Population Transfer In Perspective By Dr. Alex Grobman

A number of years ago when Avigdor Lieberman, served as Israel's Minister for Strategic Affairs, he said that the primary way to achieve peace in the Middle East would be for Jews and Arabs - including Israeli-Arabs - to live separately. “Minorities are the biggest problem in the world," he claimed. Asked if Arab Israeli citizens should be removed, he said: "I think separation between two nations is the best solution. Cyprus is the best model. Before 1974, the Greeks and Turks lived together and there were frictions and bloodshed and terror. After 1974, they constituted all Turks on one part of the island, all Greeks on the other part of the island and there is stability and security."

When reminded that they were removed forcibly from their homes, he replied, "Yes, but the final result was better." Later, he explained, "Israeli Arabs don't have to go…. But if they stay they have to take an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish Zionist state."
 

Lieberman’s remarks set off a firestorm of criticism in the Knesset and around the country. Whether you support Lieberman or find his proposals abhorrent, they should be seen with a historical perspective. After World War I and II, transferring populations was considered legal and moral, and the most favored response to inter-ethnic strife. This is no longer true. Population transfer is now seen as illegal and a crime notes Eyal Benvenisti, professor of Law at Tel Aviv University.

As Benvenisti points out, the first population-exchanges involved Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. The Treaty of Nueilly of November 27, 1919 provided for 46,000 Greeks from Bulgaria and 96,000 Bulgarians from Greece to switch countries.  After the defeat of the Greek army in the Greek-Turkish War following World War I, and the Turk assault against Greek communities in Turkey, Greek refugees began fleeing their homes in Turkey. Greece and Turkey exchanged populations with about 2,000,000 Greeks, who were Turkish citizens, and about 500,000 Turks, who were Greek citizens.

The exchange of populations had worked so effectively, Benvenisti observed, that in post-World-War II, the Allies decided to transfer 15 million Germans living in Eastern Europe, primarily in the Eastern part of Germany, after it had been granted to Poland.  According to the Potsdam Declaration, Germans living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria were to be transferred to Germany "in an orderly and humane manner.”  Although the West attempted to ease the transition, there was much distress, suffering and large numbers of deaths. After the borders in Europe were redrawn, smaller transfers were made in parts of Central and Eastern Europe.

 Population transfer was also used to settle the inter-religious enmity between Hindus and Muslims in British India in 1947.  Once it became clear the communities could not live together, the sub-continent was partitioned into two states -- India and Pakistan—requiring the resettlement of millions of people.

   

 Mass transferring of populations by states is no longer acceptable.  When Turkey invaded Cyprus in July 1974, Turkey was condemned for the large numbers of Greek and Turkish Cypriots who were displaced after being forced to flee from their homes. After atrocities were committed in the former Yugoslavia, people began using the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe the uprooting and displacement of populations, which was identified as a war crime. A process that was sanctioned, if not legal in 1948, is now regarded as criminal.

The most recent example of forced mass transfer, Benvenisti continues, occurred in Cyprus with the Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriots. After Turkey invaded and occupied the northern part of the island, more than 200,000 Cypriots fled or were relocated across the "Attila Line," set up by the Turkish military. Greek-Cypriots left the Turkish-occupied zone, while Turkish Cypriots escaped to the north, where they moved into homes abandoned by Greek-Cypriots. The Greek-Cypriot refugees resettled in the southern part of the island, a number on property owned by Turkish-Cypriots. The right to recover property and the right to return are two of the key obstacles to settling this dispute.

The need to separate Arabs and Jews or transferring Palestinian Arabs to another Arab state is not a new idea. In 1937, the British Government’s Peel Commission concluded, “An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country. There is no common ground between them. Their national aspirations are incompatible… Neither of the two national ideals permits of combination in the service of a single State.”

If partition is to succeed, the Commission said, drawing new boundaries and establishing two separate states will not be sufficient. “Sooner or later there should be a transfer of land, and as far as possible, an exchange of population.”

For numerous reasons, transfer never took place. In his book on the international proposals to transfer of Arabs from Palestine, Chaim Simons found that a number of leading Zionist leaders entertained such ideas, as did president Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, Czechoslovakian President Benes, and three Nobel Peace Prize winners Sir Norman Angell, Christian Lange and Philip Noel-Baker.

“A Place Once Settled Is Not To Be Abandoned” Dr. Alex Grobman

As Israel continues its quest to find a solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict, Jimmy Carter and others are pressing Israel to leave parts of Judea and Samaria. Before even considering such a move, which would repeat the disaster of Gush Katif, Israeli leaders might learn from the experiences of former Israeli leaders.

On March 1, 1920, Joseph Trumpeldor, a political activist, along with five of his men from the Tel-Hai settlement, was killed in a fight with Arabs from a nearby village.

Historian Anita Shapiro notes that two months before the encounter, Aharon Sher, a settler, wrote an article in which he asked for help to defend the settlements in this lawless and remote northern region.  One sentence became a rallying cry to battle: “A place once settled is not to be abandoned.”  

In subsequent discussions about whether to defend or desert these communities, leaders of the Labor movement essentially adopted Sher’s view. Yitzhak Tabenkin, a leader of the kibbutz movement, argued that if the Arabs terrorized the Jews enough to leave a few settlements, they would not stop until the Jews were forced out everywhere. Only by taking an “obstinate, desperate stand, without looking back,” could the Jews guarantee their right to the land.

The moderate-left-of center Ha-Poel ha-Tzair party paper asserted that their work in settling the land was based on “mutual understanding and amicable relations” with their neighbors. “Yet wherever Hebrew soil is drenched with the sweat of Hebrew workers, and with their blood, that place is holy to us, and we have no right to abandon it.”

In the 1930’s, when the Arabs rioted in Palestine over increased Jewish immigration, David Ben-Gurion thought the Arabs might be more receptive to Jewish settlement if he could demonstrate how it would benefit them economically. In 1934, he went to see Musa Alami, a young “moderate” Arab lawyer, who served as the Private Secretary to Arthur Wauchope, High Commissioner for Palestine.

Alami’s response to Ben Gurion was quite telling: “That’s true,” he said, “but we don’t want your blessing. We prefer the land to remain impoverished, barren and empty until we ourselves are capable of doing what you are doing. And if it takes another century, then we will wait a hundred years.”

Shortly after the Arab Rebellion began on April 19, 1936, Ben Gurion didn’t even bother trying to convince the Arabs of the morality of Zionism or about the economic advantages that would accrue to them from increased Jewish settlement, according to Shapiro. “It would be extremely naïve to assume that the Arabs would determine their attitude toward us from the standpoint of abstract justice,” Ben Gurion declared. “The Arabs are adamant that “this country is an Arab country, and they wish it to remain so. That is quite elementary!” 

Arthur Ruppin, the foremost authority on Jewish efforts to settle the land, explained the difficulty of reaching an accord with the Arabs. On February 21, 1931, he wrote in his diary, “We are not offered what we need, and what we are offered is of no use to us.”

Ruppin, who was chairman of Brit Shalom, which advocated a bi-national state, recognized that the “conciliatory tone” the group took toward the Arabs was “interpreted by the Arabs as weakness.”

In November 1929, German Zionist members of Brit Shalom suggested that an appeal for a reprieve be made to the British for the Arabs convicted of killing Jews in Hebron and Safed. On Friday August 23, 1929 the Arabs began a week of rioting, killing and looting. More than 400 Jews were murdered or wounded. In Hebron eight American Jews were killed and 15 wounded. The dead were students at the Slobodka yeshiva, who were not Zionists and not involved in the Jewish national movement. Neither were those attacked in Safed.

Although “in principle” Ruppin opposed the death penalty, he felt in this case it would be too dangerous to stop the practice. Prisons don’t “frighten the Arabs,” he said, “since they are relatively better off in jail than they were at home.” Furthermore, “they would not regard a prison sentence—with the hope of amnesty after a few years—as a serious punishment, and thus might encourage others to slaughter Jews.”

The lessons learned by early Jewish leaders should not be lost on those in power today. The Arabs have not yet accepted the Jewish right to live in the Land of Israel. Palestinian PM Ismail Haniya made this clear when he declared, "We will not give up our Jihadist movement until the full liberation of Beit al-Muqqadas [Jerusalem] and Palestinian land."

 Israeli leaders would do well to heed the words of Edmund Burke who said: “The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.”  Appeasement has a place in resolving disputes but not in dealing with aggression.

When Did Anti-Zionism Become An International Issue? Alex Grobman

For more than 20 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, anti-Zionism was a regional phenomenon — a conflict between Arab and Jewish national movements in the Middle East. In the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, the Soviets exploited antisemitism for political purposes, but it was seldom part of international debate until after the Six-Day War in 1967.

By the end of the 1960s, and since 1975, anti-Zionism became international in scope. It first appeared in the universities in the West where the New Left, in cooperation with Arab student associations, attacked Israeli policy. ¹

When the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 on November 10, 1975, and declared "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination," it significantly expanded anti-Zionism into the sphere of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and therefore into Third World countries. This was accomplished in collaboration between the Arabs and the Soviet Union that endowed anti-Zionism with legitimacy and official recognition.²

After the First World War, the Arabs expected Greater Syria — which included Palestine and Lebanon — to become a vast, united, and sovereign Arab empire. Instead, the French and the British divided the area into what the Arabs considered "irrationally carved out" entities that became the present-day states of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Trans-Jordan (later Jordan), Iraq, and Israel. The Arabs were outraged that a "non-Arab embryo state in Palestine" had been inserted into an area where it would never be accepted. They claimed that this shattered their dreams of unification and impeded their search for a common identity. ³

The fight against a Jewish homeland became an integral part of their struggle "for dignity and independence." Israel's existence, they claimed, "implied that not only a part of the Arab patrimony, but also parts of Islam, had been stolen. For a Moslem, there was no greater shame than for that to happen." The only way to eliminate this deeply felt affront — this "symbol of everything that had dominated them in the past" — was to rid the area of "imperialist domination." ⁴

Zionism has been branded as the official enemy of the Arab national movement, but Arab governments have long been accused of using the Arab-Israeli confrontation to divert attention from their own critical domestic social and economic problems. When confronted, they respond that if this were not a real concern, it would not resonate so strongly among the Arab masses. ⁵

 Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton University, the dean of Middle Eastern scholars in the West, says Arab fixation with Israel "is the licensed grievance. In countries where people are becoming increasingly angry and frustrated at all the difficulties under which they live — the poverty, unemployment, oppression — having a grievance which they can express freely is an enormous psychological advantage." ⁶

The Israeli-Arab conflict is the only local political grievance that can be openly discussed. If the population were permitted freedom of speech, Lewis believes that the obsession with Israel would become far less important. Like most people, Arabs are concerned about their own priorities. For the Palestinian Arabs, who view themselves as the permanent victims, the main issue is their struggle with Israel. If Arabs in other countries were permitted to focus on their own problems, they would do so.  ⁷

For Arabs, the attempt to blame Western imperialism is nothing more than an excuse to attack Israel, as another Hebrew University professor Jacob Talmon asserted: "For decades the Arabs have been obsessed by memories of past glories and prophecies of future greatness, mocked by the injury and shame of having an alien and despised race injected into the nerve center of their promised pan-Arab empire, between its Asian and African halves, just at a time when the colonial powers had started their great retreat from their colonial possessions in Asia and Africa." ⁸

To lessen their feelings of shame for losing every war against Israel, the Arabs attributed the success of Jewish settlement in Palestine and the Israeli military triumphs of 1948 and 1956 to Western imperialism. As the representative of the Great Powers, Israel became the Arabs' scapegoat whenever they became frustrated in their attempt to transcend "centuries of social, economic, and cultural development, and catch up" with the West.

This anti-Israel fixation precipitated a methodical "Manichean metaphysic, the focus of an entire philosophy of history, with the Jewas the devil incarnate from the days of patriarch Abraham himself till his assumption of the role of the linchpin of an American-Imperialist-Zionist world-plot against the Arab world, the Socialist Commonwealth and all colonial peoples." ⁹

1. Yohanan Manor, "Anti-Zionism," (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1984):  8.

2. Ibid.

3. Saul Friedlander and Mahmoud Hussein, Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975), 6, 18, 21.

4. Ibid., 9, 34.

5. Ibid.

6. "Islam's Interpreter," The Atlantic Online (April 4, 2004), Online.

7. Ibid; Friedlander and Hussein, Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue, 32-33, 36.

8. Jacob L. Talmon, Israel Among the Nations (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 169-170.

9. Ibid.170.