Zionists Never Truly Accepted Israel’s UN Borders—Ben-Gurion Admitted It Was a Trick
“The UN — Blah!” — David Ben-Gurion
“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 forgo the smallest portion of Eretz Israel. The Debate was over which of two routes would lead quicker to the common goal.” — David Ben-Gurion. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians.
Publicly, Ben-Gurion had to pretend Zionists were in the right, but sometimes he let the truth slip inside a lie:
“We accepted the UN resolution, but the Arabs did not. They are preparing to make war on us. If we defeat them and capture western Galilee or territory on both sides of the road to Jerusalem, these areas will become part of the state. Why should we obligate ourselves to accept boundaries that in any case the Arabs don’t accept?” — David Ben-Gurion, 12 May 1948. Quoted in “One day that shook the world” by Ellli Wohlgelernter, in The Jerusalem Post, 30 April 2002.
The answer to his question is simple: Because those were the UN terms. What Arabs did was irrelevant. By rejecting the UN boundaries, Ben-Gurion rejected Israel’s right to exist.
Further, saying the Arabs were preparing to make war on the Zionists is, depending on your politics, a gross over-simplification or an outright lie. In the 1948 war, the Arabs lost because they were not prepared—they had inferior weapons and fewer troops. At the beginning of the war, Zionists had 10,000 soldiers and Arabs had 2,000; by the end of the war, Zionists had 115,000 soldiers and Arabs had 70,000. The Arab leaders knew they were weak, which is why they did not invade until after Ben-Gurion launched Plan Dalet to seize as much land as possible and after massacres like that at Deir Yassin had become common knowledge.
Everything Ben-Gurion did was consistent with his philosophy:
“To maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic State, bent upon creation and reform, building and expansion.” — David Ben-Gurion (Quoted in Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p. 419)
His commitment to expanding Israel never wavered. Three years before his death, he wrote:
“We will make a great and awful mistake if we fail to settle Hebron, neighbor and predecessor of Jerusalem, with a large Jewish settlement, constantly growing and expanding, very soon. This will also be a blessing to the Arab neighbors. Hebron is worthy to be Jerusalem’s sister.” — David Ben-Gurion, 1970 (From the introduction to The Book of Hebron)
Bonus quotes!
