Brief History of Zionism
A free course of the histroy of zionism and their ethnic cleansing in Palestine since 1948, inspired by the works of Ilan Pappé, a Jews historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine 1948, and Norman Finkelstein Historian Jews and author of The Holocaust Industry.
SSince October 7th, numerous individuals from Israel, the USA, and Europe have voiced their condemnation of Hamas, advocating for the end of its existence and, in some cases, justifying the zionists crimes in Gaza. It is evident that many of these individuals likely have connections or interests tied to the Zionist occupation, although such alignment may lack moral foundations.
Yet, I find it challenging to comprehend another group of people who support or justify Zionist actions as a response to Hamas without possessing knowledge of the history of the occupation, which dates back to the 1940s and even earlier.
This article is directed at individuals in the (intellectual, thoughtful, and peace-seeking) categories, urging them to understand the origins of the problem. By the end of this article, you will gain insights into historical facts often omitted by your governments. The content relies on authentic Jewish sources, conveniently provided at the end of the blog.
You can consider it as a FREE course of history, enjoy it !
Zionist’s ideology
The Zionist policy was first based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks in February 1947, and it transformed into an initiative to ethnically cleanse the country as a whole in March 1948 untill today.
Once the decision of 1948 was taken, it took six months to complete the mission.
When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants. And yet, such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel.
But what if you go further back in history?
Zionism emerged in the late 1880s in central and eastern Europe as a national revival movement, prompted by the growing pressure on Jews in those regions either to assimilate totally or risk continuing persecution (though, as we know, even complete assimilation was no safeguard against annihilation in the case of Nazi Germany). By the beginning of the twentieth century, most of the leaders of the Zionist movement associated this national revival with the colonization of Palestine.
In contrast, Jewish tradition and religion clearly instruct Jews to await the coming of the promised Messiah at ‘the end of times’ before they can return to Eretz Israel as a sovereign people in a Jewish theocracy, that is, as the obedient servants of God (this is why today several streams of Ultra-Orthodox Jews are either non or anti-zionist). In other words, Zionism secularised and nationalised Judaism. In other word, any religious argument will be refuted!
However, to bring their project to fruition, the Zionist thinkers claimed the biblical territory and recreated, indeed reinvented, it as the cradle of their new nationalist movement. As they saw it, Palestine was occupied by ‘strangers’, and had to be repossessed. ‘Strangers’ here meant everyone not Jewish who had been living in Palestine since the Roman period.
In fact, for many Zionists Palestine was not even an ‘occupied’ land when they first arrived there in 1882, but rather an ‘empty’ one: the native Palestinians who lived there were largely invisible to them or, if not, were part of nature’s hardship and as such were to be conquered and removed.
Until the occupation of Palestine by Britain in 1918, Zionism was a blend of nationalist ideology and colonialist practice. It was limited in scope: Zionists made up no more than five per cent of the country’s overall population at that time. Living in colonies, they did not affect, nor were they particularly noticed by, the local population.
Historical evidence shows that at some time between 1905 and 1910, several Palestinian leaders discussed Zionism as a political movement aiming to purchase land, assets and power in Palestine, although the destructive potential was not fully comprehended at that period.
What the Zionists anticipated was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine in order to escape a history of persecutions and pogroms in the West, invoking the religious ‘redemption’ of an ‘ancient homeland’ as their means. Which as I mentioned this has no religious foundations according to the Jews themselves.
The moment British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour gave the Zionist movement his promise in 1917 to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine, he opened the door to the endless conflict that would soon engulf the country and its people.
By the end of the 1920s, it was clear that this proposal had a potentially violent core, as it had already claimed the lives of hundreds of Palestinians and Jews. This now prompted the British to make a serious, albeit reluctant, attempt to solve the smouldering conflict.
in 1928, the Palestinian leadership, apprehensive of the growing Jewish immigration into the country and the expansion of their settlements, agreed to accept the formula as a basis for negotiations, the Zionist leadership quickly rejected it. The Palestinian uprising in 1929 was the direct result of Britain’s refusal to implement at least their promise of parity after the Palestinians had been willing to set aside the democratic principal of majoritarian politics, which Britain had championed as the basis for negotiations in all the other Arab states within its sphere of influence.
I mean think about it, why on earth does anyone accept an occupier to bring in his house another one and asks him to make peace and share my home with him?
Before continuing the history to 1947, I will stop here to emphasize a brief History of the Jews in Europe. Jews were oppressed and illegally immigrated by European state, even by the UK. So, of course giving Jews a state outside Europe sounds great for UK and the rest of the European country.
Military preparation, villages filles before 1947.
In 1901 the JNF was founded by the Zionist, and it has one goal, gather the tinniest details about Palestinian villages and it served as the agency the Zionist movement used to buy Palestinian land upon which it then settled Jewish immigrants.
I ask you here another question, why they did so?
Most of the JNF’s activities during the Mandatory period and surrounding the Nakba were closely associated with the name of Yossef Weitz, the head of its settlement department. Weitz was the quintessential Zionist colonialist.
By the end of 1948, the Jewish community owned around 5.8% of the land in Palestine. But the appetite was for more, if only for the available resources to expand and new opportunities open up; this is why Weitz waxed lyrical when he heard about the village files, immediately suggesting turning them into a ‘national project’.
So what is the village files? It is a Zionist project had as goal to create as I mentioned above filles with all the details abouts Palestinians and their villages.
Regular members of the Hagana who were entrusted with collecting the data on ‘reconnaissance’ journeys into the villages realised, from the start, that this was not a mere academic exercise in geography. One of these was Moshe Pasternak, who joined one of the early excursions and data collection operations in 1940. He recalled many years later:
We had to study the basic structure of the Arab village. This means the structure and how best to attack it. In the military schools, I had been taught how to attack a modern European city, not a primitive village in the Near East…. The Arab village, unlike the European ones, was built topographically on hills. That meant we had to find out how best to approach the village from above or enter it from below. — Moshe Pasternak
I ask again, why? Let me remind that we are now in 1940.
In 1944 special units in the service of the village files project received their training and it was from here that they went out on their reconnaissance missions. Shefeya looked very much like a spy village in the Cold War: Jews walking around speaking Arabic and trying to emulate what they believed were the customary ways of life and behaviour of rural Palestinians.
Again we are not in 1947 yet.
Zionists recalled that it was this minute and detailed knowledge of what was happening in each single Palestinian village that enabled the Zionist military command in November 1947 to conclude ‘that the Palestine Arabs had nobody to organise them properly.’
Ben-Gurion the devil master.
Leading Zionist figures did not air their views in public, but confided their thoughts only to their close associates or entered them into their diaries. One of them, Yossef Weitz, wrote in 1940:
It is our right to transfer the Arabs’ and ‘The Arabs should go!
Ben-Gurion himself, writing to his son in 1937, appeared convinced that this was the only course of action open to Zionism:
The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.
The opportune moment came in 1948. Ben-Gurion is in many ways the founder of the State of Israel and was its first prime minister. He also masterminded the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
In the final days of August 1946, Ben-Gurion gathered together the leadership of the Zionist movement in a hotel in Paris, the Royal Monsue, to help him find an alternative to the Biltmore plan that had aimed to take over all of Palestine. An ‘old-new’ idea of the Zionist movement now resurfaced: partitioning Palestine. ‘Give us independence, even on a small part of the land,’ pleaded Nachum Goldman with the British government in London while his colleagues in Paris were deliberating their next move.
A few months later the Jewish Agency translated Ben-Gurion’s ‘large chunk of Palestine’ into a map which it distributed to everyone relevant to the future of Palestine. This 1947 map envisaged a Jewish state that anticipated almost to the last dot pre-1967 Israel, i.e., Palestine without the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Palestine Population
When the Zionist movement started its ethnic cleansing operations in Palestine, in early December 1947, the country had a ‘mixed’ population of Palestinians and Jews. The indigenous Palestinians made up the two-third majority, down from ninety per cent at the start of the Mandate. One third were Jewish newcomers, i.e., Zionist settlers and refugees from war torn Europe, most of whom had arrived in Palestine since the 1920s.
As of the late nineteenth century, the indigenous Palestinians had been seeking the right of self-determination, at first within a pan-Arab identity, but then, soon after the First World War, through the Mandate system that promised to lead the new nation-states it had created in the Middle East to independence and towards a future based on principles of democracy. But Britain’s Mandate charter for Palestine also incorporated, wholesale, the 1917 Balfour Declaration and, with it, Britain’s promise to the Zionist movement to secure a ‘homeland’ for the Jews in Palestine.
The state before was, almost all of the cultivated land in Palestine was held by the indigenous population — only 5.8% was in Jewish ownership in 1947 which makes the use here of the adjective ‘mixed’ somewhat misleading, to say the least. Although the Zionist leaders had tried to persuade Jewish immigrants, ever since the movement had set foot in Palestine, to settle in the countryside, they had failed to do so: Jewish newcomers overwhelmingly preferred the cities and towns.
So, my next question for you is, and I think you can answer that. Why Palestine has to accept the UN’s partition plan?
Palestine was actually to be divided into three parts. On forty-two per cent of the land, 818,000 Palestinians were to have a state that included 10,000 Jews, while the state for the Jews was to stretch over almost fifty-six per cent of the land which 499,000 Jews were to share with 438,000 Palestinians. The third part was a small enclave around the city of Jerusalem which was to be internationally governed and whose population of 200,000 was equally divided between Palestinians and Jews.
I can keep going with historical evidences and proofs, but, you are already watching TV.
I n onclusion, Israel had always this strategy of victimization, the fact of saying that Arabs always starts the wars is wrong, because you are merley looking at the symptoms but if you dig deeper in History, you will understand that actions come always first from Zionists.
You can talk about Gaza and Hamas actions, but again this is a mistake, Gaza has been in illegal blockade since 2005. Other fact is, the West Bank, it is always under attack and crimes, Even thought, Hamas has no control in west back.
Israel used always to oppress and provoke with their actions, by preventing Muslims to pray in al-Aqsa for example, taking hostages, torturing civilians, and when they get a respond they use it as an excuse. Just like US in Iraq, France in Algeria and so on.
In other words, Israel has never been in the middle east to make peace.
Palestine was alwayse shared by Christians, Muslims and Jews; the problem had never been with Jews, but with the Zionist occupation which even their orthodox don’t consider it as a state of peace.
Here are 3 books that I recommand to understand the History of Israel in Palestine.
- The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — Ilan Pappé
- The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering — Norman G. Finkelstein
- The Fictional Jewish Nation — Schlomer Sander
