Why do Israeli leaders admit that if they were Palestinians they would fight for freedom ?

If he were a Palestinian, former head of the Israeli intelligence agency Shabak Ami Ayalon said in a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv, he would have fought "without limits" against people who stole his land.
He stated:

"As far as the Palestinians are concerned, they lost their land, which is why when people ask me, what would you do if you were Palestinian? I say that if someone came and stole my land, the land of Israel, I would fight him without limits."

Ayalon affirmed that the Palestinians:

"See themselves as a people. One of our tragedies is that we see them as individuals, some of whom are good, while others are bad."

Despite the barrage of racist accusations leveled against Palestinians by both Israeli and pro-Israel groups, including that they are barbarians, antisemites, pogromists, terrorists, savages, and even human animals, Ayalon and other prominent Israeli leaders have long identified with the Palestinian struggle and have admitted publicly that they, too, would have joined the fight against Zionists and Israel if they were Palestinians rather than Jewish colonists.
Moshe Dayan, the renowned Israeli defense minister, was aware of the Palestinians' plight and their fight against Israeli colonization in Gaza. Nahal Oz, a colony established one mile from the Gaza border in 1953, saw a security officer killed by Palestinian resistance fighters in April 1956.
Days earlier, the officer had attacked other Palestinians who were attempting to return to their lands following Israeli expulsion. He forced them to return to Gaza. During the funeral, Dayan reminded the attendees:

Let us not today cast blame on the murderers. Who are we that we would argue against their hatred? For eight years now they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes, we turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had lived… We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home.

Ayalon's recent statements are not novel. In a March interview with the American television network ABC, he stated that if he were Palestinian, he "would fight against Israel" and "would do everything" to attain freedom.
Ayalon is not the first Israeli leader to fully comprehend the Palestinians' struggle against Zionist settler-colonialism and Israeli apartheid. Indeed, Ayalon joins a long list of Zionist and Israeli leaders who have unambiguously expressed their understanding and alignment with the Palestinian struggle.
In 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism, subsequently replaced by Menachem Begin, remarked the following on Palestinian resistance:

Any native people - it's all the same whether they are civilised or savage - views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked… [and] who will abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences… They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervour that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon the prairie… this childish fantasy of our "Arabo-philes" comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people… [that] this race [is] a rabble ready to be bribed or sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

Jabotinsky, nonetheless, did not align himself with the Palestinians, despite his efforts to draw parallels between them and European Jews, mutatis mutandis, regarding their connection to their homeland and the employment of violence for its defense.
He grasped that the Palestinians "are not a rabble but a nation". Jabotinsky, a fascist who idolized Mussolini, did not permit his hatred towards Palestinians to obscure the realities on the ground, which is why he endeavored to combat the Palestinians and impose Zionist control and expulsion upon them.
Some Zionists would associate even more closely with Palestinians.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, recognized the Palestinian struggle fully, despite his dedication to suppressing it. He declared:

If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural; we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but that was two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Zionist leaders' identification with Palestinians persisted in subsequent decades, with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak articulating this connection most explicitly. Barak was part of an Israeli death squad commando unit sent to Beirut in 1973 to assassinate three Palestinian rebels.
Barak's identification with Palestinians is clear, and in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he stated:

"If I were a Palestinian, I'd also join a terror group."

Leah Rabin, the widow of the late Yitzhak Rabin and a participant in the 1948 Zionist takeover of Palestine, has shown greater acumen in her association with the Palestinians than any other Zionist leaders.
She stated in 1997:

"We [the Jews] used terrorism to establish our state. Why should we expect the Palestinians to be any different?"

Palestinians appear to be analogous to Jews and not different from them at all.
It is crucial to emphasize that none of the Israeli officials in these declarations believed that the Palestinians' resistance to Israel was because Israel was Jewish.
On the contrary, they unanimously maintained that Palestinians fight Israel and Israeli Jews due to the theft of their land and nation by Israelis, who oppress them and deny them their independence and freedom.
The present Israeli government's egregious propaganda asserts that the Palestinian operation on 7 October was aimed at Israeli Jews because they are Jews rather than as colonizers and thus constitutes the "deadliest" assault on Jews since the Holocaust, a narrative perpetuated by Western leaders and their compliant mainstream media, which seeks to obscure the Israeli Jewish colonization of Palestinian land as the underlying cause of Palestinian resistance.
These falsehoods seek to absolve Israeli Jews of the transgression of stealing Palestinian land, contrasting with the insistence of Palestinians and various Zionist and Israeli leaders who have consistently understood the Palestinian struggle, specifically that the Palestinian resistance is directed against Israeli Jews because they are colonizers rather than due to their Jewish identity.
The understanding and identification with the Palestinian cause by the Israeli leaders who have oppressed them are not simply rhetorical embellishments or oversights. They speak plainly about a clear understanding of the violence and oppression that Israel has inflicted and continues to inflict upon the Palestinian people.
In contrast to official Israeli propaganda and its reiteration by Western political leaders and mainstream media, Palestinians who have resisted Zionist colonization since the early 1880s are not an anomaly. Indeed, Palestinians, according to the aforementioned Israeli officials, are remarkably similar and not that different from the colonizing Zionist Jews who oppress them.
The only difference seems to be that Palestinians are not Jews and, as such, do not receive the respect and appreciation from the West that any group resisting oppression for a century and a half deserves.
Although Israeli leaders may still identify with Palestinians despite their colonial racism, the pervasive western racism towards Palestinians is the reason no western political leaders have ever considered what they would do if they were Palestinian.

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