Who is Pushing Whom into the Sea?

This is a recent Counterpunch article, by Willaim Martin, but it hardly contains recent ideas. It seeks to find where the expression "driving (pushing or whatever) the enemy into the sea" enters the discourse of the Palestinian struggle. Allegedly Ahmed Shukeiry said it in about 1964, a few years after the allegation was first made, though there is no actual proof of his having said it and Shukeiry himself went to his grave denying that he had said it:

On 11 October 1961 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion declared in the Israeli Knesset:

'The Arabs' exit from Palestine...began immediately after the UN resolution, from the areas earmarked for the Jewish state. And we have explicit documents testifying that they left Palestine following instructions by the Arab leaders, with the Mufti at their head, under the assumption that the invasion of the Arab armies at the expiration of the Mandate will destroy the Jewish state and push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive'.

The phrase has been variously attributed by Zionist supporters to Yasser Arafat, Gamel Abdul Nasser, or any other of Israel's enemies, but none whom I have challenged, including U S Congressman Henry Waxman who made the claim in a letter to me, attributing the phrase to Nasser, have been able to provide any documentation of support for their claim. This 1961 speech certainly predates Arafat's 1968 ascension to the head of the PLO. The phrase is very much entrenched in the thinking of Israel supporters and is taken as a factual basis for an Arab intent of Genocide and of their own potential for peril.

Giving up on his search for this Arab incitement, Martin then debunks the most enduring of Zionist lies; that of the Arab states'and leaders' instigation of the Arab flight from Palestine. As I said, it's nothing new but sadly it has to be restated continually. Martin sums up thus:

Much of the perception of Israel and much of its popular support rest on the myth of the purity of Israel and much of that can be traced directly to David Ben Gurion's distortions of truth. The unambiguous historical evidence is that the state of Israel was founded upon terrorism and the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population. There is nothing pure or righteous about that.