Masalha Nur. Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion

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or whenever other Arab regimes encouraged them to do so. The

promotion of large Arab emigration combined with Jewish mass

immigration – for example, great hopes were placed upon Jewish

‘aliyah’ from the Soviet Union – to be settled in the newly acquired

territories would help to transform the ‘demographic balance’ and

political reality in the ‘whole Land of Israel’.

A decade later, in 1977, a large volume of the maximalist

movement appeared under the title The Book of the Whole Land of

Israel.

The many contributors to this book discussed various social,

political, economic, demographic and regional considerations in the

context of the advocacy of Greater Israel and the need to annex the

West Bank and Gaza. Among the contributors to the book and

propagators of the ‘transfer’ solution was Haim Hazaz, a prominent

author who was awarded the top literary prizes, the Bialik and Israel

Prizes. In fact, Hazaz’s contribution to this volume was a reprint of

the speech he made at the foundation conference of the movement

held on 31 October 1967, and the speech had already been published

in its entirety in Davar on 10 November 1967. Echoing the Zionist

apologia of the pre-1948 era, Hazaz had this to say:

There is the question of Judea and Ephraim [the West Bank], with

a large Arab population which must be evacuated to neighbouring

Arab states. This is not an exile like the exile of Jews among the

Gentiles ... They will be coming to their brothers to large and wide

and little-populated countries. One culture, one language and one

religion. This is ‘transfer’ such as that which took place between

Turkey and Greece, between India and Pakistan ... putting the

world aright in one place through exchanging [the Arab

population] to its designated place. We will assume responsibility

for this task and assist in planning, organising and financing.

Hazaz – who was willing to allow an Arab minority to remain in

Greater Israel provided it ‘would not disrupt or change the Jewish

character of the Land of Israel’

– repeated his ‘transfer’ proposal in

a simplistic way in an interview in 1968: ‘the [1967] war cost us 3

billion [Israeli] pounds – let’s take three billion more pounds and

give them to the Arabs and tell them to get out.’

Once again the leaders of the movement as well as its ‘experts’ on

demographic affairs argued that transfer of the Palestinians of the

territories is the best solution. Eli’ezer Livneh, a former prominent

Mapai member, explained that in 1948 the Israeli leadership ‘rejected

36 Imperial Israel and the Palestinians

the demographic-ethnic reality’ of the country as a criterion for

establishing the boundaries of the state by conquering predomi-

nantly Arab-populated areas and simultaneously transforming them

by establishing Jewish settlements.

Yosef Shaked added that ‘the

right to change the existing demographic situation in the Land of

Israel is the meaning of Zionism and the content of its war’.

Two self-styled demographic ‘experts’ of the movement, Haim

Yahiel and Dr Dov Yosefi, contributed two articles under the titles

‘Demography and Israel’s Uniqueness’ and ‘A Humane Solution to

the Demographic Problem’ respectively. Yahiel saw ‘in principle ...

in population exchange or in the transfer of minorities an efficient,

just and in the final consideration the most humane solution to

conflicts between nations’. He realised, however, that a large-scale

outright transfer, which ‘few are talking about but not a few are con-

templating’, could only be carried out under circumstances of war,

and therefore, officially the Whole Land of Israel Movement should

refrain from including such a proposal in its political programme

‘not because of moral reasons but for political considerations’; ‘such

a plan would be received by [Arab, Western?] public opinion as a

conspiracy for expulsion and would increase the enmity’ towards

Israel. According to Yahiel, mass transfer ‘would only be possible as

an agreed solution in the framework of peace agreement, ... or in the

opposite case, that is a solution implemented in the midst of war’.

The second demographic ‘expert’ Yosefi came up with yet more

strident conclusions – first:

If we want to prevent mutual and continuous bloodshed, there is

only one solution – the transfer of the Arab population of the

Land of Israel to Arab states ... True, this is a little painful (who

knows this like us the Jews), but it is inevitable and preferable than

cumulative poisoning which undermines the whole body. There

is no doubt that this solution will come sooner or later. The

question is only whether it will be by peaceful ways through

regional planning and international assistance, or, God forbid, as

a result of bloody events ...

second:

The State of Israel has to show political courage at an opportune

moment ... and to announce that according to experiences in

other places and similar situations there is no other solution but

Labour Zionism's 'Activists' 37

population transfer ... The problem of the Arab minority in the

Land of Israel remains without a solution because this [minority]

has not been transferred to Arab states ...

third:

We should also not be deterred from repeating time and again in

the ears of the world nations that Jordan (or the combination of

Jordan and Syria) actually constitutes a Palestinian homeland and

only in it will the Arabs of the Land of Israel have self-determina-

tion ... This should be the central Israeli demand in any

negotiation with Arab countries. The author does not overlook

the fact that this solution is not easy to implement in no-war

situations. Because most cases of population transfer in the world

were in time of battle or shortly after. In any case, this is a humane

solution ...

Yosefi’s position appears to have further hardened since the mid-

1970s, as demonstrated in the more extremist version of his article

‘A Humane Solution to the Demographic Problem’, published in the

periodical Haumah in the autumn of 1987.

In this version, Yosefi

asserts that the ‘Arab minority [including the Arab citizens] is already

endangering, and will endanger with greater vigour in the future,

the sovereignty and even the existence of the state of Israel’ (p. 21).

‘The main objective’, he elaborates, ‘so long as Judea and Samaria

are in our hands, there exists the hope that in a political or military-

political-regional, or international constellation, the ideal solution of

population transfer will be made possible. And in the region in

which we are living such a constellation is a permanent possibility.’

While Yosefi explicitly raises the ‘military’ solution for Arab removal

he proposes that in the interest of the two parties

... not to wait for painful and even tragic opportunities ... but to

plan in good time the transfer of the Arab population from the

West Bank to Arab countries – with the understanding and

assistance of the world nations, if possible. Yet for that purpose

the government of Israel must set up, as early as possible, a special

information department, which would conduct a worthy

information/propaganda [campaign] – with the assistance of

experts on the mentality of the Arab leaders and the interests of

Arab states, on the one hand, and the political, strategic and

38 Imperial Israel and the Palestinians

economic interests of European states, and especially of the two

superpowers, on the other. In question is an adequate information

campaign which clearly proves that the solution proposed here is

the only humane solution for the two parties.

Yosefi, like several leaders of WLIM, was a senior Israeli government

official and a member of the Labour Party and it is worth describing

his public career in mainstream Labour Zionism and in various

official posts. Yosefi was a Zionist publicist and journalist and Israeli

diplomat. Born in Chile, Yosefi first joined the Hashomer Hatza’ir

‘socialist’ movement – the Mapam party youth movement after 1948

– and became a member of its Chilean executive. He immigrated to

Israel shortly after its establishment at the age of 43 and was among

the founders of the Mapam Kibbutz Ga’ash. He also held central

positions in the Mapam Party: he was the secretary of the Mapam

international movement and the editor of its Yiddish-language organ

Yisrael Stema’a. After leaving Mapam in the early 1960s, Yosefi joined

the Mapai Party and later the diplomatic service in Latin America

where he stayed until 1970. And in the late 1960s, while he was still

a serving diplomat, he showed an interest in the activities of WLIM.

In the late 1980s, Yosefi joined the far-right Moledet Party of General

Rehava’am Zeevi.

Many leaders of WLIM believed that Zionism’s mission of

territorial expansion had not been completed and that military

campaigns and ‘wars of liberation’ were still needed to recover other

parts of the Land of Israel. A founder of WLIM, General Avraham

Yoffe – a former member of the Mapam Party

and a longtime head

of Israel’s Nature Reserve Authority – stressed the necessity of war

between Israel and Arabs for the sake of further expansion into the

‘whole Land of Israel’, an expansion which flows from the incom-

pleteness of Zionism’s mission: ‘The State of Israel, as presently

constituted, does not represent the fulfilment of Zionism. This is a

state on the way ... Our duty is not completed ... The state must

provide a refuge for the Jewish people as a whole. The Arab world

will never accept this idea.’

Yoffe also believed that the extension

of Israeli sovereignty over ‘Judea’, ‘Samaria’ and Gaza would cause at

least ‘part [of the Arabs] to emigrate from here and the other part to

remain as loyal citizens of the State of Israel’.

A deeply rooted strand in Israeli imperial thinking regarding the

Middle East was the ‘alliance of minorities’. Israelis preferred to

portray the Middle East not as predominantly Arab or Islamic but as

Labour Zionism's 'Activists' 39

a multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural area. David Ben-

Gurion had often argued that the majority of the inhabitants of the

Middle East were not Arab. He was referring not only to the Persians

and the Turks but also to non-Arab minorities such as the Kurds, the

Jews and the (allegedly non-Arab) Christian Maronites of Lebanon.

By pursuing an imperialist political and military strategy which

consisted of interfering in the domestic affairs of its Arab neighbours

and forging an alliance with ethnic and religious minorities, the

Israelis aimed at countering the forces of pan-Arabism and keeping

the Arab world fragmented.

The Zionist movement had close

clandestine links, going back to the 1920s, with many leaders of the

Maronites of Lebanon.

Israeli–Maronite relations were maintained

largely through clandestine contacts until the late 1970s. Under the

Likud government from 1977 to 1984, they became more open with

Israeli direct support and military intervention.

Leading WLIM

figures not only did not accept the existence of the Arab nation, but

also envisaged a complete political reorganisation and a cultural

transformation of the region in which the predominantly Arab

cultural character of the area would disappear. Professor ‘Ari

Jabotinsky suggested that the non-Arab peoples of the Middle East,

with Israeli assistance, would ultimately break the cultural

domination of the area by the Arabs.

Professor ‘Ezra Zohar

suggested pursuing an activist Israeli foreign policy designed to

encourage the break-up of the Arab states and their replacement by

ethnic and sectarian entities.

In November 1976, at the height of

the Lebanese civil war, Tzvi Shiloah suggested the occupation of

southern Lebanon and the establishment of territorial continuity

between Israel and a pro-Israeli ‘independent’ Christian Maronite

entity in Lebanon.

In the same year, relations with Christians

along Israel’s northern border were established under the interven-

tionist ‘Good Fence’ policy of the Rabin government.

Some spokesmen of the movement made little distinction

between the inhabitants of the occupied territories and the

Palestinian citizens of Israel and questioned the possibility of any

Arab–Jewish co-existence. As Yosefi put it: even in the case of ‘our

withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, the demographic problem as

well as the problem of Arab-Jewish coexistence in one state will not

be solved. Because all the arguments regarding an Arab minority of

one million and a half hold true for an Arab minority of one million

and even half a million.’

40 Imperial Israel and the Palestinians

From the above discussion it appears that many protagonists of

Greater Israel within WLIM sought maximum territorial expansion

and the expulsion, (or ‘transfer’, as it was euphemistically put), of at

least the bulk of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. The

perusal of numerous publications by other leaders and sympathisers

of the movement gives further substantiation to this argument. The

following will discuss in detail the proposals put forward by three

prominent WLIM campaigners: Eli’ezer Livneh, Yisrael Eldad and

Tzvi Shiloah. The three publicists have contributed much to the

revival of the ‘transfer/ethnic cleansing’ theme and its spreading in

public debate in Israel in the post-1967 period. Although these

figures rehash many of the classical Zionist arguments in justification

of territorial expansion, they do however emphasise different facets

of the territorial ‘demographic’ debates in Israel. The three figures

come from diverse political backgrounds (Livneh and Shiloah from

Labour Zionism, Eldad from Revisionist Zionism) and had different

political weight and influence – as we shall see – but they all

subscribe to the goal of Greater Israel, with as few Palestinian

inhabitants as possible.

ELI’EZER LIVNEH’S PROPOSALS (JUNE–AUGUST 1967)

The new Israeli empire of 11 June 1967 thrilled Eli’ezer Livneh who,

like other leaders of WLIM, represented a Zionist school of territorial

maximalism, for which security was not the primary reason for

holding on to the newly occupied territories. Livneh’s mystical ideas

on the territorial issue show a great affinity with the messianic ideas

of the incipient settlement movement of Gush Emunim.

Livneh’s proposal to remove over half a million Palestinian

refugees from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank was first put forward

in the mass-circulation daily Ma’ariv on 22 June 1967. ‘They will

choose, willingly, resettlement in whatever Arab country, or

emigration to countries overseas. The Prime Minister of Australia has

already suggested cooperation,’ he wrote. A few weeks later Livneh

reiterated his proposal: ‘The refugees are now within our boundaries.

We could rehabilitate some of them in our country [in Sinai], and

transfer others for productive life overseas or resettle them in

neighbouring countries with which we will come to an arrangement

... Jordan ... is likely to be the chief beneficiary [to be able] to

populate its wide territories.’

Livneh developed his proposal further

Labour Zionism's 'Activists' 41

into a plan in an article in the liberal daily Haaretz on 28 August

1967. In the last 19 years, Livneh wrote:

... tens of thousands of refugees have crossed ... to Saudi Arabia,

Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and the [other] oil prin-

cipalities. Tens of thousands of their families, who have remained

in the camps have lived off money remitted by their distant

relatives ... Just as half a million Jews immigrated to the Land of

Israel from Arab countries ... hundreds of thousands of

‘Palestinian’ Arabs were crossing to Arab countries. The parallel is

amazing ... What is happening in the refugee camps in a sporadic

and limited way without the support of a governmental body [in

Arab states] should be widened and developed by us from the side

of dimensions and means. This means: 1) constructive emigration

should be directed to all the countries in need of a workforce

including the United States, Canada, Australia and Latin America;

b) the emigrants would be entitled to financial support from Israel

...; c) the implementation must be planned for a prolonged time,

let us say 18 years; d) the number of countries designated for

migration and resettlement should be as large as possible.

‘If these Arabs [would-be transferees] would want to maintain their

Arabness in the United States, Canada, Brazil and Australia’, it is up

to them, Livneh wrote. Livneh made another little ‘concession’: ‘To

the extent that there might be a number of refugees who want, in

spite of everything, to experience striking agricultural roots in a

landscape close to their spirit and tradition, it is worth offering them

settlement in northern Sinai ... in the opinion of cautious experts

there are there water, land and other conditions for the settlement

of tens of thousands of families (approximately 60,000 persons).’

Livneh argued that the ‘carrying out of the [transfer] task’

depended mainly on Israel and on the conditions it could create:

... a) ‘the allocation of large sums; b) patience. If we spend 5,000

dollars on the emigration of a family of 6–7 persons on average

(1500 dollars on the journey, and the rest for the exclusive control

of the emigrating family) we would be able to finance every year

the emigration of tens of thousands of families, or 60–70,000

persons by 50 million dollars (or 150 million Israeli Lira, 3 per cent

of our state budget). There would be no lack of candidates and

they would increase when encouraging information from abroad

42 Imperial Israel and the Palestinians

on the settlement of the first ones arrived ... if we placed such

encouragement sums ... within 8–9 years about 600,000 persons

would be likely to emigrate at this pace, meaning all the refugees

from the [Gaza] Strip, the Hebron mountain, the mountains of

Ephraim [in the West Bank] and the Jordan valley.

While in his earlier proposal Livneh had suggested that the world

powers should finance the transfer and resettlement, in the August

plan he proposed that Israel should shoulder ‘financing the project’:

... there is no need to explain its importance from the national,

security and propaganda point of view. It should be placed at the

top of our national priorities. In so far as we need for it [financial]

means greater than the estimate given here, we are entitled to

appeal to world Jewry. This is more justified and blessed than the

use of fund-raising to raise the standard of living [of Israelis] ...

The Jews of the Diaspora will respond to this in understanding,

and even in enthusiasm.

For Livneh, the success of the ‘project’ would depend on its

planning in the long term. In the beginning there will certainly be

various difficulties of running it ... Our reckoning should not be

for one month or one season. We will develop the project on our

responsibility, without making it conditional upon the participa-

tion of other elements. To the extent that we carry it out we will

gain the cooperation of others. The United Nations action in the

refugee camps (UNRWA) would then assume constructive and

purposeful meaning ... the training in the schools of UNRWA

would be adjusted to the needs of emigration and resettlement.

From other references it is obvious that Livneh was not content with

the removal of 600,000 Arab refugees from Palestine, as he put

forward in his euphemistically-termed ‘emigration project’, but

sought to transform the demographic and political reality of the

occupied territories by clearing out other residents as well.

What is

also noticeable is the absence of any discussion in his plan of the

resistance the Palestinians would be likely to put up to foil such a

mass removal. Such a deliberate attempt to ignore Palestinian

resistance to transfer is common to several transfer proposals and

Labour Zionism's 'Activists' 43

plans put forward publicly in the euphoric period following the

conquests of the 1967 war.

YISRAEL ELDAD (1910–96): A JEWISH STATE STRETCHING FROM

THE NILE TO THE EUPHRATES

Dr Yisrael Eldad and the poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg were the most

extremist right-wing founding members of WLIM. Eldad, in

particular, espoused one of the most extreme positions with respect

to the destined borders of the State of Israel. Echoing Avraham

Stern’s vision of the establishment of a Jewish empire across the

Middle East, Eldad was well-known for his advocacy, throughout the

1950s and 1960s, of a Jewish state stretching from the Nile to the

Euphrates. In the early 1970s, he still argued for territorial expansion

that would at least include the modern state of Jordan and Sinai

under Jewish sovereignty.

Judging that ‘the map of the Middle

East is still very much in a state of flux’, Eldad believed that Israel

‘will yet help many an oppressed minority to attain its independence

and in turn redraw the map’ of the region.

Although subsequently

Eldad scaled down his objectives to focus on Israel’s ‘judaisation’ of

the West Bank and Gaza, in 1985 he still argued that Israel’s

northern border should be the Litani River in south Lebanon.

A founding member of the Revisionist Betar movement, Eldad

immigrated to Palestine in 1941, joining Lehi, the most militant of

the Jewish underground groups, and editing its publications Hazit

and Hama’as. He was soon considered the ideologue of the

movement, whose political programme called for the ‘transfer’ of

the Palestinian Arabs to neighbouring states. After Avraham Stern’s

death, Eldad was one of the triumvirate that ran the group, along

with Yitzhak Shamir (later to become Prime Minister) and Natan

Yellin-Mor. In April 1948, Lehi took part in a premeditated,

murderous assault on the Arab village of Dayr Yasin, in western

Jerusalem, in which 250 residents, mostly women, elderly people

and children, were slaughtered. Most historians consider the Dayr

Yasin massacre as one of the major single factors precipitating Arab

exodus in 1948. In September of the same year, Lehi assassinated the

United Nations Mediator for Palestine Count Folke Bernadotte in

Jerusalem. According to Israeli historian Amitzur Ilan, the decision

to murder Bernadotte was taken by the Centre of Lehi, which

consisted of the trio: Yellin-Mor, Shamir and Eldad.

44 Imperial Israel and the Palestinians

After the establishment of the State of Israel, Eldad’s political

agitation for maximum territorial expansionism remained confined

to the fringe of Israeli politics. Only after Israel’s spectacular

conquests of 1967 were his views accepted as ‘relevant and

legitimate’

and he became a regular columnist for the daily Haaretz

and Yedi’ot Aharonot. In the 1950s he was appointed lecturer in

humanities at the Technion and he also launched the monthly

Sulam (‘Ladder’) in which he espoused a Zionist philosophy

advocating the eventual establishment of the Kingdom of Israel

(‘Malkhut Yisrael’), or Jewish rule over all the ‘biblical land’ from the

Nile to the Euphrates and strongly attacked the then Mapai-led

government for not adopting territorial maximalism as an official

policy.

Eldad used to print in Sulam a map of the ‘Land of Israel’

which included Transjordan and the Syrian capital Damascus. The

main theme of Eldad’s writings was that Israel had to conquer the

‘entire land of Israel’ by force, in a process that would inevitably

involve blood, glory and honour.

For Eldad the 1967 conquests

were a step in that direction. In conjunction with this territorial

maximalism, Eldad called shortly after the 1967 conquests for ‘total

Arab emigration’ from all the territories under Israeli control.

1990, 23 years later, Eldad was still calling for ‘the [‘organised’]

transfer of the vast majority of the Arabs of the Land of Israel

[presumably including the Arab citizens] to one of the countries

which is their real historical homeland’; ‘the Arab countries must

receive one million Arabs and settle them’; ‘there are those who are

shocked by the term “transfer”. So let them say “population

exchange”, “resettlement”, “return to their ancient homeland in the

Arabian peninsula”.’ For Eldad, while the euphemism changes

according to the circumstances, the goal of wholesale Arab removal

must not be a hidden agenda but rather placed at the top of the

official agenda as a declared objective.

The question of what to do with the Palestinian population in the

‘liberated’ territories was an obsessional topic in Eldad’s writings. In

an article entitled ‘The Realpolitik of Our Sages’, published by the

Gush Emunim’s Department of Information, Eldad maintained that

the Palestinians faced the same problem as the Canaanites of old.

He explained that the choice which he would like them to make was

by no means new to political Zionism: ‘the transfer as a Zionist

solution’,

was put forward by mainstream Zionist leaders such as

Nahman Syrkin, Israel Zangwill, Yitzhak Tabenkin, David Ben-

Gurion, Avraham Stern

and Avraham Schwadron. According to

Labour Zionism's 'Activists' 45