Did Ben Gurion say this about conquering Palestinian land?
The claim is that Ben Gurion (the first prime minister of Israel) said the following about the settlements in about the 1920s and 1930s:
“We were not just working–we were conquering, conquering, conquering land. We were a company of conquistadores.”
.. The land, he believed, must be conquered by the toil and sweat of Jewish pioneers, not by force of arms.
From: David Landau: “Ben-Gurion: A Political Life”, Schocken Books: New York, 2011.This much less aggressive stance is evidenced in praxis later: