Augusto Pinochet. Efraín Ríos Montt. Enver Pasha. Julius Popper. Mario Roatta. Pietro Badoglio. Roberto D’Aubuisson. Rodolfo Graziani. Talât Pasha. Yahya Khan. These are but a few of the names that would sit nicely next to David Ben‐Gurion, who is more fortunate in that his name is more celebrated (for now). While normally I am against simplifying anybody as ‘a monster’, for colloquial purposes it suffices to summarize David Ben‐Gurion, Zionism’s first head of state, as monstrous, for reasons which I shall now show you.

Quoting Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, page 28

Ben‐Gurion had already realised by the end of 1946 that the British were on their way out, and with his aides began working on a general strategy that could be implemented against the Palestinian population the moment the British were gone. This strategy became Plan C, or Gimel, in Hebrew.

[…]

Like Plans A and B, Plan C aimed to prepare the military forces of the [Zionist] community in Palestine for the offensive campaigns they would be engaged in against rural and urban Palestine the moment the British were gone. The purpose of such actions would be to ‘deter’ the Palestinian population from attacking [Zionist] settlements, and to retaliate for assaults on Jewish houses, roads and traffic. Plan C spelled out clearly what punitive actions of this kind would entail:

• Killing the Palestinian political leadership.
• Killing Palestinian inciters and their financial supporters.
• Killing Palestinians who acted against Jews.
• Killing senior Palestinian officers and officials [in the Mandatory system].
• Damaging Palestinian transportation.
• Damaging the sources of Palestinian livelihoods: water wells, mills, etc.
• Attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks.
• Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc.

Plan C added that all data required for the performance of these actions could be found in the village files: lists of leaders, activists, ‘potential human targets’, the precise layout of villages, and so on.⁴⁸

However, within a few months, yet another plan was drawn up: Plan D (Dalet).⁴⁹ It was this plan that sealed the fate of the Palestinians within the territory the Zionist Leaders had set their eyes on for their future Jewish State. Indifferent as to whether these Palestinians might decide to collaborate with or oppose their […] State, Plan Dalet called for their systematic and total expulsion from their homeland.

We saw how that happened. Page 250:

David Ben‐Gurion was very clear in December 1947 that ‘there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent.’³ [His neocolony], he warned on the same occasion, would have to deal with this ‘severe’ problem with ‘a new approach in due course’.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine [that] Ben‐Gurion instigated the following year, his ‘new approach’, ensured that the number of Palestinians was reduced to less than twenty per cent of the overall population in the new […] state.

One of the few Arab cities that Ben‐Gurion and his cronies spared from annihilation was Nazareth, after the Jewish WWII veteran Ben Donkelman, horrified that anybody would want to expel so many innocents, convinced the Zionist régime to leave them alone. He was mostly successful: Ben‐Gurion cancelled the order, but when Ben‐Gurion later visited Nazareth, he looked around in astonishment and asked some Zionist officers, ‘Why are there so many Arabs? Why didn’t you expel them?’ Page 171:

Once again, […] not all those allowed to stay were spared. Some of the people were expelled or arrested on the first day of the occupation, as the intelligence officers began searching the city from house to house and seizing people according to a pre‐prepared list of suspects and ‘undesirables’. Palti Sela was going around with a well‐known Arab personality from Nazareth, carrying with them seven notebooks filled with the names of people who could stay, either because they belonged to clans that had been collaborating with the [Zionists], or for some other reason.

Ben‐Gurion and his lackeys could have pursued a less violent course if they wanted to, but they refused:

Following a coup in Damascus, Husni al‐Zaim seized power and offered [the Zionists] even more concessions. As a matter of fact, he suggested meeting Ben Gurion face to face to negotiate a full-fledged peace. Not only that, he offered absorbing and resettling 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria. The U.S. was enthusiastic about this development, the [Zionists] however, were indifferent and refused the offer. Ben Gurion wanted to force an agreement through military might only. [Jewish] historian Avi Shlaim wrote that:

“During his brief tenure of power [Zaim] gave [the Zionists] every opportunity to bury the hatchet and lay the foundations for peaceful coexistence in the long term. If his overtures were spurned, if his constructive proposals were not put to the test, and if a historic opportunity was frittered away […] the fault must be sought not with Zaim but on the [Zionist] side.”

From the late 1940s to the 1950s, Ben‐Gurion’s unambiguous plan to expel as many Arabs as possible resulted in 800,000 displacements and the extermination of at least 15,000 Palestinians.

All right, he didn’t exactly like his Arabic cousins. What about his Jewish siblings?

Ben Gurion, who described the Sephardi immigrants as lacking even “the most elementary knowledge” and “without a trace of Jewish or human education.”⁴ Ben Gurion repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews: “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.”⁵

[…]

Ben Gurion, who called the Moroccan Jews “savages” at a session of a Knesset Committee, and who compared Sephardim, pejoratively (and revealingly), to the Blacks brought to the United States as slaves, at times went so far as to question the spiritual capacity and even the Jewishness of the Sephardim.⁹

In an article entitled “The Glory of Israel,” published in the Government’s Annual, the Prime Minister lamented that “the divine presence has disappeared from the Oriental Jewish ethnic groups,” while he praised European Jews for having “led our people in both quantitative and qualitative terms.”¹⁰

(Source.)

Did he at least care about the Shoah victims?

A month after the [Fascist] pogrom against Germany’s Jews, famously known as Kristallnacht, [David Ben Gurion] stated on December 7, 1938: “If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz‐Yisrael, I would choose the latter—because we are faced not only with the accounting of these [Jewish] children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People.”

(Emphasis added in all cases. Source.)

This is a man who, instead of being taken to a court, retired to a kibbutz in 1970 and lived peacefully until he experienced a cerebral haemorrhage in November 1973 and remained in a hospital until expiring on December 1st of that year. He received a few rewards, including the ‘Bialik Prize for Jewish thought’, numerous schools, streets, and an aeroport (of which he is the mascot) were named after him, and depending on your calendar, today is his birthday, which is a holiday in the neocolony:

Ben‐Gurion Day (Hebrew: יום בן־גוריון‎) is [a Zionist] national holiday celebrated annually on the sixth of the Hebrew month of Kislev, to commemorate the life and vision of Zionist leader, and [Zionism’s] first Prime Minister David Ben‐Gurion.

Well! I know how I’ll commemorate him.