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Top: Jewish World Conspiracies: Zionism: Fallen Pillars
 

Mr. Neff recently published Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy toward Palestine and Israel since 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995).

The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is rooted not in 1948 but in the fermenting soil of the rise of Zionism in the late nineteenth century, specifically with the convening of the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The meeting, which began August 29, 1897, attracted 204 Jews from 15 countries and had been arranged by Zionism's founder, Theodor Herzl. The delegates agreed that "Zionism aims at the creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine to be secured by public law," and to that end they would encourage emigration to Palestine. When the congress ended three days later, Herzl confided to his diary: "If I were to sum up the Basel Congress in a single phrase--which I would not dare to make public--I would say: in Basel I created the Jewish State."(1)

At the time of the Basel congress, Arabs represented 95 percent of the population of Palestine and they owned 99 percent of the and.(2) Thus it was obvious from the beginning of Zionism that dispossession of the Palestinian majority, either politically or physically, would be an inevitable requirement for achieving a Jewish state. It was not only land that was needed to reach Zionism's goal, but land without another people in the majority.

Since Palestinian Arabs were by far the majority throughout the period up to Israel's establishment as a Jewish state in 1948, the Zionist state could emerge only by denying the majority its rights or by becoming the majority either through immigration or in reducing the number of Palestinians by ethnic cleansing. There was no other way to create a Jewish, rather than democratic, state.(3)

That the Jewish state was secured in 1948 by the expulsion of the Palestinians should have come as no surprise. Expulsion as Zionism' s logical imperative was clearly seen by Herzl as early as June 12, 1895. At the time he was still formulating his ideas about Zionism and confided to his diary: "We shall try to spirit the penniless population [Palestinians] across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."(4) Even if this was perhaps the fanciful imagining of a rather romantic personality, as some sympathizers of Herzl contend, its essential imperative was inescapable. This was recognized by most early Zionists, as evidenced by the fact that the theme of expulsion consistently ran through Zionist thought from the very beginning.(5)

For instance, as early as 1905, Israel Zangwill, an organizer of Zionism in Britain and one of Zionism's top propagandists, who had coined the slogan "a land without a people for a people without a land," acknowledged in a speech in Manchester that Palestine was not a land without people. In fact, it was filled with Arabs: "[We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us."(6)

This comment came at a time when there were around 645,000 Muslims and Christians in Palestine and only 55,000 Jews, mainly non-Zionists or anti-Zionists in the Orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem and other cities.(7)

David Ben-Gurion, the man who along with Herzl and Chaim Weizmann was one of the progenitors of Israel, explicitly acknowledged the linkage between Zionism and expulsion: "Zionism is a transfer of the Jews. Regarding the transfer of the Arabs this is much easier than any other transfer."(8) Or, as Israeli scholar Benjamin BeitHallahmi put it: "While the basic problem confronting Diaspora Jews was to survive as a minority, the basic problem of Zionism in Palestine was to dispossess the natives and become a majority."(9)

Much attention has been paid to how the early Zionists secured land in Palestine, but relatively little study has focused on the equally essential effort by Zionists to delegitimize and replace the Palestinian majority.(10) Without Jewish control, the Zionists concluded they would be no better off than in Europe, where Zionism arose specifically as a way to escape antisemitism, pogroms, the ghetto and minority status.

As former defense minister Ariel Sharon, a leading spokesman of Zionism's right wing, has commented: "Our forefathers did not come here in order to build a democracy but to build a Jewish state."(11) A similar view was recently expressed by Labor leader and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin: "I don't believe that for 2,000 years Jews dreamed and prayed about the return to Zion to create a binational state." (12) Though the terms are softer, the meaning is the same.

Thus from the very beginning of Zionism's dream of creating a Jewish state, there were two complementary and equally imperative objectives: gain land and replace the majority population, either by denying them their rights, out-populating them or displacing them by one method or another. Despite soothing promises by Herzl and other Zionists that Jews and Palestinians would live happily side by side, there was, indeed, no other way to create Zionism's envisioned Jewish state in Palestine.

The early Zionists pursued several strategies to achieve their goal. One was Jewish immigration. In their early enthusiasm, many Zionists and their supporters genuinely believed that large-scale Jewish immigration would soon solve the "Palestinian problem" by giving Jews a majority. Another rested on the belief that enough Palestinian farmers and labors, denied work, would accomplish the same thing by migrating out of Palestine. A third strategy, less well-known because it was conducted largely in the corridors of power in Constantinople, Berlin, London and Washington, was to gain the sponsorship of a world power, thereby affording legitimacy to Jewish claims as a counterbalance to the rights of the Palestinian majority.

The Zionists pursued all of these strategies simultaneously with lesser and greater success. But in the end it was only forced expulsion that secured their state.

The roots of Zionism reached deep into the psyche of Jewish suffering. But the major immediate cause for its emergence at the end of the nineteenth century was the massive waves of migration set off by pogroms in Russia in 1881 and the spread of blatant antisemitism throughout Eastern Europe in the waning decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Individuals, families and even whole communities fled the antisemitic terror. Up to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, about 2.5 million Jews had left Russia and other European countries, the vast majority of them seeking new homes in the West, particularly in the United States, Canada, South America and Australia. Less than 1 percent of them moved to Palestine and remained there.(13)

The figures for the United States alone were indicative of the profound demographic changes taking place. In 1880, there were about 250,000 Jews in America. By the end of World War I, there were four million.(14) With such a massive population change taking place, the question of the Ubiquitous Jew became the subject of dinner conversation even in the White House. President Woodrow Wilson, his wife and presidential confidant Colonel Edward M. House speculated one night in 1918 about the number of Jews in the world. House guessed 15 million, Mrs. Wilson 50 million and Wilson 100 million. At the time there were around 11 million.(15)

This torrent of Jewish migration unleashed events that directly favored the development of Zionism and, incidentally, its early embrace by both Britain and the United States. Reluctance and even refusal by many countries to receive the desperate Jewish immigrants fleeing antisemitism increased Jewish disillusionment with the gentile world and helped emphasize the Jews' sense of isolation, an alienation that lay at the heart of Zionism. Zionism, was explained by Herzl in his seminal pamphlet Der Judenstaat in early 1896: "We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us."(16)

At its heart, then, this was the fundamental rationale of Zionism: a profound despair that antisemitism could not be eradicated as long as Jews lived among gentiles.

It was not a sentiment universally shared by Jews, particularly those scholars and businessmen who had successfully assimilated in the secular Western democracies or had found security under guarantees of religious freedom. In fact, Zionism remained a minority movement among Jews well into the twentieth century. There were strong and vocal anti-Zionist groups like the American Council for Judaism in the United States as late as the 1950s. Among the fruits of Israel' s 1967 victory over its Arab neighbors was the final acceptance of Zionism by nearly the whole of the Jewish community from that time hence.

But even in its infancy, Zionism enjoyed the advantage of having powerful advocates in both London and Washington, Christian as well as Jewish. Moreover, the social problems caused by the massive Jewish migrations convinced other Western political leaders to favor the idea of a Jewish state. This was because the flood of Jewish emigrants seeking entry in those countries became so great over the years that they eventually provoked anti-immigration riots in London and restrictive immigration laws in both Britain and the United States.(17) Establishment of a Zionist state was an obvious way to divert Jewish immigrants from Western shores and thereby calm the political storms building over immigration policy. That little consideration was given by ambitious politicians to what impact Jewish immigration would have on the Arabs already in residence was hardly surprising under such circumstances.

But while Zionism slowly gained converts in the West, opposition to it built in the Middle East. In Palestine, Arabs and the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled Palestine for 400 years, were not unaware of the dangers to the established order posed by unlimited Jewish immigration. Although only about 60,000 of the 2.5 million who fled Eastern Europe up to World War I became permanent residents in Palestine, even this small number found themselves unwelcome.(18)

As early as 1882, Sultan Abdul Hamid II decreed that while he was "perfectly ready to permit the Jews to emigrate to his dominions, provided they became Ottoman subjects, he would not allow them to settle in Palestine."(19) He justified this restriction by saying that "Jewish emigration may in the future result in the creation of a Jewish government."(20) At the time, before the massive Jewish emigration began, there were about 25,000 Jewish and a half-million Arab residents in Palestine.(21) Despite the sultan's orders, a steady if small stream of Jewish immigrants managed through bribery and stealth to continue to arrive in Palestine.(22)

By 1891, some Palestinian merchants were concerned enough that they sent off a telegram to Constantinople complaining that they feared Jewish immigrants might come to monopolize trade and pose a threat to local business interests.(23) As early as 1897, the same year as the first Zionist Congress, the mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Tahir Husseini, father of Hajj Amin Husseini, headed a commission established specifically to study land sales to Jews. The result of the commission' s work was effectively to halt land sales to Jews in the Jerusalem district for several years.(24)

In 1899, Mayor of Jerusalem Youssuf Zia Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar and a member of the Ottoman Parliament, wrote a letter that was later forwarded to Herzl that warned against Zionist claims to Palestine. Palestinians were particularly resentful of Zionism's assertion that Jews had a right to Palestine because they had once lived there two millennia earlier. Khalidi noted that Zionist claims to Palestine were impractical since the land had been under Muslim control for the last thirteen centuries and that Arabs and Christians had inherent interests because of the holy places. Moreover, he added, the existing majority population of Arabs opposed Jewish control.(25) When Constantinople decided in 1901 to give foreign residents, essentially meaning new Jewish immigrants, the same rights as Arabs to buy land, a group of Palestinian notables sent a petition to the Ottoman capital protesting the action.(26)

Nonetheless, despite these early suspicions by some Palestinian leaders and merchants, relations between Palestinians and Jews remained in general fairly friendly up to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. According to historian Neville J. Mandel: "By the eve of the Young Turk Revolution...it is clear that Arab anti-Zionism had not yet emerged. On the other hand, there was unease about the expanding Jewish community in Palestine, and growing antagonism toward it."(27) Added Israeli historian Gershon Shafir: "The revolt of the Young Turks in July 1908 is to be viewed as the beginning of open Jewish-Arab conflict, as well as the cradle of the Arab national movement."(28)

In large part, the general Palestinian apathy up to 1908 resulted from the fact that the early Zionists successfully emphasized their quest for land and friendly relations while masking any intention to displace the Palestinians. As Herzl's diary entry about acting "discreetly and circumspectly" implies, even in the waning days of colonialism the idea of deliberately displacing an indigenous population in favor of foreign immigrants carried with it a cynical odor that the early Zionists sought to avoid for political reasons as well as for the need to maintain peaceful day-to-day relations with their neighbors. Thus plans to dispossess the Palestinians soon became euphemistically known among Zionists and to the outside world as the "transfer" issue. Publicly, Zionists emphasized the benefits Palestinians and the Ottoman Empire would gain from new Jewish immigrants, who brought with them money, intelligence and international connections.

But privately, transfer of the Palestinians was a recurrent topic in the inner councils of Zionists for the half-century leading to the massive expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.(29) While there were Zionists opposed to transfer on humanitarian grounds, the logical imperative of Zionism dictated that there was no other way short of delegitimizing the Palestinian majority or out-populating them to achieve Jewish statehood. But gaining a Jewish majority turned out to be unrealistic: even in 1947, after nearly six decades of immigration, there were in Palestine only 589,341 Jews among a total population of 1,908,775.(30)

Ultimately it became clear that the Zionists had only two major strategies for gaining control: delegitimizing the Palestinians, which the Zionists proved exceeding successful at over the years, and expelling them, either through denying them jobs or through forcible expulsion. For many years the early Zionists clung to the belief that the Palestinians could be replaced by the expedient of denying them work. This was obvious to outside observers, such as the U.S. King-Crane Commission, which issued its report on Palestine in 1919: "The fact came out repeatedly in the commission's conference with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine by various forms of purchase." It added that non-Jews represented "nearly nine-tenths of the whole."(31) [See American-Arab Affairs, no. 9, Summer 1984, for text of the King-Crane report.]

The campaign to evict the Palestinian farmers was done in the name of Labor Zionism. On its surface this was a beneficial and benign policy aimed mainly at rehabilitating the stereotypically weak diaspora Jews into the New Jew of Palestine. One of Labor Zionism's prominent advocates, Aharon David Gordon, wrote that such redemption must come through "work with our very own hands," adding: "We must feel all that the worker feels, think what he thinks, live the life he lives, in ways that are our ways. Then we can consider that we have our own culture, for then we shall have life."(32)

As late as the 1929 constitution of the Jewish Agency, the goals of Labor Zionism were embraced in an article decreeing that only Jewish labor could be hired on land owned by the Jewish National Fund: "The Agency shall promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labor, and in all works and undertakings carried out or furthered by the Agency, it shall be a matter of principle that Jewish labor shall be employed."(33) The Jewish National Fund was the Zionist Organization' s land-buying agency in Palestine. It had been founded in 1901 by the Fifth Zionist Congress with the express purpose of holding all land it purchased as inalienable Jewish property that could not be sold to non-Jews. Its charter also decreed that land held by the fund could be leased only to Jews. Lessees were forbidden to sublease.(34)

While there could be no doubt about the sincerity of the effort to create the New Jew through labor redemption, there was nonetheless a dark underside to the program. If Jews were going to do the work' then it was the Palestinians who would necessarily go jobless. That was because most of the land purchases by Zionists were from absentee landlords, who gave the Palestinian peasants no choice in the matter.(35) Just as Herzl had early dreamed, they became "penniless" and ripe for migration.

But the prohibition against hiring Arabs was not uniformly observed, nor did Palestinians show any inclination to move from Palestine, even when they were denied their jobs. Instead, they simply relocated from farms taken over by Jews to others where they could find employment, sometimes with other Jewish owners. In addition, the program eventually came under criticism as being intrinsically racist. Historian Arnold Toynbee joined other critics, charging in 1931 that Labor Zionism was creating "an exclusive preserve for the Jews, what in South Africa is called segregation." Others called it "economic apartheid."(36)

Ultimately, Labor Zionism failed. Not only did it increasingly tarnish Zionism's humane face, it never achieved its most important goal--to displace the Palestinians.

While one of Zionism's strategies was to delegitimize the Palestinians, its corollary was to legitimize the Jewish presence. From the beginning, Herzl was acutely aware that the Zionist community would need a major power as a sponsor. His first efforts were directed at Sultan Abdul Hamid, a logical choice since the Ottoman Empire exercised ultimate control over Palestine. Even before officially founding Zionism in I 897, Herzl traveled to Constantinople in 1896 to seek the sultan' s grant of land in Palestine in return for helping the empire restore its depleted treasury through Jewish financiers. Significantly, a draft of his proposed charter written after this trip sought from the sultan the right for Jews to deport the native population.(37)

But the sultan repulsed Herzl's efforts, finally sending a message that urged Herzl "to take no further steps in this matter. I cannot alienate a single square foot of land, for it is not mine but my people' s. My people fought for this land and fertilized it with their blood....Let the Jews keep their millions."(38)

Next, in 1898, Herzl turned his attentions to Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had ambitions in the Middle East. Herzl bluntly told the Germans: "We need a protectorate and the German would suit us best."(39) He pointed out that the leaders of Zionism were German- speaking Jews and that the language used at the First Zionist Congress the previous year had been German. Thus a Jewish state in Palestine would introduce German culture to the region. However, the kaiser turned Herzl down, largely because he did not want to provoke the Ottoman Empire, which was a major purchaser of German arms, or anger Christians at home.(40)

Undaunted by this latest rebuff, Herzl next turned to Great Britain in 1902. Here he found more fertile ground. There was a tradition among Protestant Christians and English writers stretching over the previous two centuries for support of "the return of the Jews" to Palestine, a tradition that had also moved to the United States. Moreover, Britain's concern for the security of the Suez Canal as the lifeline to its Indian colony had led to its takeover of Egypt in 1882, and protection of the canal remained the focus of London's interests in the region. Having a friendly population in the region would be to London's advantage.

However, since Britain was no more interested in antagonizing the sultan than was Germany, gaining British support for a Palestine charter was out of the question at the time. So Herzl sought a charter for nearby British territory: Cyprus, El Arish or the Sinai Peninsula. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain ruled out Cyprus because a Jewish presence would mean angering the existing Greek and Turkish inhabitants, and Egypt was ruled out because the local British governor opposed granting any Egyptian territory. So Chamberlain suggested a compromise: territory about the size of Palestine in British East Africa. Although it was called Uganda at the time, it corresponded to today's Kenya.(41) Herzl was delighted with the offer, if not as a substitute for Palestine then as a stepping stone to it. But the suggestion was met by a fire storm of protest from many Zionists, especially among the Russians, and equally from British colonists. By early 1904 both Herzl and Chamberlain were glad to drop the idea.(42)

But the experience had been profitable for Zionism. A major connection had been made with high officials of the British government, a link that Herzl correctly prophesied would eventually lead to concrete results. Shortly before his death on July 3, 1904, Herzl confided to a friend: "You will see, the time is coming when England will do everything in her power to have Palestine ceded to us for the Jewish state."(43)

After this, Zionist ambitions focused solely on Palestine as the site of the hoped-for Jewish state.

By 1914, on the eve of World War I, there were about 604,000 Arabs and 85,000 Jews in Palestine, an increase of about 30,000 Jews in a decade.(44) Despite the comparatively low rate of immigration, it had already become clear to a growing number of Palestinians that Zionism was a permanent and pervasive threat, however slow its development. This dawning awareness was prevalent among members of Palestine's leading families, intellectuals and merchants. After listening to the claims of Zionists and their forerunners for nearly two decades, many prominent Palestinians by the eve of World War I recognized that, if successful in its stated goals, Zionism ultimately meant dispossession of much or all of the Arab community, Muslim and Christian alike.

With distrust growing of the Young Turks in Constantinople and new winds of Arab nationalism beginning to blow over the Arab world, political activism increased in Palestine during the 1908-14 period. A number of newspapers and local political organizations espousing Arab rights sprang up in Palestinian communities. Regardless of their varied programs, almost all of the new groups shared a common thread of anti-Zionism.(45)

A political tract distributed anonymously in Jerusalem in 1914 read in part: Men! Do you want to be slaves and servants to people who are notorious in the world and in history? Do you wish to be slaves to the Zionists who have come to you to expel you from your country, saying that this country is theirs?(46)

By the outbreak of war, almost all the Arab arguments against Zionism that still echo today had been expressed, and Arab-Jewish hostility had become a permanent feature of what was soon to become an open conflict.(47)

Among the Palestinian activists was a young teenager, Muhammad Amin Husseini, scion of a wealthy family that for centuries had controlled the most important religious and political posts in Jerusalem. Already by the age of 13, in 1913, Husseini had formed a short-lived anti- Zionist club and begun writing tracts against Jewish immigrants. One of the new Arab nationalists, he was to become Zionism's greatest foe. In 1921 he would be elected mufti of Jerusalem, a post that his family had held with few exceptions since the seventeenth century, a position that in essence made him leader of the Palestinians.(48) From that time until the founding of Israel, Husseini would exert his considerable talents to prevent the Zionists from establishing a state.

Husseini and other Palestinian notables like him were neither naive nor innocent. They had dealt for centuries with the Ottoman Empire and were conversant with the subtle and internecine plottings of the oriental court as well as the perils and privileges of the complex communal relations between Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze and others living side by side in Palestine. While they had by World War I identified the threats in Zionism and their own strengths, including their rights as a majority and the weakness of the Zionist claim to Palestine on the basis of a residency 2,000 years before, they lacked a sophisticated understanding of the West. They were unable to compete with the extent and entree of Jewish influence in Britain and the United States, and they underestimated the historic trends in the West that favored a Jewish state.

The Palestinians were also placed at a great disadvantage by their inability to counteract Zionist propaganda in the West, which painted Palestinians as variously ignorant, dirty, rapacious anti-Christians undeserving of support. Although not successful enough by itself to gain a Jewish state, the effort was highly effective in delegitimizing the Palestinians.

The Zionists employed every known technique to reinforce anti-Islamic stereotypes, propaganda that no doubt predated the Crusades. The Arabs were pictured as vicious and dirty in news stories and books (and later movies and television) as well as in lectures, pamphlets and face-to-face interviews. It was a process that continues to this day, even after the Israeli-PLO mutual recognition in 1993. Typical of the results of the Zionist effort were such passages as the following written by the distinguished president of Brandeis University, Dr. Abram Leon Sachar:

The Arabs remained sullen and unimpressed [with Zionist farming and industrial achievements in Palestine]. They were constantly fomented to resentment and riot by a small clique of Arab landowners who were violently opposed to Jewish immigration. For centuries these parasitic effendis had with impunity exploited their peasant vassals, the sharecroppers, the poor fellahin who could easily move from dissatisfaction to revolt. In one area was the Jewish colony, green, tidy, productive, the laborers well paid, educated, secure, singing at their work. Adjacent to it was the miserable, squalid, dirty Arab village, ignorance the rule, discouragement the climate....How long would it be before the dispossessed and the disinherited, stirred by the example of Jewish standards, cried out for a decent way of life? It was in the interest of feudal self-defense to forestall such demands by persuading the fellahin that the Jews were trespassers who had come to rob the Arabs of their land, to steal their jobs, to subjugate them, to pollute their holy places."(49)

Such views were propagated at the highest levels of academia, especially in the United States and Britain, perpetuating over the decades an image of glorious and selfless Jewish labor against the greed of exploitative Arab landowners and the ignorance of dirty Arab peasants. These crude cartoons provided a powerful argument in enlisting Christians and their political leaders in the Zionist cause.

How effective the Zionists were in promoting their program became startlingly clear in 1917, when they obtained Britain's public (and America's private) support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Finally, after two decades of effort, Zionism gained a major power as its sponsor.

The success rested on differences between Britain in 1902, when Herzl first sought London's sponsorship, and 1917 when Britain no longer cared about the sensitivities of the Ottoman Empire because it was now at war with Constantinople. British troops were about to overrun Palestine, and the ancient land was to come under London's control. With this shift in the geostrategic kaleidoscope, one thing remained constant: British concern for the security of the Suez Canal.

It was no coincidence that defense of the canal was highlighted by British Zionists to find favor for their cause. They and their influential supporters propounded the idea that a friendly Zionist presence in Palestine would be of great political and military importance to the British Empire. As the pro-Zionist Manchester Guardian argued in 1915: "A couple of thousand years before the Suez Canal was built, the rulers of Egypt were perplexed with the problems of the defense of their land frontier, and what helped them to solve it was the existence in the old Jewish nation of powerful buffer-states against the great military empires of the north."(50) Although this was bad history- -there had been no "great military empires" in the north at the time- -it was good propaganda. It associated a Zionist state with British security.

Another event favoring the Zionists was the coming to power in late 1916 of David Lloyd George as prime minister and Arthur James Balfour as foreign secretary. Balfour had been prime minister in the early 1900s at the time of the British offer of "Uganda" as a Jewish homeland and, although not Jewish, he considered himself a Zionist.(51) Welshman Lloyd George was a firm believer in the Old Testament's claim to the right of the Jews to Palestine.(52)

Both men shared a common concern for gaining U.S. support for Britain' s postwar goals to divide up the tottering Ottoman Empire, including the ambition of taking over Palestine. In this, they were advised by the British embassy in Washington that Britain could be helped in achieving U.S. backing by finding favor with Jewish Americans. Reported the embassy: "They are far better organized than the Irish and far more formidable. We should be in a position to get into their good graces."(53)

One seemingly obvious way to do this was to follow the natural inclinations of Lloyd George and Balfour and support Zionist ambitions in Palestine, if only London could be sure President Wilson agreed with such a path. In this, Lloyd George and Balfour failed to appreciate that there remained major Jewish American groups opposed to Zionism, including the Jewish Socialists representing New York's sweatshops, the Agudath Israel orthodox religious movement, which considered Zionism "the most formidable enemy that has ever arisen among the Jewish people," and wealthy assimilated Jews like former ambassador Henry J. Morgenthau, who called Zionism "wrong in principle and impossible of realization."(54) Moreover, Secretary of State Robert Lansing was distinctly cool to Zionism.

Nonetheless, supporting the Zionists was one of the policies pursued by the two British leaders. Specifically, they worked to gain U.S. support for a declaration that would be approved by the British Cabinet and commit that country to endorsing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In this they were immeasurably helped, as well as goaded, by a persistent and persuasive Russian-born Jewish chemist, Chaim Weizmann. In 1917 he was head of the Zionist movement in Britain and a tireless worker in that cause. His achievements were so great that eventually he would be head of the World Zionist Organization and Israel's first president.

Aware of Lloyd George's and Balfour's desire for U.S. support, Weizmann sought a backdoor past the State Department to the White House via America's foremost Zionist, Louis B. Brandeis, an intimate of President Wilson, who had appointed him in 1916 to the Supreme Court. On April 8, 1917, Weizmann cabled Brandeis, advising that " an expression of opinion coming from yourself and perhaps other gentlemen connected with the Government in favor of a Jewish Palestine under a British protectorate would greatly strengthen our hands."(55) A month later, following America's entry into the war, Brandeis had a 45-minute meeting with Wilson on the president's views of Palestine and discovered that he was "entirely sympathetic to the aims of the Zionist Movement" and favored a British protectorate in Palestine.(56) However, Wilson did not want to make a public declaration because of his concern with French ambitions toward the region and a futile hope that Turkey could still be persuaded to quit the war.

This vital intelligence Brandeis shared with Balfour, who was in Washington at the time. In turn, Balfour gratified the justice by proclaiming "I am a Zionist."(57)

When Britain sought Wilson's endorsement in September 1917 of a draft declaration, however, he responded that the time was "not opportune" for him to go public. In desperation, Weizmann cabled Brandeis that it "would greatly help if President Wilson and yourself would support the text. Matter most urgent. Please telegraph."(58) Brandeis was able to use his access to the White House to meet with Colonel House, and together they assured Weizmann that from talks I have had with President and from expressions of opinion given to closest advisers I feel I can answer you in that he is [in] entire sympathy with declaration quoted in yours of nineteenth as approved by the foreign office and the Prime Minister. I of course heartily agree."(59)

However, Wilson would not make a public statement at the time because of his continuing hope of a separate peace with Turkey and concern about France. Weizmann felt more was needed to counteract anti-Zionist sentiment in Britain, including strong opposition from the only Jew in the Lloyd George cabinet, Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India. Montagu was able to bring to the argument an anti-Zionist assessment by one of the greatest Arabists of the time, Gertrude Bell, a colleague of T.E. Lawrence and currently involved in British intelligence in Cairo. She wrote that two considerations rule out the conception of an independent Jewish Palestine from practical politics. The first is that the province as we know it is not Jewish, and that neither Mohammedan nor Arab would accept Jewish authority; the second that the capital, Jerusalem, is equally sacred to three faiths, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, and should never, if it can be avoided, be put under the exclusive control of any one location, no matter how carefully the rights of the other two may be safeguarded.(60)

Another dissent from the Middle East came from A.P. Albina, a Levantine Catholic merchant from Jerusalem who enjoyed good relations with top British officials. He wrote that it was contradictory for the Western powers to grant freedom to small nationalities while at the same time planning to give Palestine to the Jews. He described the Zionists as a foreign and hated race, a motley crowd of Poles, Russians, Romanians, Spaniards, Yemenites, etc., who can claim absolutely no right over the country, except that of sentiment and the fact that their forefathers inhabited it over two thousand years ago[.] The introduction into Palestine of Jewish rule, or even Jewish predominance, will mean the spoliation of the Arab inhabitants of their hereditary rights and the upsetting of the principles of nationalities....Politically, a Jewish State in Palestine will mean a permanent danger to a lasting peace in the Near East.(61)

To appease the anti-Zionists, the British cabinet drafted a revised declaration. It specifically addressed Montagu's concern about non- Zionist Jews living outside of Palestine by adding a final clause that said the establishment of a Jewish national home would not prejudice the "rights and political status enjoyed in any other country by such Jews who are fully contented with their existing nationality.(62)

Once again, Weizmann turned to Brandeis to help get Wilson's endorsement of the new text. In a long letter on October 7, Weizmann wrote "I have no doubt that the amended text of the declaration will be again submitted to the President, and it would be most invaluable if the President would accept it without reservation and would recommend the granting of the declaration now"(63) [Italics in original].

When the British Foreign Office sent the draft to Wilson at about the same time, he turned it over to Brandeis for his comments. The justice and his aides redrafted it in slightly stronger and cleaner language, substituting "the Jewish people" for "the Jewish race"-- thereby muting the vexing question of who is a Jew--and making the final clause read that there would be no prejudice to the "rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."(64)

Colonel House sent the revision on to Wilson, who as a son of a clergyman and a daily reader of the Bible was predisposed to a Jewish homeland. But, in the midst of world war, he felt no urgency about the matter. It was not until October 13 that he sent a memo to House saying:

I find in my pocket the memorandum you gave me about the Zionist Movement. I am afraid I did not say to you that I concurred in the formula suggested by the other side. I do, and would be obliged if you would let them know it.(65)

So casual was Wilson about this momentous decision that he never did inform his secretary of state, or publicly announce his decision.(66) Thus, in the most off-handed way possible, the United States lent its enormous weight to supporting the Zionist dream of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was a decision that was to have a profound effect on Middle East history and on the daily lives of Palestinians.

Its immediate result came on November 2, 1917, when Britain issued the fateful statement that was to become known as the Balfour Declaration. It came in the form of a personal letter from Foreign Secretary Balfour to a prominent British Jew, Lionel Walter, the second Lord of Rothschild:

Foreign Office November 2nd, 1917

Dear Lord Rothchild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty' s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours, Arthur James Balfour(67)

Arabs and anti-Zionists could not help noting the totally pro-Zionist content of the declaration. It failed to mention Christians or Muslims, Arabs or Palestinians, even though they remained by far the majority population in Palestine. It spoke of a homeland, but that was widely understood to mean a Jewish state, although many Zionists continued to deny it. And it pledged to actively help Jews while merely promising to protect the rights of "the non-Jewish communities."

Arabs far beyond Palestine were alarmed and disappointed. It was clear to them that British wartime promises of Arab independence were being ignored by London. The campaign to chase the Turks from Palestine was just now being concluded, with Arab help. British forces aided by Arabs stood at the gates of Jerusalem. Soon they would clear the area, and Palestine would pass from the Ottoman to the British Empire. But Arab aspirations were now being ignored.

However, for the Zionists the timing of the Balfour Declaration could not have come at a more propitious moment. Now, in their twentieth year, Zionists had found a major power as their sponsor. Britain's endorsement of their ambitions at last gave a gloss of legitimacy to their enterprise.

For all that, the Zionists still were faced with the fact that they had to employ other strategies to realize their dream. For however impressive their new international standing, the Zionists faced one undeniable reality--the Palestinians' presence in the land. They remained and they continued to be the vast majority. Precise figures are not available for the period when the Balfour Declaration was issued. Both the Arab and Jewish populations had declined during the war, which hit Palestine hard leaving perhaps 55,000 Jews and under 600, 000 Palestinians.(68)

The first fairly reliable figures only came in the British census taken in 1922. For the Zionists it was more evidence that their dream remained far away. The census put Palestine's total population at 757,182, of whom nearly 88 percent were Arabs (590,890 Muslim and 73,024 Christians) and 11 percent (83,794) Jewish.(69)

Within the inner councils of Zionism it became increasingly clear that the only realistic way to gain a Jewish state was to reduce the size of the Palestinian majority. Although it had been true from the beginning that there was an irreconcilable conflict between Zionism and Palestinians, the issue increasingly came out in the open as the years passed. After anti-Zionist riots in 1920-1 and again during new riots in 1929, David Ben-Gurion admitted: "The Arab in the land of Israel need not and cannot be a Zionist. He cannot want the Jews to become a majority. Herein lies the true conflict, the political conflict between us and the Arabs. [Both] we and they want to be the majority."(70)

In that same year, it was clear that a campaign of ethnic cleansing would be necessary to realize the Zionist goal. By the beginning of 1930, Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization, secretly urged the British, as Palestine's Mandate ruler, to assist in expelling Palestinians to Transjordan. The British declined. But Weizmann did not suspend his campaign to rid the land of Palestinians. In an article he wrote that same year, Weizmann discreetly suggested a "voluntary transfer" of Palestinians because "it would be just as easy for landless Arabs or cultivators from the congested areas to migrate to Transjordan as to migrate from one part of Western Palestine to another."(71) Weizmann remained a strong supporter of transfer, whether voluntary or compulsory, throughout his life.

In 1931, Revisionist Zionists, led by fire-brand Vladimir Jabotinsky, became a major force with the slogan "The aim of Zionism is gradually to convert the land of Israel [including Transjordan] into a self- governing Jewish Commonwealth, resting on a permanent Jewish majority." The implication was clear: the Palestinian majority would have to go. Commented Michael Bar-Zohar, an Israeli biographer of Ben-Gurion, on the Revisionist slogan:

It must be admitted that this was the true and faithful slogan of Zionism. The other Zionist parties...favored quiet diplomacy toward the British and not arousing the anger of the Arabs prematurely. All the same, there is no doubt that the Revisionist slogan correctly expressed the feelings of Zionists all over the world and consequently gained many supporters.(72)

The revisionists that year became the third largest faction with 21 percent of the delegates at the Seventeenth Zionist Congress.(73)

Although Ben-Gurion, as leader of the majority Labor Zionists, despised Jabotinsky (Ben-Gurion referred to him as Il Duce because of Jabotinsky's admiration for the Italian dictator.(74)), he essentially agreed with Jabotinsky in his attitude toward transfer. Israeli historian Simha Flapan observed: "...[w]here the Arabs were concerned, [Ben- Gurion] espoused the basic principles of Revisionism: the expansion of the borders, the conquest of Arab areas, and the evacuation of the Arab population."(75)

Zionist plans for transfer gained urgency during the middle 1930s, a time when Palestine began filling with Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, increasing the proportion of Jews among the Palestinian population to around 30 percent, and thus for the first time making the prospect of a Jewish state more realistic than ever before.(76) Sensing the new threat, the Palestinians erupted in 1936 in the Arab rebellion. Britain responded by appointing the Royal (Peel) Commission to study deteriorating relations between the two communities. The commission report, released on July 8, 1937, found differences between Arab and Jew irreconcilable and for the first time called for partition of Palestine into two sovereign states, "one an Arab state consisting of Transjordan and the Arab part of Palestine, and the other a Jewish state."(77)

The stunning feature of the Peel report was its essential adoption of the Zionist idea of transfer. Although it gingerly called it an "exchange" of population, the report proposed that 225,000 Palestinians be expelled from the allotted Jewish state while 1,250 Jews would be moved from the Arab state, leaving vague whether the exchange would be voluntary or compulsory. Paradoxically, it insisted at the same time that there had to be guarantees for the protection of minorities.(78)

The Twentieth Zionist Congress withheld endorsement of the Peel report the following month despite the fact that it proposed allotting a Jewish state 33 percent of Palestine even though Jews at the time owned no more than 5.6 percent of the land.(79) The Congress thought the size of the proposed Jewish state was not large enough. But it agreed that discussions should continue with London on the subject of how a Jewish state might be created. This in itself was a major achievement, since negotiations from now on focused on the establishment of an actual independent Jewish state instead of a homeland. Britain the next year abandoned its support of partition and transfer, but its brief embrace of the idea encouraged Zionists.(80)

Internally, the Peel report energized discussion of the transfer issue among Zionists, an issue that from now on assumed a new prominence and seriousness as the road to statehood increasingly opened up. Among the immediate reactions was the appointment by Moshe Shertok, head of the political department of the Jewish Agency and later Israel' s first foreign minister under the Hebraized name of Sharett, of a Population Transfer Committee.

Like Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, Shertok was a firm believer in transfer. Among the members he appointed to the transfer committee was Josef Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund's Land Department. He was the man in charge of purchasing Palestinian land so that it could be held "in inalienable possession of the Jewish people," as the fund' s charter decreed. Weitz was among the strongest believers in compulsory transfer, as he made clear at an early meeting in November 1937 of the transfer committee. He informed the committee that the transfer of Arab population from the area of the Jewish state does not serve only one aim--to diminish the Arab population. It also serves a second, less important, aim which is to evacuate land presently held and cultivated by the Arabs and thus to release it for the Jewish inhabitants.

He added that the goal was to reduce by one-third the Arab population inside a Jewish state within two to three years. Another member of the committee, Alfred Bonne, said that in his opinion "all the Arabs must be removed in ten years."(81)

The discussions of the transfer committee were long and detailed, and they provided the basis for keeping the Zionist leadership informed on the most minute matters of the distribution of Palestinian land and population as well as illuminating the complex issues surrounding transfer. In 1938, David Ben-Gurion, who since 1935 had been the powerful chairman of Jewish Agency Executive, declared at a meeting of that body: "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it."(82) Around that same time, he proposed paying Iraq 10 million Palestinian pounds [$50 million] in exchange for taking 100,000 Palestinian families.(83) Given the large size of Palestinian families, the number amounted to well over half of the Palestinian population of nearly one million people; Jews at the time numbered around 400,000.(84) But Britain, already scorned throughout the Arab world for issuing the Balfour Declaration and reneging on its wartime promises to the Arabs, declined the additional opprobrium of publicly acting as the power that forced the Palestinians to leave in order to make room for the Jews.(85)

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 brought a global instability that Ben-Gurion recognized had the potential for generating momentous change. Ben-Gurion noted: "The possibility of a large-scale transfer of a population by force was demonstrated when the Greeks and the Turks were transferred [after World War I]. In the present war the idea of transferring a population is gaining more sympathy as a practical and the most secure means of solving the dangerous and painful problem of national minorities."(86)

Indicative of Zionist thinking in this period was a diary entry made by Josef Weitz, the man in charge of land-purchasing activities for the Jewish community in Palestine. On December 20, 1940, Weitz confided to his diary a conversation with a JNF colleague:

Amongst ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. No "development" will bring us closer to our aim to be an independent people in this small country. After the Arabs are transferred, the country will bewide open for us; with the Arabs staying the country will remain narrow and restricted....The only way is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them, except perhaps Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not a single village or single tribe must be left....And only then will the country be able to absorb millions of Jews and a solution will be found to the Jewish question. There is no other solution.(87)

During the fighting in 1948 that resulted in Israel's establishment, Weitz was placed in charge of another Transfer Committee, this time with the specific aim of destroying villages left empty by Palestinian refugees.(88) He and others did the job well. At least 418 Palestinian villages disappeared after Israel took them over.(89)

It was such leaders and planners as Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, Shertok and Weitz and their strong support for compulsory transfer of the Palestinians that in 1948 resulted in reducing the Arab community from the majority to a minority inside Palestine. Although Israelis long contended--with more success than common sense should allow-- that the Palestinian exodus was a "miraculous simplification," as Weizmann put it, in which Israel had little responsibility, the fact is that elimination of the Palestinian majority was fundamental to the achievement of Zionism's aim of a Jewish state.

The fact that no document or order outlining a specific strategy of expulsion has been found should not carry excessive weight. In the circumstances, it is not persuasive to claim that the lack of documentary evidence proves that an expulsionary policy did not exist, any more than it would be to claim that the Holocaust did not occur because no written orders have been recovered with Hitler's name on them. The evidence emerges from what actually occurred, not the lack of prior written intentions.

For instance, while it is true that Ben-Gurion consistently refrained from issuing clear or written orders or even confiding in detail the subject of transfer in his diaries, it was well known that, in his words, he wanted as many areas as possible "clean" and "empty" of Arabs.(90) Israeli historian Benny Morris notes, "He preferred that his generals `understand' what he wanted done. He wished to avoid going down in history as the `great expeller' and he did not want the Israeli government to be implicated in a morally questionable policy." Nonetheless, Morris adds, "Ben Gurion clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible to remain in the Jewish state."(91)

Another Israeli historian, Simha Flapan, noted:

That Ben-Gurion's ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve this purpose: an economic war aimed at destroying Arab transport, commerce, and the supply of foods and raw materials to the urban population; psychological warfare, ranging from "friendly warnings" to outright intimidation and exploitation of panic caused by dissident underground terrorism; and finally, and most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants by the army.(92)

In the end, what is more persuasive than any written document about the Zionist effort to expel Palestinians are the facts: the displacement of well over half of the Palestinian community and the emergence of a Zionist state with a Jewish majority.

The size of the remaining Palestinian minority was also an important consideration for the Zionists. Ben-Gurion early on warned that the 1947 U.N. partition plan left Israel with an Arab minority that he put at 40 percent and which he deemed unacceptable. He told a Zionist meeting on December 30, 1947, that "such a [population] composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish state. This fact must be viewed in all its clarity and acuteness. With such a composition, there cannot even be absolute certainty that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority....There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent."(93)

Indeed, it was the relatively huge size of the Palestinian population that had convinced Arab leaders to believe the United Nations would not ultimately support partition. To them it was clear that the proposed Jewish state with its bare majority would soon be overtaken by an Arab majority. Sir Hugh Gurney, the chief secretary of the British Palestine government in 1947, reported the Arabs were struck dumb by the passage of partition since they realized they would soon become a majority by natural increase.(94)

At the beginning of the 1948 fighting, there were an estimated 900,000 Palestinians on land allotted to Israel by the United Nations and the additional 21 percent of land Israel had captured during the war. On August 18, 1948, while the war continued, Shertok wrote to Weizmann:

As for the future, we are equally

determined...to explore all possibilities of

getting rid, once and for all, of the huge

Arab minority which originally threatened

us. What can be achieved in this period of

storm and stress will be quite unattainable

once conditions get stabilized.(95)

At the end of the 1948 fighting, more than 400 Palestinian villages had been destroyed and depopulated, and there were only 156,000 Arabs left in the territory of Israel. In addition, 13,000 Palestinians had been killed in the fighting.(96) The Arab minority had been reduced to under 20 percent of the Jewish population inside the frontiers controlled by Israel.(97) At the time of its birth on May 14, 1948, there were about 650,000 Jews in Palestine, substantially less than the number of Palestinians who were turned into refugees, 726,000.(98)

For the Palestinians, Zionism turned out to be, as scholar Rupert Emerson observed, "a prolonged and tragically successful invasion [by] an alien people under Western imperialist auspices, ending in the expulsion of most of the people whose country it was."(99) But without the massive slaughter and transfer of Palestinians, there would have been no stable Jewish state. This achievement was the fruition of a half-century of Zionist ambition, furthered by the opportune chaos of war, the result inherent in Zionism's quest for a Jewish, rather than a democratic, polity.

(1) Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, Tel Aviv: Steimatzky's Agency Ltd., 1976, pp. 44-46.

(2) Walid Khalidi (ed.) From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948, Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, second printing, 1987, p. xxii.

(3) For Zionist efforts to delegitimize or deny the existence of the Palestinians, see Edward Said, et al., "A Profile of the Palestinian People," pp. 235-96, in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (eds.), Blaming the Victims, New York: Verso, 1988.

(4) Raphael Patai (ed.), The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960, pp. 88-9. Also see Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1928-1948, Washington, DC: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1992, p. 9; John Quigley, Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice, Durham: Duke University Press, 1990, p. 5.

(5) David McDowall, Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, p. 196.

(6) Masalha, p. 10.

(7) Ibid., p. 39, note 4; Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 60; Shabtai Teveth, BenGurion--The Burning Ground: 1886-1948, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987, p. 40.

(8) Masalha, p. 159.

(9) Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel, New York: Olive Branch Press, 1993, p. 72.

(10) Two excellent studies are Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi's Original Sins and Nur Masalha's Expulsion of the Palestinians.

(11) Menachem Shalev, Forward, May 21, 1993.

(12) Clyde Haberman, The New York Times, July 7, 1995.

(13) Tessler, p. 61; Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1981, pp. 4-5.

(14) Abram Leon Sachar, A History of the Jews, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, pp. 304, 398.

(15) Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983, p. 66.

(16) Howard M. Sachar, p. 40.

(17) Khalidi, pp. xxix-xxxi.

(18) Tessler, p. 61.

(19) Ronald Sanders, Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988, p. 121.

(20) Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986, p. 91.

(21) Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin Al-Husyni and the Palestinian National Movement, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 7, 10.

(22) Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 18-9.

(23) Tessler, p. 127.

(24) Mandel, p. 21.

(25) L.M.C. Van Der Hoeven Leonhard, "Shlomo and David: Palestine, 1907," p. 119, in Khalidi.

(26) Tessler, p. 127.

(27) Ibid., p. 128.

(28) Ibid., p. 128.

(29) Masalha, pp. 15, 49.

(30) Janet L. Abu-Lughod, "The Demographic Transformation of Palestine, " p. 155, in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (ed.), Transformation of Palestine, 2nd ed., Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1987.

(31) Ralph H. Magnus (ed.), Documents on the Middle East, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1969, pp. 32-3.

(32) Avineri, p. 156.

(33) Quigley, p. 21.

(34) Leonhard, "Shlomo and David: Palestine, 1907," pp. 117-8, in Khalidi; Masalha, p. 24; Quigley, p. 21.

(35) Rashid Khalidi, "Palestinian Peasant Resistance to Zionism before World War I," p. 216, in Said and Hitchens.

(36) Quigley, p. 21.

(37) Leonhard, "Shlomo and David: Palestine, 1907," p. 119, in Khalidi; Walid Khalidi, "The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company: Herzl's Blueprint for the Colonization of Palestine," Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1993.

(38) Neville Barbour, Nisi Dominus: A Survey of the Palestine Controversy, (Beirut: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1969), p. 45.

(39) Howard M. Sachar, p. 47.

(40) Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974), p. 275.

(41) Barbour, p. 50.

(42) Howard M. Sachar, pp. 62-3.

(43) Howard M. Sachar, p. 63.

(44) Tessler, p. 145.

(45) Rashid Khalidi, pp. 210-3, in Said and Hitchens Tessler, p. 144.

(46) Tessler, p. 144.

(47) Ibid., p. 128.

(48) Matter, p. 27.

(49) Abram Leon Sachar, pp. 412-3. Sachar's book was written in 1930, but similar reports of the idyllic life provided by Zionism had begun circulating almost as soon as the first Zionists arrived in Palestine.

(50) Barbour, pp. 56-7.

(51) Grose, p. 64.

(52) Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem: A History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983, pp. 119-20.

(53) Grose, p. 63.

(54) Ibid., p. 72.

(55) Bruce Allen Murphy, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices, Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1983, p. 57.

(56) Murphy, p. 57.

(57) Grose, p. 64.

(58) Murphy, p. 58.

(59) Ibid., p. 58.

(60) Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 585.

(61) Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 586.

(62) Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, pp. 590-1.

(63) Murphy, p. 59.

(64) Ibid., p. 60; Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 598.

(65) Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 598.

(66) Grose, Israel in the Mind of America. p. 64.

(67) Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, pp. 612-3. The text of the early and the final drafts of the declaration are also in Thomas and Sally V. Mallison, The Palestine Problem in International Law and World Order, London: Longman Group Ltd., 1986, pp. 427-9.

(68) Tessler, p. 145.

(69) Janet L. Abu-Lughod, "The Demographic Transformation of Palestine, " p. 142, in Abu-Lughod.

(70) Michael Bar-Zohar, Ben-Curion: A Biography, New York: Delacorte Press, 1978, p. 81. Bar-Zohar reports the remarks were made during a "discussion" but fails to provide with whom; presumably it was with other Zionists.

(71) Masalha, pp. 30-5.

(72) Bar-Zohar, p. 63.

(73) Ibid., p. 63.

(74) Ibid., p. 68.

(75) Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, New York: Pantheon Books, 1987, p. 37.

(76) Masalha, p. 49.

(77) Ibid., pp. 60-1; Howard M. Sachar, pp. 204-5. A third independent region was to be reserved for Britain between Jerusalem and Bethlehem with British rule continuing in the main towns in the north and a corridor to the sea between Jaffa and Jerusalem.

(78) Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973, p. 171. Also see Jewish Chronicle, "Dr. Chaim Weizmann's Conversation with Mr. Ormsby-Gore the Secretary of State for the Colonies on the Partition of Palestine 1937," August 13, 1937, pp. 24-5, in Walid Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest.

(79) Walid Khalidi, Before the Diaspora, p. 189.

(80) Howard M. Sachar, pp. 207-8.

(81) Masalha, pp. 94-7.

(82) Ibid., p. 117.

(83) Teveth, p. 688.

(84) Janet L. Abu-Lughod, "The Demographic Transformation of Palestine, " pp. 151-2, in Abu-Lughod.

(85) Masalha, pp. 93, 117, 126.

(86) Ibid., p. 128.

(87) Ibid., pp. 131-2

(88) Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, pp. 136- 7.

(89) Walid Khalidi (ed.), All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991, p. xx.

(90) Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 218.

(91) Morris, pp. 292-3. Also see McDowall, p. 195.

(92) Flapan, p. 90.

(93) Masalha, p. 176.

(94) Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their Homeland, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987, p. 29.

(95) Masalha, p. 193; Flapan, p. 105.

(96) Walid Khalidi, All That Remains, p. xxxi; Appendix III. Also see Janet L. Abu-Lughod, "The Demographic Transformation of Palestine, " p. 161, in Abu-Lughod; Quigley, p. 86.

(97) Masalha, p. 199.

(98) Noah Lucas, The Modern History of Israel, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974, p. 335; Walid Khalidi, All That Remains, Appendix III.

(99) From Emerson, From Empire to Nation, quoted in Quigley, p. 86.