A Brief History of Genocidal Rhetoric in Israel Before Oct. 7th
For nearly a century, Zionist and Israeli leaders have been making genocidal statements about Arabs and Palestinians.
Yizhak Rabin, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, said in 1992, “I would like to see Gaza drown in the sea.” (Photo: Reuters/The Jerusalem Post)
For nearly a century, Zionist and Israeli leaders have been making genocidal statements about Arabs and Palestinians. This started with the accusation that Palestinians are themselves genocidal and thus likened to animals, Nazis or Amalek. “There are no innocent Palestinians in Gaza,” to use a phrase that long predates October 2023. This is a brief history of genocidal rhetoric in Palestine and Israel before Oct. 7th.
Since the 1930s, Zionist leaders have convinced themselves Palestinian Arabs were genocidal. The leader of the Haganah militia from 1922-1931, Yosef Hecht, confided in his diary that “we are always persecuted [and] murdered by the majority of ‘civilized’ peoples, or savage & cruel [peoples] like the Arabs…their intention toward us is not only to humiliate but also to destroy [us] physically.” Zionists realized early on that there was no better justification for violence against Palestinians than in the name of preventing their own annihilation.
In August 1947, the leader of the Zionist community in Palestine, David Ben Gurion, echoed this point. “The aim of the Arab attacks on Zionism is not robbery, terror, or stopping Zionist growth, but total destruction of the Yishuv.” They are not “political adversaries,” but “pupils & teachers of Hitler, who claim there is only one way to solve the Jewish question… total annihilation." In fact, Hitler ranks #1 on the list of people the Palestinians are compared to, as we shall see.
The 1948 War broke out a few months later and the Zionist propaganda machine went into overdrive. The Israeli military distributed pamphlets comparing the Arab enemy to Amalek, the biblical people whom the Israelites were commanded to exterminate. Zionist leaders spread the claim that the Arabs wanted to “throw the Jews into the Sea.”
Yet, the Israeli historian Shay Hazkani spent 15 years looking for such claims in Arabic sources, and found nothing, not a single reference to push the Jews of Palestine into the Sea.
In his words, “Judging by the documents I collected for my latest book, the claims about an Arab plan to “throw the Jews into the sea” are actually rooted in official Zionist propaganda. This propaganda began during the war, perhaps to encourage Jewish fighters to leave as few Palestinians as possible in the areas that would become part of Israel.”
“You show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome” is an expression that should be more popular in discussions about genocidal rhetoric among Zionist leaders. After all, a genocide of the Palestinians amounted to a Zionist dream come true: a land without a people, for a people without a land.
The attitude of “they-want-to-kills-us-all” runs deep in Israeli society. In 1970, a piece in Davar, an Israeli “left” publication, reads: “the anti-semitic movement in all its anti-Zionist and anti-Israel revelations proves that its perpetrators wish to complete the “final solution” which Hitler initiated through the division of roles: The Arab nations will continue with physical genocide…”.
It was none other than the “peacemaker” Yizhak Rabin who rose to prominence on genocidal campaign messaging. In 1992, he promised to “keep Gaza out of Tel Aviv,” adding in an unguarded moment, "I would like to see Gaza drown in the sea."
After the failure of the Oslo Process and the outbreak of the Second Uprising during which more than 1,000 Israelis were killed and 3,000 Palestinians were killed, the genocidal rhetoric spread like wildfire. The fiercer the Palestinian resistance to Jewish supremacy, the more genocidal the rhetoric, a trend that has become obvious since Oct. 7th but was plain and simple long before.
The religious right led the charge in 2001, when Israel’s Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, in reference to the Arabs, said "it is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.” In 2010, he said of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the people he leads that "all these evil people should perish from this world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians."
The rabbis also have a secret weapon at their disposal: the Bible. In 2010, the Chief Rabbi of Safed Shmuel Eliyahu published a religious edict co-signed by 50 taxpayer-funded religious authors in Israel, citing a genocidal Biblical verse in his plea not to rent to Arabs: “When your god, Yahweh, brings you to the land that you are going to inherit, he will banish other nations…Yahweh will deliver them to you, and you will strike them down. Utterly destroy them, and do not sign any pacts with them. Show them no mercy…”
The Biblical reference provided a veneer of defensibility in what was a naked call for genocide against Palestinians coming from dozens of rabbis on the Israeli government’s payroll.
In 2010, The rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur published a legal guide justifying mass murder. The book insists that the commandment against murder “refers only to a Jew who kills a Jew, and not to a Jew who kills a gentile, even if that gentile is one of the righteous among the nations.” Much like the other genocidal rabbis, Shapira and Elitzur similarly faced no consequences.
The religious justifications for genocide coming from Israel’s spiritual leaders were matched by political and military ones coming from Israel’s mainstream.
During the Nov. 2012 War on Gaza, the “center-left” Kadima party activist Gilad Sharon called on the Israeli army to "flatten all of Gaza.” “The desire to prevent harm to innocent civilians in Gaza”, he wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “will ultimately lead to harming the truly innocent: the residents of southern Israel. The residents of Gaza are not innocent. They elected Hamas… they chose this freely and must live with the consequences.”
Then, in June 2014, Netanyahu called rogue Hamas operatives who kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers “human animals.” Israeli leaders exploited the episode to round up and arrest hundreds of Hamas officials in the West Bank, effectively declaring war on the organization. Within a few weeks, Israel had declared an all-out war on Gaza, killing 2,251 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, in its 51 Days onslaught in July 2014.
During the aggression on Gaza, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked, a senior party in the government coalition, published a Facebook post describing the entire Palestinian people as legitimate targets:
“The enemy soldiers hide out among the population, and it is only through its support that they can fight. Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads.”
Then she said Palestinian mothers give birth to snakes, effectively a call to slaughter the hundreds of thousands of Gazan Palestinian women of child-rearing age.
All the while, Israeli leaders continued to liken Palestinians to Nazis. In 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, came up with a novel theory of history, arguing that it was a Palestinian, Amin al-Husseini, who gave Hitler the idea of exterminating Europe’s Jews. No historians believe this, but facts have never been relevant when describing Palestinians as genocidal.
In fact, Netanyahu has a track record of referencing Nazi era terminology when discussing Palestinians. "Judea and Samaria cannot be Judenrein," a Netanyahu confidant quoted him as telling Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Judenrein was the term used by Nazis to refer to ridding Germany of its Jews.
By 2018, the highest echelons in Israel’s political establishment were now openly genocidal. As was the case in 2012 and 2014, the genocidal rhetoric came in the context of Palestinian resistance to subjugation.
In response to the 2018 Gaza protest movement, known as the Great March of Return, a Ghandian-like unarmed struggle for freedom, Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said, “You have to understand, there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip. Everyone has a connection to Hamas.”
“There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip.” Those were the words of Israel’s Defense Minister, in 2018.
Since October 7th, the genocidal rhetoric has moved from the margins into every nook and cranny of Israel’s mainstream. We now need databases just to keep track of the hundreds upon hundreds of genocidal statements made by Israel’s media, political and military establishment. If only there were warning signs.
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