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No remorse for destruction of Palestinian villages

January 23, 2014 at 4:34 am

Former IDF commander, brigadier general of the Givati Brigade and Israeli ambassador to Tanzania, Yitzhak Pundak, expressed no remorse about the destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948, declaring it a necessity in order to establish the State of Israel. Speaking on Israeli army radio, Pundak asserted that he sleeps with a clear conscience, ‘otherwise the number of Arabs in Israel would have been a million more than their number now’.


Pundak’s attempt at strangulating Palestinian memory of the Nakba has distorted history and availed itself of conjuring abstract comparisons between 1948 and the present, while omitting a crucial detail – international support for Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.

An analysis of Pundak’s comments conveys a striking detachment from atrocities, as perceived in his glorification of war, the misuse of terminology to define massacres, and a sense of patriotism relating to the insubstantial ‘right’ to a Jewish national homeland. Epitomising war as a unifying factor for Jews may easily be discerned in the disdain for political parties, which according to the former commander, coerces Jews into dividing factions. Death, so callously shunned and reduced to a favourable form of demography when referring to Palestinians, is hailed as a metaphor of patriotism when discussed in relation to Israeli soldiers killed under Pundak’s command. Palestinians enter into Israeli memory for the purpose of defining and legitimising, within Zionist narrative, the occupation’s concept of war. The reality of ethnic cleansing is misrepresented through Pundak’s incorrect use of war terminology, which fails to take into account the millions of displaced Palestinians whose alternatives were narrowed down to an exodus or the reality of massacre.

According to Pundak, Israel has remained in a precarious state since 1948, despite the fact that the international community is reluctant to uphold international law and hold Israel and its allies accountable for the on-going persecution of Palestinians. Security concerns are an integral foundation of the state of Israel. While Israel will never admit to corrupting the narrative of Palestinian resistance turning it into terrorism, Zionist powers are equally aware of the fact that the rhetoric of security concerns bolsters Israel’s self-asserted right to targeted assassinations, military operations and the fabled ‘moral right’ to defend a state which came into existence as a result of colonial interests in the Middle East.

In the event that a war breaks out, according to Pundak, ‘the Jews will be able to sacrifice the same way they did in 1948’. As with other wars waged by imperialism, the euphemism of collateral damage is collectively applied by superior powers in reference to deaths sustained by the targeted population. Evoking the deaths of 145 Israeli soldiers who died under his command, Pundak assumes a mournful stance while callously dismissing the massacres of Palestinians as a necessity to create the Jewish state. Such affirmations only serve to consolidate Israel’s concern for maintaining an ethnic majority at the expense of deliberately striving to alter the historical reality of the Nakba, manipulating the consequences of the massacres into a parody of victory.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.