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Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948

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You have to hand it to Nur Masalha for trying to prove that 80 years of Zionist discussions on transferring Arabs preceded and caused the 1948 war and Arab exodus. This effort is an abysmal failure.

For one thing, the supposed Zionist transfer "discussions" Masalha cites were never part of mainstream Zionist political discourse or policy. He claims modern Zionism founder Theodore Herzl seriously discussed transfer. But Herzl merely discussed plans to buy land thereby transferring it from Arab to Jewish owners by legal means of purchase under the Ottoman Land Law of 1858. Herzl saw this as an eminently moral course, one not followed by any previous settlement movement.

He planned for Zionists to pay fair market value--and that's what happened. In fact, Jewish purchasers often paid far more than market value. (Besides, the Ottoman government held more than 80 percent of the land in Israel; it wasn't owned by anyone.)

Another major difficulty is Masalha's avoidance of declared 1948 Arab plans to annihilate the Jewish people and Israel. After all, this caused Arab flight from Israel; Without that war, the 1948 "transfer"--actually a conflict-bred refugee crisis--would not have occurred. And the Arabs declared the war. Masalha's claim that Israel pre-planned this doesn't track with actual events. Indeed, 1 million Arabs hold Israeli citizenship, with all attendant civil rights.

Contrary to Masalha's contention, the "population transfer" idea was not a Jewish, Zionist or Israeli idea. It was born in the 1920s, not the 1890s, and the term was first used to describe a 1920s Turkish-Greek population exchange. In Israel, the concept was first floated in the 1937 by Britain's Peel Commission, not Zionists. They wanted to transfer an Arab minority from a tiny Jewish state as part of a partition plan to further subdivide Western Mandate Palestine, which the British had already unilaterally divided from Eastern Mandate Palestine in 1922. David Ben Gurion actually opposed the plan at first.

Masalha claims the Zionists were behind the Peel Commission transfer proposal. But he really doesn't prove this point. In fact, David Ben-Gurion welcomed Britain's transfer idea reluctantly--and only to persuade Zionists to accept a sliver Jewish state. But in doing so, Ben Gurion also warned that the Peel plan contained inherent dangers. In any case, the transfer idea fizzled when the Zionists accepted it reluctantly and the Arabs opposed the proposed partition.

Masalha is unconvincing not least because only Israel's tiny revisionist faction incorporated transfer into an official party platform. And revisionists--who didn't adopt the notion until well after the 1948 war--never exercised major influence over Israel's labor Zionist mainstream.

Masalha forgets that early Zionist leaders expected Israel to obtain a Jewish majority from massive immigration. They believed (rightly, as we now know) that Western Palestine could accommodate millions of Jews and Arabs, up from 600,000 or so inhabitants in the 1920s, most of them fairly recent immigrants.

And finally, despite his wish to blame Zionists for planning a population transfer, Masalha neglects transfers forced on Jewish residents and landowners in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s by Arab riots and massacres. The ancient Jewish community of Hebron, for example, was wiped out in 1929 with the massacre of 70 unarmed Jewish civilians. Egypt likewise illegally removed Jewish residents of Gaza with its illegal 1948 occupation there, as did Jordan when it illegally seized the Jordan River's west bank in 1948 and forced 100,000 Jewish Jerusalemites to leave their ancient homes, tipping East Jerusalem's population balance from two thirds Jewish to 100 percent Arab.

This book is completely unconvincing. Masalha steeps his text in theory, but he does not prove it with historical facts.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

excellent book, it reviews a very critical era in modern history. I like the factual evidence and the sober analysis

This book proves, without a doubt, that the zionist's thoughts slowly converged to the necessity of the forced expulsion of the palestinians.

The inflexion point came in 1937, i.e. 11 years before the expulsion.

Masalha extensively quotes major figures of zionism and the result is, well, damning. These guys knew very well they had to expel the palestinians and felt very good about this.

This book takes the post-Zionism analysis to its rightful conclusion: the Palestinians were forced out by design, not by circumstance of war. Masalha does uses the very same material employed by Morris, et al. His devastating analysis makes this work a classic critique and history of the effects of the Zionist project on the native inhabitants of Palestine.

Nur Masalha's work provides conclusive evidence that Israel and pre-Israel Jewish terrorists (like the Irgun and Haganah) deliberately expelled Palestinians from their lands in 1948. This is a crucial point in the debate between Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis, apparently, rely only on wishful thinking and the brute forces of violence and propaganda, while the Palestinian side, it appears, is finally being borne out with undeniable historical truths based on recently declassified Israeli documents.

A classic. Highly recommended for anyone interested in a balanced look at the roots of the conflict.

It seems to me that his book is mostly 'lifted' from Dr. Chaim Simons earlier (1988) well researched book available at Amazon, "International Proposals to Transfer the Arabs of Palestine: 1895-1947, A Historical Survey". What Nur Masalha ignores in his 'edited version' of Dr. Simons' work is that the earliest proposals to transfer the Arabs out of what became Israel were proposed by non-Jews first, not by the Zionists. Several major prominent international figures, former US president Herbert Hoover for example, supported the TRANSFER IDEA. Take a good look at Dr. Simons' book, you'll discover just how popular TRANSFERING ARABS OUT OF ISRAEL really was among world leaders in that period. And I might add, if it had taken place and the Arabs would have been comfortably settled elseware, non of the violence, warfare, and bloodshed would have occured for the last 50+ years. THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD!

There are much better books on the Palestinian diaspora out there - I suggest that you look around. This book was rather boring and a little opinionated.