular problem of Jewish existence in Europe. These scholars had preceded Herzl in their reinvention of Judaism as the ideology of a nation rather than a religion..."
"Herzl's initial inclination was to recruit the Jewish elite in the West for the Zionist cause. In Poland, Russian and Romania he found wretched, persecuted and underprivileged Jewish communities eagerly awaiting the arrival of a savior..."
"These early immigrants saw themselves as haluzim (pioneers), emulating, or at least borrowing from the reservoir of images common among, the white settlers who drove into the west of North America."
"Their main difficulty was money, so they turned to the richest Jew in Europe, Baron Edmond de Rothschild..."
"The foreign presence in Palestine created island of introverted settlers who viewed the local population as one of the physical hardships they were forced to cope with."
"For the early Zionists, the indigenous people were cheap laborers or producers of cash crops. For the more ideological Zionists, Palestinians were an enigma. They were defined as the shell nee lama, the 'hidden question;, both invisible and a puzzle."
"Herzl believed that Zionism could not succeed without the blessing of a European power. ...he chose the right ally in Britain. It was a logical choice given the recent British interest in the Middle East. ...Herzl succeed in inflaming the British colonialist and evangelist imagination when he offered the British government the opportunity to turn the arid El-Arish, near Gaza, into a Zionist oasis."
"the headquarters of the Zionist movement was in Berlin until the First World War."
"Zionism on the eve of the First World War remained a colonialist project motivated by national emotions. The private land owners wanted a muted version of nationalism; they desired a large Jewish territory but were content with a measured flow of immigrants. This position stemmed from their wish to employ Palestinian, in the preference to Jewish workers, who were more conscious of their rights as laborers. The Palestinian workers did not demand high wages and were better qualified for plantation work."
"Although still fewer than 50,000 people at the time, the Zionists antagonized the population at large, a feeling that found expression in the physical resistance by Palestinians. The settlers defended themselves, and later discovered that military force could be employed to obtain important goals, including non-defensive ones."
"At the start of WWI, the Zionists leadership had quickly tried to persuade the British government that the establishment of a jewish colony in Palestine was a superior British interest."
"On 2 November 1917, Lord Balfour declared British commitment to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine."
"East Europeanism was also at the heart of the construction of a new culture for the settlers. The cultural elite expanded into meaningful proportions in the 1920s, formulating the cultural code, canons, ambitions and pretensions of the Jewish community in Palestine. This community aspired to be an integral part of Western culture and looked for ways of eliminating any Middle Eastern of Arab characteristics in their society."
"Zionist leaders, who regarded segregation as a prerequisite for the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine."
"The Jewish leadership in 1942 declared that it would not be satisfied with less than the whole Mandate Palestine as a Jewish state."
"The second, and far more important, objective of the plan was the cleanse the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible. The main military force was the Hagana, which had several brigades. Each brigade received a list of villages it was to occupy. Most of the villages were destined to be destroyed."
"Several massacres were committed near the mixed towns, sometimes in retaliation for Palestinian attacks on Jewish convoys, but quite often they were unmitigated acts of brutality. These atrocities were not randomly committed; they were part of a master plan to rid the future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible. Like many master plans throughout history, Plan D was general, and in parts vague. No less important than the plan as the atmosphere created, which paved the way for the ethnic cleansing operation in Palestine. Thus, while the actions of the Hagana were part of a master plan, it had no clear and specific local directives. The plan was executed because the soldiers in the battlefield were orientated by a general attitude from above and motivated by remarks made by the Yishuv's leaders on the need to 'clean' the country. These remarks were translated into acts of depopulation by enthusiastic commanders on the ground, who knew that their actions would be justified in retrospect by the political leadership. By the time the British left in the middle of May, one-third of the Palestinian population had already been evicted (August 31 to May 1940."
Between May 1948 and January 1949, approximately 300 Palestinian villages were destroyed.
"Armed Israeli soldiers surrounded each village on three sides, and put the villagers to flight through the fourth side. In some villages, there were Arab volunteers were resisted by force, and when these villages were conquered they were immediately blown up and destroyed."
Only two of these originally 300 villages remain today, Fureidis and Jisr al-Zarqa.
By May 1948, "Out of 850,000 Palestinians living in the territories designated by the UN as a Jewish state, only 160,000 remained"
"When the government had decided either to turn them (the destroyed villages) into cultivated land or to build new Jewish settlements on their remains. A naming committee granted the new settlements Hebraized versions of the original Arab names... David Ben-Gurion explained that this was done as part of an attempt to prevent future claim to the villages."
"It first created the legal foundations for it anti-repatriation policy, passing legislation in the Knesset in 1950 that allowed the government to go on confiscating Palestinian property and use it for Jewish public purposes. In 1953, the army too was authorized to make use of Palestinian villages and fields. This legislative campaign provided the constitutional basis for the continued depopulation of Palestinian villages in the name of security."
"The continued depopulation was closely connected to Israel's official absorption and settlement policy. The government wished to settle Jewish immigrants on deserted Palestinian land and property as quickly as possible, and as close as possible to the disputed borders. But despite these efforts, the population in some areas adjacent to the borders remained Palestinian, and Israeli security experts feared that this geographical proximity would encourage cross-border cooperation among Palestinians. Though such alliances never materialized, this proximity served as one of the principal justifications, or rather pretext, for the imposition of harsh military rule on these areas."
Ilan Pappe A History of Modern Palestine
I'm tired of typing, but I hope it is clear that what is happening in Palestine is a continuation of the murderous, fascists, fascist, and colonialist Zionist ideology.
