Zionists Never Truly Accepted Israel’s UN Borders—Ben-Gurion Admitted It Was a Trick

“The UN — Blah!” — David Ben-Gurion

Benno Rothenberg /Meitar Collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

“It doesn’t matter what the goyim say, but what the Jews do.” —David Ben-Gurion, Zionist leader and first prime minister of modern Israel

“The UN — Blah!” —David Ben-Gurion, 1955 (Transliteration of Hebrew statement, “Um-Shmum”)

Eight years before the United Nations existed, when the British Peel Commission proposed creating one state for Jews and a second for Muslims and Christians, Zionists advised each other to pretend to accept Palestine’s partition while working to prevent it:

“We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.” —David Ben-Gurion, 1937 (Quoted in New Outlook, April 1977)

By the 1930s, Zionism was driven by two groups, Ben-Gurion’s Labor Zionists and Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists. Both believed in taking Eretz Yisrael, a Jewish state that occupied all of Palestine and some of the neighboring territory. The groups disagreed on how to do that, but the goal was the same:

“The debate has not been for or against the indivisibility of Eretz Israel. No Zionist can…