[Frisbeetarian]

1938, Ben-Gurion states:

"When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves - that is only half the truth. As regards our security and life we defend ourselves. ... But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves."

In a nut shell, its a conscecion that they are invading foreign lands.

Zionist:
Foreign lands? Jews have always existed in the region, these lands are historically and divinely ours.

Yes, spoken like a true colonist. Colonizing projects have typically the same rhetoric of a 'divinely-ordained mission', 'chosen people', etc., and the same authority of the Old Testament to justify themselves. In the case of the United States, Thomas Jefferson suggested that the new national seal should show the children of Israel led by a pillar of light from the heavens, since he was 'confident that Americans were the new chosen people of God'. In later years, the same pretense was captured in the doctrine of 'Manifest Destiny', which - in the words of the journalist who coined the phrase - signalled that the North American continent was 'alloted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions'. Arnold Toynbee once observed that it was the same 'biblically recorded conviction of the Israelites that God has instigated them to exterminate the Canaanites' that sanctioned the British conquest of North America, Ireland and Australia, the Dutch conquest of South Africa, the Prussian conquest of Poland, and the Zionist conquest of Palestine.

The full gamut of the Zionist movement made much of what was dubbed the 'historical right' of the Jews to Palestine. It was a 'right that required no proof ... a fundamental component of all Zionist programs'. Steeped in German Romanticism, the claim was that because the forefathers of the Jewish people had originated and been buried in Palestine, Jews could only - and only Jews could - establish an authentic, organic connection with the soil there. Even so sober a thinker as Ahad Ha'am could aver that Palestine was 'a land to which our historical right is beyond doubt and has no need for farfetched proofs'. The veteran Zionist leader, Menahem Ussishkin, pushed the logic of the argument to its ultimate, if fantastic, conclusion, stating that 'the Arabs recognize unconditionally the historical title of Jews to the land'.

This sort of 'historical right' was also seized by the Romantic precursors of Nazism and, with a vengeance, by the Nazis themselves, to justify the conquest of the East. Germany was said to have legitimate claims on Slavic territory (especially but not limited to Poland) since it was 'already inhabited by the Germans in primeval times', 'fertilized by the most noble ancient German blood', 'germanic for many centuries and long before a Slav set foot there', ,teutonic-German Volksboden for 3000 years as far as the Vistula. ... In the 6th and 7th century after Christ the Slavs pushed outwards from their eastern homelands and into the ancient German land ... - admittedly only for a few hundred years', etc. The Slavic 'interlopers', by contrast, were seen as 'history's squatters' who merely 'existed' in surroundings that they 'could not master'. Only the remnant or newly settled German communities were supposedly able to 'shape' the environment and by so doing make it 'their own' in the course, ephemeral as it was, of Slavic rule. Poland under the Slavs, for example, was depicted as an artificial entity, more a melange of inchoate nationalities than a cohesive nation, that had fallen into a state of abject decay - 'untilled fields surrendered to the thorny clutches of wild nature, desolate farm buildings, soil erosion' - with the notable exception of the German enclaves that managed to endure and even thrive despite all. Substitue the proper nouns and one could be reading any standard Zionist history of Palestine. Indeed, so profound is the affinity of these two literatures that it is registered even in specific phraseology. Thus in 1939, the eminent pro-Nazi historian, Albert Brackmann, portrayed Germany as Europe's 'defender' and 'bulwark' against the East', and the 'bearers of civilization' against 'barbarism'. A half century earlier, Theodor Herzl portrayed the prospective Jewish State as Europe's 'wall of defense against Asia', and 'an outpost of civilization against barbarism'. (i.e: a mercenary state. My emphasis)

In any event, Zionism's 'historical right' to Palestine was neither historical nor a right. It was not historical inasmuch as it voided the two millenia of non-Jewish settlement in Palestine and the two millenia of Jewish settlement outside it. It was not a right, except in the Romantic 'mysticism' of 'blood and soil' and the Romantic 'cult' of 'death, heroes, and graves'.

Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Norman G. Finkelstein (p. 100-101)