Despite their
colonial racism, many prominent Zionist figures have acknowledged that
if they were Palestinian, they would have fought for their homeland
Palestinians
hurl stones at Israeli forces during a demonstration against Israel's
bombardment of Gaza, in the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank
on 11 October 2023 (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP)
In a recent interview in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli intelligence organisation Shabak, stated that if he were Palestinian, he would have fought those who stole his land "without limits".
"As far as the Palestinians are concerned, they lost their land,
which is why when people ask me, what would you do if you were
Palestinian? I say that if someone came and stole my land, the land of
Israel, I would fight him without limits", he added.
The Palestinians,
Ayalon affirmed, "see themselves as a people. One of our tragedies is
that we see them as individuals, some of whom are good, while others are
bad."
In the flurry of Israeli and pro-Israel denunciations of Palestinians as barbarians, antisemites, pogromists, terrorists, savages, and human animals,
among other such racist epithets that a slew of Israeli leaders have
called them for the benefit of propaganda, many of Israel's most
prominent leaders, like Ayalon, have always identified with the
Palestinian struggle and would admit publicly that if they were
Palestinian and not Jewish colonists, they would have readily joined the
struggle against Zionists and Israel.
Even the famed Israeli defence minister Moshe Dayan understood the
struggle of Palestinians in Gaza and their resistance to Israeli
colonialism. In April 1956, Palestinian resistance fighters killed a
security officer in Nahal Oz, a colony that was established one mile
from the Gaza border in 1953.
The officer had beaten up several Palestinians a few days earlier
when he caught them attempting to return to their lands after Israelis
expelled them. He forced them to return to Gaza. At his funeral, Dayan reminded the mourners:
Let us not today cast blame on the murderers. Who are
we that we would 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 had lived… We are a generation of settlers, and without the
steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home.
Ayalon's recent words are not new. In a March interview with the American television network ABC, he declared that if he were Palestinian, he "would fight against Israel" and "would do everything" to achieve liberty.
Ayalon is not the first Israeli leader to understand perfectly well
the struggle of the Palestinians to end Zionist settler-colonialism and
Israeli apartheid. Indeed, he is part of a long list of Zionist and
Israeli leaders who, without hesitation, averred their understanding or
even their identification with the Palestinian struggle.
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In 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, who was later succeeded by Menachem Begin, commented on Palestinian resistance:
Any native people - it's all the same whether they
are civilised or savage - views their country as their national home, of
which they will always be the complete masters. They will not
voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so
it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us
that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked… [and] who will
abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I
flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they
are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or
our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences…
They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true
fervour that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon
the prairie… this childish fantasy of our "Arabo-philes" comes from some
kind of contempt for the Arab people… [that] this race [is] a rabble
ready to be bribed or sell out their homeland for a railroad network.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister,
understood the Palestinian struggle fully, even though he was committed
to crushing it
Jabotinsky, however, did not identify with the Palestinians (although
he attempted to equate them with European Jews, mutatis mutandis, on
the level of attachment to their homeland and the use of violence to
defend their country).
He understood
well that the Palestinians "are not a rabble but a nation". As a
fascist who admired Mussolini, Jabotinsky did not allow his racism
against the Palestinians to blind him to the conditions on the ground,
which is precisely why he sought to fight the Palestinians and subject
them to Zionist rule and expulsion.
Other Zionists would identify even more with Palestinians.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, understood the Palestinian struggle fully, even though he was committed to crushing it. He stated:
If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms
with Israel. That is natural; we have taken their country. Sure, God
promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not
theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but that was two thousand years
ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis,
Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we
have come and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?
Not an aberration
Zionist leaders' identification with Palestinians continued in the
following decades and was perhaps most forcefully expressed by former
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak was a member of an Israeli
death squad commando unit dispatched to Beirut in 1973 to kill three
Palestinian revolutionaries.
Barak's identification with Palestinians is unreserved, and in an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he asserted: "If I were a Palestinian, I'd also join a terror group."
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Leah Rabin, the widow of the late Yitzhak Rabin, who herself had
fought in the 1948 Zionist conquest of Palestine, was more astute in
deploying her identification with the Palestinians than all other
Zionist leaders.
She asserted
in 1997 that, "We [the Jews] used terrorism to establish our state. Why
should we expect the Palestinians to be any different?" Palestinians,
it would seem, are the same as Jews and not different from them at all.
It is most important to note that in these declarations, none of
these Israeli leaders thought that the reason the Palestinians resisted
Israel was because Israel was Jewish.
On the contrary, they all affirmed that the reason Palestinians
resist Israel and Israeli Jews is because Israelis stole and continue to
steal their land and country, oppress them and deprive them of their
independence and liberty.
The current Israeli government's appalling propaganda that the 7
October Palestinian operation targeted Israeli Jews as Jews and not as
colonisers and was, therefore, the "deadliest" attack on Jews since the Holocaust, as western leaders and their obedient mainstream media
have not tired of telling us, aims decidedly to cover up Israeli Jewish
colonisation of the land of the Palestinians as the reason why
Palestinians resist them.
These lies aim to exonerate Israeli Jews from the crime of stealing
the land of the Palestinians and stand in contrast to the insistence of
the Palestinians and all these Zionist and Israeli leaders who have
always understood the Palestinian struggle, namely, that the Palestinian
resistance targets Israeli Jews because they are colonisers and not
because they are Jews.
Israeli leaders have always understood that the Palestinian
resistance targets Israeli Jews because they are colonisers and not
because they are Jews
The understanding and identification with the Palestinian struggle by
the very same Israeli leaders who oppressed the Palestinians are not
merely rhetorical flourishes or lapses. They speak plainly of a clear
understanding of the nature of the violence and oppression that Israel
has visited and continues to visit on the Palestinian people.
Contrary to official Israeli propaganda and its repetition by western
political leaders and mainstream media, Palestinians who have been
resisting Zionist colonisation since the early 1880s are not an
aberration at all. Indeed, Palestinians, according to the Israeli
leaders cited above, are most similar and not that different from the
colonising Zionist Jews who oppress them.
The only difference, it seems, is that Palestinians are not Jews and,
therefore, cannot be extended the western respect and admiration that
any people who have resisted colonialism for a century and a half
deserve.
Whereas Israeli leaders may still identify with Palestinians despite
their colonial racism, the deep western racism against the Palestinians
is why no western political leaders have ever contemplated what they
would do if they were Palestinian.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.