David Ben-Gurion Quotes

At the time all the Arab armies were attacking Israel. Many Arabs joined the assault or evacuated to return with the “victorious” Arab armies. Many others stayed in Israel. The former became the refugees of the area. The latter, are citizens of Israel with the best health and education in the Middle East and the only Arabs who have the freedom of living in a democracy.

Mohamed Anwar El-Sedat. This was the famous speech that started the peace process in motion.

She was instrumental in forming the United Nations, but one of its weaknesses was and has been since that it was very difficult and cumbersome for the UN to mount a military force to defend a country or region against aggression. The situation has not improved much on that score since 1948. Israel had just been created by the United Nations, but over a dozen Arab State armies attacked the fledgling Jewish nation. The Israelis, against all odds, not only defended their territory but were able to seize key Arab military and strategic areas. Mrs. Roosevelt, and most of the world, assumed that under the circumstances, the Arabs would negotiate a peace treaty with Israel to regain their land. However, the Arab nations would not recognize the State of Israel and would not even negotiate with the Israelis. ER and most of the world was wrong. Instead, the Arab nations’ strategy was to have a cease fire and build their military strength to attack later in greater force. When that also failed and Israel won the subsequent wars, the Arabs then turned to Terrorism. 60 years later, the Israelis and the Arabs were further apart in many ways than in 1948.

Many Arabs remained in Israel and played an important part in building the modern state. While the promise of full citizenship with representation and participation was kept, there developed a differential amount of support for social services that were administered by religious authorities whereby Arabs had less government money spent on them per capita than the Jews did. In that case they have become second class citizens, not envisioned by the Israeli founders. Nonetheless, the Arabs who are Israeli citizens, have the most freedom of Muslims in any Arab country by far. Their health care is much better, average income from work is greater and unemployment is lower, and education is much better. However, there are forces in Israel working to force the total equality with Jewish citizens that was promised in this quote and others who in reaction to the support for the Arab terrorists by some Israeli Arabs, advocate more discrimination against Arabs and even expulsion.

Muslim extremist terrorism was rampant, even before Israel was established. A few of the early Zionists took the Biblical view and responded in kind using the same terrorist tactics of the Arabs. Ben Gurion argued against that. The debate has continued in Israel ever since. With relatively few exceptions the Israelis have not engaged in terrorism although the Arabs and their supporters have defined terrorism against them as Israel using modern weapons of war within the international rules of war. Also, the Arab terrorists argue that this is the only weapon that they have available that can equalize the conflict and further if it is in “defense of Islam” terrorism or any other act is allowed by the Koran. Ben Gurion also was prescient in that the assassins of some key Israelis leaders over the years were Jews who advocated terrorism against the Arabs just as most of the victims of Islamic Terrorists have been Muslims.

The pre WWII Zionists who returned to the Holy Land brought with them, the education, culture, technology, and particularly the modern scientific methods of agriculture and irrigation. The Arabs lived the same way as they had done since 1100 when the Muslim world "closed" to new ideas and change. At that earlier time, the Arabs had the advanced agricultural techniques which Europeans copied throughout Spain and Italy. While advanced for 1100, Arab agriculture was backward by early 20th century standards. Arab farms could mostly just feed the land owning family and produced little surplus, and they wasted huge amounts of water in the process. The returning Jews assumed that the Arabs would welcome these new techniques as well as the public health, medicine, engineering and science. They thought that they were bringing great gifts to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land. However, even though the Jewish farms improved the quality of the produce and increased the productivity many times with much less water needed, for the most part, the Arabs would not depart from their traditions and religious dictates. One of the reasons Islam had been so successful in its inception was that it prescribed behavior in every phase of life, not just religious. But then it became very difficult to change. So the benefit that the Zionists thought that they were bringing back to the Middle East were not seen as benefits by the Arabs whose various cultures and countries have remained religiously and tradition bound even into the 21st century.

The Arab Countries are notoriously corrupt and undemocratic. Huge amounts of national resources are looted by the politicians in power and their supporters. Before Israel existed, the Jews and Arabs of Palestine both had a standard of living that was considerably less than that of Egypt. The Palestinians under the Palestine authority after 50 years have a standard of living that is still less than that of Egypt. But the Israeli citizens have a standard of living that is now far greater then the other Palestinians, but many times greater than Egypt. And that goes for the Israeli Arabs living in a free democracy also; they too are far better off than their non democratic co-religionists. See {588744}.

The Israeli Arabs have a much higher standard of living than their coreligionists in the Arab controlled parts of Palestine and even Eqypt.See {588743} for more information that is related.

to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab lands

This quotation has great historical significance for its logic and perception as much as for its content, The Jewish population that the British admitted plus those already in Israel was a small fraction of the Arab population then and a tiny proportion of the Jews and Arabs now inhabiting Israel with a very high standard of living. This included over 1 million Russian Jewish immigrants, The perception of the capacity of land to support a population has always been underestimated, The Arabs simply extrapolated assuming no modernization, no technology, and every family having a small farm. Given Arab traditional perceptions of societal development, modern Israel could not possibly function, much less thrive as it does. This is one of the reasons that the Arab nations have been so reluctant to absorb more Palestinian Arab refugees. A backward view of society and assumption that the Arab status quo was then the optimum society prohibited the Arabs from modern developmental possibilities.