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144 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 BOOK REVIEWS Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, by Nur Masalha. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestinian Studies, 1992. 235 pp. $24.95 (c); $11.95 (p). Expulsion of the Palestinians contains an .argument that is both familiar and novel. Nur Masalha contends that the Zionist movement systematically and intentionally deprived Palestinian Arabs of their homes and of their lands. The masses of Palestinian refugees were the necessary consequence of Zionism's successes. If this theme seems well-trodden, it dges in this presentation break new ground. Masalha reasons that there are several separate considerations which support the view that the "organized removal of the indigenous population of Palestine to neighboring countries ... occupied a central position in the strategic thinking of the leadership of the Zionist movements ..." (p. 1). At the heart of Masalha's book is the argument he adduces about Zionist policy-making. The idea of transfer, an exchange of population through voluntary incentives or forced expulsion, may have been deeply submerged in private correspondence and in informal discussions but was, according to Masalha's reading of Zionist history, lurking as a time bomb beneath the facade of benign, liberal, humanitarian Zionism pronouncements . Citing letters, memoirs, and position papers, Masalha claims that a wide spectrum of Zionist political figures espoused the removal of the Arab population from Palestine. Masalha posits that the separation of Jewish and Arab economies was also premised on the transfer of the Arab work force. Ultimately, in his view, the exile in 1948 of eighty percent of Palestine's Arab population actualized the Zionist dream held in check previously only by the force of circumstances. There are troubling aspects in Masalha's analysis, and rather than simply discussing them, I wish to engage them in a serious way. First, there is the issue of political context. Transfer as an idea gained ascendancy initially in the middle of the 1930s during the height of the Arab Revolt, a three-year violent crusade unleashed by Palestinian Arabs against the Yishuv and the mandatory government. The Royal Commission investigating this upheaval recommended that Palestine be partitioned into separate national territories, thus raising the possibility of an exchange of populations as a means of accommodating irreconcilable differences. Book Reviews 145 Second, there is a problem with methodology. Masalha not only joins together private correspondence with public declarations, he also seems to equate them. The underlying assumption, that the speculations of all Zionist political figures without regard to their official positions had palpable influence in establishing policy, is problematic at best. The full correspondence-including Jewish responses to the musings on transfer as well as reference to the terms of discourse in the counterpart Palestinian Arab community-is not addressed. Without attending to the larger cultural landscape, the meaning of transfer cannot be properly conveyed. Nor is the policy-making process within Jewish institutions examined. Finally and perhaps most important, all of these individuals and institutions operated without sovereign power. It is not at all clear that transfer was embraced by Zionists or, if it was seized upon as a vision, what practical or moral conclusions necessarily follow. Even the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from homes and villages in the 1948 war fails to vindicate Masalha's thesis. Although Palestinian Arabs were conquered and in many cases exiled in the aftermath of battles, it is still impossible to demonstrate that such tactics constituted part of an Israeli battle plan, let alone a Zionist blueprint. To see the clash between Arabs and Jews in Palestine in stark good and evil terms contradicts all we know about the fury and chaos of warfare. Scholarship by Israeli historians has made plain that military strategy excluded expelling Arabs from areas to be incorporated into the Jewish state. But this strategy was adopted long after hostilities between Jews and Arabs in Palestine had erupted and long after a significant portion of the Arab population had already left home, city, and village. How to apportion historical responSibility is by no means a simple or straightforward task. If Masalha's project is so flawed, why, then, take it seriously? The investigations...

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