Context: This was a common phrase used by Zionists in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s as a justification for the European colonization of Palestine. It had the effect of dismissing the actual presence of people on the land that was known as Palestine; people who were Christian, Muslim and in small numbers, Jewish. But Zionist leaders themselves knew this was not a factual claim:
David Ben Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel recognized that Palestine was populated with an indigenous Palestinian majority that would naturally want to resist. Ben-Gurion said:
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.
“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.
“We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return.”
— David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
Ben Gurion also warned in 1948: Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes:
“The old will die and the young will forget.”
“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.”
— David Ben-Gurion May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, a Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.
