Summary
Director of the Jewish National Land Fund from 1932, whose diaries, published in Israel in 1965, The Question of Palestine quotes as privileged evidence that transfer of the Arabs was Zionist policy, spoken with the voice of the Zionist consensus.
Details
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From 1932 on, Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund; in 1965 his diaries and papers, My Diary, and Letters to the Children, were published in Israel (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.120 / printed p.99).
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Diary, December 19, 1940, quoted at length by Said: there is no room for both peoples in this country, the only solution is Eretz Israel without Arabs, and the Arabs must be transferred all to Iraq, Syria and even Transjordan (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.120-121 / printed p.99-100).
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Said presents these as policy statements in which Weitz spoke with the voice of the Zionist consensus, one of literally hundreds of such statements beginning with Herzl (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.121 / printed p.100).
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Weitz on May 18, 1948, quoted, records Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) blessing any initiative to transform the Arab exodus into an established fact, and Weitz’s own visit to the evacuated village of Mu’ar, whose destruction left him unmoved (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.123 / printed p.102).
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Pappe spells the name Yossef Weitz, head of the Jewish National Fund’s settlement department and the quintessential Zionist colonialist, whose main priority was facilitating the eviction of Palestinian tenants from land bought from absentee landlords — a break with the tradition that a change of ownership did not mean the farmers had to move — personally visiting newly purchased plots and encouraging the new Jewish owners to throw out the local tenants (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.41-42).
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On hearing of the Village Files project Weitz waxed lyrical and suggested turning them into a ‘national project’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.42).
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Pappe quotes Weitz writing in 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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Weitz’s diary is one of the sources from which Pappe reconstructs the Consultancy’s meetings (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.63).
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Pappe quotes Weitz in April 1948, on the cleansing around Haifa: “Our army marches forward and conquers Arab villages and their inhabitants flee like mice” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.140).
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Weitz told the Committee for Arab Affairs that all village land, cultivated or residential, and the urban areas had to be covered by the confiscation solution, and proposed: ‘All we need is 400 tractors, each tractor can cultivate 3000 dunam – cultivating not just for the purpose of procuring food but in order to prevent anyone from returning to their lands’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.248).
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Ben-Gurion appointed Weitz and Ezra Danin to a committee of two to take all final decisions on Palestinian property and land, whose main features were destruction and confiscation (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.249).
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Weitz reported to the government in June 1948: ‘We have begun the operation of cleansing, removing the rubble and preparing the villages for cultivation and settlement. Some of these will become parks’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.256).
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The Jerusalem Forest was Weitz’s brainchild: he complained to Jerusalem’s mayor in 1956 about the barren western hills, once covered with Palestinian villages, and in 1967 the JNF planted one million trees on 4,500 dunam there (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.268).
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In Manna, spelled Yosef Weitz: a few days after the expulsion of the returnees from Mi’lya and Tarshiha, on 21 January 1949, a governmental committee took up transferring Tarshiha’s inhabitants; Weitz proposed moving the farmers to neighbouring Mi’lya, while the rest preferred ‘Akka, and the majority chose Haifa or ‘Akka; Weitz, for example, believed the entire village had to be depopulated so as to enable 1,000 Jews to settle there (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.177).
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In Manna, Weitz, with Ezra Danin and others, supported similar ideas to Sasson’s Libya plan for the migration of Arabs to a country in South America, Canada or Australia (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.182).
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In Manna, Weitz tried to encourage a plan for the inhabitants of Jish to move to Argentina, chosen because some relatives of Jish villagers had already immigrated there; the plan had the code name Operation Yohanan, after Yohanan bin Levi from Jish, and Weitz won the approval and blessings of the prime minister and the foreign minister for it, but it failed, as most Jish residents continued to live on their lands and in their country (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.182).
Related pages
The Question of Palestine, Nakba and Survival, Jewish National Fund, Dalet Plan, Chaim Weizmann, Eretz Israel