The colonial settler state finally sheds all pretense and flaunts its true colours
Palestinian protesters hold up placards as they demonstrate against a US-brokered peace proposal in the West Bank city of Ramallah, on February 11, 2020.
Jeremy Salt writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 17 July 2026:
For the last half century, the peace talks have come and gone. The Jarring mission and the Rogers plan of 1969; Camp David 1978 and 1979; the Fahd plan 1981; Oslo 1993; the Arab ‘peace initiative’ of 2000 and the return to Camp David the same year. All were predicated on the same formula, a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and all failed for the simple reason that Israel did not want them to succeed.
It was busy fulfilling the historic Zionist mission, to take all of Palestine, not just part of it. The conquest of 78 percent in 1948 meant the historical mission was only partly accomplished, but it was not just the land to be taken. It was the people who would have to be removed. This was decided long before Plan Dalet was put into action.
“We must expel Arabs and take their place,” Ben-Gurion wrote to his son in the 1930s. Much earlier, in 1905, Israel Zangwill had spelled out what had to be done: “We must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan, and accustomed for centuries to despise us.” It was, of course, the Zionist settlers who were the aliens, who had no living connection with the land and in fact looked down on the Jews who lived there.
In 1940, Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish National Fund’s development division, summed up Zionist intentions: “It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples … not one village, not one tribe should be left.” This was the ‘transfer’ to surrounding countries advocated by Ben-Gurion, the euphemism for what he knew could only be removal by force.
Nothing now is left of the ‘peace talks.’ Not even the names are remembered, except by historians raking over the coals to find out ‘what went wrong,’ instead of grasping the point that Israel never wanted these talks to lead to a genuine peace, who refused to acknowledge that Israel, as a colonial settler state established at the very high point of ending settler colonialism wherever it had taken root, was wrong in the first place.
The drive towards the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in the early 20th century with the removal of tenant farmers from the land bought by Zionist purchasing agencies from absentee landowners. The greatest sales were made by the Sursocks, a Greek Orthodox Beirut family that had amassed great wealth from banking, manufacturing and import-export.
The Sursocks bought Marj ibn Amir (the Jezreel valley) from the Ottoman government in the 1870s and by 1925 had sold all of it (400,000 dunums or close to 100,000 acres) to the Zionists. Despite their wealth, during the great famine that gripped Syria in 1915-16, Michel Sursock hoarded grain and sold it at inflated prices to the few who could afford it.