Challenging the widely accepted premise that the 1948 war was a war of Jewish self-defense, the author demonstrates that the 1947 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) partition resolution was fundamentally a green light for the Yishuv's fully mobilized paramilitary organizations (supported by the resources of the World Zionist Organization) to effect the long-planned establishment of a Jewish state by force of arms. He further argues that as a national movement, Zionism was inherently conquest-oriented from the moment of its birth in Basel in 1897 and that it most closely resembles——in the alchemy of its religious and secular motivation and its insatiable land hunger, irredentism, and indifference to the fate of the "natives"——the Iberian Reconquista of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.
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October 2009
Research Article|
October 01 2009
The Hebrew Reconquista of Palestine: From the 1947 United Nations Partition Resolution to the First Zionist Congress of 1897
Journal of Palestine Studies (2009) 39 (1): 24–42.
Citation
Walid Khalidi; The Hebrew Reconquista of Palestine: From the 1947 United Nations Partition Resolution to the First Zionist Congress of 1897. Journal of Palestine Studies 1 October 2009; 39 (1): 24–42. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2010.XXXIX.1.24
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