Israel haters love to quote David Ben-Gurion supposedly saying “We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian Arab refugees] never do return. The old will die, and the young will forget.”
He never said it. No one has been able to find this quote. It is a lie.
It has been published, of course, in anti-Israel media like Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada. (Even after Electronic Intifada admitted that it was a fake quote, they never corrected their earlier articles that quoted it as true.)
The quote is too good to check. Rashid Khalidi writes in his 2017 book The Hundred Years War “The comforting idea that ‘the old will die and the young will forget’ — a remark attributed to David Ben-Gurion, probably mistakenly — expresses one of the deepest aspirations of Israeli leaders after 1948.” Yes, Khalidi knowingly uses a fake quote to make a point, years after late night comedians made fun of the concept of “truthiness.”
But it is a lie that has been believed and published in mainstream media as well.
The Guardian in 2006.
Ben White writing in Al Jazeera, 2011.
The Independent, April 30, 2011 page 38.
Detroit Free Press, May 21, 2021 (not mentioning Ben Gurion)
Foreign Policy, in May of this year (with a link back to The Guardian as proof!)
The quote is given in dozens of anti-Israel propaganda books. It is accepted as fact without question. But not only books by Palestinians – it was also quoted by NBC’s Martin Fletcher in his 2011 book Walking Israel: A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation.
The earliest I can find that quote in the context of the Palestinians was from a June 12, 1986 letter to the editor at the Lansing State Journal where the writer says that he was told by a young Palestinian Arab man in a refugee camp in 1955, “The United Nations thinks that the old will die and the young will forget. We will never forget!…We will fight!”
The only legitimate source I can find for the quote was in “Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939. 1st Series Volume 16. Upper Silesia March 22, 1921- November 2, 1922. Germany 1921.” where a British analyst, discussing whether Germany may become an aggressive world power again after the first World War, says,
In any case it is not to be expected that a Nation which has been organised for war for over fifty years by the most searching form of conscription known to history, a system whose roots in the case of Prussia are 150 years deep, and whose Civil Service, Police and Education have all been tempered to that end, can be completely ‘demilitarised’ in two years. There are still too many ‘life interests’ involved in a return to the old system. Apart from the professional interests of the Armament firms, the Corps of Officers, the Military officials, and the N.C.O.’s, one has also to take into account the belligerent emotion of two strata of the population—youth and age, that is, those who were too young to be called up for military service and those who were too old. It is a common experience in all countries that those who are most disposed to glorify war are those who are least exposed to the risks of it. These two classes, strongly represented in the Universities and Gymnasia by the Students on the one hand and the Professors on the other, are a fertile field for militarist exploitation. But in time the old will die and the young will forget. In this respect the next five years will be decisive; they may decide the issues of peace and war in Europe for a generation.
It is ironic that a quote that tried to minimize the possibility of a resurgent militant Germany – one that would murder millions of Jews – is now being used to malign those same Jews.
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