“Transfer was never the plan — expulsion was an accident of war, not a Zionist idea”

The earliest statement is Herzl’s, and it is in his own hand. In the diaries he began keeping in the spring of 1895 — published in full by the Herzl Press in 1960, edited by Raphael Patai and translated by Harry Zohn — the entry for 12 June 1895 reads: “When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. 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 own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” Herzl wrote this before he had settled on Palestine as the site; the method, not the map, was what he had worked out.

Forty-two years later the idea had an institutional home. When the Peel Commission recommended partition in July 1937 and proposed a population transfer to go with it, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary on 12 July 1937 — quoted from the Ben-Gurion Archives by Nur Masalha in Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) — that “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 feet during the days of the First and Second Temple.” Masalha records that he went so far as to write: “We must prepare ourselves to carry out” the transfer — the emphasis in the original. The Jewish Agency established a Transfer Committee at the end of 1937 to study how it might be done, and another in 1948, whose members were Yosef Weitz, Ezra Danin and Zalman Lifschitz. Masalha records that Ben-Gurion referred to the 1948 body as Va’adat ‘Akirah Vegerush — the Committee for Removal and Expulsion — a name his War Diary’s editors rendered more softly as the “Committee for Evacuation and Repopulation.”

The clearest window is the diary of Yosef Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Department from 1932 to 1948 and the man who bought and allocated land for the Yishuv. His entry of 20 December 1940, recording a conversation with his JNF colleague Zalman Lifschitz, reads: “Amongst ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. No ‘development’ will bring us closer to our aim to be an independent people in this small country. After the Arabs are transferred, the country will be wide open for us; with the Arabs staying the country will remain narrow and restricted… The only way is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries, all of them, except perhaps Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Old Jerusalem. Not a single village or a single tribe must be left.” The unedited Weitz diaries are held in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem.

One frequently cited document should be handled carefully, and this archive states the dispute plainly. Ben-Gurion’s letter to his fifteen-year-old son Amos of 5 October 1937 — obtained in Hebrew from the Ben-Gurion Archives and translated by the Institute for Palestine Studies — contains the sentence “We must expel Arabs and take their place,” but the original manuscript carries crossed-out words immediately before it, and Benny Morris, who quoted the sentence in 1988, later concluded that the deletion was made by another hand and that Ben-Gurion’s sentence had meant the opposite. The dispute is real and the sentence is best left aside. What is not in dispute is the rest of the letter, which needs no gloss: “a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning”; “every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole”; “Palestine is grossly under populated. It contains vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified (because of their lack of need) to exploit”; and, on the possibility that Palestinians would refuse to cede the Negev, “we will have to talk to them in a different language — and we will have a different language — but such a language will not be ours without a state.”

Morris, who documented the 1948 expulsions from the Israeli military archives while defending them politically, put the point about intent to Ari Shavit of Haaretz on 8 January 2004: “From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer… there is an atmosphere of transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea.” Whether one calls that a plan or a disposition, it was not an accident, and it was not invented after the fact by Palestinians.

Sources

• The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn (Herzl Press, 1960), Volume 1 — entry of 12 June 1895
• Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) — full text
• Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos, 5 October 1937 — Institute for Palestine Studies translation from the Ben-Gurion Archives (PDF)
• The 1937 Ben-Gurion letter — the dispute over the crossed-out sentence, including Morris’s revised reading
• “Survival of the Fittest”: Ari Shavit interviews Benny Morris — Haaretz, 8 January 2004