Israeli historian Benny Morris might deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but Jeremy R. Hammond’s own research shows that this was indeed how Israel came into being.

The Israeli historian Benny Morris has been very vocal of late in denying that Palestine was ethnically cleansed of Arabs in order for the “Jewish state” of Israel to be established.

In a series of articles in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Morris has debated the question with several of his critics who contend that ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred.

It’s worth noting at the outset that, while such a debate exists in the Israeli media, the US media remains, as ever, absolutely silent on the matter.

As Morris notes in 1948, “The fact that the Peel Commission in 1937 supported the transfer of Arabs out of the Jewish state-to-be without doubt consolidated the wide acceptance of the idea among the Zionist leaders.”[14]

“Once the Peel Commission had given the idea its imprimatur, . . . the floodgates were opened. Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, Shertok, and others—a virtual consensus—went on record in support of transfer at meetings of the JAE [Jewish Agency Executive] at the Twentieth Zionist Congress (in August 1937, in Zurich) and in other forums.”[15]

Chaim Weizmann, for example, in January 1941 told the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maiskii, “If half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place.”[16]

The Zionist leader who would become Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, after the Peel Commission had recommended the “compulsory transfer” of Arabs, expressed his acceptance of the partition plan as a pragmatic first step toward the ultimate goal of establishing a Jewish state over all of the territory of Palestine.

On October 5, 1937, he wrote to his son (underlined emphasis in original):

Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure. But the country that they are partitioning is not in our actual possession; it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English.

What is in our actual possession is a small portion, less than what they are proposing for a Jewish state. If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant.

But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have, though of course much less than we merit and desire. . . .  What we really want is Not that the land remain whole and unified. What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish. A unified Eretz Israeli [sic] would be no source of satisfaction for me—if it were Arab.

Note: The partition gave the Jews 57% of the land while they were barely 40% of the entire population

Acceptance of “a Jewish state on only part of the land”, Ben-Gurion continued, was “not the end but the beginning.”

In time, the Jews would settle the rest of the land, “through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors, or through some other means” (emphasis added).

If the Arabs didn’t acquiesce to the establishment of a Jewish state in the place of Palestine, then the Jews would “have to talk to them in a different language” and might be “compelled to use force” to realize their goals.[17]

“My approach to the solution of the question of the Arabs in the Jewish state”, said Ben-Gurion in June 1938, “is their transfer to Arab countries.”

The same year, he told the Jewish Agency Executive, “I am for compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.”[18]

The idea of partitioning Palestine was resurrected by the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which had drawn up the plan endorsed by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947.

This plan, too, contained the inherent problem of a sizable population of Arabs who would remain within the boundaries of the proposed Jewish state.

Benny Morris documents the attitude of the Zionist leadership with respect to this dilemma:

The Zionists feared that the Arab minority would prefer, rather than move to the Arab state, to accept the citizenship. Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure. But the country that they are partitioning is not in our actual possession; it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English.

And “we are interested in less Arabs who will be citizens of the Jewish state,” said Golda Myerson Meir (who will become PM and replace Ashkol in 1968, and who pronounced :There are No Palestinians”), acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department.

Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive and head of its Labor Department, thought that Arabs who remained in the Jewish state but were citizens of the Arab state would constitute “a permanent irredenta.”

Ben-Gurion thought that the Arabs remaining in the Jewish state, whether citizens of the Arab or Jewish state, would constitute an irredenta—and in the event of war, they would become a “Fifth Column.”

If they are citizens of the Arab state, argued Ben-Gurion, “[we] would be able to expel them,” but if they were citizens of the Jewish state, “we will be able only to jail them. And it is better to expel them than jail them.”

So it was better not to facilitate their receipt of Jewish state citizenship. But Ben-Gurion feared that they would prefer this citizenship.

Eli‘ezer Kaplan, the Jewish Agency’s treasurer, added: “Our young state will not be able to stand such a large number of strangers in its midst.”[19]

In sum, there was a consensus that such a sizable population of Arabs within the borders of their desired “Jewish state” was unacceptable.

The events that followed must be analyzed within the context of this explicit understanding among the Zionist leadership that, one way or another, a large number of Arabs would have to go.

Ruins of the former Arab village of Bayt Jibrin, in the West Bank west of Hebron. (Public Domain)