History 101: How the Israel-Palestine Conflict From June 11, 1967 Until October 6, 2023 Set the Stage for the Next Day’s Events and All That’s Followed

A story in Haaretz puts last year’s operation by Hamas in the context of Israeli rule over the Occupied Territories since 1967 and offers a perspective that’s verboten in the US media.

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, a symbol of the new nation of Israel who led the June 1967 War that ended with the IDF’s seizure of the Occupied Territories. “We give them 48 hours to leave. If the person doesn't come to arrange his affairs – we bring a bulldozer to demolish the house.” Photo courtesy of IDF Spokesperson's Unit/Public Domain.

In September of 1982, an estimated 400,000 Israelis, about ten percent of the population, attended a rally in Tel Aviv to protest the invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of as many as 3,500 Palestinian and Shia civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which was perpetrated by a Christian militia in coordination with the country’s army. Nineteen years later, Ariel Sharon, who’d headed the defense ministry in 1982 and was found by a government commission to share "personal responsibility" for the massacre was elected prime minister and by now, Israel’s once powerful peace and leftist movements have been largely extinguished as the country has largely united in support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sociopathic ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the West Bank.

It’s still far more common to find blunt criticism of the government and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) than it is in US news outlets, as it has been for as long as I can remember. The same applies to questioning the country’s founding myths – succinctly captured by the PR slogan that very conveniently and falsely described Palestine as "A land without a people for a people without a land" – which the Israeli media periodically challenges but remains the framework for most news coverage here.

That’s not to say Israeli reporters are rigorously independent in general as the country’ press has largely acted as a cheerleader for the IDF, but is more a reflection on the disgraceful collective role of the US media in narrating Netanyahu’s relentless assault on Gaza and the broader Mideast conflict through a prism that’s heavily skewed in Israel’s favor. To judge from the coverage here, Israel is eternally besieged by irrational radical Islamist regimes and terror groups that prefer to slaughter civilians for sport rather than live in harmony with their friendly Jewish neighbors, thereby forcing the IDF to retaliate in order to deter future unprompted attacks that threaten its existence and people.

A December 5 story in Haaretz, where critical accounts in the Israeli press are heavily concentrated, provided a perspective that’s all but absent from mainstream outlets in the US. Written by Ofer Aderet under a headline that read “Israel's Plans to Transfer Gazans Go Back 60 Years,” the article was based on minutes of meetings held by Labor Party governments following Israel’s seizure of the Occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights during the June War of 1967 against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

Aderet, who discovered the minutes in the Israel State Archives, found government officials scheming to annex Gaza, expel Palestinians, and settle it with Jewish colonists. “A broad array of words was used by Israeli government ministers during the historic deliberations in the 1960s and 1970s about the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” the story began. “There were proposals to send them out of the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, Jordan, Sinai, Arab countries or any other place in the world that could receive them – by force, by consent, by subterfuge.”

Among the specific words and phrases Aderet was referring to were "diluting the population," "evacuating homes," "expulsion," "exile," "emptying" and "transfer." The views of left-leaning Labor Party leaders on handling Palestinians living on land stolen by the IDF didn’t “differ much” from the positions of Netanyahu’s current lunatic administration, he concluded.

The Haaretz story covered remarks made by government officials during meetings held over roughly seven years, beginning about two weeks after the war’s conclusion. At that time, the newly-established Committee for the Development of the Occupied Territories, made up of military officials and academics, was already drawing up plans for Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s government.

Due to the political sensitivity” of the task at hand, the Committee urged Israeli leaders to keep secret about the government’s true goal – “a global solution” for Palestinian land – and portray future development projects as “humanitarian campaigns.” The Committee was pushing on an open door in that regard, because Israeli officials had already decided to lie about their aims because they knew if they stated them openly it would generate serious international blowback.

Below are a selection of statements made by Labor Party leaders that were reported by Haaretz.

1967

Prime Minister Eshkol: "We have to handle this issue quietly, calmly and secretly...Because of these suffocating conditions and the enclosure [in Gaza] maybe the Arabs will move from the Strip, but even afterward about 400,000 Arabs will remain here [in Israel] and another 150,000 will remain in Gaza...It's possible that if we don't give them enough water they won't have any choice, because the orchards will turn yellow and wither. But we can't know all that ahead of time. Who knows, maybe we can expect another war and then this problem will be solved, but that's a kind of luxury, an unexpected solution.”

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan: "If we can evict 300,000 refugees from Gaza to other places … we can annex Gaza without a problem.”

Minister without Portfolio Yosef Sapir: "We should take them to the East Bank by the scruff of their necks and throw them there."

Labor Minister Yigal Allon, in suggesting deportations shouldn't be limited to residents in the Occupied Territories: "Why can't we expand that to the Arabs of...Israel?"

1968

Prime Minister Eshkol on the need to keep Gaza relatively impoverished: "If we arrange things there so they'll be in order, that there will be work and industry there and we build factories there and employ the Arabs there...they'll remain."

Who could ever forget lovable Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who always had a kind word for everyone. Take, for example, her words about Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories. “There's a matter of thinning out the camps. There's no argument about the principle. And nevertheless, there's no doubt they don't want to be moved.” Hmm, I don’t remember that part of the story.

1969

Prime Minister Golda Meir, who replaced Eshkol that year after he died of a heart attack, about whether Palestinians should be expelled from their land. “There's no other choice. We have to do it, either willingly or by force.”

1971

Prime Minister Meir, joking that Israel was treating Palestinian refugees benevolently by pressing them to abandon their homes and seek refuge overseas. "There's a matter of thinning out the camps. There's no argument about the principle...This really is terrible 'cruelty.’ Moving them to an apartment, giving them compensation. If that's cruelty, I don't know how you do something comfortably. And nevertheless, there's no doubt they don't want to be moved.”

Minister Dayan: “We give them 48 hours to leave…You give them an option of moving voluntarily. You remove the furniture from the house. If the person doesn't come to arrange his affairs – we bring a bulldozer to demolish the house. If there are people in the house, we evict them from the house."

Tourism Minister Moshe Kol: "If we want to see the Gaza Strip as part of the State of Israel, we have to get rid of part of the population there, no matter what the cost. We'll pay greater compensation to people who want to move."

Minister Yisrael Galili: "I'm not deluding myself that this is a humanitarian act and that we are doing charity work with them...I don't want to sugarcoat this cruel operation but it's the least worst option under the given conditions."

A few years later – the article doesn’t specify exactly when – Minister Allon stated that “expulsions” of Gaza’s local residents were essential. “We've done that in the past and we need to continue it in the future as well. [We need] to begin to move refugees to places where, with the passage of time, it will be possible to view them as permanent solutions...Through coercion too."

Despite the concerted efforts of Israeli governments to induce, coerce, or force Palestinians to leave Gaza, relatively few did during the early years after the 1967 War. As Israel made life increasingly miserable, emigration steadily picked up but the total population had grown to about 2.3 million people by last year.

In July of 2024, the UN estimated that number had fallen by 10 percent after the IDF launched its ethnic cleansing campaign the previous October, with some 200,000 Gazans having been killed or forced to flee by Israeli troops. About 90 percent of residents had been displaced, some multiple times, and large numbers were preparing to leave or trying to.

As the story in Haaretz makes plain, Palestinians have been the victims of violence far more often than they’ve been the perpetrators, and when they have employed violence it’s the Palestinian side that’s retaliating against routine, longstanding brutality committed by Israeli troops, not the other way around. It further demonstrates that Israeli leaders from left to right never had any intention of negotiating a fair two-state solution, but simply mouthed empty promises they could easily walk away from by depicting Palestinians as intransigent or terrorists or whatever other phony claim they concocted to explain why the IDF was resuming its latest Middle Eastern kill spree.

However, very little of this is evident in the standard version of events provided by historic accounts in the US media that closely mirror the official line that bestows a special status upon Israel as a key American ally worthy of special treatment and protection. That’s been blazingly apparent since October 7, 2023, when the media has rarely challenged public positions taken by the Biden administration as it seeks to justify its blanket support of Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide in Gaza and overall pursuit of Israeli Lebensraum in the region.

US readers of the Haaretz story who take the documentary evidence it contains and follow the path it charts en route to the unmistakable conclusions it leads to might begin to question whether the Hamas raid into Israel last year was truly the act of a deranged group of bloodthirsty terrorists against a peaceful neighbor, as US government officials and news reports had confidently portrayed events. Indeed, they might even wonder if it was better understood as a desperate act of asymmetrical warfare on the part of a guerilla group with legitimate grievances against a murderous regime next door that has worked for many decades to ensure that peaceful change in Palestine was impossible and made violent revolution inevitable.

As Americans know well, when tyrannical regimes conduct themselves in such a fashion it’s bound to result from time to time with the tree of liberty being refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants, and October 7 could certainly be seen as an example of that. The particular events that day could also be viewed as an unfortunate display of how citizens of the tyrannical regime would surely be alive, and never been in harm’s way to begin with, had their enraged and unhinged leaders not squandered the heritage of the people they claim to represent with their bizarre choice to become the closest approximation to the Third Reich since the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945 and the birth of Israel three years later.

If you’d like to read the full December 5 Haaretz story, email me at ken.silverstein@gmail.com and I’ll send you a PDF.