The Jerusalem Post, November 20, 2001
(November 20) - Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, was not - as many people have
alleged in their desire to
shame his memory - the father, the mother, or even the midwife of the
"transfer the Arabs out of the Land
of Israel" idea. Nor were Ze'evi's alleged spiritual fathers - David
Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, Haim
Arlosoroff, or any of the other "activist" Socialist Zionist leaders
who have been mentioned as advocates
of the idea - its inventors.
In his lifetime - and since his martyrdom last month in the cause of
Jewish appeasement - Ze'evi has
been branded a "fascist" and a "racist" for advocating the idea. If
considering the transfer of Arabs from
the Land of Israel - by agreement or, if necessary, by coercion - earns
one those epithets, then he and
those Zionists and other estimable Jews are in the glorious company
of such "fascists/racists" as Nobel
Peace laureate Fridtjof Nansen, organizer of the mutual transfer of
Greek and Turkish populations after
World War I; the 31st president of the US, Herbert Hoover; his successors,
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry
Truman; Nobel Peace Prize laureate Sir Norman Angell; the 1937 Royal
(British) Peel Commission;
British Col. Richard Meinertzhagen; American author John Gunther; Harry
St. John Philby, a rabid British
anti-Zionist and adviser to Saudi Arabian ruler Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud,
the man responsible for the transfer
of the Hashemite Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula to Transjordan; Rev.
James Parkes, English
Christian theologian and historian; British secretary for the colonies
William Ormsby-Gore; the British
Labor Party; British foreign secretary and prime minister Anthony Eden;
and other non-Jewish
luminaries.
(The history of transfer is told in richly documented detail in Chaim
Simons's book, International
Proposals to Transfer Arabs from Palestine, 1988.)
Let's begin with Herbert Hoover, who was a Quaker, a noted humanitarian,
and an engineer by education
and profession. (His story is told in greater detail by one of his
biographers, Richard N. Smith, in An
Uncommon Man, 1984.)
In 1945, Hoover proposed the recovery of some 12 million dunams (three
million acres) of land in Iraq for
the resettlement of the Arabs of Mandatory Western Palestine. (This
designation applied only to the area
west of the Jordan River, the eastern part of the Mandate having long
since been presented by Winston
Churchill to the Hashemite newcomers from Arabia.)
"Palestine itself," Hoover wrote, "could be turned over to Jewish immigrants
in search of a homeland."
He thought this might prove to be "the model migration in history -
transferring Arabs to an Arab nation;
restoring agricultural prosperity to the ancient valleys of the Tigris
and Euphrates, and providing
persecuted Jews with a refuge and a beacon. It would be a solution
by engineering instead of by
conflict," Hoover said. He subsequently wrote a letter of elaboration
to the New York World-Telegram
newspaper (long since defunct) saying that his proposal offers "a method
of settlement with both honor
and wisdom." Truman liked the idea.
As for Franklin Roosevelt, today we know things we wish were not so
about his response to the
1939-1945 murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe. In
light of that, it is interesting to
note that he was an ardent supporter of the idea of transfer of the
Arabs, at one point even advocating
forced transfer if necessary.
In 1942, Roosevelt told his secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau,
Jr.: "I actually would put barbed
wire around Palestine, and I would begin to move the Arabs out of Palestine...
I would provide land for the
Arabs in some other part of the Middle East... There are lots of places
to which you could move the
Arabs." And he told the under-secretary of state, Edward Stettinius,
that "Palestine should be for the
Jews and no Arabs should be in it."
As for the British Labor Party, in 1944 it adopted a pro-Zionist resolution,
including a proposal for the
transfer of Arabs from Palestine, that was too radical even for some
of the Zionist leadership. But that
was before it came to power the following year, and came under the
sway of that rabid anti-Zionist and
anti-Semite, foreign secretary Ernest Bevin.
In 1927, even Iraq's King Feisal I implicitly welcomed the idea of "Muslim
Arab peasants from Syria and
Palestine" coming to cultivate the vast expanses of unoccupied Iraqi
land. A little more than two decades
later, Iraqi prime minister Nuri Sa'id put forth the idea of exchanging
Baghdad's Jewish population for an
equal number of Israeli Arabs.
More recently, a distinguished Jerusalem Arab, Prof. Sari Nusseibeh,
advocated the idea of voluntary
transfer. Nusseibeh, today president of Jerusalem's Al-Quds University
and Yasser Arafat's chosen
successor to Faisal Husseini as the Palestinian Authority's "voice
of Jerusalem," told an interviewer 10
years ago (Newsweek, 11/11/91): "In a future Palestinian entity it
should not be illegal for Jews to hold
land. But Jews there would have to live under Palestinian law. I expect,
however, that during an interim
autonomy period most Jewish settlers would get the message and would
be encouraged to move back
to Israel."
Perhaps Arabs who don't like living under Israeli law in the ancestral
Jewish homeland might similarly get
the message.
Russion version