"Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs" Israel in the words of its founders and leaders - Part 1
"Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs" Israel in the words of its founders and leaders - Part 1
The founders and leaders of the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel have, over the years, made some truly obnoxious and dehumanising remarks about the Palestinians.
In the context of Israel, you have heard some of the most vile propaganda, such as “a land without people for a people without land,” “making the desert bloom,” “the only democracy in the Middle East,” etc., in a bid to justify their settler colonial apartheid state, which was created in the aftermath of the massacre of 15,000 Palestinians and displacement of a further 800,000 indigenous inhabitants.
When they were not spouting blatant propaganda to justify their theft of Palestine, the Israeli leadership let out what it really thought of the Palestinians.
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"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either . . . There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." [Source.]
— Moshe Dayan, former Israeli Defence Minister, and a Haganah terrorist during the 1948 Nakba
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“A good Arab is a dead Arab.” [Source.]
Rafael Eitan, former IDF Chief of Staff and a Haganah terrorist during the Nakba
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“Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs.” [Source.]
— Menachem Begin, the sixth Prime Minister of Israel and an Irgun terrorist
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"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 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 here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?" [Source.]
— David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel
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“The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest.” [Source.]
— Berl Katznelson, a close ally of Ben-Gurion and a leading intellectual force among the early Zionists
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“There was no such thing as a Palestinian … They did not exist.” [Source.]
— Golda Meir, the fourth Prime Minister of Israel
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“These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.” [Source.]
— Plan Dalet, 10 March, 1948
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“The only peace negotiations are those where we settle the land, and we build, and we settle, and from time to time we go to war.” [Source.]
— Moshe Dayan, former Israeli Defence Minister, and a Haganah terrorist during the 1948 Nakba
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