November 5, 2013
The Washington Post

A Greater Israel?

Faction says no to two-state solution, yes to annexing Palestinian areas

by William Booth and Ruth Eglash

JERUSALEM -- As Secretary of State John F. Kerry resumes talks here Wednesday in the quest to create "two states for two people," a vocal faction in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government is, more openly than ever, opposing the very idea of a Palestinian state -- and putting forward its own plans to take, rather than give away, territory.

Ministers in Netanyahu's ruling coalition and leaders of his party, the Likud, are in revolt against the international community's long-held consensus that there should be two states between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In the process, they are seeking to overturn the commitments of every U.S. president since Bill Clinton and at least four Israeli prime ministers, including the current one. . . .

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United Nations Security Council Resolution 242

IF AMERICANS KNEW - What every American needs to know about Israel / Palestine

Mike Rivero's examples of the desire for peace by Israelis:

"Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."--Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.

"We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world."--Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920

"The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war."--Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, March 19, 1972

"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."--Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of July 14,1972.

"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."--Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum," April 1976

"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai."--David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'"--Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, October 23, 1979.

"We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours."--Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983, New York Times April 14, 1983

"When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle."--Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, April 14, 1983

"We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves."--Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983

"The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls."--Isreali Prime Minister (at the time, in a speech to Jewish settlers) New York Times, April 1, 1988

"Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."--Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.

A. K. Ramakrishnan, "Mahatma Gandhi Rejected Zionism," The Wisdom Fund, August 15, 2001

"Wipe Out Israel? Or Palestine?," The Wisdom Fund, December 20, 2005

[The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.--Richard Cohen, "Hunker Down With History," washingtonpost.com, July 18, 2006]

Ilan Pappe, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," Oneworld Publications, October 2006

George Bisharat, "Israel and Palestine: A True One-State Solution," Washington Post, September 3, 2010

[the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria and Iraq, the war in Yemen, the process of regime change in Egypt, must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli expansionist project.

"Greater Israel" consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates.--Israel Shahak, "Greater Israel: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East," globalresearch.ca, April 29, 2013]

[When Shlomo Sand's book The Invention of the Jewish People was published it caused a largely a storm of outrage here in the United States among the few who read it. It was a bestseller in Israel, though mostly reviled, and where it was reviewed in the American corporate press the response was deeply hostile. Its central argument holds that the Jews of Europe, the Ashkenazim, are largely descendants of peoples who converted to Judaism in the distant past and that the claim that all Jews descend from ancient Israelites is false. Therefore the contention that European Jews are reclaiming ancient rights to their homeland in what is now Israel is a false claim. Moreover, the peoples now known as "Palestinians" are in all likelihood much more closely descended genetically from the ancient Israelites but who in the course of history converted for one reason or another either to Christianity or to Islam, and who therefore have a just claim to the land.--Paul Atwood, " Whatever Happened to Shlomo Sand? Missing in Action After the Storm Over the 'Invention of the Jewish People'," counterpunch.org, February 14, 2014]

Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in 1948 (Nakba), May 14, 2011

[Islam saved Jewry.--David J Wasserstein, "So, what did the Muslims do for the Jews?," thejc.com, May 24, 2012]

[Israeli soldiers were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the hundreds, a fact that the entire Israeli army leadership knew about and condoned, according to the army's own historian.--"June 8, 1967: Israel Attacked the USS Liberty," The Wisdom Fund, June 8, 2013]

[In line with warnings he has issued in his UN post for the past six years, Mr Falk, a professor emeritus in international law at Princeton University, said Israeli policies were designed to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the occupied territories, and especially East Jerusalem, the expected capital of any Palestinian state.--Jonathon Cook, "As peace talks falter, Israel's intentions become clearer," thenational.ae, April 6, 2014]

Peter Beaumont, "Netanyahu pushes to define Israel as nation state of Jewish people only," theguardian.com, May 4, 2014

Miko Peled, "Israel and Gaza: Six Decades of Oppression and Resistance," August 22, 2014

Max Blumenthal, "Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel," Nation Books (August 26, 2014)

[Nothing has changed since the Zionists' infamous "Plan D" in 1948 that ethnically cleansed an entire people. Recently, on the website of the Times of Israel were the words: "Genocide is Permissible". A deputy speaker of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, Moshe Feiglin, demands a policy of mass expulsion into concentration camps. An MP, Ayelet Shaked, whose party is a member of the governing coalition, calls for the extermination of Palestinian mothers to prevent them giving birth to what she calls "little snakes".--John Pilger, "Gaza and the Threat of World War," counterpunch.org, September 12, 2014]

Alison Weir, "Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel," May 8, 2015

Dan Sanchez, "How the State of Israel was founded on the plunder of Palestine," antiwar.com, May 26, 2015

Ilan Pappe, "New evidence from 1967 war reveals Israeli atrocities," electronicintifada.net, June 23, 2015

Yossi Gurvitz, "Netanyahu gov't is implementing annexation of West Bank as secret but official policy," mondoweiss.net, March 3, 2016

Richard Silverstein, "Sephardic Chief Rabbi Argues Ethnic Cleansing Justified by Jewish Law," richardsilverstein.com, March 27, 2016

Jonathon Cook, "Israel's Fear of the Arab Jews in Its Midst," counterpunch.org, June 23, 2016

Rachael Revesz, "Colin Powell leaked emails: Israel has '200 nukes all pointed at Iran', former US secretary of state says," independent.co.uk, September 16, 2016

Abby Martin, "The Empire Files: How Palestine Became Colonized," September 28, 2016

Robert Fisk, "The Butcher of Qana: Shimon Peres Was No Peacemaker," counterpunch.org, September 29, 2016

Glenn Greenwald, "U.S. Admits Israel Is Building Permanent Apartheid Regime -- Weeks After Giving It $38 Billion'," theintercept.com, October 6, 2016]

Joshua Mitnick, "With the two-state solution a distant dream, Palestinians ask if it's time to push for a one-state solution," latimes.com, December 29, 2016

Diana Buttu and Gideon Levy, "Israeli Settlements, Kerry, Military Aid & End of Two-State Solution," December 30, 2016

Robert Fisk, "The Paris peace conference was beyond useless -- everyone knows a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine is impossible now," independent.co.uk, January 16, 2017

[The Israelites' control barely lasted for 77 years and it is largely contested that Israeli Jews of today are even blood relatives of the groups that inhabited Palestine 2,000 years ago.

. . . both the "peace process" and the "two-state solution" charade have been largely an American investment to maintain US leadership, power and influence over the conflict in Palestine.--Ramzy Baroud, "Trump's embassy move to Jerusalem 'self-destructive'," aljazeera.com, January 24, 2017]

[The struggle Trump's equivocation provokes, however, must first play out in the internal politics of Israelis and Palestinians. It is a supremely clarifying moment. Each side must now define what it really wants to fight for: a fortress for their tribe alone, or a shared homeland ensuring rights and dignity for all.--Jonathon Cook, "One State: Trump Has Reminded Palestinians What It Was Always About," counterpunch.org, February 23]

Stanley L Cohen, "Jim Crow is alive and well in Israel," aljazeera.com, March 1, 2017

"In Historic Report, U.N. Agency Says Israel Is Imposing an 'Apartheid Regime' on Palestinian People," democracynow.org, March 15, 2017

[Netanyahu is prepared to risk it all, tearing down the post-war international order, if this act of colossal vandalism will finally rid him of the Palestinians.--Jonathon Cook, "UN Last Hurdle Before Israel Can Rid Itself of the Palestinians," counterpunch.org, June 15, 2017]

Yotam Berger, "Netanyahu Vows to Never Remove Israeli Settlements From West Bank: 'We're Here to Stay, Forever'," haaretz.com, August 28, 2017

Gary Fields, "Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror," University of California Press (September 5, 2017)

Jonathon Cook, "Balfour Declaration: How Britain broke its feeble promise to the Palestinians," jonathan-cook.net, October 30, 2017

Chantal Da Silva, "Prince Charles blames 'foreign Jews' for Middle East turmoil in 1986 letter," independent.co.uk, November 13, 2017

Zena Tahhan, "Israel's settlements: 50 years of land theft explained," aljazeera.com, November 21, 2017

[Zionism was originally a minority opinion among Jews.--Allan C. Brownfeld, "Examining 'Ten Myths about Israel', by Ilan Pappe," mondoweiss.net, January 24, 2018]

Robert David Steele, "Zionist Vision Is Rooted in Five Big Lies and Four Big Thefts," ahtribune.com, April 7, 2018

"Noura Erakat on the Palestinians' Reaction to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem," CBS News, May 14, 2018

Jonathan Cook, "Israel Bulldozes Khan Al Ahmar and Buries the Two-State Solution," consortiumnews.com, July 9, 2018

Adam Entous, "The Maps of Israeli Settlements That Shocked Barack Obama," newyorker.com, July 9, 2018

Jonathan Lis and Noa Landau, "Israel Passes Controversial Jewish Nation-state Bill After Stormy Debate," haaretz.com, July 19, 2018

N D Jayaprakash, "The Apartheid State of Israel: Decoding the 'Basic Law' and the Meaning of a 'Jewish Nation'," counterpunch.org, August 8, 2018

[Israel defines 'Jewish' as a Nationality, . . . The purpose of this is to reserve exclusive national rights to Jews only--Jonathan Ofir, "Understanding Israel's deception regarding citizenship vs. Jewish nationality'," counterpunch.org, March 14, 2019]

[What is Jared Kushner if not the team captain for the Greater Israel Project? After all, he is Jewish, an ardent Zionist, an investor in the illegal settlements in Palestine and an advocate, par excellence, for Israeli survival and supremacy.--Jafar M. Ramini, "Jared Kushner's Palestine 'Peace' Plan Is the Lie of the Century," russia-insider.com, July 6, 2019]

Hagar Shezaf, "Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs," haaretz.com, July 6, 2019

"Debate: Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism," iqsquared, July 26, 2019