- Dec 12, 2000
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<< The plain fact is that one wing of Zionism - the socalled "revisionist" wing - founded itself on the notion that the Palestinian people would have to be driven out of the land of both Palestine and Transjordan (today's state of Jordan) and that, if they weren't willing to go, they would have to be subjugated as a permanent minority within a Zionist state, or forced to leave by any means necessary.
Revisionism's founder, Vladimir Jabotinsky, laid down the basis of the argument in the 1920s. To clear Palestine of Arabs he wanted a Jewish army, and he founded a series of Zionist youth militias across Europe - groups which leftwing Zionists charged had more in common with farright militias than with the Zionist project. Jabotinsky made some efforts to discipline his more effusive followers (though he never expelled those such as Abba Achimeir, who suggested that Hitler's "renewal" of the German people was something Zionists could follow by example), but by the 1940s they had blossomed into the Irgun and the Lehi. These gangs terrorised Palestinians after World WarII, rolling bombs into Arab markets and massacring people in villages such as Deir Yassin.
The strategy was ethnic cleansing, pure and simple, and it worked - it turned nearly a million Palestinians into refugees. The Irgun hoped they would simply keep on going into wider Arabia. The Arab world, which was well aware of the strategy, has had other ideas.
Jabotinsky's follower, Menachem Begin, became prime minister in 1977 and accelerated phase two of the plan - land theft in the West Bank and the creation of Jewish settlements, to ensure that Palestinians became a powerless minority within expanded borders. Because this was an ongoing military campaign, Begin made a former general his minister of housing - Ariel Sharon.
The world has forgotten this history. The Palestinians remember it, and that is part of the reason they fight with such desperate ferocity, with a strategy - terrorism - that had hitherto been so successfully turned on them. "We would not go down into the ditch again," Begin said, remembering his terrorist years in his memoirs. Clearly, the Palestinians have come to the same resolution - they will not be disappeared, cleansed or permanently subjugated as second-class citizens. >>
Click here to read the full article by Guy Rundle