In 1919 Lord Balfour, the father of the Bolfour Declaration, justified the usurpation of Palestinians right of self determination as the following:
One day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine, Menachem Begin, the commander of the Irgun and Israel's future Prime Minster between 1977-1983, proclaimed:
Just before his death in 1940, Ze'ev Jabotinsky expressed a justification for implementing "population transfer" for the Palestinian Arabs to realize Zionism as the following:
Soon after the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1936, Ben-Gurion stated in a meeting with his Mapai party:
In 1937 David Ben-Gurion wrote about the compulsory population transfer, or ethnic cleansing, proposed by the Peel Commission:
He also stated that Arabs would come to terms with Zionism only when faced with a fait accompli:
Ben-Gurion eloquently articulated the fundamental goals of Zionism to Auni Abdul Hadi, a prominent Palestinian politician before 1948, as the following:
Ben-Gurion wrote in his dairy on November 30, 1947 after the UN's vote to partition Palestine into two states:
When Ben-Gurion visited Haifa on May 1st, 1948 he heard Abba Khoushi was trying to persuade the Palestinian Arabs in the city to stay, and Ben-Gurion reportedly said:
When Pinhas Rozen, who became Israel's first Israeli Justice, demanded that Israel's Declaration of Independence should cite the COUNTRY'S BORDERS, Ben-Gurion objected, and both exchanged the following:
"Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder important then the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit the ancient land."
"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever." (Iron Wall p. 25)
"The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them." He later added, "Hitler--- as odious as he is to us---has given this idea a good name in the world." (One Palestine Complete, p. 407)
" .... the [Palestinian Arabs] fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people, which others want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish people. The [Palestinian] Arab is fighting a war that cannot be ignored. He goes out on strike, he is killed, he makes great sacrifices." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 18)
"There is no conflict between Jewish and Arab nationalism because the Jewish nation is not in Palestine and the Palestinians are not a nation." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 19)
"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." (Righteous Victims, p. 144)
"This is only a stage in the realization of Zionism and it should prepare the ground for our expansion throughout the whole country through Jewish-Arab agreement .... the state, however, must enforce order and security and it will do this not by mobilizing and preaching 'sermons on the mount' but by the machine-guns, which we will need." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 108)
"Our ULTIMATE GOAL is the independence of the Jewish people in Palestine, ON BOTH SIDES OF THE JORDAN, not as a minority but as a community of several million. In my opinion, it is possible to create over a period of forty years, if Transjordan was included, a community of four million Jews in addition to an Arab community of two million." (Israel: A History, p. 74)
and he also added:
"we did not wish the [Palestinian] Arabs to 'sacrifice' Palestine. The Palestinian Arabs would not be sacrificed so that Zionism be realized. According to our conception of Zionism, we were neither desirous nor capable of building our future in Palestine at the expense of the [Palestinian] Arab." (Israel: A History, p. 75)
"In my heart, there was joy mixed with sadness: joy that the nations at last acknowledged that we are a nation with a state, and SADNESS that we LOST half of the country, Judea and Samaria, and , in addition, that we [would] have [in our state] 400,000 [Palestinian] Arabs." (Righteous Victims, p. 190)
"Doesn't he have anything more important to do?" (Benny Morris, p. 328)
ROZEN: "There's the question of the borders, and it CANNOT BE IGNORED."
BEN-GURION: "Anything is possible. If we decide here that there's to be no mention of borders, then we won't mention them. Nothing is a priori [imperative]."
ROZEN: "It's not a priori, but it is a legal issue."
BEN-GURION: "The law is whatever people determine it to be." (1949, The First Israelis, p. xviii)
