Nakba and Gaza: Zionism’s Century-Long History of Genocide

I was going to subtitle this post “chronicle of a genocide foretold.” Then I recalled I’d used the same phraise in an August 2023 blog post. It was eerily prescient. I published it two months before 10/7.  It addressed the looming genocide on the West Bank, which had by then killed several hundred Palestinians and led to the depopulation of 20 villages.  It was an incipient, but not (yet) full-scale genocide.  That’s why I called it a “genocide foretold” since I feared it would become one.  And it did. I could in no way imagine that in two months, a full-blown genocide would commence. In this post, “genocide foretold” is a historical reference to the Nakba and a series of similar acts of genocide. They were precursors to the Gaza mass slaughter.

As heinous as Itamar Ben Gvir and Israel Katz’s $20-billion plan to expel all 2-million Palestinians from Gaza is, it’s important to recognize that this isn’t a new phenomenon.  In fact, the Nakba of 1947-48 led to the mass expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians and the eradication of 400 villages.  It is the earliest example of such Zionist ethnic cleansing.  It serves today as a precedent for their plan to make Gaza Palestinerein (the Nazi term, Judenrein meant “cleansed of Jews”).

During the Nakba, the Haganah launched massive systematic terror attacks on hundreds of Palestinian villages after they had conquered them.  Testimony by IDF commanders confirm orders to units in the field to terrorize the remaining inhabitants with civilian killings, rape and destruction of homes (and sometimes entire villages). Zohrot has identified 400 such villages which were depopulated.  In order to accomplish their task, Israel forces perpetrated such massacres in at least 100 villages according to historical accounts referenced by leading Israeli Nakba historian, Adam Raz. I wrote about one of them here, Tantura.

In 1967, Israel repeated its crime of 1948, expelling 300,000 Palestinians from land that the IDF conquered in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.  Throughout the ensuing years, Israeli politicians have continued to advocate it.  In recent years, Knesset MKs have called for a “Nakba 2.0,” not realizing that 1967 was the second Nakba. That would make any Gaza expulsions, Nakba 3.0. The third genocide in a long historical series.

Polls show that a majority of Israelis favor it: 56% support wholesale expulsion of all Palestinians, while 82% support the expulsion of Palestinans from Gaza. In other words, expulsion and genocide are not new phenomena confined to Gaza 2023-26. They are part of a broad Zionist history of such crimes.  Israel was founded on such crimes and in fact could not exist without them. Ethnic cleansing goes as far back in the Zionist historical record as 1937, when David Ben Gurion, the founder of the state, wrote to his son:

“We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our disposal.”

Nor was Ben Gurion the only Zionist leader to argue for what was euphemistically called “transfer.”  They maintained the illusion that indigenous Palestinians would voluntarily “relocate” to what was then Transjordan. To this day, there are far-right Israelis who continue advocate this “Final Solution” to the Palestine Problem. This fact sheet offers similar quotations from numerous other key figures in the movement, including future IDF chiefs of staff (Dayan), presidents (Weizmann) and prime ministers (Sharett).

Nakba: Zionism’s Original Sin

The existence of the State of Israel is based on multiple crimes of ethnic cleansing, mass murder, rape, destruction of homes and villages, and land theft.  This includes the systematic elimination of the physical, cultural, religious, and ethnic presence of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 Israel.

Israel is based on a crime.  Nor is it any wonder that the Gaza genocide has transformed it into a criminal state as recognized by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Unfortunately, the Palestinian Nakbas are not unique in human history.  There are even Biblical records of the Israelite tribe exterminating competing tribes such as the Amalekites.  Contemporaneously to 1948, India and Pakistan engaged in a serial genocide in which 1-million Hindus (from Pakistan) and Muslims (from India) were massacred.  There have been similar genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia, and elsewhere.  Nor must we forget the catastrophe that most clearly echoes Gaza, the Holocaust. The human race is capable of the ultimate savagery. Genocide appears throughout our history and appears encoded in our DNA.

This Zionist history of dispossession gives the lie to any claim that Israel will ever agree to a two-state solution.  As I’ve argued here, the latter has become a poisoned chalice. Anyone who drinks from it believing they will imbibe a refreshing drink, will die by poison.  Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped liberal Zionists from flogging this dead horse, as if doing so will bring it back to life. Anyone, for example, who argues that if West Bank settler terrorism or new settlements isn’t prevented, then the two state solution will become impossible–is engaged in an act of self-delusion.  Not only is this a lie which can never become reality–it is a cruel, even dangerous belief that delays any real solution to the conflict, in particular a one-state solution.

Now, the world must decide whether such a state should exist, unaccountable for its crimes; and whether it should be free to take such a criminal enterprise to its bloody conclusion.  The Allies prevented Adolph Hitler from completing his diabolical plan to eliminate the Jewish people.  The western world appears unwilling to prevent such a catastrophe to the Palestinian people.