From:
http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdfWhen political Zionism began in earnest in the late 19th century, there were only about 15,000 Jews in Palestine.(1)
In 1893, for example, the Arabs comprised roughly 95 percent of the population, and though under Ottoman control, they had been in continuous possession of this territory for 1300 years.(2) Even
when Israel was founded, Jews were only about 35 percent of Palestine’s population and owned 7 percent of the land.(3)
The mainstream
Zionist leadership was not interested in establishing a bi‐national state or accepting a permanent partition of Palestine. The Zionist leadership was sometimes willing to accept partition as a first step, but this was a tactical maneuver and not their real objective. As David Ben‐Gurion put it in the late 1930s, “
After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”(4)
To achieve this goal, the
Zionists had to expel large numbers of Arabs from the territory that would eventually become Israel. There was simply no other way to accomplish their objective. Ben‐Gurion saw the problem clearly, writing in 1941 that “
it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.”(5) Or as Israeli historian Benny Morris puts it, “the
idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.”(6)
This opportunity came in 1947‐48, when
Jewish forces drove up to 700,000 Palestinians into exile.(7)
Israeli officials have long claimed that the Arabs fled because their leaders told them to, but careful scholarship (much of it by Israeli historians like Morris) have demolished this myth. In fact, most Arab leaders urged the Palestinian population to stay home, but fear of violent death at the hands of Zionist forces led most of them to flee.( 8 ) After the war, Israel barred the return of the Palestinian exiles.
The fact that the creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian people was well understood by Israel’s leaders.
As Ben‐Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti‐Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”(9)
Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions.(10) Prime
Minister Golda Meir famously remarked that “there was no such thing as a Palestinian,” and even Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, nonetheless opposed creating a full‐fledged Palestinian state.(11)
Pressure from extremist violence and the growing Palestinian population has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from some of the occupied territories and to explore territorial compromise, but no Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own. Even Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David in July 2000 would only have given the Palestinians a disarmed and dismembered set of “Bantustans” under de facto Israeli control.(12)
_____________________________________________________________
1. The first wave of European Jews to come to Palestine is known as the First Aliyah, and it covers the years from 1882 to 1903. There were slightly more than 15,000 Jews in Palestine in 1882. Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (NY: Columbia University Press, 1990), p.11, which has excellent data for the years from 1850 to 1915. Also see Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 124.
2. The total population of Palestine in 1893 was roughly 530,000, of whom about 19,000 were Jewish (3.6 percent). Arabs comprised the vast majority of the remaining population. McCarthy, Population of Palestine, p. 11. 49
3. Flapan, Birth of Israel, p. 44; Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 186.
4 . Flapan, Birth of Israel, p 22. Similarly, Ben‐Gurion told his son, “I am certain we will be able to settle in all the other parts of the country, whether through agreement and mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or in another way.” He went on to say, “
Erect a Jewish State at once, even if it is not in the whole of the land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come.” Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (NY: Norton, 2000), p. 21. Also see Flapan, Birth of Israel, pp. 13‐53; Nur Masalah, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882‐1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), chapter 2; Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 138‐139; Avi Shlaim, The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists, and Palestine, 1921‐1951 (NY: Oxford University Press, 1999).
5. Masalah, Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 128. Also see Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 140, 142, 168‐169.
6. Benny Morris, “A New Exodus for the Middle East?” Guardian, October 3, 2002. On the pervasiveness of transfer thinking among Zionists before Israel was established in 1948, see Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians; Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948,” in Rogan and Shlaim, War for Palestine, pp. 39‐48; Morris, Birth Revisited, chapter 2; Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest,” Ha’aretz, January 9, 2004.
7. Morris, Birth Revisited, provides a detailed account of this event. Also see Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, trans. Maxine Kaufman‐Lacusta (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), chapters 3‐4.
The only remaining debate of real significance regarding the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland is whether it was “born of war,” as Morris argues, or by design, as Norman Finkelstein argues in Image and Reality of the Israel‐Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 1995), chapter 3.
8. Erskine Childers, “The Other Exodus,” Spectator, May 12, 1961; Flapan, Birth of Israel, pp. 81‐118; Walid Khalidi, “Why Did the Palestinians Leave Revisited,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 ( Winter 2005), pp. 42‐54; Idem, “The Fall of Haifa,” Middle East Forum, Vol. 35, No. 10 (December, 1959), pp. 22‐32; Morris, Birth Revisited.
9. Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox, trans. Steve Cox (NY: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), p. 99. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Israeli right, made essentially the same point when he wrote, “
Colonization is self‐explanatory and what it implies is fully understood by every sensible Jew and Arab. There can only be one purpose in colonization. For the country’s Arabs that purpose is essentially unacceptable. This is a natural reaction and nothing will change it.” Quoted in Ian Lustick, “To Build and To 50
Be Built By: Israel and the Hidden Logic of the Iron Wall,” Israel Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1996), p. 200.
10. See Geoffrey Aronson, Israel, Palestinians, and the Intifada: Creating Facts on the West Bank (London: Kegan Paul International, 1990); Amnon Barzilai, “A Brief History of the Missed Opportunity,” Ha’aretz, June 5, 2002; Idem, “Some Saw the Refugees as the Key to Peace,” Ha’aretz, June 11, 2002; Moshe Behar, “The Peace Process and Israeli Domestic Politics in the 1990s,” Socialism and Democracy, Current Issue Number 32, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer‐Fall 2002), pp. 34‐47; Adam Hanieh and Catherine Cook, “A Road Map to the Oslo Cul‐de‐Sac,” Middle East Report Online, May 15, 2003; “Israel’s Interests Take Primacy: An Interview with Dore Gold,” in bitterlemons.org, “What Constitutes a Viable Palestinian State?” March 15, 2004, Edition 10; Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Sara Roy, “Erasing the ‘Optics’ of Gaza,” The Daily Star On Line, February 14, 2004; “36 Years, and Still Counting,” Ha’aretz, September 26, 2003.
11. Rahid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (NY: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 147. Meir also said, “
It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Masalha, Imperial Israel, p. 47. Rabin said in 1995, two years after signing the Oslo accords,
“I seek peaceful coexistence between Israel as a Jewish state, not all over the land of Israel, or most of it; its capital, the united Jerusalem; its security border with Jordan rebuilt; next to it, a Palestinian entity, less than a state, that runs the life of Palestinians …. This is my goal, not to return to the pre‐Six Day War lines but to create two entities, a separation between Israel and the Palestinians who reside in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Hanieh and Cook, “Road Map.” Also see Akiva Eldar, “On the Same Page, Ten Years On,” Ha’aretz, November 5, 2005; David Grossman, “The Night Our Hope for Peace Died,” Guardian, November 4, 2005; Michael Jansen, “A Practice that Prevents the Emergence of a Palestinian State,” Jordan Times, November 10, 2005.
It is worth noting that in the spring of 1998, Israel and its American supporters sharply criticized First Lady Hillary Clinton for saying that, “It would be in the long‐term interests of peace in the Middle East for there to be a state of Palestine, a functioning modern state that is on the same footing as other states.” Tom Rhodes and Christopher Walker, “Congress Tells Israel to Reject Clinton’s Pullout Plan,” New York Times, May 8, 1998; James Bennet, “Aides Disavow Mrs. Clinton on Mideast,” New York Times, May 8, 1998.
12. Charles Enderlein, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995‐2002, trans. Susan Fairfield (NY: Other Press, 2003), pp. 201, 207‐208; Jeremy Pressman, “Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba? International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2003), p. 17; Deborah Sontag, “Quest for Mideast Peace:
How and Why It Failed,” New York Times, July 26, 2001; Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David: The Untold Story about the Collapse of the Peace Process (NY: Nation Books, 2004), pp. 284, 318, 325.
Barak himself said after Camp David that “the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor‐thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from Maale Adumim to the Jordan River,” which effectively would have been under Israel’s control. Benny Morris, “Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak)”, New York Review of Books, Vol. 49, No. 10 (June 13, 2002), p. 44. Also see the map Israeli negotiators presented to the Palestinians at Camp David, a copy of which can be found in Roane Carey, ed., The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid (London: Verso, 2001), p. 36.
