Palestinian right to self-determination an unrealizable, illusory right and to, simultaneously, contrive a purported Israeli-Jewish right to selfdetermination that is somehow exceptional, legitimate and applicable to the whole of Palestine. Palestinian apprehension and vehement opposition to Zionism have always been grounded in a well-placed sense of the Zionist intent to permanently deprive Palestinians of their land. From the outset, Zionism was framed by its founder, Theodor Herzl, as a colonial project,3 that eventually fixated on Palestine as the site “to establish a home for the Jewish people in Eretz-Israel secured under public law,”4 or, in other words, to establish a Jewish state in the whole of Mandatory Palestine. If understood properly as a settler-colonial project, it can be more readily accepted that Zionism necessarily seeks the elimination of the native people, in this case the Palestinian people, in order for the foreign settler population to dominate and expropriate the land, and accumulate prosperity for that population, in this case, Jews from around the world.5 Virtually from the outset, the success of the Zionist enterprise in Mandatory Palestine was predicated on the need to cleanse the land of its native people, the Palestinians. At the turn of the twentieth century, Herzl’s diaries already wrote of the need for discrete population transfer through land acquisition and employment enticements in other countries.6 The forcefulness of the intended transfer intensified as the Zionist project advanced under the British Mandate. David Ben-Gurion, who later became the first Israeli Prime Minister, expressed the need to expel the Palestinian people,7 and the Director of the Settlement Division of the Jewish National Fund, Yosef Weitz, wrote of the fact that “there is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries [and that] not one village must be left, not one [Bedouin] tribe.”8 10 3 Herzl targeted Britain to support the establishment of a Jewish state, because it was “the first to recognize the need for colonial expansion.” Additionally, Zionism was sold to the British on the basis of the capacity of Jews to “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” John Quigley, The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 6-7. 4 Basel Program, cited in Gotthard Deutsch, “Basel Program,” Jewish Encyclopaedia, webpage, available at: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/2612-basel-program [accessed 28 February 2020]. 5 See Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). 6 Raphael Patai (ed.), The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Harry Zohn (trans.), vol.1 (New York & London: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), 88-89, available at: https://archive.org/details/ TheCompleteDiariesOfTheodorHerzl_201606/page/n49/mode/2up [accessed 28 February 2020]. 7 Quigley, supra 3, 25. 8 Ibid.