Democratic Palestine : 38 (ص 20)
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- Democratic Palestine : 38 (ص 20)
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took the name Ahad Haam, meaning «one of the people,»
said: «We are accustomed to believe, outside Israel, that the
land of Israel is today almost entirely desert, bare and
uncultivated, and that anyone who wants to buy land there
can do so without hindrance. But the truth is quite diffe-
rent... We are accustomed to believing, outside Israel, that
the Arabs are all desert savages, a people like donkeys, and
that they neither see nor understand what is happening
around them. But that is a great mistake»(quoted by Halevi,
pp.168-9).
In 1914, in a lecture delivered in Paris, Chaim Weiz-
mann declared: «In its initial stages, Zionism was conceived
by the pioneers as a movement completely dependent on
mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be
called Palestine, a country without a people, and, on the
other hand, there exists the Jewish people who have no
country...»(quoted by Halevi, p.170).
Based on this myth, the Zionist movement worked to
enforce a Jewish majority in Palestine, enabling them to
establish their state. However, the Arab people of Palestine
proved to be the greatest obstacle facing the Zionist project.
The main question faced by the Zionists was how to deal
with the Palestinians. Their answer was expelling the native
inhabitants of Palestine, to be replaced by Jewish immig-
rants, laying the basis for the «transfer» policy which gained
renewed currency in the 1980’s. As Theodor Herzl put it in
1897: «We shall encourage the poverty-stricken population
to cross the border by securing work for it in the countries
it passes through, while denying it any work in our own
country. The twin process of expropriation and displacement
of the poor must be carried out prudently and discreetly.
Let the landowners imagine that they are cheating us, and
sell us their land at exorbitant prices. We shall sell nothing
back to them»(quoted by Halevi, p.186). Faced with the
Palestinians’ refusal to sell their land, the violent nature of
the «transfer» idea was to become obvious.
Soon after the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917,
the demographic transformation of Palestine began with
large-scale Jewish immigration organized by the Zionist
movement. As a result, the Jewish population in Palestine
increased from 11 per cent in 1922, to 28 per cent in 1936.
Yet Palestinians continued to be the majority, despite some
of them being deprived of their land by the colonization
drive. Expulsion became a main concern of the Zionist
movement. In the 1937 Zurich Congress of the Mapai Party
and its supporters, «transfer» occupied the first basic priority
in the programs of the Zionist movement. Israel Shahak,
president of the Israeli League for Human Rights, says: «It
was then that the ‘transfer’ became policy, planned and sup-
ported by most of the highest-ranking leaders and opposed
on moral grounds by none»(Journal of Palestine Studies, 71,
Spring 1989).
Despite unanimity on the morality of «transfer,» the
participants in the congress responded in different ways to
questions about the future of the Palestinians. Commenting
on the Peel Commission’s partition proposal, Ben Gurion
said, «Despite the smallness of the territory offered to the
Jewish state, there exists in the commission’s proposals the
possibility of transferring the Arab population, with their
consent, if not by force, and thus extending Jewish coloni-
20
zation... until now, we have only been able to settle by
transferring populations from place to place... There are
only very few places where we have been able to colonize
without being forced to transfer the inhabitants»(quoted by
Halevi, p.186).
A. Cizling, leader of Mapam and a government minis-
ter in 1948, viewed «transfer» as «an exchange of population
between a united Jewish Land of Israel, sometime in the
future, and Iraq and other distant Arab countries, including
the transfer of their Jews to the Land of Israel»(Journal of
Palestine Studies, 71).
In the opinion of Berl Katznelson, transfer was «the
best of all solutions,» but he opposed what he feared Ben
Gurion meant, i.e., that transfer was to be within Palestine.
Katznelson who was called «the conscience of Labor
Zionism,» believed that the Palestinians «were destined to
be transferred to Syria and Iraq,» because «a remote
neighbor is better than a close enemy>»(op. cit.).
For all of them, «transfer» was a moral act and not
unjust. One delegate to the Zurich conference, Abraham
Lulu, described it as «a logical and just program, moral and
humane in every sense... If we deny ourselves this right to
transfer, we condemn all that we have so _ far
accomplished»(quoted by Halevi, p.188).
Yossef Weitz who was appointed head of the Jewish
National Fund’s colonization department in 1932, was obses-
sed by the idea of «transfer.» Hoping to see an Israel devoid
of Palestinians, he wrote in his diary, December 19th, 1940:
«There is no room for both peoples in this small country. If
the Arabs leave the country, it will be wide open for us.
And if the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and
miserable... There is no compromise on this point!... That
must come all at once, in the manner of Redemption, and
there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to
the neighboring countries, to transfer them all... We must
not leave a single village, not a single tribe... And only with
such a transfer will the country be able to absorb millions
of our brothers, and the Jewish question will be solved once
and for all. There is no other way out»(Journal of Palestine
Studies, 71).
Transfer in practice
With the creation of Israel, 800,000 Palestinians were
forced out of their homeland. Only a small number of them
remained under Israeli rule. In the aftermath, the Israeli
leadership encouraged the exodus of more Palestinians
under a variety of pretexts. Most important, however, they
had attained the power and authority to adopt «transfer» as
an Official policy. An IDF Intelligence Branch report from
June 30th, 1948, which came to light in the mid-eighties,
surmises that «more than 70% of the Arab exodus from
Palestine by June 1948 was caused by Jewish military
attacks»(Jerusalem Post, March 2nd, 1986). One of the
many examples of how the Zionists implemented the trans-
fer policy was the destruction of Haifa. After viewing the
ruins of the Palestinian city, emptied of its inhabitants, Ben
Gurion commented, «What happenned in Haifa can happen
in Other parts of the country if we will hold out... there will
be great changes in the country, and great changes in the
composition of the population of the country.» Ben Gurion
Democratic Palestine, March-April 1990
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