Tag: occupation

“We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] 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.

“We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise position. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism.”
General Yehoshafat Harkabi (former head of IDF Intelligence); Maariv, 2 November 1973. Cited by David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East; third edition (2003), p.181.

Israel could not exist without certain areas: ‘Even with the latest means of fighting with which the army is equipped, we cannot defend Israel without Judea and Samaria, and without the Golan Heights.’ Rafael Eitan on on Israel Television, 11 May 1978 Eitan was found drowned in mysterious circumstances in 2004 after criticising Sharon’s plans for disengagement in Gaza, of which he said “This disengagement plan is a historical error and I can prove it.”

“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel… Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces – Gad Becker,Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.

“… all the Arabs will be able to do is scuttle around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle” Rafael Eitan [Israeli Chief of Staff] addressing an Israeli Knesset committee in 1983 describing the results after Israel had further multiplied its West Bank settlements. See The Times, 15 April 1983 – From Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk; footnote to Chapter 11, “Terrorists”

“You don’t simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away … I prefer to advocate a more positive policy … to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave.” Ariel Sharon, quoted by David Bernstein in Forcible Removal of Arabs gaining support in Israel”, The (London) Times, August 24, 1988, page 7. Cited in Imperial Israel And The Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion, by Nur Masalha; Chapter 2, footnote 117.

“In order to prepare properly for the next campaign, one of the Israeli officers in the territories said not long ago, it’s justified and in fact essential to learn from every possible source. If the mission will be to seize a densely populated refugee camp, or take over the casbah in Nablus, and if the commander’s obligation is to try to execute the mission without casualties on either side, then he must first analyze and internalize the lessons of earlier battles – even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto.

The officer indeed succeeded in shocking others, not least because he is not alone in taking this approach. Many of his comrades agree that in order to save Israelis now, it is right to make use of knowledge that originated in that terrible war, whose victims were their kin. The Warsaw ghetto serves them only as an extreme example, not linked to the strategic dialogue that the defense establishments of Israel and Germany will hold next month.”
from “At the gates of Yassergrad ” by Amir Oren in Haaretz, January 25, 2002. [this article has disappeared from Haaretz, noticed today 12/4/11. There’s a full version here]

“Iran can never be threatened in its very existence. Israel can. Indeed, such a threat could even grow out of the current intifada. That, at least, is the pessimistic opinion of Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. ‘If it went on much longer,’ he said, ‘the Israeli government [would] lose control of the people. In campaigns like this, the anti-terror forces lose, because they don’t win, and the rebels win by not losing. I regard a total Israeli defeat as unavoidable. That will mean the collapse of the Israeli state and society. We’ll destroy ourselves.’

In this situation, he went on, more and more Israelis were coming to regard the ‘transfer’ of the Palestinians as the only salvation; resort to it was growing ‘more probable’ with each passing day. Sharon ‘wants to escalate the conflict and knows that nothing else will succeed’.

But would the world permit such ethnic cleansing? ‘That depends on who does it and how quickly it happens. We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.'” Martin van Creveld in the Guardian 21st September, 2003.

“Without lies, it would be impossible to talk about peace with the Palestinians for 36 years while at the same time seizing more and more Palestinian land. Without lies, it would be impossible to claim that there is no partner for the road map, while at the same time injecting more and more money into outposts that the road map calls for dismantling. Without lies, it would be impossible to promise ‘painful concessions’ in exchange for peace, while at the same time terming people who concluded such an agreement ‘traitors.'”
Akiva Eldar, Haaretz 24 November 2003

“it is permissible to lie for the sake of the Land of Israel.” Yitzhak Shamir, quoted by Akiva Eldar in Haaretz, 24 November, 2003

“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians. That is exactly what happened. You know, the term ‘peace process’ is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen…. what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did.”

“[Sharon could also argue] ‘honestly’ [that the disengagement plan was] “a serious move because of which, out of 240,000 settlers, 190,000 will not be moved from their place.”
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s senior adviser Dov Weisglass in a Haaretz interview, 6 October 2004.

Israel’s hasbara on peace proposals is dissected in Does Israeli Intelligence Lie?

FACT:

It was a condition of the 11 May 1949 UN General Assembly Resolution 273 which admitted the State of Israel to UN membership that the Israeli State accepted the continuity of the rights and claims of Palestine’s ethnic communities in and to their home territories. (This was in accordance with principles enunciated in the 1922 League of Nations administrative mandate which the UN General Assembly has no power to alter without a comprehensive and properly conducted plebiscite that includes a strong element of native party agreement.)

Israel accepted in full the conditional Resolution without which, its UN membership is invalid. Sixty years later Israel still shirks its responsibilities, hiding behind cowardly lies touted as ‘self-defence’ and bullies those who recognise its irresponsibility.