"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 own country."
-Theodor Herzl in his diary, 1895.
"As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the (Palestinians) to impede us, they will not sell these hopes – not for any sweet words nor for any tasty morsel, because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left."
- Vladimir 'Ze'ev' Jabotinsky from “The Iron Wall', 1922.
"The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war".
-David Ben Gurion in a letter to his son Amos,
1937.
The present scenes of wide-spread starvation in the Gaza Strip alongside plans to construct a large concentration camp complex in Rafah has finally brought home to most but the most hardened deniers that the State of Israel has since the aftermath of the October 7th, 2023 attack by militant Palestinian militias being embarked on an enterprise designed to purge Gaza of its inhabitants. But this draconian state-backed policy of mass murder and the intended expulsion of an indigenous population is not a state of affairs which has haphazardly developed out of the events of October 7th. Neither is it an original idea conceptualised by the Kahanite members of Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. On the contrary, the idea of purging Palestine of its non-Jewish inhabitants lies at the core of the ideology which undergirds Israel. Each of the early key figures who defined the objectives of Political Zionism emphasised the requirement of “transfer”, this the euphemism for removing the Palestinian people from their homeland in order to make way for a geographically contiguous landmass that would constitute a Jewish state. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine did not end with what the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba of 1948. It continued after the seizure of the West Bank, Gaza and the whole of Jerusalem following the Six Day War of June 1967. While the West Bank has been incrementally colonised and Gaza continually besieged, the right-wing extremist drift of Israeli society as represented by largely religious fundamentalist Mizrahi Jews –but also including the settler class and Revisionist Zionists- have in recent years become frustrated at what they perceive as the ‘uncompleted’ Zionist project begun by mainly ‘Liberal Zionist’ Ashkenazi Jews, and have agitated for the establishment of what they consider to be ‘Israel proper’ on the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael), which in its maximalist expression exceeds the area between the proverbial ‘river and the sea.’
The theory
While the phrase “A land without a people for a people without a land”
became one of the founding maxims upon which the adherents of Political Zionism
sought to justify the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the reality was
altogether more different. Even the Balfour Declaration, the letter written in
1917 by Lord Arthur Balfour and sent to Lord Walter Rothschild which Zionists
hold as one of the sacred foundational texts of the Israeli state, referred to
“existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. The land of Palestine, which is
located in the Levant, has been inhabited by human beings for over half a
million years. Zionism’s leaders were fully aware of the towns, cities and
villages settled by indigenous dwellers and they consistently explained a
necessary precondition to creating a state for Jews would involve the uprooting
and resettlement of what had become over the centuries an Arabised population.
Such an endeavour would necessarily involve ethnic cleansing.
The word “transfer” was the euphemism used by the leaders of Zionism and such transfer was aimed to be achieved by both voluntary and involuntary means that ranged from inducements to forceful methods. While Theodor Herzl wrote about finding employment for the natives outside of the Judenstaat he had envisaged, David Ben Gurion, although initially projecting what was disingenuously referred to as a policy of “accommodation”, remained wedded to the idea of removing the Arabs from their land. In June 1938, Ben Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, the organisation which he headed, that “with compulsory transfer we (would) have a vast area (for settlement). I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” The previous year he had privately written that the transfer of the Arab population on a desired scale would have to be accomplished opportunely under the cover of war.
But Ben Gurion’s public utterances were more guarded, and others had begun developing other expressions of Zionism which were more explicit in outlining how a Jewish state would have to be achieved. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the key figure of what came to be known as Revisionist Zionism, articulated the inevitable use of force if Zionism was to achieve its ultimate goal.
In his essay, “The Iron Wall”, Jabotinsky called on Zionists to drop all pretence about reaching an accommodation with the Arab population of Palestine, insisting that in attaining the goal of transforming Palestine “from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority” a militaristic policy of colonisation had to be pursued.
It is important to note that all Zionists regardless of whether they are designated as secular "liberal Zionists", "revisionist Zionists" or "religious fundamentalist Zionists" are united in the belief in the idea of the Land of Israel, an area of land that is larger than the modern Israel created in 1948 and expanded in 1967.
Maximalist expression of Eretz Yisrael encompasses a swathe of land between the brook of the River Nile in Egypt and the River Euphrates in Iraq. It includes the whole or parts of the modern states of Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Zionist land claims extending to Lebanese territory south of the Litani River were made by Ben Gurion at the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War.
But while the precise extent of the territory of what is also referred to as “Greater Israel” may differ, among Israelis and Zionist Diaspora Jews, there is unanimity, for instance, in a belief that the West Bank approximates to the biblical region of Judea and Samaria.
The founding charter of the mainstream Likud Party of current Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu explicitly states that “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Likud is the successor party of Herut, the political party which was effectively the reconstituted Mandate era terrorist organisation Irgun. Led by Menachem Begin, a disciple of Jabotinsky, Irgun’s claim of territory extended to Trans-Jordan. The claim to Jordan is no longer publicly insisted upon, but in 1977, the year in which Likud broke the hold of Labor Zionist parties by coming to power, a key mantra of its electoral campaign was that “Judea and Samaria” would “not be handed to any foreign administration.”
The implication that the native Palestinians do not have a right to inhabit the West Bank is clear. And although the specific means of how they would be transferred was never publicly articulated, it is clear that the overarching goal of their removal remained. Indeed, while researching a biography on the late Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu in the 1970s, the English writer Max Hastings overheard the young Binyamin Netanyahu invoke Ben Gurion’s calculation that war presented a useful means for ejecting the Palestinian population. “If we get it right,” Hastings recalled Netanyahu saying, “we'll have a chance to get all the Arabs out … We can clear the West Bank and sort out Jerusalem."
It is important to remember that this ultimate goal was not limited to the Israeli political right. Israel’s founding father Ben Gurion was a Labor Zionist who did not believe in the right of a state of Palestine to exist. And those on the now virtually extinct Israeli political left did not manifest a sincere belief in co-existing with a viable Palestinian state as even the Oslo accord was an agreement predicated on a Palestinian entity which would amount to something much less than full statehood.
Moreover, both Israeli left and right have deliberately refrained from declaring what they consider as Israel’s final borders, an omission at the heart of Ben Gurion’s proclamation in 1948 of what he referred to as Eretz Yisrael.
The only logical inference from this perpetual state of affairs is a universal belief among past and present Israelis in the statement by Yosef Weitz, the head of the Colonisation Department of the Jewish Agency and known as the “Architect of Transfer,” who said that “There is no room for both peoples in this country.”
The practice
For the early Zionist settlers who were known as the Yishuv, the acquisition of land was undertaken through land purchases under the auspices of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) which by 1945 amounted to 5.6% of the total land area of the Mandate. The JNF worked closely with the Zionist Settlement Department (ZSD), an organisation charged with evicting Palestinian tenants from land sold to the Zionists. But it was clear that the objective of acquiring a substantial contiguous area of land within which a new state would be birthed could only be achieved by force of arms. This would necessarily involve removing the British administrators from Palestine and then ejecting a large swathe of Palestinian Arabs from their homesteads.
The British officially withdrew from Palestine on May 15th, 1948 after a terroristic campaign spearheaded by Irgun and Lehi. The former, which specialised in bomb attacks, notably carried out the King David Hotel atrocity in Jerusalem on July 22nd 1946, while the latter, more widely known as The Stern Gang, developed an expertise in assassinations such as that of Lord Moyne, Britain’s Middle East envoy who was gunned down in Cairo on November 6th, 1944.
The British withdrawal signalled the commencement of a war between the military wing of the Jewish Agency and Arab armies. The primary objective of the Arab militaries was not to liberate Palestine but to hold onto territory apportioned to the Arab Palestinians under the UN Partition Plan, an endeavour which was null and void because it was rejected by the Security Council which sent it back to the General Assembly for further deliberation. The Partition Plan, which proposed to unfairly take tracts of agricultural land and sea ports from the Arab Palestinian population, who were the overwhelming majority, was an initiative which Ben Gurion outwardly pretended to accept, but which he privately rejected.
The idea that the Jewish Agency would accept the division of Palestine along the lines of the UN Partition Plan and be content with establishing a Jewish state within such borders in perpetuity simply does not stand the test of historical data. Acceptance would also have been inconsistent with the fundamental belief held by all Zionists in the concept of the god-promised land of Eretz Yisraeli, which Ben Gurion explicitly mentions in his speech declaring the coming into existence of the State of Israel.
The truth is that Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders had a longstanding plan to ethnically cleanse as much of Palestine as they could of its Arab inhabitants. This evidence, found in the state archives of Israel has come to be known as the “Village Files”. Compiled over the course of several decades by Haganah-trained intelligence officers, the “Village Files” consisted of detailed information on Palestinian villages garnered through aerial photographs, topographical maps and records on individuals living in each village. The files recorded things such as the arability of land and access to water sources. They were not created merely to provide information to the JNF about purchasing Arab land, they explicitly functioned as vital sources of intelligence which would be used in the war of conquest and expulsion envisaged by Zionism.
While most of the massacres and expulsions of Palestinians occurred after May 1948, it is wrong to presume that no actions were taken by Zionist militias against Palestinian populations before the official withdrawal of British troops and the incursions in Palestine by Arab armies. The ethnic cleansing of Arab inhabited villages and towns had already begun in December of 1947 with a series of massacres in places such as Al-Tira, Yehiday, Qazaza and al-Muwaylih in Jaffa. Thus, it was the case that the completion of the withdrawal of British troops in May was the prompt for the Jewish militias to intensify the course of ethnic cleansing through what was earmarked as Plan Dalet.
The main goal of Plan Dalet was for the Haganah, the main army, and the Palmach, its special forces, to seize as much land from the Arab Palestinians in order to create a contiguous area of territory -including the water resources of the Galilee area- in which Jews would be in the overwhelming majority. The Haganah were given operational orders to uproot Palestinian villagers, expel them and demolish the villages. The village files were extremely useful since they contained the names of males between the ages of 16 and 60. They also identified the families with members who participated in the Arab uprising between 1936 and 1939 and pinpointed those Palestinians who were political active and needed to be shot on the spot. When Jewish militias entered a village all male inhabitants would be lined up and a Palestinian collaborator, who would usually have a sack over their head, would pick out those who had been earmarked for execution.
The terrorist militias, Irgun and Lehi also played a crucial role in purging Palestinian settlements, most infamously at Deir Yassin. At Deir Yassin where Palestinian women were raped, pregnant women’s foetuses were cut open and babies decapitated, the horrors were recorded by a range of independent sources including representatives of the Swiss Red Cross; Richard Catling, a British inspector general in Mandate-era Palestine; and a doctor and nurse from Government Hospital, Jerusalem. There the murders and mutilations inflicted on non-combatant women, children and old men proved to be an effective psychological operation designed to instil fear into neighbouring communities. The Jewish militias used vehicles travelling with megaphones to broadcast to other Arab villages urging their inhabitants to flee. Most heeded this and fled in terror –something Menachem Begin himself acknowledged in his book The Revolt when writing “The Arabs began fleeing in panic shouting ‘Deir Yassin’.”
This reality stands in stark contrast to the Zionist propaganda narrative which falsely claimed that the Arabs left their villages in order to clear a path for the advancing Arab armies. Indeed, the existence of Plan Dalet, the village files and the atrocities at Deir Yassin, as well as those that occurred in places such as Khinsas, Balad al-Shaykh, Sa’sa, Tantura, Lydd and Safsaf have been written about by Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, both Israeli historians who based much of their work on the programme of ethnic cleansing from documents contained in the state archives of Israel.
The Zionist claim that war was forced onto the Jews of Palestine and that the subsequent atrocities and population displacement occurred under the “fog of war” is one of many myths associated with Israel’s formation. It was the fulfilment of Ben Gurion’s dream of effecting depopulation and mass expulsion under the cover of war. His goal, as was that of other Zionists spanning the spectrum of his Left Labor and Jabotinsky’s Right Zionist Revisionism, was to acquire maximum territories with majority Jewish populations. Zionists did not want to live alongside Palestinians and the act of purging them was seen as one of Tihur, the Hebrew word for “purification.”
The callousness employed in achieving the objective of what was declared by Ben Gurion to be the modern state of Israel proved unnerving to some Zionist leaders. Aharon Zisling, the Minister of Agriculture under the Provisional Government established by Ben Gurion wrote:
"Now the Jews have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is shaken".
Post Nakba: The strategy for ethnic cleansing and Land Usurpation.
Palestinian villages continued to be purged as were larger population centres. A prime example of this was the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the towns of Lydda and Ramleh, both of which lay on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Once conquered, the properties of Arabs were then registered under the trusteeship of bodies such as the Haganah-created Committee for Arab Properties in Villages and those designed to cater to major Palestinian towns and cities. Then another Haganah-created body, The Committee for Abandoned Arab Property, was charged with disposing of Arab property to members of the Yishuv.
The seizure of Palestinian property by the newly created State of Israel was given the veil of legality by the passage of several pieces of legislation. In late 1948, the Emergency Regulations Relative to Property of Absentees was issued. This was followed by the Law of the Acquisition of Absentee Property. They were designed to deprive Palestinians who had been expelled beyond the Armistice Line and those who remained within the borders of Israel.
By the end of 1948, over 80% of the Palestinian inhabitants of what became Israel were expelled. But the twin policies of expulsion and expropriation did not end after the Nakba. The conquests of Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem after the Six Day War of June 1967 provided Israel with the opportunity to continue its quest to ethnically cleanse Palestine. In the West Bank a great expanse of land within the Jordan Valley was taken over for Jewish settlement and more than two-thirds of the Palestinian population of 300,000 was displaced.
After 1967, the strategy of incremental colonisation lay at the heart of Israeli state policy. Jewish settlements were inserted into both Gaza and the West Bank. However, the density of the Palestinian population in Gaza led to the dismantling of Jewish settlements and an Israeli withdrawal in August 2005. This was followed by the policy of besiegement which led to Gaza being turned into what many considered to be an open air concentration camp. On the West Bank, the policy of incrementally expropriating Palestinian land and water resources while increasing Jewish settlements continued. Settlers, backed by soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), are able to take land by force without legal consequences. The settler communities are connected by highways which can only be used by Jews, while Palestinian communities have steadily become more constricted and isolated in pockets of territory which some declare to be akin to the Bantustans of Apartheid-era South Africa.
Jerusalem, which the Jewish militias had failed to take in whole in 1948, has also been the target for gradual settler colonisation. Ben Gurion had described the initial failure as “a lamentation for generations.” In the eastern part of the city, efforts geared towards ethnically cleansing non-Jewish communities have been focused on implementing residency laws which make it difficult for those who leave to return. A three-part test has to be passed lest a Palestinian will have their residency permit revoked. Firstly, the Palestinian must not live more than 7 years abroad and must not receive permanent residency or citizenship from a country abroad. Secondly, the onus is on a Palestinian to prove that their “centre of life” must be in Jerusalem, and thirdly, Palestinians must not breach their “allegiance “to Israel”. In all, the Israeli authorities have revoked almost 15,000 residency permits of Palestinians since 1967.
Many did not understand at the time of its happening that far from being a defensive war in which Israel pre-emptively struck at its Arab adversaries to forestall an attack, the June War of 1967 was in fact engineered by Israel. Ben Gurion’s lamentation about 1948 went further than the failure to conquer all of Jerusalem. The dream of establishing Eretz Yisrael meant that the Palestinian West Bank, known to Zionists as Judea and Samaria, had to be wrested from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Other territories within what would come to be described as Greater Israel would also be conquered. After the war Egyptian-controlled Gaza, Egypt’s Sinai and Syria’s Golan Heights –in addition to the West Bank came under Israel’s control.
A 1948-style Nakba was not possible because Israel was given a limited timeframe by its benefactor the United States to conduct its war. A prolonged war in which Israel seized even larger swathes of territory from Egypt and Syria risked provoking a response by the Soviet Union which supplied arms to Egypt and Syria.
So although up to 325,000 Palestinians fled eastwards into Jordan, Israel was left with a large population of Palestinians to administer through a military government. The same applied to Gaza, while the Golan Heights was eventually annexed in 1981.
It is clear that the present quest to purge both Gaza and the West Bank of Palestinians is not the finite goal of the contemporary inheritors of Zionism. Political Zionism intrinsically seeks to expand Israel further from the territories it was able to seize in 1948 and 1967.This reach for “Greater Israel” was explicitly alluded to by Netanyahu who in an interview conducted with i24 TV News in August 2025 said that he believed himself to be on a “historic and spiritual mission” and that he was very much attached to the vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel. The attempts by Israel to occupy south Lebanon up to the River Litani and its expansion of occupied Syrian territory after the fall of the Assad government testify to this.
The quest for Greater Israel is a long term plan embedded in the ideology of Zionism. It is designed to be accomplished under the cover of war and through the destabilisation efforts of Israel’s allies and proxies working to achieve the balkanisation of Israel’s neighbours.
Balkanisation has a twin objective. The first is that weakening such states provides Israel with a greater level of long-term security, and secondly, the breaking up of such a state provides it with the opportunity for territorial acquisition. The former has been explicitly alluded to in policy documents such as the “Yinon Plan” from 1982, the “Securing the Realm” policy paper from 1996 and various papers by the now defunct U.S.-based Project for the New American Century. Indeed, PNAC’s overarching goal of destroying Israel’s Arab and Muslim enemies found expression in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks of 2001 when retired General Wesley Clark revealed that he had seen a policy paper at the Pentagon which aimed to “take out” seven Arab and Muslim states over a five-year period beginning with “Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran”. A “hardnosed” group of persons Clark would explain had “hijacked” U.S. foreign policy without a debate. He was referring to the resolutely pro-Zionist neoconservative ideologues who proliferated the administration led by President George W. Bush.
These policies go back to Israel’s founding. As mentioned earlier, Ben Gurion made a claim on south Lebanon where he hoped that a Christian state could be carved out. But this was not predicated on benevolent feelings towards Lebanon’s Christian community. The diaries of Moshe Sharett, an early prime minister of Israel, reveal the cynicism behind this goal. Sharett recalled that Moshe Dayan sought to profit from Lebanon’s interdenominational rivalries by using a Christian proxy army of defectors from the Lebanese National Army who would declare a Christian state which would be eventually annexed by Israel.
The attempt to accomplish this during Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon in the 1980s when it allied with the Christian officer-led South Lebanon Army ended in failure as did the effort of Gush Emunim, a now defunct ultranationalist religious Zionist settler organisation, to settle Jews in south Lebanon. Israel’s plot to extend its borders into Lebanon was met with criticism from Sharett who warned that that it would be “an adventurous speculation upon the well-being and existence of others.”
His words resonate today as Netanyahu seeks to redraw the map of the Middle East.
Zionist colonial mentality and amorality
Vladimir Jabotinsky was honest in his assessment that Zionism was a “colonising adventure”. He also asserted in “The Iron Wall” that it would stand or fall on the question of armed force. Implicit in this prerequisite for the creation of a Jewish state on Palestinian land was an accompanying morality in which the Jewish resolve for self-determination was a “sacred principle” which had primacy over everything else, including the rights of the native Arab population.
“The Ethics of Zionism” which he published a week after “The Iron Wall” made vague and contradictory references to Arabs also enjoying rights. But this did not deviate from the fact that he identified Zionism as fundamentally a settler colonial movement in which coercion, not consent, would be the dominating factor in the relationship between Jew and Arab.
Political Zionism, it should be reminded, emerged during the 19th century at a time when European forms of nationalism which were xenophobic and explicitly anti-Jewish were developing. It was a period also of expansion and consolidation of European empires in Africa and Asia. The parallels between Zionism and Western European colonialism are stark. It has mirrored those European settler colonialist projects which created apartheid societies and ethnically cleansed indigenous populations.
Both forms of colonialism mandate that a group of people have total political, economic and cultural domination over a territory inhabited by a native population. Zionism also insists that the goal must be to eventually expel the indigenous population. Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that a brand of racism and ethno-supremacism would evolve.
Anti-Arab racism was apparent from the start. In his essay “Truth from Eretz Israel” which was published in 1891, Ahad Ha’am (born Asher Ginsberg), the purveyor of “Cultural Zionism”, wrote that the Jewish settlers “treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty; trespass unjustly, beat them shamelessly for no sufficient reason and even take pride in doing so.” He also noted that Jews thought of Arabs as “primitive men of the desert” and as a “donkey-like nation.” Jabotinsky himself thought that “Culturally they are five hundred years behind us. They have neither our endurance nor our determination.”
This view of Arabs, largely those of European-originated Ashkenazi Jews, was transferred to those Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin (referred today as Mizrahi) even as they sought to elevate them above their Arab counterparts. For Ben Gurion, “Even the immigrant of North Africa, who looks like a savage, who has never read a book in his life, not even a religious one, and doesn’t even know how to say his prayers, either wittingly or unwittingly, has behind him a spiritual heritage of thousand years.”
Political Zionism was after all a movement created by European Jews for European Jews, and the racism towards Arab Jews embodied in the “Yemenite Children Affair” in the years following the creation of Israel has been recounted by numerous Arab Jewish figures such as Avi Shlaim. According to Shlaim, the vast majority of Arab Jews arriving in the “Promised Land” were sprayed with the insecticide DDT before being herded to transit camps where the living conditions were dire.
The superiority complex of Ashkenazis who form the traditional ruling class of Israeli society in contrast to the underclass status of Mizrahis was, Max Hastings observed, reflected by the likes of the young Binyamin Netanyahu. Referring to the Golani Brigade, an infantry force which was composed of many Jews of North African and Yemenite origin, Netanyahu joked that “They’re okay as long as they’re led by white officers.”
This backdrop of anti-Arab racism has for long formed a central part of of the indoctrination of children in the Israeli education system. In a 2007 article titled “The portrayal of Arabs in textbooks in the Jewish school system in Israel”, Ismael Abu-Saad identified what he determined as the three dominating influences in the portrayal of Arabs in Ministry of Education-approved textbooks. First is Orientalism, the belief that Zionism’s mission was to establish a civilised state in the midst of culturally inferior people. Second is that the territory encompassing historic Palestine belongs exclusively to the Jewish people by virtue of the presence of on the land in biblical times, and third is that Palestinian objections to the Zionist project is a continuum of the ages-long persecution of Jewry.
In her book Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan examined a range of Israeli textbooks and concluded that right from the start of their education, children are inculcated with a belief system that accepts the “Israeli policy of expansion”, and that the textbooks are consistent in this objective regardless of whether “they were published during leftist or right-wing (education) ministries.” As many examinations in this area have shown, Peled-Elhanan argues that Palestinians are often portrayed in Orientalist ways, noting that “all (the books) represent (Palestinians) in racist icons or demeaning classificatory images such as terrorists, refugees and primitive farmers – the three ‘problems’ they constitute for Israel.”
Israeli children internalise negative feelings about Palestinians who are depicted as stone-throwing miscreants and gun-wielding terrorists who present a perpetual menace to Israeli life. This stands in contrast to the often used accusation by Israeli figures and their Western supporters that Palestinians teach their children to hate, an argument that on reflection is projection.
This dehumanisation of Palestinians during the education process provides the backdrop for the norms and values displayed by in Israeli society and the armed forces that represent it. In truth, it is merely perpetuating the old attitudes of Zionism’s original colonisers whose leaders, beginning with Ben Gurion have placed little value on the lives of Arabs. Far from being the “world’s most moral army”, the IDF and its precursor Jewish militias have traditionally shown little restraint when contemplating the fate of Palestinian and Arab non-combatants, including women and children. In fact there is ample evidence that demonstrates purposeful attacks on Arab civilians as a permanent feature of Israeli military doctrine.
A starting point for an examination could be Ben Gurion’s words in his Independence War Diary in 1948 in which he wrote that Israel must “strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise the action is inefficient. At the place of action there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.” One soldier who famously abided by this principle was Ariel Sharon. In 1953, Major Sharon, a favourite of Ben Gurion’s, was in command of Unit 101, which massacred Palestinian villagers –most of them women and children- during a reprisal raid on the West Bank village of Qibya.
Writing for Ha’aretz newspaper in 1978, the military analyst Ze’ev Schiff summed up an interview given by IDF Chief of the General Staff Lieutenant General Mordechai Gur to Al HaMishmar about a key strategy employed by his troops during an invasion of Lebanon:
In
South Lebanon we struck the civilian population consciously because they
deserved it … the importance of Gur’s remarks is the admission that the Israeli
army has always struck civilian populations, purposefully and consciously …
even when Israel’s settlements had not been struck.
Three years later Abba Eban, Israel’s former foreign minister and UN ambassador, wrote in the Jerusalem Post a response to a letter written by Menachem Begin, the serving Prime Minister:
The
picture that emerges (from Begin’s letter) is of an Israel wantonly inflicting
every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood
reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor myself would dare mention by
name.
The next invasion of Lebanon in 1982 provided ample evidence of Israeli targeting civilian populations through bombing campaigns conducted by its air force. Most of the 20,000 people killed during the conflict were civilians and many were far removed from the battle sectors, something acknowledged by Lieutenant General Yitzhak Rabin who the Jerusalem Post recorded in 1988 as noting that Israeli raids in remote Lebanese villages inflicted civilian casualties which “is precisely our aim.”
The Lebanese civilian population also bore the brunt of many operations carried out by the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF), a phantom terror organisation established by Israeli military intelligence in 1979. The purpose of the FLLF was to cause chaos among the sectarian communities in Lebanon. A Mossad officer quoted in Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations said, “We are speaking here about mass killing for killing’s sake, to sow chaos and alarm among civilians.” The FLLF carried out a series of indiscriminate bombings in the country between 1979 and 1983 which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent Lebanese citizens.
The punitive rationale of attacking civilians is undergirded in the military doctrines the Israeli military has developed over the decades. The “Dahiya Doctine”, which was drawn up in 2006 by then Major General Gadi Eisenkot, a future IDF Chief of the General Staff, which specifically promotes the targeting of civilian populated areas when Israel takes military action against Lebanon. Parallel to this is the “Mowing the Grass Doctrine” employed in Gaza which involved the physical destruction of a portion of Gaza’s civilian population and civil amenities alongside the task of degrading the capabilities of Hamas during the periodic conflicts that ensued prior to October 7th, 2023.
One of the practices employed by Israeli forces during the occupation of has been the use of Palestinians as human shields under the so-called Neighbour Procedure. This has meant that people picked at random on the basis that they are “the terrorist’s non-dangerous neighbour” are forced to approach the residences of suspected militants to attempt to persuade the designated militant to surrender.
All of the aforementioned, which stem from a pattern of behaviour and national mentality which the early Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett referred to as Israel’s “Sacred Terrorism”, utterly contradict the “purity of arms” doctrine, a purported core value of the IDF. A central tenet of the “Spirit of the Israel Defence Forces” is that an Israeli soldier “will not use their weapon or power to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners and will do everything in their power to prevent harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.”
This clearly has not been the experience of Palestinian and other Arab civilians who have lived under Israeli occupation or have shared the same ethnicity or nationality with a militia or national armed force in conflict with the IDF. Neither have captives of the IDF been spared the sadistic techniques employed by Israeli soldiers on Arabs in captivity.
The post-October 7th conflict with Hamas can no longer be doubted to be a campaign of mass murder of Gaza’s Palestinian population as a prelude to their removal from the territory. In seeking to destroy all vestiges of civil amenities, the IDF has routinely and systematically targeted homes, hospitals, institutions of education, desalination plants and places of worship.
IDF snipers, aided by foreign mercenaries from the United States, have targeted Palestinian men, women and children queuing for food at Israeli designated depots, a continuum of the practice of maiming and killing unarmed civilians during the Palestinian “Right to Return” marches of 2018.
Israeli soldiers were also involved in widespread looting of Palestinian property in Gaza whose authorities claimed that up to $25 million had been stolen in the form of cash, gold and valuables during the first three months of the invasion.
The conflict has also revealed an industrial scale level of torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners. When questions were raised over the routine sodomizing of Palestinian captives, protests erupted to protect the soldiers involved in one of the dungeons Sde Teiman in the Negev Desert and they were widely celebrated in the Israeli media as doing the right thing.
In August of 2024, the author of the IDF’s code of ethics, Asa Kasher, told Ha’aretz that the IDF was disregarding the code, saying that “many thousands of non-involved Gazans have died, a fact which has to be considered by anyone whose principles include the sanctity of human life.”
Kasher was clear in his assessment of gross shortcomings of the Israeli army:
Every aspect of intentional harm to non-combatants is wrong. It violates the duty to preserve human dignity, it violates the principle of distinguishing between hostile forces and non-combatants according to the just war theory, and violates the IDF’s value of the purity of arms.
Kasher toned down his criticism in an interview conducted with Kan Reshet Bet in early August 2025 when asserting that while he had reviewed hundreds of films sent to him of soldiers in Gaza falling short of the standards set by the code of ethics, he remained unconvinced about the claim that they were committing genocide.
However, in an opinion piece published in Ha’aretz on August 18th 2025, he reiterated his criticism of the overall moral bearing of the IDF. Dismissing the frequent claim that the IDF was the “most moral army in the world” as “dangerous” sloganeering, Kaher’s six point examination of this claim could only find it to be substantively justified in regard to demonstrated efforts of the Israeli Air Force’s tactical rescue unit in evacuating wounded soldiers from the battlefield to hospitals. He was clear that statements made by a high ranking military officer, cabinet ministers and members of the Knesset that there were “no non-combatants in Gaza” opened the door to what he saw as “blatantly immoral conduct.”
The question of morality and Israel is crucial because the Zionist state styles itself as the “Jewish state”. And while the religion of Judaism posits its creed, as other religions do, as a bastion of moral and ethical principles, Judaism has been invoked by Jewish rabbis as condoning the slaughter of non-combatants and rape. For instance, during a Passover sermon delivered in 2001, the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who once served as Chief Rabbi for Israel’s Serphardic community, called for the annihilation of Arabs. His words were:
It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable…waste their seed and exterminate them and vanish them from this world.
And Manis Friedman the rabbi who famously re-directed Bob Dylan to Judaism after his flirtation with born-again Christianity offered the following counsel in response to a question posed in Moment magazine’s “Ask the Rabbis” column:
The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: destroy their holy
sites. Kill men, women and children (and their cattle).
On the question of rape the present head of the Military Rabbinate of the IDF Brigadier General Eyal Krim implied in 2002 that it was permissible to rape non-Jewish women during wartime. He later claimed that his words were taken out of context as he was referring to the pre-modern era. Yet, there is scepticism over the rabbi’s clarification given the blessing given by another rabbi to one of the Israeli soldiers accused of gang-raping Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman. Rabbi Meir Mazuz told the soldier that he had done “nothing wrong.” This was the feeling of the group of ultra-nationalists who stormed two detention centres in protest at the arrival of military police to question the suspects. The justification for raping Palestinian prisoners found support among some MPs in the Knesset including Likud’s Hanoch Milwidsky, as well as from Itamar Ben Gvir, the Kahanist cabinet member.
The inevitability of Resistance
Zionism’s core objective of establishing a state on already inhabited land was opposed by many Jews who could foresee the turmoil which would be caused. Ahad Aham predicted it when he wrote that the Arabs would “not easily step aside”. Jabotinsky also understood this when noting that they were not “a rabble” who were “ready to be bribed or sell out their homeland for a railroad network.” They were to the contrary what he termed a “living people” who would not voluntarily cede their land until “there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us.”
Yet, the default position of the defence of the Zionist project has been to portray the Palestinian people as being unreasonable for refusing to vacate their land. But in what is reputedly the defining speech of Zionism, Lieutenant General Moshe Dayan acknowledged the inevitability of Palestinian resistance after the ambushing and killing of Roi Rotberg, a Jewish settler, near Gaza in 1956. In his eulogy for Rotberg, Dayan therefore reminded Israelis that they must forever be alert to the inevitability of attacks and embrace the ethos of the sword:
Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken. This is the fate of our generation. This is our life’s choice – to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.
What is more, many military officers have gone on record to assert that had they been Palestinian they would have taken up arms against Israel. Consider the words of Ami Ayalon a former naval commander who headed the Shayetet 13 commando unit:
As far as the Palestinians are concerned, they lost their land, which is why when people ask me, what would you do if you were Palestinian? I say that if someone came and stole my land, the land of Israel, I would fight him without limits.
And Ehud Barak, the former IDF Chief of the Genera Staff and former Prime Minister, caused a stir in 1998 when he told the journalist Gideon Levy in an interview that had he been a Palestinian he “would have entered one of the terror organisations and fought from there.”
The issue of land dispossession caused by the buying of land by Jewish migrants was a key cause of the Arab Revolt of from 1936 to 1939. That along with fears of the consequences of continued Jewish immigration, as well as their political disenfranchisement prompted the resistance which was ultimately put down through a counterinsurgency strategy devised by then Captain Orde Wingate, a British officer with strong Zionist convictions. Wingate’s units of Special Night Squads (SNS) included Jewish members, some of whom like Moshe Dayan would go on to become key figures in the IDF.
Palestinian resistance must also be seen from the prism of what Moshe Sharett of Israeli contrived violence. By this it is meant that Israel has from its inception deliberately orchestrated incidents which it knows will provoke a response and the excuse for responding with disproportionate force. Sharett termed this a “provocation and retaliation strategy”.
In his diary which was posthumously published in 1979, Sharett bemoaned what he claimed as “the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and so many clashes we have provoked.”
The prelude to the Six Day War which led to Israel acquiring more Arab land in the form of the West Bank and the Golan Heights testifies to this. Many Israeli generals including Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Bar-Lev and Matetiyahu Peled admitted that Egypt had no intention of attacking Israel in 1967. And politicians who were brought into the government of national unity such as Menachem Begin and Mordechai Bentov also confirmed this. Indeed, Bentov dismissed the propagandised myth of an imminent threat of an Egyptian invasion and of genocide. In an interview with Al-Hamishmar newspaper in April, 1971 he said the following:
All this story about the danger of extermination has been a complete invention and has been blown up a posterior to justify the annexation of new Arab territories.
Moshe Dayan was candid in a conversation he had with the journalist Rami Tal in 1976. He admitted that taking the Golan Heights was based on the need for farmland and not security.
Along the Syrian 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 in to plough to get the Syrians to shoot. If they didn’t, we would advance further and further until they did shoot. Then we would use artillery and air force.
Duplicity is also part and parcel of the manner in how Palestinian resistance is portrayed. Not only is it claimed that Palestinian groups invariably initiate attacks to which Israel is “forced” to respond, the frequency of such attacks is also distorted. The figures produced by the Foreign Ministry of Israel testify to a gross imbalance of attacks by Palestinian militant groups on Jewish Israelis in comparison to those of Israel against Palestinian communities. Figures from August 2000 to April 2023 show 672 attacks –many of them being “revenge attacks” against Jewish settlers on the Palestinian West Bank. Of the 672 attacks, 105 are attributed to Hamas. In fact, just 25% are attributed to specific Palestinian groups and 75% are nameless. So far as the body count is concerned, over the 23 year period, Palestinian violence claimed 1,455 Israeli lives while the Israelis killed 7,065 Palestinians between 2000 and 2013.
The low figures of Israeli-recorded Hamas attacks prior to October 7th, 2023 belie the bloodthirsty reputation built up by both Israeli and Western media. This tendency of characterising it as an ISIS-type body is not only hypocritical given Israel’s support of Islamist death squads during the Syrian “dirty war”, it is a continuum of a multi-decade strategy of distorting the conflict as one based on an irrational “Mohammedan” foe rather than one which is fundamentally about land dispossession. While Hamas was formed by adherents of the Egyptian-originated Muslim Brotherhood, it has functioned as a legitimate manifestation of Palestinian national resistance, a resistance which historically has drawn from secular groups and from Christian figures such as George Habash and Waddie Haddad.
Renewed Messianism
Any explanation of the rationale behind Israel’s present quest to annihilate a substantial proportion of Gaza’s population prior to executing their total expulsion cannot be complete without addressing the political, social and religious evolution of Israeli society. Substantive demographic changes have paved the way for the rise in political influence of the Mizrahim, many of who support Israel’s right-wing political parties. They, alongside the Revisionist Zionists of the Likud Party and the religious nationalists who constitute the settler class in the occupied West Bank, have become the most influential political bloc in contemporary Israeli politics.
Politics in Israel has in recent years developed an unmistakably messianic quality which is intolerant of what is considered as the stale, redundant state of Zionism which, despite the incrementally increase in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, has tolerated the total population of Arab Palestinians living between the “river and the sea” to numbers that are roughly equivalent to the overall population of Jewish Israelis.
The question of maintaining a demographic balance in favour of Jewish settlers has always loomed large in the thinking of Zionism’s leaders. It lay at the heart of Ben Gurion’s calculations prior to launching Plan Dalet and in the policies undertaken by Israel’s leaders after the acquisition of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. In subsequent decades, the calls by right-wing figures to expel the Palestinians using the model of expulsions undertaken against the Ionian Greeks after the Greco-Turkish War and that of the Sudeten Germans after the Second World War were never taken seriously.
But this has changed in recent years. A significant proportion of the right now feel it to be the time to revive the ruthless form of Zionism which led to Israel’s creation. The intent is to create what they deem as Israel proper on the Land of Israel. The incorporation into Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, both ideological descendants of Rabbi Meir Kahane, signified a profound shift in Israeli politics. It was no accident that on May 21st, 2023, Netanyahu’s coalition cabinet -the most right-wing in Israeli history- met inside a tunnel under the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, was prior to the October 7th attack, periodically invaded by religious fundamentalists who have ambitions of building a Third Temple on Temple Mount.
The divide in Israeli society can be characterised in essence as one between the Europeanised and secular Liberal Zionists of Ashkenazi heritage and the largely religiously-orientated Mizrahim alongside their religious fundamentalist settler allies. The divide was clearly evidenced during the demonstrations against Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms. Much of the support for the bid to limit the powers of the Ashkenazi-dominated judiciary, have come from the Mizrahim.
The divide sits at the heart of questions regarding the fundamental direction of Israel and Zionism. Will the country continue what Joseph Massad wrote of as its “commitment to cosmopolitan European gentile culture”, or will it become more Messianic, looking to the Torah and the Talmud for its political, spiritual and cultural basis?
Certainly, the language and the deeds of Israel’s political leaders has since the aftermath of October referenced the annihilation model of warfare found in the Old Testament and the Talmud. On October 28th, 2023, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu himself invoked the biblical people known as Amalek as the justification for the intended wholesale destruction of Gaza. His then defence minister Yoav Gallant, a former major general of the IDF, referred to Gazans as “human animals” when announcing on October 9th, 2023, that Israel would impose a total siege on Gaza. Both Netanyahu and Gallant were subject to the issue of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in November 2024 following an investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, was quoted as saying after October 7 that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians who were not aware and not involved. It is absolutely not true.” Herzog’s words were taken by the United Nation’s independent international commission of inquiry took his words as “incitement to the Israeli security forces personnel to target the Palestinians in Gaza as a group as being collectively culpable for the 7 October 2023 attack in Israel.”
The commission concluded in its report released in September 2025 that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Expert opinion that Israel is in fact committing genocide on the basis of legal analysis and not of political propaganda has been voiced by organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.
The orgy of sadistic violence aimed at reducing Gaza into a wasteland has been well-documented and the intention to make life unsustainable in Gaza is clear. The strategy for accomplishing the removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza began at the very outset when the Israeli military advised Gazans to evacuate specific areas to find refuge in designated “safe zones”. The idea was to subsequently destroy the area which had been evacuated so that the residents would be unable to return. This pattern was repeated in a manner so that the bulk of the population was being systematically moved from north to south. The objective is to herd the remaining population into a reservation area pending their presumed expulsion into the bordering Sinai region of Egypt.
The mass slaughter of Palestinians and their intended removal from Gaza has found wide support among the Israeli public. Public opinion polls such as those reported by Ha’aretz in May 2025 have consistently underlined this. The survey found that 82% of Israelis supported the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and that 65% of Israelis consider Palestinians in Gaza as “Amalek” and that every man, woman and child should be killed.
The implications of this revelation are far reaching. It vindicates the concern expressed by a group of Jewish intellectuals in 1948 who when writing to the New York Times predicted that the establishment of Menachem Begin’s Herut as a political party would lead Israel down a path which would legitimise “ultranationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority”. Herut is of course the precursor of Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud.
It also signifies a critical juncture in the evolution of Zionism which will determine the future of the Israeli state. It is useful to consider the views of two figures who envisioned an evolution to this very state of affairs. For Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose ideological disciples Smotrich and Ben Gvir exercise considerable influence in the cabinet headed by Netanyahu, Israel could only preserve its future existence by expelling all Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and Israel itself. His writings and the avowed policy of his Kach Party also called for Israel to be transformed into a theocratic state which would codify Halakha, Jewish religious law as set out by Maimonides, the revered Torah scholar of the Middle Ages.
Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz, an Israeli public intellectual and a self-described secular Zionist, decried messianism and what he considered to be Zionism’s misappropriation of Judaism. Central to his thinking was Israel’s occupation of the remnant territories of Palestine which he foresaw would morally compromise Israel because it would be unable to reconcile its self conception as a liberal democratic state with that of an occupier which did not grant the occupied people human and legal rights. He posited an evolution in which the finite stage would be Israel’s ultimate disintegration. Leibovitz wrote the following in the late 1960s after the June War of 1967:
The national pride and euphoria following the Six Days is temporary, and will carry us from proud nationalism to extreme messianic nationalism. The third stage will be barbarism, and the final stage will be the end of Zionism.
Israel’s present resort to barbarism is not disputed by the writer Yossi Klein. In an opinion article written for Ha’aretz which was published in August 2025, he noted that the “bloodlust in Gaza has been awakened by from the ancient myths of the Torah by these messianic nationalists,” adding that “In their eyes, fear of God is a license to kill.”
It is a genus of the unleashed bloodlust which the world has been consistently reminded consumed the lives of millions of European Jewry during the middle part of the 20th century. In the previous century, Heinrich Heine, the German poet and thinker, wrote of his fear that the veneer of civilised restraint which had been inculcated into the German psyche by centuries of Christianisation, would be broken by the rise of a Germanic demagogue-thinker who would be able to use his primitive powers to summon up the demonic forces of German pantheism. Today, Israel’s homicidal rampage is the fruit of decades of internal socialisation, the prevalence of varying species of extremist Zionist ideology and the means provided to its present political leaders by the military aid and diplomatic cover provided by the United States and its allies.
The rationale for the episodes of mass murder in Israel’s history also posits a psychological dimension. On his arrival to Palestine in 1934, Erich Neumann, a student of Carl Jung in the area of psychotherapy, wrote the following in a telegram:
I’m afraid that all of our repressed drives, all of our aspirations for government and revenge, all of the hidden brutality within us, will be realised here. The Jews in the Land of Israel, liberated from the pressures of other nations that we have suffered from in Exile. This could cause, in the final analysis, the bursting forth of “the shadow” here in Palestine, it will be seen and come forth. And it will not be pleasant.
But the key determinant of the present bloodletting lies in ideology. It is clear to that the Zionist Revisionist philosophy that undergirds Netanyahu’s Likud is found to be after all compatible with that of the religious nationalists – at least in so far as territorial expansion and the unimpeded destruction of Palestinian life is concerned. Begin’s Herut and Likud may have officially stopped laying claim to Jordan as an inalienable part of the Jewish state, but its members, as do the Kahanites, always believed in the eventual claim to Greater Israel, which Netanyahu has finally acknowledged.
The question now is whose vision of Israel will now prevail: that of Rabbi Kahane or that of Professor Liebovitz. In other words, is Israel inexorably fulfilling the idea of expanding to the maximalist territorial limits as it destroys Palestinian and non-Jewish life in establishing a theocratic state? Or is its homicidal rampage and continuous waging of war on many fronts the precursor to its own destruction?
The Netanyahu-led government points to Gaza’s destruction, the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership and the fall of the Ba’athist Syrian state which has led to Israel seizing further territory including the strategically important Mount Hermon, as evidence of the victorious path Israel is taking.
But what is not mentioned is the negative impact wrought on the economy, the increasing refusal of reserve soldiers to answer the call to serve in renewed battles and Israel’s increasing isolation among the world community of nations. The threat that Israel has begun the process of becoming a pariah state is one which looms large. And if such loss of support is not reflected by the governments of nations, including Arab and Muslim ones, the same cannot be said of the populations they represent. Support in Western European nations such as Britain and crucially in the United States is plummeting.
Leibovitz argued that Israel could not escape a morally compromised trajectory after opting to become the occupier of another people. During his life, he went so far as to assert that Israel has undergone “nazification” and that Israel’s soldiers had turned into “Judeo-Nazis”. But his alternate concept of “secular Zionism” and his rejection of messianism proved to be futile competitors with the spectrum of thinking within Political Zionism.
The Religious Nationalist Zionists are spurred on by what they consider to be the 80-year curse which has afflicted Jewish kingdoms, a question acknowledged by secular Israelis such as Ehud Barak who said the following in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth in May, 2022:
Throughout
Jewish history, the Jews did not rule for more than eighty years, except in the
two kingdoms of David and the Hasmonean dynasty, and in both periods, their
disintegration began in the eighth decade.
Barak made his comments in the context of what he believed –and still believes- to be the danger of his country disintegrating through a civil war because of deep and widening fractures in Israeli society. This fracture between the aforementioned “Liberal Zionists” and the “religious Nationalists” may play a role in the demise of the present incarnation of a Jewish state.
The basis of an internal war is based on the argument, not without substance, of the development of a second parallel army within the IDF since the early 2000s. This army as Yagil Levy put it in an opinion article published in Ha’aretz in 2016 consists of “units whose culture, operational logic and motivation are very different.” This potential “Army of Judea” is composed of soldiers who come from settler families who by default are dedicated to protecting settler communities and backing up settlers when they steal land from Palestinians and are violent towards them. Many of these soldiers belong to the Kfir Brigade, the youngest and largest infantry brigade of the IDF. They are also well represented in the Border Police.
It was acknowledged in the past that the basis for a Jewish civil war would be predicated on the question of settlements on the West Bank. Any attempt by the IDF to enforce the dismantling of settlements in pursuance of an agreement to create a Palestinian state was expected to be met by violent resistance by the settlers and a segment of the Israeli military. The entrenchment of the settlers and the development of the putative “Army of Judea” only reinforces the inevitability of such an outcome. Thus, the denial of the Palestinians a state of their own in order to avoid an internecine war forms the bedrock of decades-long policies aimed at colonising the West Bank as a precursor to the eventual expulsion of the Palestinian population.
While Palestinian resistance has over the decades been characterised by the Israeli-supporting Western media as been fuelled by malign ideologies of the left and then by barbarous jihadist cults, there has been a steadfast refusal to critically examine Political Zionism as a peculiar form of Jewish nationalism which is inherently infected by the dogma of ethno-supremacism.
This has meant that no government of Israel would ever contemplate a genuine accommodation of a Palestinian state. The passage in 2018 of the Basic Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish and Israel’s refusal to declare its final borders underscore this. Political Zionism has meant that the default position of the Jewish state is that it can only relate to the occupied Palestinian population by force as indeed is the case with its neighbours who must live with the existential threat of Greater Israel. Moshe Sharett decried Israel’s “sacred terrorism” which he noted stemmed from a “provocation and retaliation strategy” which condemned Israel to exist in a perpetual state of “endless wars.” He was aware that Israel would strive to expand its borders, and in regard to Ben Gurion and Dayan’s designs on south Lebanon wrote with prescience that such machinations would be “an adventurous speculation upon the well-being and existence of others.”
They are words which resonate in regard to Binyamin Netanyahu’s present goal of “changing the face of the Middle East”. This is the manifestation of Political Zionism, an ideology committed to the destruction of not only Palestinian life, but also to those the Lebanese and others who contest Zionism’s goal of outright regional hegemony.
It is the implementation of this ideology which lies at the root of the allegation of anti-Palestinian genocide, an accusation from which the State of Israel will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to be exonerated.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2025).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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