Israel’s founding entailed mass expulsion of Arabs to secure a Jewish majority.

Evidence

Despite debatable stories of early Zionist settlers driven by socialist ideals of peaceful coexistence with local Arabs on land commonly tilled and towns cohabited, by the early 1970s Golda Meir could claim rhetorically that the Palestinian people did not exist. Romantic coexistence in these parts has always gone arm in arm with assertive claims to territorial and political sovereignty, on both sides of the conflict. In Israel’s triumphant War of Independence (what Palestinians characterize as “Al-Naqba” or “the catastrophe,” a root meaning curiously more or less synonymous with “Shoah”), Israeli gains expanded the territory ceded it by the original UN Partition Resolution by almost one third. It widened its cartographic waistline, evicting 750,000 of the 850,000 or so Arabs living within enlarged Israel in order to ensure a Jewish majority. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 571

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that coexisting interethnic contact existed alongside political assertion — the contact/institution gap — is exactly the reader’s focus; worth verifying across other colonial settler cases.
• XREF: The coexistence-vs-expulsion tension parallels the reader’s contact/institution gap hypothesis: everyday interracial socializing alongside institutional subjugation. — connects to: Israel’s founding ideology combined anti-Arab rhetoric with Jewish supremacy over Arab citizens — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 602; Israel’s self-conception was racially configured from its very founding. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 566; Israeli independence expanded partition-territory by a third and evicted 750,000 Arabs. (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Israeli independence expanded partition-territory by a third and evicted 750,000 Arabs. #corroborates (0.90)
• Israel’s founding security logic predicated its birth on Palestinian destruction #corroborates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 575
• Israel’s founding ideology combined anti-Arab rhetoric with Jewish supremacy over Arab citizens #expands (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 602
• Israel’s self-conception was racially configured from its very founding. #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 566
• Zionism externalized the Arab from the Jew and the Jew from Europe #expands (0.75) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 975
• Israel’s founding inverted the Jew’s historical role from victim into oppressor. #corroborates (0.75)
• Israel has long oscillated between apartheid-style control and expulsion of Palestinians #expands (0.75)
• Yemenite Jews were used as disposable Hebrew labor then expelled #exemplifies (0.75)
• The originary diaspora concept tied to Israel mandates reclaiming land already settled by others #expands (0.72)