"The endorsement of partition along the lines of Resolution 181 by Ben-Gurion was essentially a tactical move. 'Does anybody really think that the original meaning of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, and indeed, that of the millenarian yearning of the Jewish people, was not that of establishing a Jewish state in the whole of Eretz-Israel?' he had asked rhetorically in a speech to the People's Council on 22 May 1947. His acceptance of the principle of partition, he explained a week later, was an attempt to gain time until the Jews were strong enough to fight the Arab majority.
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, pp. 34..
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"Ben Gurion was a prudent gradualist who relied on 'the course of time.' The immediate task, as he put it in a letter to his wife in the summer of 1937, was that of establishing a Jewish state, however modest in its size, as a guarantee for Jewish immigration and as a possible springboard for future expansion. To his son Amos he wrote in October of the same year: 'Erect a Jewish state at once, even if it is not in the whole land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come.'"
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, pp. 24-5.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"The attitude of Chaim Weizmann, more moderate and always more measured in his words than Ben-Gurion, was not essentially different. To him as well the 'Peel state' was only the beginning. 'The Kingdom of David was smaller,' he said, 'but under Solomon it became an empire. C'est le premier pas qui compte,' he consoled the skeptics."
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, pp. 25.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"In formulating her policies and addressing diplomatic initiatives, Golda Meir was flanked by a most powerful political triumvirate. Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Israel Galili -- the last was the mastermind behind the Galili document that established the major guidelines for Israel's creeping annexation of the West Bank -- were the most authentic representatives of the Zionist Labourite ethos of land, settlements and security. Like Ben-Gurion, they wanted to explore avenues for peace, but again as in his case, peace was not their strategic priority, which was that of developing and consolidating the Jewish state."
"Dayan and Allon were the prodigious sons of the generation of Israel's founding fathers....They both believed in the immanent right of the Jewish people to the totality of Eretz-Israel."
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 140.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"In 1938 Ben-Gurion even made the stunning acknowledgement that the entire presence of the Zionists in Palestine was 'politically' an aggression. The fighting, he said, 'is only one aspect of the conflict which is in essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.'"
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 13.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"We are fighting and we shall fight for all the lands that were possessed by the Jewish settlement so far. ... the borders of our state will be defined by the limits of our force. ... the political borders will be those of the territories that we shall be able to liberate from the enemy; the borders will be the fruit of our conquests."
Israel Galili, Chief of Staff of the Haganah, 8 April 1948 in Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 137. Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"Every military plan that had been prepared ever since the late 1930s -- the Avner plan, Plan B of September 1945 and a similar scheme of May 1946, and the 'Yehoshua Plan' that preceded Plan D -- relied on the premise that the whole of Palestine was a single territorial unit that needed to be addressed as such in a future war."
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 37.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"The reality on the ground was at times far simpler and more cruel than that which Ben-Gurion was ready to acknowledge. It was that of an Arab community in a state of terror facing a ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory was paved not only by its exploits against the regular Arab armies, but also by the intimidation, and at times atrocities and massacres, it perpetuated against the civilian Arab community. A panic-stricken Arab community was uprooted under the impact of massacres that would be carved into the Arabs' monument of grief and hatred, like those of Dir Yassin, Ein Zeitun, Ilabun, and Lydda; of operational orders like those of Moshe Carmel, the commander of the Carmeli Brigade in Operations Yiftah and Ben-Ami, 'to attack in order to conquer, to kill the men, to destroy and burn the villages of Al-Kabri, Umm al Faraj and An Nahar'; and by the mass expulsion during the Yoav Operation. In that operation, in the words of one of the Israeli soldiers, as quoted by Benny Morris, whose thesis about the birth of the refugee problem being not by design but by the natural logic and evolution of the war is not always sustained by the very evidence he himself provides, 'cultured officers ... had turned into base murderers and this not in the heat of battle ... but out of a system of expulsion and destruction; the less Arabs remained, the better; this principle is the political motor for the expulsions and the atrocities.'"
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 42-43.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
David Ben-Gurion
The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill: from the Nile to the Euphrates.
David Ben-Gurion
I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?
David Ben-Gurion
If I was an Arab leader I would never make [peace] with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.
David Ben-Gurion
The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.
David Ben-Gurion
Gee, wonder why the Arabs didn't trust them or accept the Partition Plan.
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, pp. 34..
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"Ben Gurion was a prudent gradualist who relied on 'the course of time.' The immediate task, as he put it in a letter to his wife in the summer of 1937, was that of establishing a Jewish state, however modest in its size, as a guarantee for Jewish immigration and as a possible springboard for future expansion. To his son Amos he wrote in October of the same year: 'Erect a Jewish state at once, even if it is not in the whole land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come.'"
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, pp. 24-5.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"The attitude of Chaim Weizmann, more moderate and always more measured in his words than Ben-Gurion, was not essentially different. To him as well the 'Peel state' was only the beginning. 'The Kingdom of David was smaller,' he said, 'but under Solomon it became an empire. C'est le premier pas qui compte,' he consoled the skeptics."
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, pp. 25.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"In formulating her policies and addressing diplomatic initiatives, Golda Meir was flanked by a most powerful political triumvirate. Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Israel Galili -- the last was the mastermind behind the Galili document that established the major guidelines for Israel's creeping annexation of the West Bank -- were the most authentic representatives of the Zionist Labourite ethos of land, settlements and security. Like Ben-Gurion, they wanted to explore avenues for peace, but again as in his case, peace was not their strategic priority, which was that of developing and consolidating the Jewish state."
"Dayan and Allon were the prodigious sons of the generation of Israel's founding fathers....They both believed in the immanent right of the Jewish people to the totality of Eretz-Israel."
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 140.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"In 1938 Ben-Gurion even made the stunning acknowledgement that the entire presence of the Zionists in Palestine was 'politically' an aggression. The fighting, he said, 'is only one aspect of the conflict which is in essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.'"
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 13.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"We are fighting and we shall fight for all the lands that were possessed by the Jewish settlement so far. ... the borders of our state will be defined by the limits of our force. ... the political borders will be those of the territories that we shall be able to liberate from the enemy; the borders will be the fruit of our conquests."
Israel Galili, Chief of Staff of the Haganah, 8 April 1948 in Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 137. Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"Every military plan that had been prepared ever since the late 1930s -- the Avner plan, Plan B of September 1945 and a similar scheme of May 1946, and the 'Yehoshua Plan' that preceded Plan D -- relied on the premise that the whole of Palestine was a single territorial unit that needed to be addressed as such in a future war."
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 37.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
"The reality on the ground was at times far simpler and more cruel than that which Ben-Gurion was ready to acknowledge. It was that of an Arab community in a state of terror facing a ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory was paved not only by its exploits against the regular Arab armies, but also by the intimidation, and at times atrocities and massacres, it perpetuated against the civilian Arab community. A panic-stricken Arab community was uprooted under the impact of massacres that would be carved into the Arabs' monument of grief and hatred, like those of Dir Yassin, Ein Zeitun, Ilabun, and Lydda; of operational orders like those of Moshe Carmel, the commander of the Carmeli Brigade in Operations Yiftah and Ben-Ami, 'to attack in order to conquer, to kill the men, to destroy and burn the villages of Al-Kabri, Umm al Faraj and An Nahar'; and by the mass expulsion during the Yoav Operation. In that operation, in the words of one of the Israeli soldiers, as quoted by Benny Morris, whose thesis about the birth of the refugee problem being not by design but by the natural logic and evolution of the war is not always sustained by the very evidence he himself provides, 'cultured officers ... had turned into base murderers and this not in the heat of battle ... but out of a system of expulsion and destruction; the less Arabs remained, the better; this principle is the political motor for the expulsions and the atrocities.'"
Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, p. 42-43.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Minister of Security, Member of Knesset, Professor at Tel Aviv University
Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
David Ben-Gurion
The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill: from the Nile to the Euphrates.
David Ben-Gurion
I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?
David Ben-Gurion
If I was an Arab leader I would never make [peace] with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.
David Ben-Gurion
The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.
David Ben-Gurion
Gee, wonder why the Arabs didn't trust them or accept the Partition Plan.
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