At the time of the Basel congress, Arabs represented 95 percent of the population of Palestine and they owned 99 percent of the land.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 Beit-Hallahmi 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.
Continued
The Palestinians and Zionism: 1897-1948 - Middle East Policy Council
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