By now, Israel's critics are mostly inured to the well-known litany of atrocities associated with the state's founding. Not least, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homeland in 1948 to make way for Israel and its new Jewish immigrants.
The story of the stolen babies, however, offers the shock of the unexpected. These crimes were committed not against Palestinians but other Jews. The parents whose babies were abducted had arrived in the new state lured by promises that they would find in Israel a permanent sanctuary from persecution.
But the kidnapping of the children and the mass expulsion of Palestinians at much the same time are not unrelated events. In fact, the babies scandal sheds light not only on Israel's past but on its present.
The stolen babies were not randomly seized. A very specific group was targeted: Jews who had just immigrated from the Middle East. Most were from Yemen, with others from Iraq, Morocco and Tunisia.
The Arabness of these Jews was viewed as a direct threat to the Jewish state's survival, and one almost as serious as the presence of Palestinians. Israel set about "de-Arabising" these Middle Eastern Jews with the same steely determination with which it had just driven out most of the area's Palestinians.
Like most of Israel's founding generation, David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, was from Eastern Europe. He accepted the racist, colonial notions dominant in Europe. He regarded European Jews as a civilized people coming to a primitive, barbarous region.
But the early European Zionists were not simply colonists. They were unlike the British in India, for example, who were interested chiefly in subduing the natives and exploiting their resources. If Britain found "taming" the Indians too onerous, as it eventually did, it could pack up and leave.
That was never a possibility for Ben Gurion and his followers. They were coming not only to defeat the indigenous people, but to replace them. They were going to build their Jewish state on the ruins of Arab society in Palestine.
Scholars label such enterprises -- those intending to create a permanent homeland on another people's land -- as "settler colonialism." Famously, European settlers took over the lands of North America, Australia and South Africa.
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has observed that settler colonial movements are distinguished from ordinary colonialism by what he terms the "logic of elimination" that propels them.
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