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Prof. John Mearsheimer: A Brief History of Israel (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of political scientist Prof. John Mearsheimer’s interview on Judging Freedom Podcast with Judge Napolitano on “A Brief History of Israel”, August 7, 2025.

The Origins of the Zionist Enterprise

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, August 7, 2025. Professor John Mearsheimer joins us now. Professor Mearsheimer, thank you very much for your time. I’m going to give the floor to you and you take as long as you want. Can you explain to us, please, as only you can, the origins of the state of Israel?

PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, I’d be glad to do that. And let me start by making some comments. Four sets of comments at about 60,000 feet, really general comments, and then drop down to 15,000 feet. Make a handful of comments that are more specific. But fill in the general comments that I’ll start with, please.

The first of my general comments is that when the Zionist enterprise got started around 1900, it’s important to understand that there were very few Jews, certainly very few Zionists in Palestine. You know, there was an adage at the time that this was “a land with no people for a people,” meaning the Jews who had no land. And of course, that was simply not true. There were a huge number of Palestinians living on that land. That’s the first point you want to keep in mind.

Second point is there’s no way you’re going to create a Jewish state on that land that’s filled with Palestinians without doing horrible things to the Palestinians without committing great crimes. And common sense just tells you there’s no way you could create a Jewish state in a piece of real estate that’s filled with Palestinians, again, without doing great crimes. And that includes stealing their land. And it’s very important to emphasize that the Zionists understood this from the get go. David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky and so forth and so on. They all fully understood this.

Third point you want to keep in mind is that the Zionists from the get go paid very careful attention to demography. They were very concerned with how many Palestinians were in the land of Israel versus how many Jews there were. And 80% Jewish, 85% Jewish, that was acceptable. The ideal, of course, was to be 100% Jewish, but you didn’t want to have more than 20% Palestinian population. So demographics mattered.

The other thing that they paid enormous attention to was what was called transfer. We now call this ethnic cleansing. They talked about ethnic cleansing all the time. Not much in public, but in private they did because they fully understood that to create a Jewish state in a land filled with Palestinians, they were going to have to do transfer or ethnic cleansing.

Final general point that you want to keep in mind is that from the beginning, almost all of the Zionist leaders had very expansive goals concerning borders. They wanted to build a Greater Israel that included lots of territory. This was not stated publicly by most of the leaders, and the leaders had different views on what that Greater Israel should look like. But David Ben-Gurion, for example, wrote a book in Yiddish in 1918. He laid out his vision and it included what we call Green Line Israel. The Israel that was created after 1948. The occupied territories, that’s the West Bank and Gaza, parts of Syria, parts of Lebanon, parts of Jordan and the Sinai Peninsula.

So you get a sense for how ambitious the Zionists were from the get go. They wanted to create a Greater Israel. And that’s one of the principal reasons that Israel has no borders, no official borders. I believe it’s the only country on the planet that does not have official borders because they’re bent on creating a Greater Israel, whatever that might look like.

Jewish Migration to Palestine Before 1948

So that’s the sort of big picture. But let’s drop down to 15,000 feet and talk about the specifics. It’s important to understand that few Jews came out of Europe to Palestine before 1933. And of course, 1933 is when Hitler comes to power. And I think there are about 4 million Jews who leave Europe between 1880 and 1920, about 4 million Jews leave Europe and only 100,000 go to Palestine. Many, of course, come to the United States.

So you have this situation where there are not that many Jews in the land of Palestine. And then of course, you have World War II. And after World War II, lots of Jews leave Europe and go to Israel. But most Jews prefer to come west to come to places like Canada and the United States. So you have a situation in 1948 when the state is about to be created where 35% of the population is Jewish and 7% of the land is owned by Jews. So you just want to think about it. This is 1948, when the state is created, 35% of the population is Jewish in Palestine and the Jews own 7% of the land.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Let me just stop you here, Professor Mearsheimer, how was the state created? How do you take somebody else’s land and suddenly you become a recognized country?

The Creation of Israel and the UN Partition Plan

PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Okay, it’s important to understand that up until World War I, the Ottoman Empire, or what we today call Turkey, controlled Palestine. And then as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Britain took over control of what was called Mandatory Palestine. So Britain was in control after World War II when there was huge resistance around the world to colonial empires, that is, there was huge resistance to the British Empire.

The British were up to their eyeballs in alligators trying to deal with resistance in places like India and in places like Palestine.