Did ‘Chairman Heilbrun’ Really Say “We Have to Kill All the Palestinians Unless They Are Resigned to Live Here as Slaves”?
David Lange
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It is another alleged quote by an Israeli official disseminated by the Jew-haters, most notably Miftah (the organization for which Hanan Ashrawi is Chairperson of its Board of Directors, and which has a track record of disseminating blood libels).
The source of the quote is supposedly one Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, in October 1983.
In case you are wondering why, unlike my other posts debunking these alleged quotes, I have not included a meme showing the alleged source (in this case ‘ Chairman Heilbrun’), that is because he does not exist, making it damn hard for the Jew-haters to create such a meme.
Per CAMERA’s debunking of this in 2004:
The quote is found on numerous anti-Israel sites, in addition to MIFTAH’s, but the facts do not check out. While Shlomo Lahat was indeed re-elected as mayor of Tel Aviv in 1983, no record was found of any “Chairman Heilbrun.” The quote was traced to a 1988 book, The Hidden History of Zionism, by radical Marxist Ralph Schoenman (dismissed by mainstream historians as a crazed conspiracy theorist), and is one of many bogus quotes in the book attributed to Israeli leaders. According to Schoenman’s footnote, the quote by Heilbrun was hearsay relayed to him in private conversations:
Cited by Fouzi El-Asmar and Salih Baransi during discussions with the author, October 1983
Needless to say, Schoenman’s scholarship, upon which many anti-Israel Web sites depend, leaves much wanting. CAMERA contacted former Mayor Lahat who attested that he has never employed, known or heard of any such person as “Chairman Heilbrun,” and that the reported incident never took place. Lahat also emphasized that he would never allow any of his employees to make such statements, as it completely contradicts his own sentiments about Palestinians.
That last part accords with Shlomo Lahat’s 2014 New York Times obituary:
Mr. Lahat was formally affiliated with the conservative Likud party, but he became a strong supporter of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the main force behind Israeli peace efforts with Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Mr. Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist in Tel Aviv in 1995 at a peace rally that Mr. Lahat had helped organize.
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