Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Walid Khalidi on the conquest of Palestine

"Every Jewish immigrant who entered Palestine between 1917 and 1948, incrementally eroding the country’s majoritarian demography, did so against the wishes of the Palestinians, for the most part with the help of British bayonets. This was acknowledged by the Zionist leaders themselves: Weizmann told U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 that it had been impossible to submit the Zionist project to the Palestinians for their consent, because it would have been refused. [2] At about the same time, David Ben-Gurion, the paramount leader of the Yishuv, challenged the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who was then having moral qualms about Zionism, by stating that “not even” Buber had immigrated to Palestine with Palestinian consent. [3] "