In an extensive interview by journalist Sarah Dream of the British Middle East Eye website, Israeli author and researcher Yaakov Sharett said that he does not only regret the "settlement of the Negev" in the 1940s, but rather regrets the entire Zionist project.

Yaakov, 92, told the former Jerusalem correspondent and journalist that he was not responsible for being the son of Moshe Sharett, who was one of the founding fathers of Israel, its first foreign minister and the second prime minister from 1954-1955.

The report dealt with the story of an Arab village called "Abu Yahya" in the current Negev, and the researcher told how the Palestinians who lived there in the 1948 Nakba were expelled, which is the war that led to the establishment of the State of Israel.

In 1946 a young soldier and a group of his companions moved to the area to seize their lands, and he was appointed commander of one of the 11 Jewish settlement outposts in the Negev. The goal was to secure a Jewish foothold to ensure Israel's control of the strategic area when the war broke out.

Although the partition resolution defined the Negev region - in which the number of Arabs significantly outnumbered Jews - was part of an Arab country, but the Israeli planners were determined to consider them their own. During the war, almost all Arabs were expelled, and the Negev was declared part of Israel.

Immigration from Ukraine
After the 1948 war and the founding of Israel, Yakov studied Russia in the United States, and then sent a diplomat to the Israeli embassy in Moscow, to be expelled later, accused of being "a Zionist propaganda man and a CIA spy."

On his return to Israel, he worked as a journalist and devoted his last years of retirement to the founding of the Moshe Sharett Heritage Society, dedicated to publishing his diaries and memoirs that one critic described as among the best published political diaries ever.

His grandfather, Jacob Shtterok (the original family name) was one of the first Zionists to set foot in Palestine, and left his home in Kherson, Ukraine in 1882 after the Russian massacres.

He had this dream of plowing the land, the great Zionist idea was to return to the land and leave superficial activities for the Jews who had become off the ground.

He says about his grandfather and his peers: They thought that little by little more Jews would emigrate until they became a majority, and they could demand a state, asking: What did his grandfather think about the fate of the Arabs who were then 97% of the population, with about 2 to 3% Of the Jews.

He comments on that by saying that his grandfather probably believed that the more immigrant Jews increased the prosperity and the Arabs were happy, considering that his grandfather was dreamy and if he and his peers were realistic, they would not have reached Palestine mainly, as it was not possible for the minority to replace the majority that lived on this land Hundreds of years, according to his testimony to the British site.

Four years later, the grandfather hoped that he did not come, and he returned to Russia - not because of Palestinian animosity because the numbers of Jews were still small - but because he could not make a living here.

Many of the first settlers in Palestine found work on the ground much more difficult than they imagined, often returning to Russia in despair.

But in 1902, after more massacres in Russia, this time Jacob returned with a family including eight-year-old Moshe, who later became Prime Minister of Israel and spoke Arabic fluently.

Yaakov states that the Palestinians - most of them - welcomed the Jews because the threat of Zionism remained unclear to them. For two years, Jacob lived there as an Arab grandfather and his children went to a Palestinian kindergarten.

He also says, "My father used to care for sheep, learn Arabic and live in general as an Arab."

minority
But the Zionist plan was to live like Jews, and the family moved to the fast-growing Jewish center in Tel Aviv, and Moshe soon honed all his skills - including studying Ottoman law in Istanbul - in order to realize the dream of the Zionist project.

Thanks to the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine and ushered in British colonial rule, plans to establish a “Jewish state” became possible, and over the next two decades Sharett helped the project, becoming a key figure in the Jewish Agency that he was president until 1960.

Jewish settlement began, land grabbing, and changing its features. The Palestinian revolution erupted in 1936 and brutally crushed it, and doubts began to circulate about the possibility of the success of the Zionist project and the establishment of the State of Israel.

From a psychological point of view, there was an anticipation for a bad day that would come and they had to leave with their bags, he says. Therefore, the priority has always been to create a majority and get rid of "minority psychology forever", he told Middle East Eye correspondent.

The Arabs are human beings
Yakov quotes his father as talking about Arabs as human beings, but he also points out his harsh stances against the return of refugees and his agreement in this regard with David Ben-Gurion, one of the most prominent founding fathers and the first prime minister of Israel.

In 1967, while Yaakov was working as a journalist for the Israeli newspaper Maariv, he lost his faith in Zionism.

In that Arab-Israeli war, Israel seized more lands, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, where military occupation was imposed on Palestinians who did not flee this time.

Yakov refuses to go to Jerusalem, which he says was seized by ultra-Orthodox Jews, and also says he never wants to return to the Negev because he has long settled in the hands of new generations of Jews who have no sympathy for the Arabs.

He can still breathe in Tel Aviv, but he feels he is living in a bubble. "Thousands are leaving Israel and most of them have travel passports, and we have the worst Israeli government ever with Netanyahu."

"We live on the sword," says Moshe Dayan, the famous Israeli military commander, and continues, "As if we should have to make Israel a kind of castle against the invaders, but I do not think we can live with the sword forever."

The journalist says that her interview with Yakov appeared to be a confession session, and quoted him as describing the treatment of Palestinians today as racial hatred, considering that Israel is a "criminal state."

The story of the Negev
By 1939, World War II erupted and many young Jews joined the British Army's Jewish Brigade, serving on the frontlines of Europe.

The Jewish brigade had the idea of ​​a parent. Once he was old enough, Yakov volunteered and joined him in 1944 at the age of 17, but after a few months the war ended.

These youths later participated in a new war in Palestine to establish the state of Israel, which Yaakov says was "at the expense of others."

Before 1948, the Negev used to form the British administrative region of Beersheba and the Gaza Strip, which together made up half of Palestine's land, and with coasts overlooking the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, the Palestinian territories enjoyed vital access to water.

However, given that about a quarter of a million Arabs live in the Negev in 247 villages, compared to about five hundred Jews in three small outposts, the recent Anglo-American Partition Plan made the Negev part of a future Palestinian state that lives alongside a Jewish state.

Late in 1946, with a new UN partition plan in the making, a "11-point" plan was launched in the Negev not only for the new settlements to strengthen the Jewish presence there, but to serve as military bases when war breaks out.

Al-Jazeera Net had obtained, in the middle of last year, a secret document that revealed the implementation of a plan prepared by the leaders of the Jewish gangs aimed at displacing and displacing Arabs from all of Palestine during the Palestinian Nakba in 1984.

According to the document, most of the displacement, displacement, and uprooting of Arabs during the first months of the war resulted from the military operations of the Jewish fighters, without mentioning by name these gangs that supervised the implementation of the plan. Note that militias and gangs "Hagana, Etzel, Lehi, and Irgun" had the most prominent role in terrorizing the Palestinians and pushing them to leave.