It is one of those myths beloved of the settler-colonial that the natives want nothing more than to drive the settlers into the sea, murder them in their beds, eat their babies….

But the phrase about ‘driving the Jews into the sea’ has a particular resonance amongst Zionist apologists. But now we have the truth from the horses mouth.

Aharon Barak, the former Israeli Chief Justice, reputedly a liberal (at least in Israeli terms though his record on the bench was abysmal in terms of human rights), now he’s no longer a serving judge, has admitted that if anything, the reverse is true.

In a lecture to the New Israel Fund’s Jurists for Human Rights, Barak bemoaned the fact that human rights violations in the West bank are coming home to affet Jews too. He uses a telling analogy:

“If you were to ask a Jew: ‘Are you in favor of equality with the Arabs?’ he would say, ‘Of course.’ If you were to ask if he is in favor of throwing the Arabs into the sea, he would say, ‘Of course.’ He does not see a contradiction between these two things.”

In fact the only recorded incident of people being driven into the sea was of Haifa’s Arabs in 1947 as their homes were bombarded and set alight by the Irgun terrorist militia. (see Ilan Pappe’s ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’.

Haaretz used Barak’s comments as the vehicle for an Editorial, ‘Courageous, but belated’ of today.