Jewish Supremacy From The River To The Sea In Three Acts

Why Israel's 2023 bombardment of Gaza is inextricably linked to its 1948 Final Solution to the Palestinian Question.

[Ethnic cleansing is when] you act in such a way that in a given territory, the members of a given ethnic group are eliminated. . . . You have massacres. Everybody is not massacred, but you have massacres in order to scare those populations. . . . Naturally, the other people are driven away.

-  Serge Brammertz

At the trial in the Hague of Radovan Karadžić

In Kishinev, a Christian patient at a Jewish hospital committed suicide.  Nearby, a peasant found the corpse of a child.  Stab wounds congregated around the boy’s main arteries. A local paper blamed the Jewish community and claimed they used their blood to prepare the Matzah for Passover.

The blood libel enraged the natives. In 1903, fury burgeoned into an incorrigible and very drunken mob with axes and pipes in hand. They looted from liquor stores first. Fueled by more booze, they pelted stones at Jewish homes, cut out a two-year-old’s tongue, and raped a woman consecutively for four hours straight – even clergy jumped in on the debauchery.

A grocer blind in one eye begged for his life with an offer of sixty rubbles. One of the rioters gouged out his other eye and said, "You will never again look upon a Christian child."

In the end, they successfully butchered 49 people and, more importantly, instilled fear in the Jewish Community.

Pogroms like Kishinev were the Zionist impetus for a home that was just for Jews. They didn’t feel safe in Europe and they were right. Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question took six million lives.

After he was defeated, freed prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp hung up handmade signs in various languages with the words “Never again.” They had enough and would never allow this to happen again no matter what.

Benjamin Netanyahu invoked these words in a speech he gave commencing the second phase of punishment Gaza would suffer for Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7, 2023:

You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible... Our heroic soldiers have one supreme goal: To destroy the murderous enemy and ensure our existence in our land. We have always said 'Never again'. 'Never again' is now.

Amalek is the demonic cancer that keeps coming back to wreak havoc on the Jews – shapeshifting from biblical foes into the Nazis and now, according to Bibi, Hamas.

Israel’s second bombardment was vicious and brutal like many others. But if a group of people had come to the brink of being blotted out of existence, don’t you think they’d fear it happening again and overreact? This captures the essence of the words “Never again.”

A need for a national home for the Jews and the slogan “never again” would become inextricably linked and the raison d'etre – the justification – for the State of Israel.

Does the slogan apply to all oppressed people? We can begin to answer this question by asking another question: How did the Palestinians become refugees?

On May 15, 1948, the day the British lifted the mandate, the surrounding Arab countries invaded. The narrative many of us learned in Hebrew School was that Arab armies told the Palestinians to leave their houses while they threw the Jews into the sea. But a declassified Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence report called “Migration of Eretz Yisrael Arabs between Dec. 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948” undermines this claim:

The impact of ‘Jewish military action’ (Haganah and Dissidents) on the migration was decisive, as some 70% of the residents left their communities and migrated as a result of these actions.

In other words, most Palestinians didn’t leave on their own accord or at the behest of Arab authorities. The Jewish military forced them out.

Even more, before the British lifted the mandate and the surrounding Arab countries invaded, the Jewish Military  (the Haganah and paramilitary units like Irgun) began the Final Solution to the Palestinian Question: Plan Dalet.

The official version of Plan Dalet directed 

Operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force… [by] destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris)… In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.

In the absence of resistance, the official Plan Dalet allowed the population to stay, albeit, under Jewish occupation.

But the actual orders given to the brigades were quite different from the official Plan Dalet document.

Benny Morris tells us,

The Haganah regarded almost all the villages as actively or potentially hostile.

The orders given to the Carmeli Brigade were as follows:

The villages which you will capture, cleanse or destroy will be decided according to consultation with your advisors on Arab affairs and the intelligence officers.

The orders given to the other Brigades were likely the same.

Put simply, the orders left it up to the brigades to do as they pleased with the villages they occupied.

Ilan Pappe interviewed many of these officers and they said,

They took the orders as “kick them out.”

Benny Morris tells us,

An atmosphere of what would later be called ethnic cleansing prevailed.

With a few exceptions, it was forced expulsion – even when the population didn’t resist, like in the village of al-Dawayima.

Plan Dalet’s first campaign was Operation Nachshon. Paramilitary groups Irgun and the Stern Gang terrorized the West Jerusalem town of Deir Yassin.

According to a UN Report:

Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities.

Some frame the massacre as propaganda. They claim the atrocities were exaggerated and the fatalities were inflated.

They are right about two things: One, recent research has reduced the number of deaths to 107 from what the Jewish Agency had claimed at the time: 254. But why would they inflate the numbers?

That leads to the second thing they’re right about: Propaganda. The massacre was used by Zionists as propaganda.

Ilan Pappe thinks,

It is likely this figure was deliberately inflated in order to sow fear among the Palestinians.

In Menachem Begin’s book The Revolt, he backs up this suspicion:

Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of ‘Irgun butchery’ were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives.

Zionists understood that fear was a powerful lubricant to get people to leave their homes.

Benny Morris writes that the remaining inhabitants of Deir Yassin:

Fled down the slope to Tiberias, sowing panic and fear in the population.

In turn, this fear caused many denizens of Tiberias to run for their lives.

A potent cocktail of fear and force persuaded Palestinians to flee for the sea in Haifa. The Carmeli Brigade called the first phase of the attack “Misparayim.” It means scissors in English and it sought to cut Haifa into three isolated parts. When the British decided to leave Haifa on April 20, 1948, the Carmeli Brigade entered a more aggressive phase called “Mitzva Bi‘ur Hametz” (Operation Cleansing the Leaven) on the eve of Passover. Every year on the Eve of Passover, Jewish families cleanse their houses of bread and flour. At the start of this eve, the Palestinians were the bread and the flour.

Mordechai Maklef ordered his troops to:

Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.

The population made a b-line for the old marketplace next to the harbor. To ensure no last-minute resistance, the Carmeli Brigade bombarded them with mortars. Frightened Palestinians piled into boats and fled into the sea.

Six thousand people went North along the coast to Acre. The Carmeli Brigade followed.  Under Operation Ben Ami, they carried out germ warfare. They poisoned the water supply and caused a Typhoid outbreak among the Palestinians.

During Operation Dani, under the aegis of Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin, the Palmach looted the valuables of the 50K inhabitants of Lydda and Ramle. They forced them out of their homes, stripped them of their belongings, and made them march into the Westbank without food or water.

By the end of the cleansing, they destroyed 531 villages, cleared out eleven neighborhoods, and uprooted 800,000 natives.

As a work-around to UN Resolution 194 (The right of the Palestinians to return home), the Knesset passed the Law of Absentee Property. The law is so vague, that any Palestinian landholder could be deemed Absentee.

More specifically, any Palestinian landowner was considered absentee if:

1)  Between Nov. 29, 1947, and March 14, 1950, they were citizens of Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, or Yemen. Or, during these dates, they went to these territories or any territory outside the 48 Israeli borders between Nov. 29, 1947, and March 14, 1950.

2)   They moved to a place where forces sought to prevent the establishment of Israel between Nov. 29, 1947, and Sept. 1, 1948.

All absentee properties were automatically vested to an arm of Israel’s Finance Ministry called the “Custodian.”  Today, 93% percent of Israel’s land is owned by the State, the Development Authority, or the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and leased exclusively to Jews.

Let’s revisit the words Benjamin Netanyahu invoked in a speech he gave commencing the second phase of punishment Gaza would suffer for Hamas’ surprise attack on Oct. 7, 2023:

You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible... Our heroic soldiers have one supreme goal: To destroy the murderous enemy and ensure our existence in our land. We have always said 'Never again'. 'Never again' is now.

Netanyahu isn’t the first to invoke the biblical Amalek.

During the War of Independence, the Haganah claimed the Palestinians were descendants of Amalek. This gave soldiers the moral justification to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the land.

A military training pamphlet called "Morality In Israel's Army" from 1948 clearly states this:

Israelite morality commands us to revenge. In oath of revenge {shvu'at nakam] the Torah commands us 'the Lord' will have war with Amalek from generation to generation [Exodus 17:16]... He demands revenge of extermination without mercy to whover tries to hurt us for no reason.

Who was Amalek and what are the consequences of comparing a group to him?

According to the Book of Genesis, Isaac intended to give the blessing to his son Esau — a divine blessing passed on from Abraham that both makes a person the father of the people and bestows the Holy Land to him.

When Isaac was very old and nearly blind his other son Jacob dressed up as Esau. Isaac fell for the deception and gave the wrong son the blessing. Esau was livid.  And Jacob became the father of the Israelites.

Amalek was Esau’s grandson and harbored his grudge.

In the Bible, God commanded King Saul to carry out a genocide against Amalek’s entire people — the Amalekites.

Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; But slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, oxen and sheep, camel and ass.

- 1 Samuel 15:3–23 KJV

Why did the Amalekites deserve such a harsh punishment?

When the Israelites were making the exodus out of Egypt and back to the Holy Land, the Amalekites attacked them.

Surely, the entire Amalekite tribe didn’t attack. But it’s clear that God wanted every member to suffer for these sins.  

The real crime had little to do with what the Amalekites did and everything to do with whom they attacked.

For you [Israel] are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples to be a people for Himself, as treasure above all the people on the face of the earth.

- Deuteronomy 7:6 NKJ

Put simply, God’s chosen people are the Israelites. Any person or group who messes with that plan needs to suffer. And not only do they need to suffer but their entire people need to suffer for their sins. Suffer how? By being blotted out of existence.

Moreover, when David Ben-Gurion testified before the Peel Commission, he said, “The Bible is our Mandate.”

What mandate could that be?

I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea and from the desert to the Euphrates River. I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you.

-        Exodus 23:31-33 NIV

God promises the Holy Land to the Israelites and explicitly gives the mandate to ethnically cleanse the natives from the land.

Surely, in 2023, Israel has evolved since biblical times and by “smiting Amalek” Netanyahu means rooting out Hamas, not ethnically cleansing Palestinians, right?

Alas, the words of numerous high-profile Israeli officials cast doubt on this.

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett tells us,

We are fighting Nazis. The world can bring them whatever they want. I'm not going to feed electricity or water to my enemies.

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warns,

We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals and we are acting accordingly…

And he threatens,

Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.

And their Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben Dahan opines:

To me, they [the Palestinians] are like animals, they aren’t human.

And claims,

The souls of all Jews are higher than those of Christians or Muslims or anybody else.

The phrase “Never Again” applies exclusively to Jews. Beyond the fog of war, the violence on both sides and the terrible suffering of Jews lies a painful truth. The biggest crime of the Palestinians is getting in the way of the Jewish God’s chosen people in a land he chose for them.

Are there more compelling reasons for cleansing the land from the river to the sea?

Indeed. In act two, we will explore these justifications.