The state of Israel was founded on a lie: that Palestine was an empty land. "Land without people for a people with no land" was the Zionists' slogan.
Even after the majority of Palestinians had been expelled, Israel's prime minister, Golda Meir, declared in 1969, "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Zionism originated as a chauvinist movement among European Jews in the late 19th century. The 1897 congress of the World Zionist Organisation adopted the aim of "the creation in Palestine of a homeland for the Jewish people".
Zionists regarded Palestinian Arabs as inferior and uncivilised, an attitude similar to that of the British and French towards indigenous people in the colonies they controlled.
Theodor Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organisation, recognised this when he wrote, "We should there [in Palestine] form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism".
Imperialist backing
With the world having already been carved up by imperialism, the Zionists realised they needed support from an imperialist power to achieve their aim.
For their part, the main imperialist powers hoped that Zionism would be a counterweight to rising Arab nationalism. Britain was the first imperialist power to declare its support, in its 1917 Balfour Declaration.
Although Jews had lived continuously in Palestine since Roman times, they were only a very small part of the population. During most of its history, over 80% of the Palestinian population had been Sunni Muslims. Of the many minority communities in Palestine, Christians were the most significant, making up 10% of the population by the early 20th century.
To establish an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine, the Zionists had to change the population balance.
In the late 19th century, large numbers of Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to escape violent anti-Jewish pogroms. But most didn't emigrate to Palestine, instead emigrating to the US.
When the Nazis gained power in Germany in 1933 and began the holocaust, refuge in other countries became a matter of life and death for millions of Jewish people.
But with the US and Britain closing their doors to all but a few refugees, most Jewish refugees had nowhere else to flee but Palestine.
Sections of the US left campaigned for the US government to open its doors, but the main Zionist organisations opposed this demand. Instead, they saw a chance to create a Jewish state in Palestine by directing Jewish refugees there.
The purpose of Jewish emigration to Palestine was not to integrate into the Palestinian population but to transform the land into a Jewish state, initially by building a separate Jewish community with its own institutions and economic enterprises.
The British mandate was biassed in favour of Zionism. Jewish economic and institutional development was supported by the British, while Palestinian development was not. The British turned a blind eye to Jewish arms imports and military training, whereas the Palestinians were systematically deprived of arms.
Palestine Liberation Organisation chairperson Yasser Arafat told the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, "If the immigration of Jews to Palestine had as its objective the goal of enabling them to live side by side with us, enjoying the same rights and assuming the same duties, we would have opened our doors to them ... But that the goal of this immigration should be to usurp our homeland, disperse our people and turn us into second-class citizens — this is what no-one can conceivably demand that we ... submit to."
Partition
In 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states by May 1948. The Jewish state would get 54% of the land, despite Jews only being 31.5% of the population.
The Palestinians opposed partition, instead demanding a single, independent Palestinian state for all who lived there.
Despite the favourable partition plan, the Zionist leaders weren't happy, either. It wasn't possible to have an exclusively Jewish state with Jews still being a minority of the population.
They decided to force out the indigenous population. Joseph Weitz, former head of the Jewish Agency's Colonisation Department, stated in his 1940 diary, "there is no room for both peoples together in this country ... The only solution is Palestine, at least Western Palestine [west of the Jordan River] without Arabs ... And there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries; to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left."
The Zionist militias didn't wait until the formal declaration of independence in 1948. They launched a terror campaign against the indigenous population in December 1947.
The militias launched hundreds of brutal attacks on Palestinian towns and villages, blowing up buses and trains, marketplaces and houses. Between December 1947 and May 1948, 2500 people were killed. By the end of this war of terror, 418 Arab towns and villages had been wiped off the map.
Menachem Begin, later Israeli PM in the 1980s, was the leader of the Irgun militia, which massacred 259 Arab men, women and children while they slept in Deir Yassin village. He wrote "The legend of the Deir Yassin helped us ... Arabs throughout the country ... were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened uncontrollable stampede."
Through this war, Israel expanded its territory to cover 81% of Palestine. The Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were the only bits it didn't grab.
More than 850,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled from their homeland. Their property and land was seized by the Israeli government. The Palestinians who remained became, by Israeli law, second-class citizens. Only one sixth of the Palestinian Arab population remained in Israel after the war of terror had ended in 1949.
The terror for Palestinian refugees didn't cease after 1948. In 1956, Israel expelled 3000-5000 Palestinians from the Galilee region. Between June and December 1967, after the Six Day War, an additional 430,000 were forced to leave their homes.
Immediately after capturing the Gaza Strip in 1967, the Israeli army, led by Ariel Sharon, killed at least 275 Palestinians in Gaza. Houses were blown up, large tracts of refugee camps were bulldozed and severe collective punishments were imposed on the population.
Israel still has a significant Palestinian Arab population, approximately 20%, but Arabs aren't allowed to own land and are only allowed to live and travel in certain areas. Excluded from military service, they are denied the many welfare benefits which only accrue to veterans.
Israeli residents carry identity cards, not to determine Israeli nationality, but to state a person's religious category.
Israel often paints itself as the innocent victim of aggressive Arab neighbouring nations. This is far from the truth. Of all the wars and military skirmishes that Israel has been involved in, Israel has almost always been the aggressor.
Between 1967 and 1970, Israel launched scores of naval, air, artillery and commando attacks on Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. Some of these attacks destroyed whole villages.
Israel's June 1982 invasion of Lebanon made nearly half a million people homeless. At least 14,000 people were killed, over 90% unarmed civilians, even before the Israeli army backed the massacre, by the fascist Phalange militia, of at least 2000 residents in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
While Israel continues to exist, it will be permanently at war with the indigenous Palestinians who wish to return home. The only rational way of ending the bloodshed is for the replacement of the Zionist state with a democratic, secular state in Palestine, which guarantees the rights of all minorities, whatever their religion or ethnicity.
BY SUE BOLAND