• Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Herzl himself certainly did. Zionism is Settler Colonialism, Setter Colonialism is always violent. The difficulty in creating a democratic Jewish state in an area inhabited by people who are not Jewish, is that enough needs to be ‘Transferred’ so that the demographic majority is Jewish. Ben-Gurion explicitly rejected Secular Bi-national state solutions in favor of partition.

    Zionism’s aims in Palestine, its deeply-held conviction that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people as a whole, and the idea of Palestine’s “civilizational barrenness" or “emptiness” against the background of Euro pean imperialist ideologies all converged in the logical conclusion that the native population should make way for the newcomers. The idea that the Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere was articulated early on. indeed, the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, provided an early reference to transfer even before he formally outlined his theory of Zionist rebirth in his Judenstat. An 1895 entry in his diary provides in embryonic form many of the elements that were to be demonstrated repeatedly in the Zionist quest for solutions to the “Arab problem ”-the idea of dealing with state governments over the heads of the indigenous population, Jewish acquisition of property that would be inalienable, “Hebrew Land" and “Hebrew Labor,” and the removal of the native population.

    Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.