How The Founder Of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, Planned on Eradicating Palestinians as Early as 1890

A Historical Timeline of Israel’s Slow Erasure of Palestine

Zionism was born in Europe. Not in Palestine. Not out of any connection to the land. It emerged from the mind of a secular, cosmopolitan Hungarian-Jewish journalist who spoke no Hebrew, had never been to Palestine, and was responding entirely to a European political crisis: antisemitism on the continent.

The solution he devised was to take someone else’s land.

HR STUDIOS is Creating Award Winning Journalism
Support our workbuymeacoffee.com

Herzl’s Own Words

In 1895, Herzl confided in his diary that he did not favor sharing Palestine with the natives.

What he wrote instead:

“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side.” — Theodor Herzl, Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895

He was proposing a program of Palestinian emigration enforced through a policy of strict separation between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous population. His vision was one of transfer, or ethnic cleansing, through ethnic separation.

He knew exactly what he was proposing. He called it discreet and circumspect. He meant: do it quietly enough that the world doesn’t notice.

When Herzl’s diaries were first considered for publication after his death, senior Zionist figure Max Nordau emphatically opposed it, saying: “You will ruin Herzl’s name if you publish his diaries. Whoever reads them is bound to believe that he was…” — the sentence trails off in the archive. The implication is clear enough.

This was not Herzl alone. The transfer ideology ran through the entire movement’s leadership:

“There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left.” — Joseph Weitz, JNF Lands Department director, 1947

“With compulsory transfer we would have a vast area for settlement… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” — David Ben-Gurion, Jewish Agency meeting, June 1938

“The Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs.” — Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset

“We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters.” — Uri Lubrani, Ben-Gurion’s adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960

“I have often wondered how different Zionism might have been if Herzl had not been a Viennese journalist but a shopkeeper in a Damascus bazaar. Would Zionism have realized that Palestine was a part of a big area inhabited by Arabs?” — Uri Avnery, Israel without Zionism, 1971

The answer to Avnery’s question is obvious. It was European because its logic was European — the same logic that carved Africa at the Berlin Conference, the same logic that drew the Sykes-Picot line across the Arab world. Colonial administrators deciding who gets to live where.

The LEHI and Irgun — Terror as Policy

The Deir Yassin massacre was led by Menachem Begin in his capacity as head of the Irgun terrorist militia, which was also responsible for several acts of terror, including the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Supporting the Irgun was the Haganah, a group that went on to form the basis for the Israeli army, and the Lehi, led by Yitzhak Shamir.

Both men became Prime Ministers of Israel.

The LEHI assassinated UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in September 1948 — a Swedish diplomat who had helped rescue thousands of Jews from Nazi camps. His crime was proposing UN terms that would allow Palestinian refugees to return. As with almost every single crime committed before and since Israel’s inception, the criminals responsible enjoyed full impunity.

The Israeli government granted amnesty to all LEHI members shortly after.

Deir Yassin — April 9, 1948

On April 9, 1948, just weeks before the creation of the State of Israel, members of the Irgun and Stern Gang attacked the village of Deir Yassin, killing at least 107 Palestinians.

The massacre was carried out despite the village having agreed to a non-aggression pact.

These were stone cutters and quarry workers. A village of roughly 700 people.

They loaded 150 of the villagers onto trucks and paraded them in a victory procession through Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, after which 25 men were unloaded and shot in cold blood.

De Reynier, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, managed to enter the village on April 11. He described what he saw: militia members carrying long knives, most smeared with blood. He described what he found as an extermination squad finishing off the wounded.

According to a 1948 report by the British delegation to the United Nations, the killing took place “in circumstances of great savagery.” Israeli historian Benny Morris confirmed that ransacking, theft, and dismemberment occurred.

Deir Yassin had a profound demographic effect. It was followed by mass flight of Arabs from their locations and generated more panic than all previous operations combined.

That was the point.

No one has ever been held accountable for the Deir Yassin massacre.

Today, Israel’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem sits 1,500 yards from where Deir Yassin once stood. As visitors leave the children’s memorial, they come into view of the site. There are no markers. Tour guides say nothing.

The Nakba — 1947–1949

750,000 Palestinians expelled. 400–600 villages destroyed. 78% of historic Palestine seized.

In the 1948 Palestine war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs — about half of Mandatory Palestine’s Arab population — were expelled or fled from their homes. Dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning.

This was planned. On March 10, 1948, Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership formally adopted Plan Dalet, which called for:

“Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris)… In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”

When asked what to do with the inhabitants of Lydda and Ramla, Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said “Drive them out.” Rabin added: “I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.”

70,000 Palestinian books were systematically looted by the new Israeli army and the Haganah, in cooperation with the Israeli National Library. These included priceless volumes of literature, poetry, history and fiction. Thousands were destroyed and recycled for paper.

$200 billion — the total estimated monetary loss to Palestinians dispossessed during Israel’s establishment, in current US dollars (as of 2008).

Approximately 150,000 Palestinians who remained inside Israel’s borders were granted citizenship but stripped of most of their land and governed by violent military rule until 1966.

Today there are 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees. The longest unresolved refugee crisis on earth.

The 1967 War — The Second Displacement

Six days of war. The rest of Palestine, gone.

The Naksa was the displacement of around 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip when the territories were captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. A number of Palestinian villages were destroyed by the Israeli military, including Imwas, Yalo, Bayt Nuba, Beit Awwa, and Al-Jiftlik.

145,000 of those expelled in 1967 were already refugees from the 1948 displacement.

Refugees for the second time in their lives.

Throughout the war and under the orders of Yitzhak Rabin — who later became Israel’s prime minister — Israeli forces ethnically cleansed and destroyed several Palestinian villages, expelling some 10,000 Palestinians. Among the most infamous wiped-out villages were Imwas, Beit Nuba and Yalu.

The villages were razed on the orders of Rabin, with 7,000–10,000 inhabitants expelled and 1,464 homes demolished. The inhabitants were offered compensation but not allowed to return.

In 1972, the Canadian Jewish community raised $15 million to build a recreational park — Canada Park — on the land where those villages stood.

According to former Israeli parliamentarian Uri Avnery, the creation of the park was tantamount to complicity in ethnic cleansing, and Canadian involvement was “a cover to a war crime.”

In 1976, the displaced residents wrote to Prime Minister Rabin asking for their right to return. They did not receive a reply.

Settlements — The Nakba, Ongoing

700,000 Israeli settlers. 350 settlements. All illegal under international law.

There are upwards of 700,000 Israeli settlers living illegally on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in about 350 settlements, including more than 145 official settlements and nearly 200 outposts built without official approval but with the support of the Israeli government.

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice found in an advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation was illegal and ruled that Israel had “an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities and to evacuate all settlers” from the occupied territories.

Israel continues to build.

The report documents a monthly average of 118 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians — up from 108 in 2023, which was already a record-breaking year.

“The line between settler and State violence has blurred to a vanishing point,” said the UN Human Rights Office. The report points to the enlistment of thousands of settlers into Israeli security forces operating in the West Bank.

The UN Human Rights Chief stated that the expansion of settlements amounts to a war crime under international law and that the establishment and continuing expansion of illegal settlements are occurring alongside the displacement of Palestinians through settler and state violence, forced evictions, non-issuance of building permits, home demolitions and movement restrictions.

It started with a diary entry in 1895 and it is still being written — in demolished homes, uprooted olive trees, and building permits that Palestinians are almost impossible to obtain.

Further reading: Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine | Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited | Walid Khalidi, All That Remains | Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

HR STUDIOS is Creating Award Winning Journalism
Support our workbuymeacoffee.com