Reply #313: Fake Hateful Quotes

[oberliner]

I am a long time lurker here at DU. I registered today in order to respond to the fake quotes attributed to early Israelis.

Fake Quote #1: "We must expel Arabs and take their places."
-- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Debunking: Benny Morris, for example, claims in his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, that the Israeli leader David Ben Gurion wrote to his son, “We must expel Arabs and take their places,” which fits quite well with the assertion that Israel banished the Palestinians.

But Professor Efraim Karsh, in his book Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians, refutes this, showing that the Ben Gurion letter actually states the opposite, “We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places.” (Karsh, p. 46-51)

Fake Quote #2: "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."
-- David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

This fake quote is generally attributed to "The Koenig Report" as here: resistance.jeeran.com/zionism/quotes.htm
www.middleeast.org/comments/1/2325.shtml
www.uvm.edu/~clittle/hw/palestine.doc

Debunking: MIFTAH’s “Memorable Misquotes” also unforgettably attributes the following to Israel Koenig in the “The Koenig Memorandum”:

We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.

The Koenig Report or “memorandum,” as it is sometimes referred to, was a private document of recommendations written in 1975 by civil servant Israel Koenig, the Interior Ministry’s official in charge of the Galilee, to alter the demographic balance of the region in the favor of the Jews. The recommendations, which included expanding and strengthening Israel’s Jewish presence in the Galilee, applying legal consequences to Arabs expressing hostility toward the state and Zionism, enforcing tax collection from the Arab sector, and other steps, were rejected by then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and caused great controversy in Israel. As controversial as Koenig’s proposals were, however, there was absolutely no suggestion of using “terror,” “assassination,” “intimidation,” or “land confiscations.”

Fake Quote #3: "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."
-- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

Debunking:

Here are Golda Meir's own words about this misquote: I have been charged with being rigidly insensitive to the question of the Palestinian Arabs. I am supposed to have said, ''There are no Palestinians.'' My actual words were: ''There is no Palestinian people. There are Palestinian refugees.'' The distinction is not semantic. My statement was based on a lifetime of debates with Arab nationalists who vehemently excluded a separatist Palestinian Arab nationalism from their formulations.

I repeatedly expressed my sympathy for the needless sufferings of refugees whose abnormal situation was created and exploited by the Arab states as a tactic in their campaign against Israel. However, refugee status could not indefinitely be maintained for the original 555,000 Arabs who in 1948 joined the exodus from the battle areas during the Arab attack on the new state of Israel.

When the refugee card began to wear thin, the terrorists appeared on the scene flourishing not the arguable claims of displaced refugees but of a ghoulish nationalism that could only be sated on the corpse of Israel.

(Jan. 14, 1976)

Source: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE1DC163FF933A0575AC0A966958260

Fake Quote #4: "(The Palestinians) would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls."
-- Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

Debunking: The New York Times article (from April 1, 1988) Blackwell cites for this fraudulent quote begins thus: “As Israel prepared to lift a three-day blockade of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir warned today that rioters would be crushed ‘like grasshoppers.’” Yet a few paragraphs and sentences later, we read “But Mr. Shamir, standing atop an ancient West Bank castle, told reporters: ‘Anybody who wants to damage this fortress and other fortresses we are establishing will have his head smashed against the boulders and walls.’”
Shamir was addressing reporters, not settlers.

Source: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0710FC34590C728CDDAD0894D0484D81

Hope that is helpful!