Miko Peled: “The story of the Zionists is not that they came to a desert and made it bloom — it’s that they came to a blooming country and they stole it.” As Palestinians say in Arabic: اخذوها مفروشة (Akhaduha Mafroosha) — “They took it fully furnished.” Cities, farms, orchards, ports, banks, and infrastructure were already there. They didn’t create a garden from nothing; they took a country that was already in full bloom and claimed it as their own.

In January 1948, Golda Meir (then Meyerson) flew to the US on an urgent mission for the Jewish Agency. At the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds conference in Chicago (around 21–25 January), she told American Jewish charity leaders the Yishuv needed $25–30 million in cash immediately—not next month, “now.” She was not raising money for food, housing, or refugees. She was raising it for weapons. The funds went to arm the Haganah ahead of the war that followed the UN partition vote. Palestinian and Arab forces rejected the partition; the Jewish side prepared for, and then fought, the conflict that created Israel and displaced over 700,000 Palestinians in the Nakba. American Jewish federations and welfare funds—whose core purpose was local charity and aid—were asked to divert large sums into guns, ammunition, and military equipment. Many leaders were ambivalent or non-Zionist; Meir’s speech overcame much of that resistance and helped raise tens of millions (ultimately contributing to ~$50 million on her tour). That money bought arms (including from Czechoslovakia) used in the fighting that emptied hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns. Charity money became weapons money. The result was not only a Jewish state but the permanent displacement of the Palestinian people. The same pattern—American Jewish institutional fundraising for Israel’s military—has continued for decades.