Brutalising the Palestinians has been the Israeli plan for decades

Re the upsurge of brutal Israeli violence towards the Palestinians, it is remarkable how so many commentators and writers of letters in your paper seem unaware of the historical context.

In 1895, in the early years of the Zionist enterprise, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary: “We shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in transit countries, but denying it employment in our own country.” David Ben-Gurion, one of the founding fathers of the state of Israel and chief architect of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947/48, wrote to his son, Amos, in 1937: “I am an enthusiastic advocate of the Jewish State, even if it involves partitioning Palestine now, because I work on the assumption that a partial Jewish state will not be an end, but a beginning. When we acquire 1,000 or 10,000 dunams of land, we are happy.

“Because this acquisition of land is important not only for its own sake, but because, through it, we are increasing our strength, and every increase in our strength helps us to acquire the whole country. The formation of a state, even if only a partial state, will be the greatest increase of strength we could have today, and will constitute a powerful lever in our historic effort to redeem the country in its entirety”. Plan Dalet, finalised by Ben-Gurion and his Consultancy Group advisers on March 10,1948, says: “These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state”.