David Ben-Gurion Quotes

City motto taken from the latin phrase “Pro tanto quid retribuamus” from Psalms 116:12 of the Latin Vulgate Bible.

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.

14 Arab Armies in a coordinated attack on the 1 day old Israeli state, intended to massacre all the Israelis as demonstrated by this quote. Note that this kind of extermnination intent was advertised with pride. To everyone's surprised, the Jewish defenders not only beat back the viscious attacks but enlssarged their terroitory by capturing strategic sites from which the attacks had been launched. Many people credit to the Israely victory to the fact that they were litterally fighting for their lives. Defeat would have meant death for them and their families. The Arab armies, in contrast, were fighting for land that other Arabs claimed that should have been theirs. The willingness to stand and fight for this goal did not match the self preservation that motivated the Israelis--especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust killing 6 million Jews in WWII.

There are some who argue that the quotation was made earlier and was not meant as an incendary call for massacre of Israelis. It well may be that in his original thinking, he was predicting what would happen if the State of Israel was created, basing his thoughts on historical artrocieties of the past. And many think he was concerned about that possible outcome and was trying to avoid it. The import of the quotation was not necessaruly to hisltorically blame Assam for the point of view but to simply establish that there were many Arab voices calling for victories of history where there were massacres in the Middle East. And there were those who took Azzam's quotation and broadcasted it on Arab radio, calling for the very massacre that Assam may have been warning about. Note that this notion of Jewish massacre and extermination was also picked up 60 years later and called for by the President of Iran.

The very day of Israel’s birth, 14 Arab Armies attacked a badly outnumbered group of citizens with no formal army and few weapons. The reason the Mufti called on Arabs to leave was to allow the Arab heavy armor and artillery to be used without endangering Arab civilians. The Jews however had no place to go and were fighting for their very lives. Surprising the entire world, they not only beat back all the Arab Armies but won additional strategic positions. The Arabs who stayed became Israeli citizens and there are almost ½ million of them today. Those that left, were rejected by the Arab nations who started the war (except Jordan) and asked them to leave could not be distinguished from those Arabs who, even after the Israeli victory vowed to attack again. That is the origin of the Arab refugees. Since the other Arab states except Jordan would not assist their fellow Arabs, the only solution seems to be a Palestinian State on the West Bank and Gaza, but for that to happen war and terrorism would have to end and Israel would have to be accepted.

The Arabs did not accept the UN boundaries and tried military force to obtain all or some of the Jewish territory. They failed and Israel pushed them back across the borders and further. Then the Arabs protested that the Jews are occupying land that was awarded to the Arabs in the UN partition. Ben Gurion argues that since the Arabs would not recognize the UN borders when they wanted to enlarge their territory, there was no Israeli obligation to honor those borders and Israel enlarged their territory. Since the formation of the state of Israel, this pattern has repeated many times: The Arabs refused to recognize the status quo borders, they initiate hostilities to obtain more land, fail, and end up losing more land, and complaining that Israel is not respecting the borders.

This was one of the most accurate foreign policy assessments ever made. The next year the first Arab-Israeli war began when the state of Israel came into being. See {624566} for another accurate prediction.

Just like Spain and Persia, the Arabs by fighting lost not only more land, but also lost the respect of most of the non-Muslim War. The conscious decision to choose an irrational strategy that would cause loss of life, land and respect has none-the-less repeatedly been chosen by the Arab culture. much to its detriment. Azzam is one of the few Arabs to admit this to the non-Islamic World.

When the United Nations partitioned Palestine into a Jewish and a Palestinian State the Arab Countries all jointly attacked the fledgling Jewish State of Israel. Despite the Israeli’s being overwhelmingly out numbered in man and weapons, they beat back the invaders. However while many Arabs stayed on their Israeli land and some helped the Jews defend against the Arab Armies some abandoned their homes and land and went to neighboring Arab Counties. This is what they had been asked to do by the Arab governments who wanted to be able to attack communities without worrying about killing Arabs. To spur the evacuation the spread false propaganda about Israeli atrocities and frightened them into leaving. As a motivation to leave they were told that they could move into the Jewish lands and property when the Jews had been driven out. To make matters worse, some Israeli radicals repeated the lies to induce the Arabs to abandon their lands. In at least one case Arabs who stayed were subjected to violence. After the defeat of the Arabs, the Israelis had a dilemma in that they could not tell which Arabs were residents who had just been frightened and which had fought on the Arab side or helped the invaders. The result was that with few exceptions, the Arab refugees were not allowed back. Meanwhile, the Arab countries would not allow the refugees to settle and become citizens of the Arab countries (except for Jordan). The Palestinian refugees were a particularly fertile population and were cared for by the United Nations and have multiplied to many times their original size maintaining a continuous festering problem.

When the United Nations partitioned Palestine into a Jewish and a Palestinian State the Arab Countries all jointly militarily attacked the fledgling Jewish State of Israel. Despite the Israeli’s being overwhelmingly outnumbered they beat back the invaders. However while many Arabs stayed on their Israeli land and some helped the Jews defend against the Arab Armies, some others abandoned their homes and land and went to neighboring Arab Counties. This is what they had been asked to do by the Arab governments who wanted to be able to militarily attack communities without worrying about killing Arabs. To spur the evacuation the Arab leadership spread false propaganda about Israeli atrocities and frightened them into leaving. As a motivation to leave they were told that they could move into the Jewish lands and property when the Jews had been driven out. To make matters worse, some Israeli radicals repeated the lies to induce the Arabs to abandon their lands. In at least one case, Arabs who stayed were subjected to Jewish violence. Each side has since railed about what the other side did at that point in time and each fails to mention how they contributed to the refugee problem.

When the United Nations partitioned Palestine into separate Jewish and Muslim states, the armies of all the Arab countries attacked the new nation which did not even have a formal Army. The Israelis were able to win the war.

Just before the Six Day War. Syria did take the initiative and provoked the war which the Arabs lost badly. Ironically, Egypt and Jordan, pushed into the war by Syria, lost the most in manpower and territory.

The President had earlier threatened to execute Confederate prisoners, if the South implemented its threat to execute any Union Negro soldiers they captured. The threat seems to have worked. See Lincoln.

It was signed by over 400 American notables—politicians and clergy, Christian and Jewish. Signers included the Mayors of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, congressmen and editors of most of the leading newspapers of the day. Blackstone’s Memorial predated the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl by 4 years and Blackstone, thought a Christian, was credited as being the “Father of Zionism” by many of the American Jewish Zionist leaders. See {614859}.

A large part of the Middle East and the now “Arab” states used to be a very large Jewish State. Jews had lived in the Palestinian area and expanded from there, also using conquest as all other nations had and even occasionally, forced conversion, to establish the Jewish State. This was destroyed by the Romans and the Jews have not had a state until 1948 when the UN voted to create Israel.