On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

Seen from the perspective of settler colonialism the conflict is a relentless and tireless engagement with the attempt to take over as much of Palestine as possible and leave in it as few Palestinians as possible. Ironically, the wish to de-Arabize the country stemmed from a Zionist aspiration to create a European kind of democracy within the midst of the Arab world with one caveat only: it had to be a Jewish democracy. Hence the colonialist impulse of the settlers was always geographical and demographic. The movement in its early stages was led by pragmatic leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, who recognized the need to take over Palestine bit by bit and without forgetting the imperative of always having an exclusive Jewish majority in the land. And therefore when the Jews were less than a third of the population during the mandatory period (1918–1948), the movement proposed a partition of Palestine in a way that would ensure the small minority of settlers’ demographic exclusivity in parts of Palestine, with the hope of absorbing more settlers in the future and thus more land. In fact, early on—in the 1930s—the Zionist leaders tried to persuade the British government to help materialize these dreams by transferring Palestinians from future Jewish areas as part of a solution to the emerging conflict; but the empire was not convinced.