By Samir Al-Khalidi - This is no revelation, nor an untold secret. Yet in an age of wilful forgetting, it is vital to revisit voices from within Israel itself, confessions, records, even regrets, that expose crimes long denied. These testimonies dismantle the myth of moral superiority and remind the world that the evidence is etched even in the words of the perpetrators.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé captured it starkly in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine: “Ethnic cleansing was not a mistake, it was a calculated policy.” He details how 1948 was no chaotic by-product of war but the deliberate execution of “Plan Dalet,” which sanctioned the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and the mass expulsion of their people. “The Nakba,” Pappé asserts, “was essential for creating a purely Jewish state.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin echoed this brutality in his memoirs, writing of his role in emptying Lydda and Ramle: “We wanted a city without Arabs… so we expelled them all.” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding leader, was equally candid, declaring in a government session: “We must use terror, murder and intimidation to drive out the Arabs.” General Moshe Dayan admitted plainly: “We occupy land that is not ours. We will kill and be killed until we accept this truth.” Historian Benny Morris, even while defending Zionism, conceded in 2004: “Without expulsion, there would be no Israel… I don’t like it, but it was necessary.”

These admissions are not relics of the past, they reverberate in Gaza today. From Deir Yassin and Sabra and Shatila to Qibya and the ongoing devastation of Gaza (2023–2025), the same doctrine persists: subjugate Palestinians by force and obliterate the conditions of their existence. Over 60,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza, entire neighbourhoods obliterated. The Guardian has documented Israel’s use of one-ton bombs on civilian districts, proof of a scorched-earth strategy that spares nothing.

Some Israelis have broken ranks. Miko Peled, the son of an Israeli general, declared: “I grew up in a military family and discovered the Zionist project was built on lies.” An Israeli journalist wrote in Haaretz in November 2023: “We bomb Gaza and call ourselves the victims… what deceit is this?”

When the perpetrator confesses, all pretence collapses. These testimonies do not absolve the crime, they record it. They affirm the Palestinian narrative as one grounded in documented truth, not competing stories. For the victims, they are proof awaiting overdue justice.