Britain’s 1937 Partition Plan also called for some degree of population exchange.
Britain’s Palestine Royal Commission Report (aka Peel), p. 389. Archive.
Practical ideas for dividing the land and/or its corollary of population exchange or transfer arose after the Hebron Massacre and also came from Arabs.
Ahmed Saleh Al-Khalidi’s cantonization proposal – 1934. PDF (p. 2) or Taylor & Francis.
He was an Arab intellectual who spoke of population transfer.
Harry St. John Philby’s 1940 idea in Arabian Jubilee – 1952, p. 212. Archive.
He was a British Arabist and close adviser to King Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia.
Nowhere To Lay Their Heads, pp. 28-9. Full page (29), Canada’s Memorial University.
A 1945 essay by Victor Gollancz, a British socialist.
Britain’s Mr. Ormsby-Gore:
“They would be going literally only a comparatively few miles away to a people with the same language, the same civilisation, the same religion; and therefore the problem of transfer geographically and practically was easier even than the interchanges of Greeks and Turks…”
League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission, Minutes of the 32nd (Extraordinary) Session – 22nd Meeting – August 13, 1937. UN.org.
(Find in page “comparatively”, 3rd instance.)
Notes on Chaim Weizmann’s interview with Britain’s Lord Moyne concerning King Saud and transfer – July 28, 1941.
Central Zionist Archives 1939-45 Doc. 48 in Archives of the Holocaust Vol. 4 – 1990.
Page 360, full page.
After the Arab war of 1948 created the refugees, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Said soon encouraged the departure, and expelled some, of his Jewish citizens- without taking in Arabs.
Sir William Strang (not a friend of Zionism) in Report to the Secretary of State May 21-June 18, 1949 FO 487-3.
From the British Archives in Correspondence Respecting the Middle East 1947-56. End of #63 on page 18 on Archive.org.
A few years earlier, al-Said supported an exchange of populations.
The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews
by Benny Morris. P. 72, full page, Rahs-open-lid.com.
Original:
‘Note on conversation with General Nuri Said, the Iraqi PM and Minister of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad on 5th and 6th December 1944’, PRO FO 921\149.
From Britain’s Labour Party in 1944: “It urges the British Government to encourage the transfer of Palestine Arabs to neighboring Arab countries and their settlement elsewhere under a plan carefully organized and generously financed. The Arabs have many wide territories of their own. They must not claim to exclude Jews from the small area of Palestine which is less than the size of Wales.” On JTA.org.
More:
Palestine Post article from January 12, 1937 covers a few ideas.
The Guardian (UK) article from 2002 by Israeli historian Benny Morris
details Arab politicians and others who saw transfer as a path to peace.
(His sources are in Britain’s National Archives and not available online.)
The bigger picture at this time:
(H.M.G. = Her Majesty’s Government.)
Middle East Diary 1917-1956 by Colonel Meinertzhagen – 1938, p. 171. Full, Archive.
Gollancz, p. 29.
Britain’s 1937 encouragement was partially based on the precedent with Turkey and Greece in the 1920s that involved more people- around 1.6 million (Peel, p. 390). While there was hardship at the time, it ultimately saved lives and created peace. After WWII, India and Pakistan exchanged 15 million people (with much violence because it wasn’t supervised). There’s a whole book from 1949, Population Transfer in Asia, that also covers European minorities during and after WWII, Christian Armenians, Assyrians and others.
Similarly, many countries have split along ethnic lines, like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
Peel, p. 391.
For some areas, Britain recommended compulsory transfer as a last resort- and for both sides. Later, they largely backtracked from this position.
The ill-informed and propagandists (which sadly includes some Jews) portray the idea of transfer as an evil Jewish plot to commit ethnic cleansing of the Arabs. The reality is benign- it was a natural thought by many for the sake of peace and in response to Arab violence (and, after 1937, in response to Partition).
- Partition’s Jewish domain would have had about 350,000 Jews and close to 300,000 Arabs, which was unrealistic as the Arabs could have soon outnumbered the Jews and nullified their state.
The autonomous Kurdistan Region in Iraq is predominantly Kurdish, over 75% of the people in Quebec, Canada are francophones, etc. To say the Jewish state couldn’t be like the Arab state and just about every other nation on Earth is insincere or worse.
- The voluntary schemes would have been organized with the neighbouring Arab governments and involved assistance. Archive.
“He was quite satisfied that not all the Arabs would wish to leave the Jewish State…if homesteads were provided and land was prepared for their reception not too far from their existing homes, he was confident that many would make use of that opportunity.”
Ormsby-Gore, as earlier.
Meinertzhagen, ibid.
Even those with an attitude spoke of compensation.
Chaim Weizmann in Foreign Affair Vol. 20 No. 2 – 1942, pp. 337-8. Full, Archive.
- The ideas revolved around the fellahin (peasants), most of whom were still semi-nomadic in 1937.
Report by His Majesty’s Government…Palestine – 1934, p. 49. Archive.org.
Re: Early 1920s in Kerak. Kirkbride, p. 20.
(More on Page #3.)
- A majority of the Arabs on the Jewish side of Partition had not lived in their homes for long. Along with others above-
Peel, p. 128.
Arabs moved to Jewish areas as early as the 1880s.
Turks, Arabs and Jewish Immigration Into Palestine: 1882-1914 – 1965.
Page 40 (86 of file), Oxford University Research Archive.
(More about Arab immigration and growth on Page #2.)
- Many ideas were a two-way street involving a larger number of Jews from the Middle East (few wished to leave, but then they were harassed- TOI, JFJ), and it seems about half the Arabs in Palestine did not wish to live in a Jewish state. Archive.
- Just about all the critics who misconstrue the concept of transfer in those days fully support it in the 21st century. That’s because they’re in favour of a state of Palestine that would evict Jews from the West Bank, all the while Israel has two million Arabs.
Exchange or transfer would have been unfortunate, not tragic. By not doing it in an organized manner, it happened in the worst manner- as a consequence of the Arab war in 1948 for 700,000 of their own and by expulsion and encouraged migration for 900,000 Jews afterwards.
There was no justification for the Jews from Arab states, they had been more settled than most of the 1948 Arabs, they lost much more assets than the Arabs, and 2/3 went to Israel where they were foreigners to the language and much of the culture. Their story is less known because Israel absorbed them and didn't abuse them like the Arab League did to their refugees.
Prior to the Hebron Massacre
A few Zionists, literally, had the thought of transfer before 1929. So? They were just musings. There was talk of transfer at the time of the Balfour Declaration and the bottom-line is that it wasn’t included in any draft.
Though polite, the ideas were roundly criticized by the vast majority of Jews.
Israel Zangwill in Voice of Jerusalem – 1920, pp. 97-98. Archive.org.
He was the only prominent Zionist to see co-existence as impossible and spoke of “gently”, assistance and compensation.
One reply indicative of the majority came from Max Nordau, who understood the antisemite’s mentality.
Forum on The Jewish People, Zionism and Israel – 1981 #42-43, p. 106. Full page.
A journal article by historian Joseph Nedava. It’s a famous quote and the original Hebrew source is in an Israeli archive.
The Jewish War Front – 1940, p. 220. Archive.org.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky saw no need for Arabs to leave a non-partitioned Jewish Palestine.
Diplomat Sir Alec Kirkbride in his A Crackle of Thorns – 1956, p. 19. Archive.org.
Re: Trans-Jordan in the early 1920s. Nobody had sinister intentions.
Refutations
A feature of anti-Israel publications and online activity is a list of quotes about transfer. Along with the ones above from Gentiles and the Jewish majority, here are others they omit.
Peel, p. 242.
Jabotinsky, p. 216.
- In 1902, Theodr Herzl wrote the utopian novel Old New Land (translated from Altneuland) that is based on an idyllic co-existence between Arabs and Jews (Archive).
As with Histadrut, David Ben-Gurion spoke and wrote ad nauseam about coexistence.
“…because ‘the National Home’ will not be established at the expense of the needs and rights of the non-Jewish residents of the country, because only by ensuring the interests of the Arab residents of the country can we establish the Jewish Home…”
“National Autonomy and Neighbourly Relations” in “We and Our Neighbours” – 1925. The Hebrew original; Google translated page (near the end of the paragraph after J).
From the same book:
“No takeover of others…” Hebrew; translation (6th paragraph).
More on the Jewish attitude towards Arabs:
A Middle East Forum article.
Of the Jews who later mulled peaceful exchange/transfer- it was never even an actionable plan- it’s clear that violence and Partition altered their feelings. It’s mind-boggling to say the Zionists spent vast resources on the Arabs over a period of decades as a colossal ruse.
More specifics
- As for the infamous letter that Ben-Gurion wrote to his son in October of 1937 that purportedly conveys a desire to expel the Arabs, here is CAMERA’s breakdown of the truth and how Israeli New Historian Ilan Pappé fabricated words that most people accepted as written in stone. The site also shows how the typed version altered the original, handwritten letter.
Remember the big picture: All these misrepresented quotes and even some real ones are packaged together to try and counter the overwhelming evidence that the 1948 Arab war against the Two-State Solution created the refugees. A majority fled for safety– with a few specific Arab reasons- and a minority were justifiably expelled because of militants who based themselves in villages and neighbourhoods, and because the Jews had to defend the Arab League invasion.
- CAMERA clarifies other Ben-Gurion quotes that were distorted, including from 1938 when he talked about transfer through mutual agreement with Arabs.
- Another instance goes back to 1895 by Theodr Herzl.
The Complete Diaries of Theodr Herzl Vol. 1 – 1960. Page 88, Archive.
Nothing bad about this- and these were abstractions before Herzl founded Political Zionism and they concerned Argentina, where some Jews briefly considered establishing a new home.
The ignorant and villainous erase these details or they quote misleading fragments from Benny Morris’s Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987 and Revisited 2004).
Herzl continued: “It goes without saying that we shall respectfully tolerate persons of other faiths and protect their property, their honor, and their freedom with the harshest means of coercion. This is another area in which we shall set the entire world a wonderful example … [Page 90] Should there be many such immovable owners in individual areas [who would not sell their property], we shall simply leave them there and develop our commerce in the direction of other areas which belong to us.”
Israeli historian Efraim Karsh criticized Morris for a few other misleading quotes and personal comments, and Morris was man enough to acknowledge unprofessionalism. Morris, who had access to more archival material than the dubious historians, is also crystal-clear that the 1948 War against the Two-State Solution is to blame for the displacement of those Arabs and that there was no pre-war plan to expel them. (Clip, page 7- 31 of file- of online preview of Revisited).
- Karsh did similar to Tom Segev and another Ben-Gurion distortion from May 8, 1948. A diary entry contemplating what to do about Arabs who were caught in the net of the Irregulars War was twisted into a statement to expel all Arabs.
This is the maddening aspect of the conflict. It's bad enough that the anti-Israel crowd promulgates the distorted words of these Israelis. The bigger problem is that respected scholars and journalists in the mainstream built new narratives and reports on top of the false information instead of verifying it- and even though there are more historians and professors like Karsh than the likes of Pappé. Other legitimate voices then quoted those scholars and journalists and, before long, an alternate reality was formed where Israel the democracy was an evil regime like Russia. (The UN was another factor.)
Page #4 explains why those "New Historians" wrote such things and why they were believed.
Next: Resume Chronology D with the section after transfer.
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