Background

Image: Members of the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association in Palestine c.1920–1925

Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann wrote in his autobiography that at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference he had spoken to US Secretary of State Robert Lansing of “the hope that by Jewish immigration, Palestine would ultimately become as Jewish as England is English” and described how he had taken as his example “the outstanding success which the French had at that time made of Tunisia.” “What the French could do in Tunisia,” Weizmann said, “the Jews would be able to do in Palestine”.[22][23] Anthropologist Scott Atran wrote of this comparison between Zionism and French colonialism in Tunisia that “whereas direct French colonial rule sought to utilize, rather than displace, the fellah’s labor (Poncet 1962), Zionist colonization had no use for Arab labor, at least in principle”.[24]

In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly displaced from the area that became Israel, and 500 Palestinian villages, as well as Palestinian-inhabited urban areas, were destroyed.[25][26] Although considered by some Israelis to be a “brutal twist of fate, unexpected, undesired, unconsidered by the early [Zionist] pioneers”, some historians have described the Nakba as a campaign of ethnic cleansing.[25] In the aftermath of the Nakba, Palestinian land was expropriated on a large scale and Palestinian citizens of Israel were encircled in specific areas.[27][28]

In a 1956 speech, Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan stated in regards to Palestinian political violence: “Who are we that we should argue against their hatred? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza and, before their very eyes we turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home.”[29][30]

Arnon Degani argues that ending military rule over Israel’s Palestinian citizens in 1966 shifted from colonial to settler-colonial governance.[31] After the Israeli capture of the Golan Heights in 1967, there was a nearly complete ethnic cleansing of the area, leaving only 6,404 Syrians out of about 128,000 who had lived there before the war. They had been forced out by campaigns of intimidation and forced removal, and those who tried to return were deported. After the Israeli capture of the West Bank, about 250,000 of 850,000 inhabitants fled or were expelled.[32]