Transfer

The concept precedes the word. In the diary he began keeping in 1895, Theodor Herzl set out the method under the entry of 12 June 1895: “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.” He had not yet settled on Palestine; he had settled on the mechanism.

“Transfer” entered the movement’s institutional vocabulary in 1937, when the British Peel Commission recommended partition together with a population exchange on the Greek–Turkish model. Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary on 12 July 1937 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 Jewish Agency established a Transfer Committee at the end of 1937 to examine how it might be done.

The fullest private statement belongs to Yosef Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Department from 1932 to 1948, whose unedited diaries are held in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. His entry of 20 December 1940 reads: “Amongst ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this 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.”

In 1948 the euphemism briefly slipped. Ben-Gurion’s cabinet approved a three-man Transfer Committee — Weitz, Ezra Danin and Zalman Lifschitz — instructed to submit proposals “about the possibilities of settling the Arabs of the Land of Israel in the Arab states.” Nur Masalha, who documented the committee’s work from the Israeli record, notes that Ben-Gurion referred to it as Va’adat ‘Akirah Vegerush — literally the Committee for Uprooting and Expulsion — a name the editors of his published War Diary rendered as the “Committee for Evacuation and Repopulation.” On 26 October 1948 the committee recommended that the government confirm its policy of blocking the return of the refugees and resettle them in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Transjordan.

The analytic value of the term lies in its provenance. It is one of the few words in this argument that Palestinians did not have to supply: it was written down by the movement itself, in its founders’ diaries and in the minutes of committees its own governing bodies created and named.

Sources

• Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) — full text
• The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn (Herzl Press, 1960), Volume 1 — entry of 12 June 1895
• Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos, 5 October 1937 — Institute for Palestine Studies translation from the Ben-Gurion Archives (PDF)