The Zionist dream in essence’: The history of the Palestinian transfer debate, explained
Tantura residents flee their village, May 1948.
Ofer Aderet writes in Haaretz on 12 February 2025:
Donald Trump’s plan to empty Gaza of its residents, which has already earned the moniker “Trumpsfer,” has set off a storm and returned to the debate a term that many people hoped belonged of the worst extremists in Israeli society.
Responses have ranged from right-wing television host Yinon Magal’s “we were like unto them that dream” (Psalm 126:1) to Yair Golan’s contention that transfer “is an idea that is antithetical to Judaism and to Zionism,” as the retired general and head of the left-leaning Democrats party wrote in Haaretz. Behind all this is some fascinating history.
When Israelis hear the word “transfer,” they think of Rehavam Ze’evi, the far-right tourism minister and retired general who believed that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the “transfer of Arabs outside Israel’s borders” and that “this should be said openly and without shame.” Ze’evi was assassinated by Palestinians in 2001.
His words set off a fury, starting with calls to drop him as head of Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum and as an army reservist. There were even demands to put him on trial for incitement to racism and, “based on international law, to prevent the crime of genocide.” Shlomo Lahat, the Tel Aviv mayor from 1974 to 1993, came to Ze’evi’s defense, declaring that he was “a decent person who says what he thinks. There are a lot of bastards who think like him and don’t have the courage to express their opinions openly.”
In 1940, Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote that ‘the world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them. … Hitler – as odious as he is to us – has given this idea a good name in the world.’ Ze’evi also raised a few eyebrows by name-dropping two founders of the Labor Zionist movement. “I learned about transfer from [Yitzhak] Tabenkin and Berl Katznelson. I’m a minimalist compared to them,” said Ze’evi, who would soon be elected to the Knesset.
Before him there was Meir Kahane, who served in the Knesset from 1984 to 1988 until his party was banned from running for reelection. “Transfer, removal – whether voluntary or involuntary” was Kahane’s solution. “With an iron fist, without fear, we’ll expel them.”
Palestinian refugess in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, in 1948
In 1988, when Kahane was banned and Ze’evi elected, Shabtai Teveth, a star Haaretz writer and David Ben-Gurion’s biographer, wrote a series of articles for the paper under the rubric “The Metamorphosis of Transfer in Zionist Thought.” Teveth argued that ideas about transfer “flickered in solitude on the margins of Zionism” and were “half-baked ideas” among the “childhood illnesses of Zionism.”
But the early sources he supplied spoke for themselves, and as historian Benny Morris wrote in his book “Correcting a Mistake: Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel, 1936–1956,” the idea of transfer didn’t come into the world in 1948. It has had deep roots in Zionism since the movement’s founding in the 19th century.
Historian Tom Segev weighed into the debate in his book “One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate.” According to him, the overwhelming consensus was that a transfer of Arabs was desirable for the Zionist movement and also moral. This was the Zionist dream in essence, Segev wrote.
Contrary to what Yair Golan wrote in Haaretz this week, Segev believes that transfer is rooted in Zionist ideology and was necessitated by Arab terrorism and the Arabs’ refusal to allow the Zionist movement to establish a country with a Jewish majority.
Well, this what Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, wrote in this diary in 1895: “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.”
Two years later, one of Herzl’s colleagues, Israel Zangwill, visited the Holy Land. “He concluded that there was no choice but to remove the Arabs and transfer them by force to neighboring countries,” Teveth wrote in his Haaretz series. As Zangwill put it in 1904: “We must be ready to expel them from the land with the power of the sword, as our forefathers did to the tribes that inhabited it.”
Teveth also paraphrased Zangwill’s position in 1920: “We must persuade them gently to undertake a migration journey. After all, the Arabian Peninsula with its millions of square miles is at their disposal.”
Two “great and devoted Zionists” had a similar idea, Teveth wrote. He quoted Nachman Syrkin (1868-1924): “The Land of Israel, which is very sparsely populated and where Jews today are 10 percent of the population, should be turned over to the Jews.” Aaron Aaronsohn (1876-1919) proposed that the Arabs in Ottoman Palestine go live in Iraq, whose land was much more fertile. He wrote that “as many Arabs as possible should be persuaded to emigrate.”
Yosef Sprinzak, the speaker of the Knesset from 1949 to 1959, was 10 when Herzl wrote about transfer in his diary. In 1919, at an assembly of the Jewish community’s leaders, Sprinzak said: “We need to receive the Land of Israel without any reductions or restrictions, but there is a known quota of Arabs living in the Land of Israel and they will receive satisfaction. Anyone who wishes to cultivate will cultivate his plot. Anyone who does not wish to cultivate it will be awarded compensation and seek his happiness in another land.”
Arthur Ruppin said in 1938: “I do not believe in the transfer of individuals. I believe in the transfer of entire villages.” Menachem Ussishkin added in the same year that he was willing to defend before God and the League of Nations the moral side of transfer, and Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s founding prime minister, said he did not see transfer as immoral in any way.
The residents of Jaffa leave their homes in May 1948
Transfer came up for discussion in full force when the Peel Commission released its report in 1937. The British authorities established the commission in 1936 after the start of the Arab revolt in Mandate Palestine against the British. The commission recommended dividing the land into three parts: a Jewish state, an Arab state and a Mandate section under British rule, which would include Jerusalem.
One recommendation was a transfer – both voluntary and forced – of Arabs from the Jewish state. Officially, this was called an “exchange of populations,” but the intention was a transfer or mass expulsion, Morris writes.
Ben-Gurion added in his diary, (as quoted by Morris in his book “Righteous Victims”): “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 during the days of the first and second Temples. We are given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings.”
Ben-Gurion saw population transfer as a key point of the plan and added: “With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]. I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” He believed that in many parts of the state, new settlement would not be possible without the transfer of the Arab farmers. “Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale,” Ben-Gurion said in 1937.
In August that year, he told the emergency 20th Zionist Congress in Zurich: “We do not want to dispossess, [but piecemeal] transfer of population [through Jewish purchase and the removal of Arab tenant farmers] occurred previously, in the [Jezreel] Valley, in the Sharon and in other places. … Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. … Transfer is what will make possible a comprehensive [Jewish] settlement programme. Thankfully, the Arab people have vast empty areas [in Transjordan and Iraq]. Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale.”
Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel’s first president, spoke in a similar vein, which we can glean from his influence on his listeners. These listeners included Haaretz Editor-in-Chief Moshe Glickson, who declared that “there are enthusiasts who believe that it is possible to remove hundreds of thousands of Arabs from the Jewish state practically while standing on one leg.”
The archives show that these weren’t just theoretical debates. In the ’30s, the Zionist movement began to craft a transfer plan; it even established a special committee to do so. The debate included the question of whether the transfer would be voluntary, whether villages or cities would be emptied out first, at what pace, where the people would go, and at what financial cost.
Ben-Gurion proposed that Iraq be paid 10 million British pounds to take in 100,000 Arab families. Weizmann fantasized that King Ibn Saud would accept 10 million to 20 million pounds to take in all the Arabs in Mandate Palestine, a move that would be financed by the United States.
But the Peel Commission, similar to other commissions that the British established, failed to find a solution. This dashed Zionist hopes for a transfer of the Arab population under British auspices.
The right wing also took part in the debate. In 1940, Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote that “the world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them. … Hitler – as odious as he is to us – has given this idea a good name in the world.”
In December 1944, toward the end of World War II, transfer received surprising support – once again from the British. The Labour Party adopted the following resolution at its 43rd annual conference: “Here we have halted half way, irresolute between conflicting policies. But there is surely neither hope nor meaning in a ‘Jewish National Home’, unless we are prepared to let Jews, if they wish, enter this tiny land in such numbers as to become a majority. There was a strong case for this before the War. There is an irresistible case now, after the unspeakable atrocities of the cold and calculated German Nazi plan to kill all Jews in Europe.
“Here, too, in Palestine surely is a case, on human grounds and to promote a stable settlement, for transfer of population. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in. Let them be compensated handsomely for their land and let their settlement elsewhere be carefully organized and generously financed. The Arabs have many wide territories of their own; they must not claim to exclude the Jews from this small area of Palestine, less than the size of Wales.
“Indeed, we should reexamine also the possibility of extending the present Palestinian boundaries, by agreement with Egypt, Syria, or Trans-Jordan. Moreover, we should seek to win the full sympathy and support both of the American and Russian Governments for the execution of this Palestinian policy.”
In 1944, Ben-Gurion said a transfer of Arabs would be easier than of any other population. As Morris writes, Ben-Gurion noted that there were many Arab countries in the region and argued that the expellees would see their situation improved.
Morris also quotes a May 1944 comment by Moshe Sharett, who would become Israel’s second prime minister: Transfer can be the crowning achievement, the final stage of political development, but on no account the starting point. Once the Jewish state is established, it is very possible that the result will be the transfer of Arabs.
Yitzhak Gruenbaum, who would become Israel’s first interior minister, added: “The role of the Jews is sometimes to spur the gentiles to things they cannot yet see … for example, to artificially create conditions in Iraq that will attract the Arabs from the Land of Israel. … I don’t see any injustice in that, and no crime.” Eliyahu Dobkin, the head of the Jewish Agency’s aliyah department, said the new state would have a large Arab minority, which would have to be removed.
Former Haaretz Editor-in-Chief Moshe Glickson. ‘There are enthusiasts who believe that it is possible to remove hundreds of thousands of Arabs from the Jewish state practically while standing on one leg.’
The next chapter in the debate over population transfer was written during the War of Independence, when around 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled and became refugees. As Morris has argued, it’s impossible to understand the events of 1948, including the mass expulsions and the preventing of the return of refugees, without understanding the ideology of the leaders of pre-state Israel, for whom the idea of transfer was central.
As Yosef Sapir, a minister in Israeli governments throughout the ’50s and ’60s, put it about the Palestinians, “We should take them to the East Bank by the scruff of their necks and throw them there, and I don’t know who will accept them, especially the Gaza refugees.”
Israel’s founders also wanted a population transfer from Gabshare
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