Summary
The Zionist concept of removing the Arab population of Palestine from the country, which in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Pappe, following Nur Masalha, presents as deeply rooted in Zionist political thought from Theodor Herzl to the leaders who carried out the expulsion of 1948, for which he gives the statements of Herzl’s successors in their own words.
Details
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Masalha’s Expulsion of the Palestinians, as Pappe recaps it, shows “how deeply rooted the concept of transfer was, and is, in Zionist political thought. From the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, to the main leaders of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, cleansing the land was a valid option” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.30).
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Leo Motzkin, “one of the movement’s most liberal thinkers”, in 1917: “Our thought is that the colonization of Palestine has to go in two directions: Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel in areas outside the country. The transfer of so many Arabs may seem at first unacceptable economically, but is nonetheless practical.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.30)
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David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 1938, the Preface’s second epigraph: “I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.14)
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Ben-Gurion, writing to his son in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” Pappe: “The opportune moment came in 1948.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.47)
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Joseph Weitz in his diary, 1940: “it is our right to transfer the Arabs” and “The Arabs should go!” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.47).
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Moshe Sharett, lecturing in Jerusalem on 13 December 1938 on a purchase of 2500 dunam in the Baysan Valley: “This purchase was accompanied, interestingly, by transfer of population” — a tribe west of the Jordan would be paid to move east of the river, reducing the number of Arabs in Palestine (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.48-49).
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Walid Khalidi and Samih Farsoun, as Pappe recaps them, connected the centrality of the transfer ideology more closely to the end of the Mandate and asked why the UN entrusted the fate of so many Palestinians to a movement that had clearly included transfer in its ideology (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.30).
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From ideology to plan: under Wingate’s influence, Pappe writes, “the road to contemplating the enforced transfer of the entire indigenous population would prove to be very short indeed” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.39), and in Said’s account, quoted on the Dalet Plan page from a different source, the Zionists in Galilee and elsewhere were filling space lived in by Arab residents who were, in Weitz’s word, being “transferred” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.122).
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In Makdisi, transfer’s post-1967 form is pressure toward “voluntary transfer”: what had been possible in 1948 — large-scale forcible expulsion — has seemed more difficult since 1967, “hence the shift in Israeli strategy from outright expulsion to the “voluntary transfer” of the Palestinian population” (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.49). Compulsory transfer remains the open platform of Moledet and the National Union and of Yisrael Beiteinu for Palestinians inside Israel itself (PDF p.49-50).
Where sources disagree
Pappe’s transfer is a long-held ideological commitment awaiting an opportune moment; the description of Dalet Plan quoted by Said from the Kimches presents the 1948 plan itself in military terms (strategic heights, the British vacuum, a contiguous Jewish-held area) without the transfer purpose Pappe assigns to the sequence of plans ending in Plan Dalet. Both accounts are kept with their attribution.
- Manna’s Chapter 4 remainder (part 5) records transfer as live policy talk after 1949: Moshe Dayan hoped to transfer the country’s 170,000 Arabs out when opportunity came, chief of staff Yigael Yadin called an Arab minority a danger in war and peace in February 1950, and from 1952 plans were devised — by the foreign ministry, HaKeren HaKayemet and others as well as the army — to encourage emigration to Libya, Argentina, South America, Canada or Australia; Joseph Weitz’s Operation Yohanan to move Jish to Argentina won the prime minister’s and foreign minister’s approval and failed (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.181-182).
- An intelligence report of September 1951 counted about 2,000 voluntary departures in the previous two years, most to neighbouring Arab countries (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.182).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ethnic Cleansing, David Ben-Gurion, Joseph Weitz, Moshe Sharett, Dalet Plan, Zionism