Memory-holed history from Haaretz:
““In general, those who have guns use them,” Ben-Gurion asserted, adding that some Israelis “think Jews are people but Arabs aren’t, so you can do anything to them. And some think it’s a mitzvah to kill Arabs, and that everything the government says against murdering Arabs isn’t serious, that it’s just a pretense that killing Arabs is forbidden, but in fact, it’s a blessing because there will be fewer Arabs here. As long as they think that, the murders won’t stop.”
Ben-Gurion said he, too, would prefer fewer Arabs, but not at the price of murder. “Abolishing the death penalty will increase bloodshed,” he warned, especially between Jews and Arabs. “Soon, we won’t be able to show our faces to the world. Jews meet an Arab and murder him.”
Soon we won’t be able to show our faces to the world. That statement belies a human level of shame and guilt that has appeared to have vanished from Israeli politics. Ben-Gurion, who was also Defense Minister at the time, spoke in opposition to abolishing the death penalty, because he believed that Arab murders would skyrocket as a result. Israeli Jews were just too bloodthirsty, in his mind.
Ben-Gurion can rightly be considered the creator and founder of the state of Israel, but even he was honest enough with himself to see what Israel was becoming. He resigned in 1954, but returned as Prime Minister after the fallout of the Lavon Affair, where Israel planned to plant bombs in American and British locations, kill Americans and Brits, and then blame the deaths on Arab terrorism.
