Late confessions of the son of the founder of Israel.. Regret over the Zionist project

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

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

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

In 1946, a young soldier and a group of his comrades moved to the area to seize its 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 would control the strategic area when war broke out.

Although the partition decision designated the Negev region - in which the Arabs greatly outnumbered the Jews - as part of an Arab state, the Israeli planners were determined to consider it their own.

During the war, almost all Arabs were expelled, and the Negev was declared part of Israel.

Emigration from Ukraine

After the 1948 war and the establishment of Israel, Yakov studied Russian in the United States, then sent a diplomat at the Israeli embassy in Moscow, only to be expelled later, accused of being a "Zionist propaganda man and a spy for the CIA."

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

His grandfather, Jacob Shertok (original family name), was one of the first Zionists to set foot in Palestine, leaving 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 the superficial activities of the Jews who had become far from the land.

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 at that time constituted about 97% of the population, with about 2 to 3% of the Jews.

He comments on this by saying that his grandfather may have thought that the greater the number of Jewish immigrants, the greater the prosperity and the Arabs were happy, considering that his grandfather was a dreamer, and if he and his peers were realistic, they would not have reached Palestine in the first place, 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 wished he hadn't come, and returned to Russia - not because of Palestinian hostility as the number of Jews was still small - but because he could not make a living here.

Many of the early settlers in Palestine found working the land much more difficult than they had imagined, and often returned to Russia in desperation.

But in 1902, after more massacres in Russia, Jacob returned this time with a family including eight-year-old Moshe, who later became Israel's prime minister and spoke fluent Arabic.

Yakov tells that the Palestinians were - for the most part - welcoming the Jews because the threat of Zionism remained unclear to them.

For two years, Jacob lived there as an Arab grandfather and his children attended a Palestinian kindergarten.

 He also says, "My father used to herd sheep, learn Arabic and generally live as an Arab."

Minority

But the Zionist plan was to live like the Jews, and the family moved to the fast-growing Jewish center in Tel Aviv, and Moshe quickly 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 of 1917, which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine and heralded British colonial rule, plans for a "Jewish state" became possible, and over the next two decades Sharett helped with the project, becoming a key figure in the Jewish Agency of which he was head until 1960.

The Jewish settlement and land appropriation and change of its features began, the Palestinian revolution broke out in 1936 and was brutally crushed by the British, and doubts began to swirl about the possibility of the success of the Zionist project and the establishment of the State of Israel.

From a psychological point of view, Yakov says, there was an anticipation of a bad day that would come and they had to leave with their bags, and adds: So the priority has always been to create a majority and get rid of “the psychology of the minority forever,” according to his testimony to a Middle East Eye reporter.

Arabs are human beings

. Yaakov quotes his father as talking about Arabs as human beings, but he also refers to 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 working as a journalist for the Israeli newspaper Maariv, Yaakov lost his faith in Zionism.

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

Yaakov refuses to go to Jerusalem, which he says was taken over by ultra-Orthodox Jews. He also says he never wants to return to the Negev because it was settled long ago in the hands of new generations of Jews who have no sympathy for Arabs.

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

"We live by the sword," said Moshe Dayan, the famous Israeli military leader. "As if we should have to make Israel a kind of fortress against invaders, but I don't think it is possible to live by the sword forever."

The journalist says that her interview with Yaakov appeared to be a confession session, and she 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 had broken out and many young Jews had joined the British Jewish Brigade, serving on the front lines in Europe. 

The Jewish Brigade was the father's idea.

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 young men later participated in a new war in Palestine to establish the state of Israel, which Yakov says was "at the expense of others."

Prior to 1948, the Negev constituted the British administrative district of Beersheba and the Gaza Strip, which together constituted half of the territory of Palestine, and with coastlines overlooking the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, the Palestinian territories had 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 living alongside a Jewish state.

In late 1946, with a new UN partition plan in the pipeline, the "11 Points" plan was launched in the Negev not only for the new settlements to reinforce the Jewish presence there, but as military bases when war broke out.

In the middle of last year, Al Jazeera Net obtained a secret document that revealed the implementation of a plan prepared by the leaders of Jewish gangs aimed at displacing and displacing Arabs from all over 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.

Noting that the militias and gangs "Hagana, Etzel, Lehi, Irgun" had the most prominent role in intimidating the Palestinians and pushing them to leave.