Since 1948, Israel has invoked the Holocaust to justify the forced expulsion of Arabs from Palestine to create a Jewish state, but the systematic blueprint for ethnic cleansing was being drawn up years earlier by a Zionist zealot named Yosef Weitz.
In November 1940 – eight years before the founding of the state of Israel – Weitz wrote:
“It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples … If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us …. The only solution is a Land…without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises… There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries … Not one village must be left, not one tribe… There is no other solution.”
Weitz was “a quintessential Zionist colonialist,” writes Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. Born in Russia in 1890 and immigrating to Palestine as a child, Weitz would become the influential head of the Land Settlement Department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) created to colonise Palestine by purchasing Arab land for the Yishuv (the immigrant Jews in Palestine before 1948).
As head of the Land Settlement Department, Weitz oversaw the program to purchase properties from absentee landlords and run the Palestinian tenant farmers off their land. But it soon became clear that purchasing small lots of land would not come close to fulfilling the Zionists’ dream of creating a Jewish majority state in Palestine.
In 1932, when Weitz joined the Jewish National Fund, there were only 91,000 Jews in Palestine (roughly 10 percent of the population) who owned a mere 2 percent of the land.
Hellbound and Down 