Spitting toward Christians an "ancient Jewish custom": Israel in the words of its founders and leaders - 4
As the Palestinians have been telling the world all these years, the Israelis have been openly boasting about cruelties while enacting them. Perhaps the world will pay closer attention now.
This article is the fourth in a series. Find the first three articles at these links: 1, 2, 3.
The Israelis are continuing their genocidal campaign against the civilians of Gaza. Their indiscriminate bombing — or as a Doctors Without Borders official put it, “I don’t know if indiscriminate is the right word because it’s targeting healthcare facilities, ambulances, churches, mosques, schools, refugee camps, densely-populated refugee camps, wiping out entire families in a second, entire multi-generational extended families in a second — has laid waste to vast swathes of northern Gaza and killed over 10,000 civilians — over half of them women and children.
With the Leaders of the Free World™ cheering the genocide and actively abetting it with weapons and money for the genocidaires in Tel Aviv, the Israelis don’t appear to be in any mood to stop the industrial-scale slaughter. They no longer seem content with merely “mowing the lawn.” They appear hell-bent on scorching it.
The Israeli barbarity and the accompanying incendiary remarks from its leadership, however, have spotlighted the cruelty that has underpinned their settler colonial apartheid state for the past 75 years. The message that the long-suffering Palestinians had been trying to tell the apparently deaf world for over the last seven decades has finally been broadcast at full volume for nearly a month now. And, going by the scale of protests worldwide, people seem to have started paying attention to their plight.
As the Palestinians have been telling the world all these years, the Israelis have been openly boasting about cruelties while enacting them.
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“Let us not today fling accusations at the murderers. 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.” [Source.]
— Moshe Dayan, former Israeli Defence Minister, and a Haganah terrorist during the 1948 Nakba
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“When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.” [Source.]
— Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization
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“Nothing could have been more wretched than an Arab village at the end of the 19th century. The peasants' clay hovels were unfit for stables. The children lay naked and neglected. Now everything is different. They benefited from the progressive measures of the New Society whether they joined it or not... These people are better off than at any time in the past.” [Source.]
— Theodore Herzl’s Reschid Bey, a Palestinian character in his novel Altneuland (The Old New Land)
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“I still think spitting at Christians is not a criminal case.” [Source.]
— Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister
He had earlier stated that spitting toward Christians is “an ancient Jewish custom.” [Source.]
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“Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’” [Source.]
— Vladimir Jabotinsky, a leader of the Herut Party whose members carried out terror acts inside historic Palestine to rid it of its indigenous population, and who was referred to as a good fascist by Benito Mussolini.
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“North Gaza is more beautiful than ever. Blowing up and flattening everything is amazing. Once we are finished, we will hand over the lands of Gaza to the fighting soldiers and settlers who lived in Gush Katif." [Source.]
— Amichai Eliyahu, Israel’s Minister of Heritage
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“There is no reason to hide the fact that since 1949 no one dared, or more precisely, no one was able, to threaten the very existence of Israel. In spite of that, we have continued to foster a sense of our own inferiority, as if we were a weak and insignificant people, which, in the midst of an anguished struggle for its existence, could be exterminated at any moment.” [Source.]
— General Matitiahu Peled, one of the architects of the 1967 Israeli invasion
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“A thought for Christmas…If Jesus and mother Mary were alive today, they would, as Jews without security, probably end up being lynched in Bethlehem by hostile Palestinians. Just a thought …” [Source.]
— Israeli embassy in Dublin, Ireland
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