Chapter 2: The idea of 'transfer' in Zionist thinking before 1948

Western reaction to Nakba

"In July 1948, about midway in the first Arab–Israeli war, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Ernst Bevin, wrote that ‘on a long term view . . . there may be something to be said for an exchange of populations between the areas assigned to the Arabs and the Jews respectively.’1 A few days later, he expatiated:

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.

But he then went on to argue that as there were only a handful of Jews living in the territory earmarked for Arab sovereignty in Palestine, there was no ‘basis for an equitable exchange of population’ and therefore Britain should pursue with the United Nations Mediator the possibility of a return of the displaced Palestinian Arabs to their homes.2 By this time, 400,000–500,000 Arabs (and less than five thousand Jews) had been displaced in the fighting.

But the logic propelling Bevin’s thinking, before he pulled on the reins, was highly persuasive: The transfer of the large Arab minority out of the areas of the Jewish state (as of the minuscule Jewish minority out of the Arab-designated areas) would solve an otherwise basic, insur-mountable minority problem that had the potential to subvert any peace settlement. The selfsame logic underlay the analysis, a month later, of London’s Middle East intelligence centre, the Cairo-based British Middle East Office:

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.

Previous examinations of this problem have always led to the rejection of transference of populations as a solution for the reason that the number of Arabs to be transferred from the Jewish state was 40 times as great as the number of Jews to be transferred from the Arab state. [But] this disparity has for the moment been largely reduced by the flight of Arabs from the Jewish state . . .

Now that the initial difficulty of persuading the Arabs of Palestine to leave their homes has been overcome by Jewish terrorism and Arab panic it seems possible that the solution may lie in their transference to Iraq and Syria . . . The project [of resettling the refugees in the Arab states] would have to be launched with utmost care. If it were put forward at the present stage the immediate reaction in all Arab minds would be that we had been working for this all along. But if it becomes obvious that through unwillingness on the part of either the Jewish [sic] or Arabs there is little or no chance of the displaced Arabs of Palestine being reinstated in their own homes, it might be put forward as a solution to the problem as it then appeared.3

Similar assumptions pervaded American thinking at the end of the war. The consul-general in Jerusalem, William Burdett Jr., no friend of Zionism, advised Washington in February 1949:

Despite the attendant suffering . . . it is felt security in the long run will be served best if the refugees remain in the Arab states and Arab Palestine instead of returning to Israel. Since the US has supported the establishment of a Jewish State, it should insist on a homogeneous one which [sic] will have the best possible chance of stability. Return of the refugees would create a continuing ‘minority problem’ and form a constant temptation both for uprisings and intervention by neighbouring Arab states.4"

Herzl on transfer

"The obvious, logical solution lay in Arab emigration or ‘transfer’. Such a transfer could be carried out by force, i.e., expulsion, or it could be engineered voluntarily, with the transferees leaving on their own steam and by agreement, or by some amalgam of the two methods. For example, the Arabs might be induced to leave by means of a combination of financial sticks and carrots. This, indeed, was the thrust of the diary entry by Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s prophet and organisational founder, on 12 June 1895:

We must expropriate gently . . . We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly.7

This was Herzl’s only diary entry on the matter, and only rarely did he refer to the subject elsewhere. It does not crop up at all in his two major Zionist works, Der Judenstaat (The Jews’ State) and Altneuland (Old-New Land). Nor does it appear in the published writings of most of the Zionist leaders of Herzl’s day and after. All understood that discretion and circumspection were called for: Talk of transferring the Arabs, even with Palestinian and outside Arab leaders’ agreement, would only put them on their guard and antagonise them, and quite probably needlessly antagonise the Arabs’ Ottoman correligionists, who ruled the country until 1917–1918."

Transfer as a moral solution

"Herzl, Motzkin, Ruppin and Zangwill, of course, had been thinking not of such mini-displacements but of a massive, ‘strategic’ transfer. But however appealing on the practical plane, the idea was touched, in most Zionists’ minds, by a measure of moral dubiety. True, at least down to the 1920s or 1930s, the Arabs of Palestine did not see themselves and were not considered by anyone else a distinct ‘people’. They were seen as ‘Arabs’ or, more specifically, as ‘southern Syrian Arabs’. Therefore, their transfer from Nablus or Hebron to Transjordan, Syria and even Iraq –especially if adequately compensated – would not be tantamount to exile from the homeland; ‘Arabs’ would merely be moving from one Arab area to another.

Moreover, the transfer of ethnic minorities to their core national areas, was regarded during the first half of the 20th century as morally acceptable, perhaps even morally desirable. It also made good political sense. The historical experience in various parts of the globe during the 1920s and 1940s supported this view. The double coerced transfer of Muslim Turks out of Greek majority areas in Thrace and the Aegean Islands and of Christian Greeks out of Turkish Asia Minor during the early 1920s, a by-product of Greek–Turkish hostilities, at a stroke seemed to solve two long-standing, ‘insoluble’, minority problems, rendering future Greek–Turkish relations more logical and pacific. 1947–1948 witnessed even larger (and bloodier) transfers, of Muslims and Hindus, between India and Pakistan, as these states emerged from the womb of history.11 The world looked on, uncondemning and impervious. Indeed, the transfer of German minority groups from western Poland and the Czech borderlands to Germany at the end of the Second World War was positively lauded in most Allied capitals. In both the West and the Communist Bloc it was seen as both politically imperative and just. These minorities had helped to subvert the European order and a cluster of central and eastern European nation-states, at a mind-boggling cost in lives, suffering and property; it was just and fitting that they be uprooted and ‘returned’ to Germany, both as punishment and in order that they might cause no trouble in the future."

Transfer as a moral dilemma

"Still, the notion of transfer remained, in Zionist eyes – even as Zionist leaders trotted out these historical precedents – morally problematic. Almost all shared liberal ideals and values; many, indeed, were socialists of one ilk or another; and, after all, the be-all and end-all of their Zionist ideology was a return of a people to its homeland. Uprooting Arab families from their homes and lands, even with compensation, even with orderly re-settlement among their own outside Palestine, went against the grain. The moral dilemma posed was further aggravated during the 1930s and 1940s by the dawning recognition among many of the Zionist leaders, including Ben-Gurion and Zeev Jabotinsky, the leader of the right-wing Revisionist Movement, that Palestine’s Arabs had brought forth a new, distinct (albeit still ‘Arab’) nationalism and national identity; Palestinian transferees might not feel at home in Transjordan or Iraq. For all these reasons, the notion of transfer was something best not mulled over and brought out into the open in public discourse and disputation; best not to think about it at all. Zionism might necessitate displacement of Palestinians, but why trouble one’s conscience and linger over it?

Rather, the Zionist public catechism, at the turn of the century, and well into the 1940s, remained that there was room enough in Palestine for both peoples; there need not be a displacement of Arabs to make way for Zionist immigrants or a Jewish state. There was no need for a transfer of the Arabs and on no account must the idea be incorporated in the movement’s ideological–political platform."

Transfer as a response to violence

"Hence, if during the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century Zionist advocacy of transfer was unin-sistent, low-key and occasional, by the early 1930s a full-throated near-consensus in support of the idea began to emerge among the movement’s leaders. Each major bout of Arab violence triggered renewed Zionist interest in a transfer solution. So it was with the riots of 1929. In May 1930, the director of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department and the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive in Palestine, Colonel F. H. Kisch, proposed to the president of the Zionist Organisation, Chaim Weizmann, that the Jewish Agency should press the British to promote the emigration of Palestinian Arabs to Iraq, which is

in urgent need of agricultural population. It should not be impossible to come to an arrangement with [King] Faisal [of Iraq] by which he would take the initiative in offering good openings for Arab immigrants . . . There should be suitable propaganda as to the attractions of the country which indeed are great for Arab immigrants – and there should be specially organised and advertised facilities for travel. We, of course, should not appear [to be promoting this], but I see no reason why H.M.G. should not be interested . . . There can be no conceivable hardship for Palestinian Arabs – a nomadic and semi-nomadic people – to move to another Arab country where there are better opportunities for an agricultural life – c.f. English agricultural emigrants to Canada.12"

Jabotinsky

"To be sure, the Zionist leaders, in public, continued to repeat the old refrain – that there was enough room in the country for the two peoples and that Zionist immigration did not necessitate Arab displacement. Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist movement, had generally supported transfer.16 But in 1931 he had said: ‘We don’t want to evict even one Arab from the left or right banks of the Jordan. We want them to prosper both economically and culturally’;17 and six years later he had testified before the Peel Commission that ‘there was no question at all of expelling the Arabs. On the contrary, the idea was that the Land of Israel on both sides of the Jordan [i.e., Palestine and Transjordan] would [ultimately] contain the Arabs . . . and many millions of Jews . . .’ – though he admitted that the Arabs would become a ‘minority.’18"

Ben Gurion and Sharett on resettling Arabs in the '30s

"But by 1936, the mainstream Zionist leaders were more forthright in their support of transfer. In July, Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive and de facto leader of the Yishuv, and his deputy, Moshe Shertok (Sharett), the director of the Agency’s Political Department, went to the High Commissioner to plead the Zionist case on immigration, which the Mandatory was considering suspending:

Ben-Gurion asked whether the Government would make it possible for Arab cultivators displaced through Jewish land purchases . . . to be settled in Transjordan. If Transjordan was for the time being a country closed to the Jews [i.e., closed to Jewish settlement], surely it could not be closed to Arabs also.
The High Commissioner thought this a good idea . . . He asked whether the Jews would be prepared to spend money on the settlement of such Palestinian Arabs in Transjordan.
Mr. Ben-Gurion replied that this might be considered.
Mr. Shertok remarked that the Jewish colonising agencies were in any case spending money in providing for the tenants or cultivators who had to be shifted as a result of Jewish land purchase either by the payment of compensation or through the provision of alternative land. They would gladly spend that money on the settlement of these people in Transjordan.19

Three months later, the Jewish Agency Executive debated the idea. Ben-Gurion observed:

Why can’t we acquire land there for Arabs, who wish to settle in Transjordan? If it was permissible to move an Arab from the Galilee to Judea, why is it impossible to move an Arab from the Hebron area to Transjordan, which is much closer? . . . There are vast expanses of land there and we [in Palestine] are over-crowded . . . We now want to create concentrated areas of Jewish settlement [in Palestine], and by transferring the land-selling Arab to Transjordan, we can solve the problem of this concentration . . . Even the High Commissioner agrees to a transfer to Transjordan if we equip the peasants with land and money . . .20"

Transfer in the Peel Commission

"The commission pointed to the useful Greco-Turkish precedent, in which about 1.3 million Greeks and 400,000 Turks were compulsorily exchanged or transferred in the first half of the 1920s. ‘Before the [exchange] operation the Greek and Turkish minorities had been a constant irritant. Now the ulcer had been cleaned out, and Greco-Turkish relations, we understand, are friendlier than they have ever been before.’ Formally, the commission spoke not of ‘transfer’ but of a ‘population exchange’ involving the removal to the Jewish state-to-be of ‘1,250’ Jews from the Arab-populated areas and of the removal of '225,000’ Arabs out of the Jewish state-to-be to the Arab areas. But, in effect, not an equitable exchange but a transfer of Arabs with a very small figleaf transfer of Jews, was what was envisaged. The commission preferred that the Arabs move voluntarily and with compensation – but regarded the matter as so important that should the Arabs refuse, the transfer should be ‘compulsory’, that is, it should be carried out by force. Otherwise, the partition settlement would not endure. 21

The recommendations, especially the transfer recommendation, delighted many of the Zionist leaders, including Ben-Gurion. True, the Jews were being given only a small part of their patrimony; but they could use that mini-state as a base or bridgehead for expansion and conquest of the rest of Palestine (and possibly Transjordan as well). Such, at least,
was how Ben-Gurion partially explained his acceptance of the offered ‘pittance.’ 22 But Ben-Gurion had another reason: ‘The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the First and Second Temples . . . ,’ Ben-Gurion confided to his diary. ‘We are being given an opportunity that we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government and sovereignty – this is national consolidation in an independent homeland.’ Ben-Gurion deemed the transfer recommendation

a central point whose importance outweighs all the other positive [points] and counterbalances all the report’s deficiencies and drawbacks . . . We must grab hold of this conclusion [i.e., recommendation] as we grabbed hold of the Balfour Declaration, even more than that – as we grabbed hold of Zionism itself . . . because of all the Commission’s conclusions, this is the one that alone offers some recompense for the tearing away of other parts of the country [and their award to the Arabs] . . . What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times . . . Any doubt on our part about the necessity of this transfer, any doubt we cast about the possibility of its implementation, any hesitancy on our part about its justice, may lose [us] an historic opportunity that may not recur . . . If we do not succeed in removing the Arabs from our midst, when a royal commission proposes this to England, and transferring them to the Arab area – it will not be achievable easily (and perhaps at all) after the [Jewish] state is established . . . This thing must be done now – and the first step – perhaps the crucial [step] – is conditioning ourselves for its implementation.’23"

Split in Zionist movement

"The Peel report had, for the first time, accorded the idea of transfer an international moral imprimatur. At the same time, its publication triggered a profound and protracted debate in the Zionist leadership: Should the movement renounce its historic claim to the whole of Palestine and accept the principle of partition and the offered 20 per cent of the land? The controversy cut across party lines, with Ben-Gurion’s own Mapai Party split down the middle. For the Revisionist right there was no problem; they claimed Transjordan as well as the whole of Palestine; partition was a non-starter. For the left, represented by Brit Shalom and Hashomer Hatza’ir, the Peel proposals were beside the point; they favoured a binational Arab–Jewish state, not partition. But for the moderate left and centre – the core and mainstream of the movement – the dilemma was profound. The culminating and decisive debate took place in the especially summoned Twentieth Zionist Congress in Zurich August 1937 (the Revisionists did not attend). Ben-Gurion mobilised the Peel transfer proposal in support of acceptance of partition:

We must look carefully at the question of whether transfer is possible, necessary, moral and useful. We do not want to dispossess, [but] transfer of populations occurred previously, in the [Jezreel] Valley, in the Sharon [i.e., Coastal Plain] and in other places. You are no doubt aware of the Jewish National Fund’s activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab peasantry . . . It is important that this plan comes from the Commission and not from us . . . Transfer is what will make possible a comprehensive settlement programme. Thankfully, the Arab people have vast empty areas. Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale. You must remember, that this system embodies an important humane and Zionist idea, to transfer parts of a people [i.e., Palestine’s Arabs] to their country [i.e., Transjordan and Iraq] and to settle empty lands . . .

Ben-Gurion seemed to suggest that the transfer would be compulsory and that not the British but Jewish troops would be carrying it out. Other speakers at the Congress, including Weizmann and Ruppin, spoke in a similar vein, though all preferred a voluntary, agreed transfer, and some, such as Ussishkin, doubted that the whole idea was practicable; the British would not carry it out and would prevent the Jews from doing so. Many, including Berl Katznelson, the Mapai co-leader, opposed the gist of the Peel package, which was partition (while theoretically supporting transfer). 24

In the end, after bitter debate, the Congress equivocally approved – by a vote of 299 to 160 – the Peel recommendations as a basis for further negotiation. The vote marked an in principle endorsement of the concept of partition. No specific mention was made in the resolution of the transfer proposal – though it was implicitly accepted as part of the package whose territorial provisions the Zionists sought to renegotiate (i.e., they wanted more than the 20 per cent offered). 25"

Transfer committees

"But during the months of Woodhead deliberations, the Zionist leadership – unaware of London’s secret, in principle, rejection of partition – roundly examined and debated the Peel proposals and the practicalities of their implementation. Transfer got a protracted, thorough airing. A ‘Transfer Committee’ of experts, chaired by Thon, then head of the Palestine Land Development Company, was established and investigated ways and means of implementing transfer – how many and which Arabs could or should be transferred? Where to? With what compensation? The problems were vast and the political circumstances were volatile (an ongoing Arab Revolt, a British Government whose support for the Peel recommendations was uncertain, a world drifting toward total war, when the problem of Palestine would surely be put on the back burner). The committee broke up in June 1938 without producing a final report. 26

But simultaneously, the Jewish Agency Executive – the ‘government’ of the Yishuv – discussed transfer. On 7 June 1938, proposing Zionist policy guidelines, Ben-Gurion declared: ‘The Jewish State will discuss with the neighbouring Arab states the matter of voluntarily transferring Arab tenant-farmers, labourers and peasants from the Jewish state to the neighbouring Arab states.’ (As was his wont, Ben-Gurion at the same time endorsed complete equality and civil rights for the Arabs living in the Jewish State; some executive members may have regarded this as for-the-record lip service and posturing for posterity.) 27 Five days later Ben-Gurion laid his cards baldly on the table: ‘I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see in it anything immoral.’ Ussishkin followed suit: there was nothing immoral about transferring 60,000 Arab families:

We cannot start the Jewish state with . . . half the population being Arab . . . Such a state cannot survive even half an hour. It [i.e., transfer] is the most moral thing to do . . . I am ready to come and defend . . . it before the Almighty . . .

Werner David Senator, a Hebrew University executive of German extraction and liberal views, called for a ‘maximal transfer’. Yehoshua Supersky, of the Zionist Actions Committee, said that the Yishuv must take care that ‘a new Czechoslovakia is not created here [and this could be assured] through the gradual emigration of part of the Arabs.’ He was referring to the undermining of the Czechoslovak republic by its Sudeten German minority. Ben-Gurion, Ussishkin and Berl Katznelson agreed that the British, rather than the Yishuv, should carry out the transfer. ‘But the principle should be that there must be a large agreed transfer’, declared Katznelson. Ruppin said: ‘I do not believe in the transfer of individuals. I believe in the transfer of entire villages.’ Eliezer Kaplan, the Jewish Agency’s treasurer, thought that with proper financial inducement and if left impoverished in the nascent Jewish State, the Arabs might agree to a ‘voluntary’ departure. Eliahu Berlin, a leader of the Knesset Yisrael religious party, proposed that ‘taxes should be increased so that the Arabs will flee because of the taxes’. There was a virtual pro transfer consensus among the JAE members; all preferred a ‘voluntary’ transfer; but most were also agreeable to a compulsory transfer, preferring, of course, that the British rather than the Yishuv carry it out. 28

In one way or another, Zionist expressions of support for transfer during 1936, 1937 and the first half of 1938 can be linked to the Peel Commission’s work and recommendations. Not so Ben-Gurion’s tabling of a new transfer scheme in early December 1938. Peel was now dead and buried. But in Germany, the Nazis had just unleashed the mass pogrom of Kristalnacht; in Palestine and London, the British, the Arabs and the Zionist leaders were preparing for the St James’s Conference, soon to open in the British capital. The Zionist leadership was desperate to find a safe haven for Europe’s Jews and to empty Palestine in preparation for their arrival. ‘We will offer Iraq ten million Palestine pounds to transfer one hundred thousand Arab families from Palestine to Iraq’, Ben-Gurion jotted down in his diary. On 11 December he raised the idea at a meeting of the JAE. The Iraqis, he said, were in urgent need of manpower to fill their empty spaces and to develop the country. But Ben-Gurion was not optimistic; he anticipated opposition from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He was driven by a premonition of unprecedented disaster:

The Jewish question is no longer that which was [the question] until now . . . Millions of Jews are now faced with physical destruction . . . Zionism [itself ] is in danger . . . We now need, during this catastrophe that has befallen the Jewish people, all of Palestine . . . [and] mass immigration . . .29

Nothing came of these deliberations and plans. In November, the Woodhead Committee had scuppered any possibility of British endorsement of either partition or transfer; the St. James Conference of February 1939 produced only further deadlock; and in May, in a new ‘White Paper,’ Whitehall disavowed its commitment to Zionism itself, in effect supporting a continued, permanent Arab majority and Arab rule in Palestine within a decade."

Druse

"In the absence of Anglo–Arab–Zionist agreement about a blanket transfer, proposals periodically surfaced regarding the selective transfer of this or that Arab religious or ethnic group. In March 1939, the leader of Syria’s Druse, Sultan al-Atrash, proposed that the Yishuv buy up the dozen odd Druse villages in Palestine and that their 15,000 inhabitants be transferred to Jabal el-Druse in southern Syria. The envisioned voluntary transfer would benefit both the Druse and the Jews – and might serve as a model for further population transfers from Palestine, al-Atrash argued. Weizmann responded enthusiastically, launching a series of consultations with American Zionist leaders and French army officers and officials. He reported that the French – who ruled Syria – were in favour but Shertok, in Tel Aviv, was skeptical about the willingness of Palestine’s Druse to move and ultimately quashed the negotiation. There the matter seemingly ended. 30"

Transfer plans during WWII

"Ben-Gurion was obliquely referring to the proposal by Harry St. John Philby, an orientalist and adviser to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, to establish at the end of the war a Middle Eastern ‘federation’ of states, with Ibn Saud as its ruler. The plan also provided for a Jewish state in Palestine, transferring most of Palestine’s Arabs out of the country, and the payment to Saudi Arabia of 20 million pounds sterling. Both Weizmann and Shertok were initially enthusiastic. 32"

"A few months later, an almost identical exchange took place between Shertok, visiting Cairo, and Walter Smart, the secretary for Arab affairs at the British Legation in Egypt. They spoke of possible massive Polish Jewish immigration to Palestine.

I [Shertok] said . . . that the Land of Israel could accommodate a population of at least five million. But how many Jews? – he asked.
I said: Three million Jews and two million Arabs. The Arabs increase thanks to Jewish immigration [which expands the economy that facilitates the absorption of Arab immigrants], but if we evict the Arabs there will be room for more Jews; and this will [also] benefit the Arabs.
What will you do with them? [asked Smart].
Syria, for example, will that country develop with such a small population, with its empty spaces? If several hundred thousand Arabs from the Land of Israel were transferred there, the Jewish people would provide funds, Syria would get an income. The same applies to Iraq.

During the visit, Shertok said similar things at his meeting with the American minister, Alexander Kirk. 35

Nothing, of course, came of these meetings. But they give us an insight into the desperation growingly felt by the Zionist leadership as the news of the awful fate of Europe’s Jews began to seep out – and into the measures they were willing to contemplate and propound to save their people."

British Labour party platform

"But solving the Jewish problem or the question of Palestine were far from priorities for the Allied leaders and generals during the world war; they had more pressing problems. Transferring Arabs to make way for Jews was hardly an urgent or, indeed, attractive proposition. Nonetheless, the news that gradually emerged during the second half of the war from Nazi-occupied Europe about the ongoing Holocaust certainly caused pangs of conscience among Western politicians and officials and underlined the urgency of a solution of the Jewish problem in Europe by way of a safe haven in Palestine. Pro-Zionist tendencies were rein- forced. The Executive of Britain’s Labour Party in April 1944 adopted a platform endorsing mass Jewish immigration to, a Jewish majority in, and a transfer of Arabs out of, Palestine as part of a Middle East peace settlement. ‘. . . In Palestine surely is a case, on human grounds and to promote a stable settlement, for transfer of population. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in. Let them be compensated handsomely for their land and let their settlement elsewhere be carefully organised and generously financed’, stated the resolution, which was published in the Labour Party’s volume, The International Post-War Settlement. 37 The publication of the resolution prompted a debate on 7 May in the JAE – not so much about the notion of transfer (all were agreed about its merits if not its practicality) as about how the Zionist leadership should react. Shertok, Israel’s future first foreign minister and second prime minister, said: ‘The transfer can be the archstone, the final stage in the political development, but on no account the starting point. By doing this [i.e., by talking prematurely about transfer] we are mobilising enormous forces against the idea and subverting [its implementation] in advance . . .’ And he continued (prophetically): ‘What will happen once the Jewish state is established – it is very possible that the result will be transfer of Arabs.’ Shertok was followed by Ben-Gurion:

When I heard these things [about the Labour Party Executive’s resolution] . . . I had some difficult thoughts . . . [But] I reached the conclusion that it is best that this remain [i.e., that the resolution remain as part of Labour’s official platform] . . . Were we asked what should be our programme, I would find it inconceivable to tell them transfer . . . because talk on the subject might cause harm in two ways: (a) It could cause us harm in public opinion in the world, because it might give the impression that there is no room [for more Jews] in Palestine without ejecting the Arabs . . . [and] (b) [such declarations in support of transfer] would force the Arabs onto . . . their hind legs.’ Nonetheless, Ben-Gurion added: ‘Transfer of Arabs is easier than any other type of transfer. There are Arab states in the area . . . and it is clear that if the Arabs [of Palestine] are sent [to the Arab countries] this will improve their situation and not the contrary . . ."

Arab view on transfer

"In effect, what Glubb was saying was that partition, between a Jewish state and Transjordan, was the only solution; that for partition to work, there would have to be a transfer of the Arabs out of the Jewish state (as of the far smaller number of Jews out of the Arab areas); and that the transfer would have to be voluntary and compensated because a compulsory transfer, by British or Jewish or Arab troops, was inconceivable and\or would merely lead to widespread hostilities.

But it wasn’t only Zionist activists and British officials who during the early and mid-1940s swung around to acceptance of partition accompanied by a transfer of Arabs out of the Jewish state to-be. So did senior Arab politicians – or at least that is what generally reliable British officials recorded them as saying at the time. In December 1944, Nuri Sa‘id, Iraq’s senior politician and sometime prime minister, told a British interlocutor that if partition was imposed on the Arabs, there would be a ‘necessity of removing the Arabs from the Jewish state\thought it could be done by exchange . . .’. Sa‘id assumed that the settlement would not provoke a violent Arab reaction but supported the idea – a small Jewish state in Palestine and transfer – only if it provided ‘finality’ to the problem. In a follow-up conversation, the British official heard similar things from Iraq’s foreign minister, Arshad al-Umari: ‘Arshad . . . repeated what Nuri had said . . . over [i.e., regarding] probable [Arab] reactions and also the necessity of removing the Arabs from the Jewish State.’ 44 Nuri had put his position still more forcefully in a conversation with Alec Kirkbride, the British Resident in Ammam:

Provided the partition was effected on an equitable basis, it might perhaps be best to lose part of Palestine in order to confine the Zionist danger within permanent boundaries . . . Nuri Pasha said that the only fair basis could be the cession to the Jews of those areas where they constituted a majority . . . [while] the Arab section of Palestine would be embodied in Transjordan.45

In Amman there was an understandable sympathy for a partition of Palestine between the Jews and Transjordan – and it quite naturally led to acceptance of partition’s corollary, transfer. At a meeting in Jerusalem in February 1944 between Sir Harold MacMichael, the high commissioner, Lord Moyne, the Minister Resident in the Middle East, Kirkbride, and General Edward Spears, head of the British political mission in Syria and Lebanon, there was general agreement that ‘partition offers the only hope of a final settlement for Palestine’. And, according to Moyne, Jordan’s prime minister, Tawfiq Abul Huda, and Egypt’s prime minister, Mustafa Nahas Pasha, both recognised that ‘a final settlement can only be reached by means of partition’ (though the Arab leaders, it was said, would not say so publicly). 46

Abul Huda had informed Kirkbride directly of his position at two meet- ings, on 3 December 1943 and 16 January 1944. At the second meeting, Abul Huda – according to MacMichael – had said that ‘he did not . . . see any alternative to partition . . .’. 47 Two years later, in July 1946, Kirkbride cabled London about meetings he had just had with King Abdullah and Transjordan’s new prime minister, Ibrahim Pasha Hashim:

[Abdullah] is for partition and he feels that the other Arab leaders may acquiesce in that solution although they may not approve of it openly . . . [Hashim said] 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 between the two peoples. Ibrahim Pasha admitted that he would not be able to express this idea in public for fear of being called a traitor . . . [He] said that the other Arab representatives at the discussions would be divided into people like himself who did not dare to express their true views and extremists who simply demanded the impossible. 48

A month later, Kirkbride commented:

King Abdullah and Prime Minister of Jordan both consider that partition followed by an exchange of populations [meaning, as all understood, a transfer of Arabs out of the Jewish state-to-be] is only practical solution to the Palestine problem. They do not feel able to express this view publicly . . . 49"

Conclusion

"My feeling is that the transfer thinking and near-consensus that emerged in the 1930s and early 1940s was not tantamount to pre- planning and did not issue in the production of a policy or master-plan of expulsion; the Yishuv and its military forces did not enter the 1948 War, which was initiated by the Arab side, with a policy or plan for expulsion. But transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism – because it sought to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish’ state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab popu- lation; and because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs which, in turn, persuaded the Yishuv’s leaders that a hostile Arab majority or large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure. By 1948, transfer was in the air. The transfer thinking that preceded the war contributed to the denouement by conditioning the Jewish population, political parties, military organisations and military and civilian leaderships for what transpired. Thinking about the possibilities of transfer in the 1930s and 1940s had prepared and conditioned hearts and minds for its implementation in the course of 1948 so that, as it occurred, few voiced protest or doubt; it was accepted as inevitable and natural by the bulk of the Jewish population. The facts that Palestine’s Arabs (and the Arab states) had rejected the UN partition resolution and, to nip it in the bud, had launched the hostilities that snowballed into fullscale civil war and that the Arab states had invaded Palestine and attacked Israel in May 1948 only hardened Jewish hearts toward the Palestinian Arabs, who were seen as mortal enemies and, should they be coopted into the Jewish state, a potential Fifth Column.

Thus, the expulsions that periodically dotted the Palestinian Arab exodus raised few eyebrows and thus the Yishuv’s leaders, parties and population in mid-war accepted without significant dissent or protest the militarily and politically sensible decision not to allow an Arab refugee return."

Chapter 3: The first wave: the Arab exodus, December 1947 – March 1948