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.
The Palestinian Arab strategy of suicide bombings and the tone of rejectionism that characterises much Palestinian rhetoric, from Arafat and the Palestinian Authority radio and TV stations downwards during the past two years fuels such thinking. Israel's extreme right, which wants the "whole Land of Israel" for the Jews, ultimately posits transfer as a counterweight to this mainstream rejectionism - which, in effect, endorses a transfer of the Jews out of Palestine, or "throwing the Jews into the sea", as the phrase goes.
One wonders what Ben-Gurion - who probably could have engineered a comprehensive rather than a partial transfer in 1948, but refrained - would have made of all this, were he somehow resurrected. Perhaps he would now regret his restraint. Perhaps, had he gone the whole hog, today's Middle East would be a healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state between Jordan and the Mediterranean and a Palestinian Arab state in Transjordan. Alternatively, Arab success in the 1948 war, with the Jews driven into the sea, would have obtained the same, historically calming result. Perhaps it was the very indecisiveness of the geographical and demographic outcome of 1948 that underlies the persisting tragedy of Palestine.
· This article is based partly on material published in The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews (IB Tauris, London, 2002).
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Monday October 7 2002
In Benny Morris's article on the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel, a number of quotes were removed when the piece was edited to fit the available space. Mr Morris believes that the comments were significant because they revealed that some Arab leaders supported the idea of moving the Palestinians from the Jewish state during the 1940s. The following passage was cut from the piece: "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...' Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East, 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 1946, Alec Kirkbride, Britain's knowledgeable representative in Amman, reported that 'King Abdullah and prime minister [Ibrahim Hashim] of Jordan consider that partition followed by an exchange of populations is the only practical solution to the Palestine problem. They do not feel able to express this view publicly.' Hashim 'thought that to leave Jews in an Arab state or Arabs in a Jewish state would lead inevitably to further trouble'."