User:Rudy Wagner/Sandbox

thumb|left|"Transfer was inevitable" (p.60), contends Morris in his second book on the Exodus The idea that transferist ideaology is responsible for the Exodus was first brought up by several Palestinian authors, and supported by Erskine Childers in her 1971 article, "The wordless wish".  However, in the 1980s historian Benny Morris became the most well-known advocate of the theory. In his book 'The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem" he theorized the 'ultimate cause' of the Palestinian exodus to be the prevalent idea of population transfer within Zionist thinking. According to Morris, the demographic reality of Palestine, in which most residents were non-Jewish Arabs, had long been a major obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish national state. As the attempt to achieve a demographic shift through aliyah (Jewish immigration to the land of Israel) had not been succesful (due both to higher Arab birth rate and immigration and to restictions by the British Mandate, some Jewish leaders adopted the "transfer" of a large Arab population as the only viable solution. (Morris, 2003, p. 69)

The idea of population transfer was first placed on the political agenda in 1937 by the Peel Commission. The commission recommended that Britain should withdraw from Palestine and that the land be partitioned between Jews and Arabs. It called for a "transfer of land and an exchange of population", including the removal of 250,000 Palestinian Arabs from what would become the Jewish state (Arzt, 1997, p. 19), along the lines of the mutual population exchange between the Turkish and Greek populations after the Greco-Turkish War of 1922. This solution, writes Morris, was embraced by Zionist leaders, including David Ben-Gurion, who wrote:


 * ... and [nothing] greater than this has been done for our case in our time [than Peel proposing transfer]. ... And we did not propose this - the Royal Commission ... did ... and we must grab hold of this conclusion [i.e, recommendation] as we grabbed hold of the Balfour Declaration, even more than that - as we grabbed hold of Zionism itself we must cleave to this conclusion, with all our strength and will and faith (quoted in Morris, 2001, p. 42).

However, while Ben-Gurion was in favor of the Peel plan, he and other Zionist leaders considered it important that it be publicized as a British plan and not a Zionist plan. To this end, Morris quotes Moshe Sharett, director of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, who said (during a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 7 May 1944 to consider the British Labour Party Executive's resolution supporting transfer):
 * Transfer could be the crowning achievements, the final stage in the development of [our] policy, but certainly not the point of departure. By [speaking publicly and prematurely] we could mobilizing vast forces against the matter and cause it to fail, in advance. ... What will happen once the Jewish state is established - it is very possible that the result will be the transfer of Arabs (quoted in Morris, 2001, p. 46).

Other members of the JAE, such as Yitzhak Gruenbaum (later Israel's first interior minister), Eliahu Dobkin (director of the immigration department), Eliezer Kaplan (Israel's first finance minister), Dov Joseph (later Israel's justice minister) and Werner David Senator (a Hebrew University executive) all spoke favorably of the transfer transfer principle (Morris, 2001, p. 47).

Morris concludes that the idea of transfer was not, in 1947-1949, a new one. He writes:


 * Many if not most of Zionism's mainstream leaders expressed at least passing support for the idea of transfer during the movement's first decades. True, as the subject was sensitive they did not often or usually state this in public (Morris, 2001, p. 41; see Masalha, 1992 for a comprehensive discussion).

Other authors, including Palestinia writers and Israeli New Historians, have also described this attitude as a prevalent notion in Zionist thinking and as a major factor in the exodus. Israeli historian and former diplomat Shlomo Ben Ami wrote:


 * The debate about whether or not the mass exodus of Palestinians was the result of a Zionist design or the inevitable concomitant of war should not ignore the ideological constructs that motivated the Zionist enterprise. The philosophy of transfer was not a marginal, esoteric article in the mindset and thinking of the main leaders of the Yishuv. These ideological constructs provided a legitimate environment for commanders in the field actively to encourage the eviction of the local population even when no precise orders to that effect were issued by the political leaders. (Ben-Ami, Shlomo  Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, 2005, Weidenfeld & Nicholson. ISBN 0297848836)

While not discounting other reasons for the Exodus, the 'transfer principle' theory suggests that this prevalent 'attitude of transfer' is what made it easy for local Haganah and IDF commanders to resort to various means of expelling the Arab population, even without a 'master plan' or a blanket command given by Israeli authorities. Morris sums it up by saying that given the circumstances, "transfer was inevitable" (Morris, p. 60)

The 'transfer principle' theory came under attack from several historians, notably Efraim Karsh. They accused Morris of misrepresenting and misquoting Zionist sources, and of ignoring important Arab sources (Morris does not read Arabic), and argued that transferist thinking was a fringe philosophy within Zionism. This debate is still going strong today.