A new exodus for the Middle East?
Rightwing Israelis are talking about 'transfer' - the
expulsion of all Arabs. Shocking as it sounds, the idea
once had support from British and Arab officials,
reveals distinguished Israeli historian Benny Morris.
And, continuing our series on the Arab-Israeli conflict,
he argues the Middle East might now be at peace if
Israel's first leader had driven out all the Palestinians
in 1948
Thursday October 3, 2002
The Guardian
Once again, "transfer" is in the air - the idea of helping resolve
the Israeli-Arab conflict by transferring or expelling some or all of
the Arabs from Palestine. During recent weeks Israeli
newspapers published an interview with Shmuel Eliahu, the chief
rabbi of Safad and the son of Israel's former chief Sephardi rabbi,
Mordechai Eliahu, in which he called for the transfer, to "Jordan,
the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, or Canada," of
Arabs who are unwilling to accept Israel as a Jewish state; and
a large advertisement, by Gush Shalom (the Peace Bloc), a
coalition of ultra-left groups, warning that prime minister Ariel
Sharon is pressing the US to attack Iraq and intends to exploit
the chaos that will follow "to carry out his old plan to expel the
Palestinians from the whole country ("Transfer")."
The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has
accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.
And driving it was an iron logic: There could be no viable Jewish
state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass
displacement of Arab inhabitants, who opposed its emergence
and would constitute an active or potential fifth column in its
midst. This logic was understood, and enunciated, before and
during 1948, by Zionist, Arab and British leaders and officials.
As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the prophet and founder of
Zionism, wrote in his diary in anticipation of the establishment of
the Jewish state: "We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab]
population across the border by procuring employment for it in
the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our
country ... The removal of the poor must be carried out
discreetly and circumspectly."
By the 1930s, matters had crystallised, with Arab gunmen
attacking the British Mandate authorities and the Zionist
settlers. The Arab Revolt (1936-39) aimed to force an end to
Jewish immigration to Palestine and to eject the Jews' British
protectors. Whitehall sent out a royal commission, chaired by
Lord Peel, to investigate. It published its report in July 1937.
Peel was unable to avoid the logic of transfer: The commission
recommended that Palestine be partitioned between its Jewish
and Arab inhabitants - and that 225,000 Arabs be transferred out
of the 20% of the country it earmarked for Jewish sovereignty
(and the handful of Jews, some 1,250, living in the Arab areas be
transferred to the Jewish state). A "clean and final" solution of
the Palestine problem necessitated transfer, the commission
ruled.
Both David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Zionist movement and
Israel's first prime minister, and Chaim Weizmann, the
movement's elder statesman, supported transfer. The
background was the Arab revolt and the growing anti-semitic
persecutions in Europe which heralded the Holocaust; the need
for a safe haven for the Jews in Palestine had become acute just
as Arab violence was pushing the British into closing the doors
to immigration.
Ben-Gurion hailed Lord Peel's recommendations: "The
compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the
proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never
had ... during the days of the First and Second Temples ... an
opportunity which we never dared to dream in our wildest
imaginings." In August 1937 he told the emergency 20th Zionist
Congress, convened in Zurich: "We do not want to dispossess,
[but piecemeal] transfer of population [through Jewish purchase
and the removal of Arab tenant farmers] occurred previously, in
the [Jezreel] Valley, in the Sharon and in other places ... Now a
transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried
out ... Transfer is what will make possible a comprehensive
[Jewish] settlement programme. Thankfully, the Arab people
have vast empty areas [in Transjordan and Iraq]. Jewish power,
which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry
out the transfer on a large scale."
Weizmann also supported a transfer scheme and in 1941 told
Ivan Maiskii, the Soviet ambassador in London (according to the
envoy's own account): "If half a million Arabs could be
transferred, two million Jews [ie, Jewish immigrants] could be
put in their place. That, of course, would be a first instalment ..."
According to Maiskii, Weizmann had proposed "to move a
million Arabs ... to Iraq, and to settle four or five million Jews
from Poland and other countries on the land where these Arabs
were" When Maiskii queried how 4-5 million Jews could be
expected to settle on lands previously inhabited by only 1 million
Arabs, Weizmann replied: "The Arab is often called the son of
the desert. It would be truer to call him the father of the desert.
His laziness and primitivism turn a flourishing garden into a
desert.'
But it was not only the Zionist leaders who believed transfer was
the solution to the problem of Palestine and its successful
partition. In July 1948, midway in the first Arab-Israeli war, by
which time about 400,000 Arabs had been displaced from their
homes, Britain's foreign secretary (and no Zionist), Ernest Bevin,
wrote: "On a long-term view ... there may be something to be
said for an exchange of population between the areas assigned
to the Arabs and the Jews respectively ...." And he added, in
explication: "It might be argued that the flight of large numbers of
Arabs from the territory under Jewish administration had
simplified the task of arriving at a stable settlement in Palestine
since some transfers of population seems [sic] to be an
essential condition for such a settlement."
A few days later, London's central intelligence office in the area,
the British Middle East Office, chimed in: "The panic flight of
Arabs from the Jewish occupied areas of Palestine has
presented a very serious immediate problem but may possibly
point the way to a long-term solution of one of the greatest
difficulties in the way of a satisfactory implementation of
partition, namely the existence in the Jewish state of an Arab
community very nearly equal in numbers to the Jewish one." It
went on: "Now that the initial difficulty of persuading the Arabs of
Palestine to leave their homes has been overcome ... it seems
possible that the solution may lie in their transference to Iraq
and Syria."
By the end of the 1948 war, some 700,000 Arabs had been
displaced - to become "refugees", in the jargon of the day. Most
came to rest elsewhere in Palestine, in those parts today called
the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. According to the UN, there
are today close to 4 million Palestinian "refugees", meaning
those driven out in 1948 and their descendants - and they
constitute the single most difficult and vexing component of the
Israeli-Palestinian problem.
But Bevin's and the BMEO's understanding that this massive
transfer pointed the way to a "solution" of the Palestine problem
was by no means a surprising mid-war discovery. Already in the
early and mid-1940s Arab leaders and senior British officials
understood that transfer (as an accompaniment of partition)
offered a way out of the impasse.
In April 1944 the executive of Britain's Labour party published its
platform for a postwar settlement. It included full-throated
endorsement of the transfer of the Arabs out of Palestine and,
indeed, the expansion of the mandatory borders to facilitate the
absorption of large waves of Jewish immigrants. The relevant
paragraph was formulated by Hugh Dalton, the chancellor of the
exchequer.
Earlier, in January 1943, an under-secretary of state at the
Colonial Office, the Duke of Devonshire, proposed that Britain
set up an independent Arab state in Libya and that, in
exchange, the Arabs acquiesce in the establishment of a Jewish
state "in Palestine". He added: "The Arab population in
Palestine might be dealt with by an offer of assistance to
migrate to Libya for those families who find conditions in
Palestine unendurable."
General John Glubb, the British commander (1939-56) of
Transjordan's army, the Arab Legion, thought there was no
evading a partition solution - and that the Arab population in the
areas earmarked for Jewish statehood were best transferred to
the Arab areas or out of Palestine altogether. In July 1946 he
penned "A Note on Partition as a Solution to the Palestine
Problem". He wrote: "The best course will probably be to allow a
time limit during which persons who find themselves in one or
other state against their wishes, will be able to opt for
citizenship of the other state ... It is not, of course, intended to
move Arab[s] ... by force, but merely so to arrange that when
these persons find themselves left behind in the Jewish state,
well paid jobs and good prospects should be simultaneously
open for them in the Arab state ..."
Glubb seemed to be speaking here of a "voluntary" transfer. But
in a follow-up note, written a few weeks later, he moved toward
the acceptance of some measure of compulsion as well: "When
the undoubtedly Arab and undoubtedly Jewish areas had been
cleared of all members of the other community ... every effort
would be made [in the frontier areas] to arrange exchanges of
land and population so as to leave as few people as possible to
be compensated for cash." Glubb, of course, envisaged a
population "exchange" involving the movement of hundreds of
thousands of Arabs and only a few thousand Jews - in effect, a
transfer of Arabs.
In his support of partition and transfer, Glubb faithfully mirrored
the thinking of Transjordan's and Iraq's leaders. In December
1944, Nuri Said, Iraq's senior politician, told a British interlocutor
that if the British imposed a partition solution for Palestine, there
would be a "necessity of removing the Arabs from the Jewish
state ..." Iraq's foreign minister, Arshad al-Umari, "repeated what
Nuri had said ... [regarding] probable [Arab] reaction [to partition]
and also the necessity of removing the Arabs from the Jewish
state," according to another British official.
Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East, a
few weeks earlier reported that both Tewfiq Abul Huda,
Transjordan's prime minister, and Mustafa Nahas Pasha,
Egypt's prime minister, similarly believed that "a final settlement
can only be reached by means of partition". Two years later, in
July 1946, Alec Kirkbride, Britain's well-informed representative
in Amman, reported that Abul Huda's successor, Ibrahim Pasha
Hashim, and King Abdullah of Transjordan both supported
partition: "[Hashim added that] the only just and permanent
solution lay in absolute partition with an exchange of
populations; to leave Jews in an Arab state or Arabs in a Jewish
state would lead inevitably to further trouble ... Ibrahim Pasha
admitted that he would not be able to express this idea in public
for fear of being called a traitor."
A month later, Kirkbride reported: "King Abdullah and prime
minister of Jordan consider that partition followed by an
exchange of populations is only practical solution to the
Palestine problem. They do not feel able to express this view
publicly ..." As all involved understood, "exchange of
populations" was a euphemism for transferring the Arabs out of
the area of the Jewish state-to-be.
In May 1944, the director of the Jewish Agency's Political
Department, Moshe Sharett, hesitantly predicted that "once the
Jewish state is established - it is very possible that the result
will be transfer of Arabs." In the 1948 war, which the Palestinian
Arabs and the neighbouring Arab states initiated, a transfer of
700,000 of Palestine's 1.25 million Arab inhabitants duly took
place.
Both before and during 1948 all understood the logic of transfer:
Given Arab opposition to the very idea and existence of a Jewish
state, it could not and would not be established, as a viable,
lasting entity, without the displacement of the bulk of its Arab
inhabitants. But the transfer of 1948 was incomplete: The
overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people, both local
inhabitants and refugees, remained in Palestine, many of them
in poverty, a quarter of a million in the Gaza Strip, some half a
million in the West Bank, and 150,000 in Israel proper. These
populations today stand at 1 million, 2 million and 1.2 million
respectively.
In 1967 Israel, provoked by Egypt, Jordan and Syria, occupied
the West Bank and Gaza Strip and today, directly and
indirectly, rules over more than 4 million Arabs (alongside the
country's 5 million Jews). And the basic problems remain:
Infinitely higher Arab birthrates; an intermixed population that
cannot live in peace in one multi-ethnic state; and Palestinian
opposition both to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza and to Israel's very existence (vide what is taught
Palestinian children in West Bank and Gaza schools and
statements by even so-called Palestinian moderates, such as
Marwan Barghouti and Faisal Husseini, not to mention the
oft-publicised views of Islamist leaders such as Sheikh Ahmed
Yassin). When Israeli rightwingers today speak of "transfer",
they think in terms not of facilitating a partition of historic
Palestine but of making a clean sweep and ridding the country
of its Arab inhabitants.
guardian.co.uk
Continued |
