The majority of the Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed. The Zionists had had the idea for decades and carried out the first part in 1948. "Over the next two decades, he [Ben-Gurion] consolidated his control over the Zionist movement. He advocated Jewish immigration to Palestine, raised money among wealthy Jews abroad and promoted the idea of Hebrew labour. As Segev makes clear, his ‘socialism’ was always in the service of his nationalism: when he invoked the ‘dictatorship of the Hebrew labourer’, he meant the dictatorship of the Histadrut and Mapai, the Palestinian Workers’ Party he founded in 1930. He replaced Weizmann as head of the Jewish Agency, and they frequently clashed. Weizmann was a more cautious leader, so keen to assuage British concerns that at one point he agreed to shelve the demand for a Jewish state: asking for a state in Palestine, he said, was like asking for one in Manhattan. But Ben-Gurion believed in the necessity of street combat, and was prepared to see blood shed – Jewish blood included. (He once threatened to starve a Jewish settlement if it failed to capitulate to his demands.) ‘You are Bolsheviks,’ Isser Harel, a future head of the Mossad, told him. ‘Not in the communist sense, but in the sense of the dictatorship of the party.’Ben-Gurion never concealed his admiration of Lenin, ‘a man of iron will who does not spare human life and the blood of innocent children for the sake of the revolution’. Eastern European Jews like himself, he believed, made the best Zionists because they had been touched by the flames of the October Revolution. After Hitler’s rise to power – ‘a huge political and economic boost for the Zionist enterprise’, in his words – he fought attempts to resettle German Jews anywhere other than Palestine. But he ended up taking a dim view of the new arrivals: they were ‘Hitler Zionists’ who had come to Palestine in search of refuge rather than national salvation and had suspiciously conciliatory attitudes towards the Arabs. Nor was he shy of using antisemitic language when confronted by immigrants who ‘live off the labour of others ... luft-masses, eager to speculate, living in air ... dangling, sterile and parasitic’. Ben-Gurion wanted ‘not just any immigrants but pioneers’.He was intent on building a Jewish state, not a sanctuary, and he was doing so in the certainty that this would lead to war with the Arab majority. Although he did not yet speak of expulsion, the idea of ‘transfer’, always present in Zionist ideology, would assume growing prominence in his thinking. The ‘price of Zionism’, as Segev puts it, was permanent conflict, which could be managed but never resolved. His wish to counter the rising force of Arab nationalism was tempered only by his partnership with the British, who had been given mandatory control over Palestine after the war, and now found themselves caught between their commitment to the Yishuv and their need to contain the anger of the Palestinian Arab community. But Ben-Gurion was adept at turning events to his advantage. When, in 1930, the British released a white paper that reinterpreted Balfour as a ‘dual and equal commitment to both Jews and Arabs’ most Zionists were furious. Ben-Gurion, however, took his colleagues to task for succumbing to panic: ‘Such hysterical mood swings are not to our credit and we need to fight them with all our strength.’ (The white paper was eventually revoked.) The Peel Commission report of 1937, which recommended partition into two states and the restriction of immigration to 12,000 Jews a year, was even more disappointing, but Ben-Gurion saw it as ‘the strongest possible impetus for the step-by-step conquest of Palestine as a whole’. The commission, he noted, was proposing to move Arabs out of territory that had been assigned to the Jewish state: ‘compulsory transfer’, he underlined approvingly in his diary. Who would carry out the transfer was unclear: ideally the British, he thought; or perhaps the Zionist Organisation could pay Iraq £10 million to absorb the refugees. In his diary he kept a list of Arab villages with the numbers of their inhabitants. ‘Our movement is maximalist,’ he wrote. ‘Even all of Palestine is not our final goal.’Ben-Gurion would eventually throw his weight behind the Jewish revolt against British rule that began to surge in the late 1930s, in part because he was afraid of being upstaged by the right-wing militias of the underground – Menachem Begin’s Irgun and Yitzhak Shamir’s Lehi. But he postponed his confrontation with the British for as long as he could. When an Arab nationalist suggested that they join forces against the British, he replied that Jews would never fight the British – and notified the high commissioner of the man’s remark. The Jewish Agency had relied on the Mandate authorities to help suppress the Arab revolts of the 1920s and 1930s, and would support Britain in its fight against the Axis powers. In public Ben-Gurion denounced the Mandate as a ‘half-Nazi regime’, but Britain also provided a bulwark against a Nazi invasion of Palestine, which would have necessitated a mass evacuation of the Jewish population. During the war the British recruited, armed and trained thousands of young Jews, enabling Ben-Gurion to develop his forces, the Haganah (Hebrew for ‘defence’), into an increasingly powerful army. He also created a separate organisation called ‘Special Squads’, designed to punish Arabs for attacks on Jews. The use of special forces, whose relationship to the state could conveniently be denied, would become a cornerstone of Israel’s ‘aggressive self-defence’ after the war." "The ‘price of Zionism’, as Segev puts it, was permanent conflict, which could be managed but never resolved."(Segev - review)
David Ainsworth ● 84d