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This article is about population exchange, specifically, the physical separation of Arabs from Israelis. Over time, there have been several pendulum swings in opinion as to the morality and justice in doing this. Currently, there is increasing interest both from the political Left and the political Right in, at the very least, discussing exchange as an alternative to unworkable peace processes.
It doesn't take a crystal ball to see that the resolution of the West Bank and Gaza strip problems will sooner or later be resolved by negotiation (unlikely) or, regrettably, by war. In the event that these territories come under full Israeli control, it has to be understood that such control must be accompanied by two necessary conditions.
Without completion of the population exchange -- transfering the Palestinian Arabs and settling them in neighboring Arab lands -- Israel will find herself in exactly the position she is now -- besieged by implacable internal enemies who frankly consider the Jewish State a monstrosity to be totally destroyed. The intention is not to make the West Bank "Arab-rein". It is to allow Israel the right to defend its citizens and to treat declared and active enemies as enemies. Surely any sovereign Western nation should regard the right to defend its citizens as a fundamental responsibility, the basic function of any state.
The current status(Oct 2002) of the Oslo War is briefly this:
Arab Attitudes Towards Israel
The almost universal Israel Arab and Palestinian antagonism to Israel and Jews has been evident and is documented in many sources. Boris Shusteff ("The Morality of Transfer", http://www.freeman.org/m_online/feb02/shusteff1.htm, 01/22/02 ) describes some typical poll results:
"The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah and the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem conducted this poll among Palestinian Arabs during the week of December 19-24, 2001. They found that `69% of Palestinians would not view as an act of terrorism the future use of chemical and biological weapons against Israel by Palestinians, but when committed by Israel 93% of Palestinians would define it as terror.'"
This sampling is backed by other recent polls.
Efraim Karsh (Commentary, July-August 2002) shows that the term Occupation now refers to the entire State of Israel, not just the Territories. Arabs now call
".... into question not Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza but its very legitimacy as a state.........There are limits to Israel's ability to transform a virulent enemy into a peace partner, and those limits have long since been reached.......at fault is the perduring Arab view that the creation of the Jewish state was an original act of `inhuman occupation' with which compromise of any final kind is beyond the realm of the possible."
This hardening attitude is reinforced for successive generations by what Arab children are taught in their schools and even by what they read in their comic books. In the Palestinian schools, the Jewish victims are demonized while the perpetrators of eight decades of anti-Jewish violence in Arab lands are treated as heros who may attain the Islamic paradise. The danger becomes even more evident when we realize that each entering class is indoctrinated and that the numbers of confirmed internal enemies grows with each school year. David Horowitz (Why Israel Is The Victim In The Middle East, Center for the Study of Popular Culture, p 15) provides a graphic description:
... "the mosques and schools of the Arabs, generally -- and the Palestinians in particular -- preach and teach Jew hatred every day. Elementary school children in Palestinian Arab schools are even taught to chant `Death to the heathen Jews' in their classrooms as they are learning to read. It should not be overlooked, that these twin policies of deprivation (of the Palestinian Arabs) and hatred (of the Jews) are carried out without any protest from any sector of Palestinian or Arab society."
The Basis For A Possible Transfer
I believe we should stop denying the history of Arab hostility. There have been Arab attacks, Arab slaughters, Arab progroms and Arab wars against the Jews, beginning as early as 1922. The evidence of history clearly shows that separation in whole or in part of the populations is necessary, if Israel is to survive.
When the hostility between the two sides is of such long duration and of such intensity, it warrants unusual action.
The action taken in the face of irreconcilable differences ranging in scope from a street-brawl to the Kashmir problem has usually been to recommend and promote physical separation of the combatants. When the combatants are many in numbers and intermixed -- as were the Greeks and Turks in Asia Minor and as are the Palestinian Arabs and Israelis at present, the separation to be effective calls for a population exchange.
It is possible to identify three categories of mass population movements that are precipitated by irreconcilable differences among peoples within a political entity. Briefly they are: emigration (encouraged or forced); expulsion (which differs from forced emigration in that family, economic and social values are more or less ignored during the process); and exchange, i.e., the legal and enforced exchange of populations so as to eliminate conflict by eliminating contact. As we shall see, population transfer does not necessarily have extremely severe social or economic consequences for the transferees. Some of these patterns are noted in the historical footnote below. I devote the immediate discussion to relevant events of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Two major twentieth century episodes of ethnic slaughter showed the necessity of separating irreconcilably hostile ethnic groups. During World War I (WWI), the Moslems committed genocide on the Armenians. It is true that the exigencies of war made intervention impractical, but, whatever the reason, the other Central Powers made no effective opposition. The second event was the gutting of the Greek-occupied Turkish city of Smyrna in 1922 and the slaughter of its non-Moslem population.
During and after World War I, the 19th century political chess game was continued in the Middle East. Most of the former Ottoman empire formed the game board and a bevy of new states -- Iraq, Oman, Yeman, to name a few -- were created. It was the victorious Western powers, England and France, that imposed the borders. Promises and conflicting promises were made, and usually broken. Peoples and places were aligned by rivalries between the colonial powers. Oil became an important factor. The end result was that by 1922 the root elements of the Arab-Israeli conflict had been planted. (See, for example, Samuel Katz, Battleground, rev. ed. 2002.)
Just at that time the League of Nations under Fridtjof Nansen's leadership -- he won the 1922 Nobel Peace prize for this work -- helped to impose the Greek-Turkish population exchange (http://www.Hellenic Resources Network), which saved thousands of Greek and Turkish lives. The first clause of the Treaty states:
"As from the 1st May, 1923, there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory. These persons shall not return to live in Turkey or Greece respectively without the authorisation of the Turkish Government or of the Greek Government respectively."
Additional clauses go into details protecting family structure and economic interest in great detail. To monitor and protect the function of the treaty, a High Commission was established which included League of Nations representatives.
The results have been regarded as a political success and, because of the lives saved, as morally justified. Its political justification resides in the peace established by the physical separation of the previous combatants.
The newly born United Nations after World War II (WWII) was faced by the same dilemma that confronted the League of Nations at the end of WWI.
Ethnic integrity and the rights of man could not be the primary determinants of borders. If ethnicity and human rights had been logically and systematically applied by the makers of treaties, it would have resulted in hundreds of micro nations across the map of Europe. The Basques and the Bretons would not now be governed from Paris.
The opposite alternative, sweeping population exchanges, was rejected. The victorious Russians would have none of this and neither would the French, or other victors.
Instead, the ad hoc diplomatic solutions resulted in the formation of multinational states in which a dominant ethnic group was de facto in charge of an included cluster of minority groups. The national rights of the minorities were consequently compromised. For example, passports were issued in the name of the dominant group -- you were a Chechoslovak even though you were a ethnic German. The paradigm is the creation by the League and the revivification by the UN of the former Yugoslavia. Its confirmation by the UN at the end of WWII laid the ground work for the ethnic troubles that prevail there today. (See chapter 9 of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed.)
WWII also re-animated the ancient peace table principle: (Samuel Katz, ibid, p. 190)
"If the victim [of aggression], however succeeds in repelling the aggressor, he holds the territory he has conquered or regained at least until he is ready to make a peace treaty and only the peace treaty will determine the fate of those territories."
To discuss the effectiveness and morality of population transfer, we are going to use as reference standard for comparison the territorial and demographic policies of the Soviet Union in the pre- and post-WW2 eras. Hugh Seton-Watson in his From Lenin to Kruschev (Praeger N.Y. 1960) notes that after initial occupation in Sept-Oct 1939, the Baltic States, Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania, were presented with a Soviet ultimatum in June 1940 that demanded
".....unlimited admissions of Soviet troops and that they institute governments friendly to the Soviet Union. Annexation was completed by July 1940. The effect was to increase the depth of the Russian frontier by more than 200 miles, making (among other factors) for the failure of the German army to take Moscow in 1941."
This geographical shield was fortified by an effective population transfer. More than 120,000 Balts were deported to the Siberian Far East. How many survived the Gulag is an open question. Their places were taken by Russians and other nationalities who had but little time left to build the defense against Hitler's 1941 stroke.
This was a characteristic Russian geopolitical maneuver. As Bernard Pares (History of Russia, Vintage Edition, 1965, Knopf N.Y) points out in his chapter on the 2nd Fatherland War (the Russian name for the Hitler Invasion):
"There are certain constant elements in the history of Russian military defence.....Russia has always had to retire before a sudden aggression .....Russia's vast distances are in themselves a great defence. ......The newly acquired [Polish, Bessarabian and Baltic territories] was quickly overrun, but it served a purpose in giving time to recover from the first effects of shock."
At the end of WWII, in reconstructing Eastern Europe, the depth defense was preserved by creating a Poland that was deprived of its east, and "compensated" by a slice of former German territory. The flanks were extended by the reannexation of the Baltic states in the north and Moldava and parts of Roumania in the south.
The geography and topography of the broad flat plain extending from northern Germany through central Poland and to the Byelorussian-Northern Ukraine has always been an invitation for rapid invasions in either direction. There are no serious natural obstructions and the only real initial defense is depth. Russia, without any qualms, as a victor, annexed sufficient slices of the East to give her depth against a future resurgent Germany. Behind the borders, population transfers of German or other potentially disloyal groups beyond the Urals secured the geographic shield from internal enemies, real or fancied. "The Soviet Union had annexed 272,500 sq. miles of foreign territory with an extra population of 25 millions." (Norman Davies, Europe, p. 1062).
The Cold War had not begun, yet no one in the West complained. Samuel Katz (ibid, p. 191) reports that even Winston Churchill in the House of Commons declared:
"Twice in our lifetime Russia has been violently assaulted by Germany. Many millions of Russians have been slain and vast tracts of Russian soil devasted as a result of repeated German aggression. Russia has the right of reassurance against future attacks from the West, and we are going all the way with her to see that she gets it"
This was before any peace treaty with Germany
The Russian annexations were not unique. The Czechs, even before the war was over, executed a forced territorial and population exchange with the Hungarians, who were Axis satellites.
Even while still in exile during the war, the Czech-Slovak governments decreed the exile of Hungarians from the territories to be recovered at the end of the war. The population exchange that eventually took place is detailed in http://www.htmh.hu/benesangol.htm.
"Hungary, left to fend for itself in the international arena, and Czechoslovakia signed an agreement on population exchange on 28 February 1946. Under the terms of the agreement the Czechoslovak authorities were entitled to deport as many Hungarians as many persons in Hungary volunteered for repatriation to Czechoslovakia. Originally 95,421 Slovaks enrolled for repatriation from Hungary. The number of repatriated eventually reached 73,273, as 22,148 people had changed their mind in the meantime. The Slovak displaced left behind 39,135 acres of land in Hungary. In Slovakia 105,047 Hungarians were to be resettled by the authorities. 68,407 people were resettled and 6,000 Hungarians left of their own free will. The resettled Hungarians left behind 136,619 acres of land in their native land."
The contrast in Israeli policy in 1967 and 1971 to that of the WWII victors is striking. Israel in 1948, in 1967, and again in 1971 was the eventually victorious victim of aggression. But she was not allowed to grasp the fruits of victory. In this post WWII world, only Israel -- the undoubted repeated victim of aggression by multiple adjacent Arab states -- is thought by the UN, Europe, the Arab States and the American State Department obligated to restore the conquered territory to the agressors or the agressor's assignee (PLO). Israel did not behave in 1967 as did Russia after WWII. The West Bank and Gaza were not annexed, and the Israelis foolishly allowed the myth of the Occupied territories to stay unanswered.
The Alternative Of Peace
Can Israel make a peace treaty with Hamas? With Hezbollah? With Force 17? With the PLO, no matter who leads it? Can she leave the two million or so internal Arab enemies safely ensconsed within her borders, ready to reignite conflict whenever their external Arab masters so desire? The long history of negotiation and repeated Israeli gifts and retreats since 1948 show that concessions only reinforce the Arab impression that Israel is ripening fruit, soon to be ready to be plucked. This is a particular danger since as Daniel Pipes has stated on several occasions, a major factor of Israeli strength is how opponents perceive her determination and will. This is from the Christian Science Monitor in December, 2000.
"Not only have Israel's concessions not achieved the expected harmonious peace, but they have actually harmed Israel, making it less scary to its neighbors. The result has been a spike in Palestinian and Arab ambitions that culminated in the round of violence that began in September. .... Israel's perceived weakness is now an American problem: The aggressive anti-Zionist euphoria being expressed by Arabs poses a direct danger to the United States."
Israel, after her 1967 victory, quixotically failed to annex Judea, Samaria and Gaza. This leaves the country in an almost untenable geographic position. The neck between the 1967 border and Netanya on the Mediteranean coast is less than 10 miles. There is no depth to defend against external attack -- against external attackers that are supported by 5th columns that can draw on some 2 million internal enemies. Neither the geographic situation or the demographics are acceptable.
Not only is the Israeli policy of failure to annex territories necessary for her defence unusual, but the reaction of the world to her continued "occupation" verges on the preposterous.
"The principle that Israel, in May the anticipated victim of successful attack, having in June turned the tables on her would-be destroyers, should now restore to them the bases of their aggression, was accepted almost without question not only by the Arabs Soviet allies, their French friends, and their original British mentors, but also by the United States.........even the United States Goverment .....gradually evolved the formula that Israel should `restore' to the Arab states all the territory she conquered in 1967 `with insubstantial modifications.'" (Samuel Katz, ibid, p. 188.)
A Glance At The Future
Given the difficulties involved in population transfer, does a Palestinian State in the Yesha [ed note: The West Bank is the biblical Samaria and Judea. It was renamed the West Bank when Jordan conquered it in 1948 and made it Juden-rein. The Jews who resettled there after 1967 call it Yesha. See the background page for references on the history of the region.] offer a viable alternative? No. Even if the Israelis were to yield to international pressure, a Palestinian state is not a viable solution. The reason is simple. The Arab states would not permit its independent existence. As Samual Katz puts it:
"If peace is the object and the only basis for it is a Palestinian state, it must be realized that: The one certain outcome of an Israeli withdrawal and surrender of teritory is that the Arabs of Judea and Samaria would not become an independent political unit. Judea and Samaria would become the main base and the central battlefield for the final attack on Israel -- an Israel forced to fight for her very life against the massed forces of the Arab states..... For the inhabitants of Judea and Samaria there would then be no escape from death and destruction."
Some Israeli generals take the dubious position that 1967 borders (with some adjustments) are defensible. We might ask whether these judgements were reassessed after Sept 11. Until now Israel has not only had a superb citizen army and a dedicated officer corps, but it has faced enemy armies of low morale, armies whose staff work seemed much inferior. It is now clear since 9/11 that tremendously detailed and remarkably effective planning by Arab groups is to be expected by any developed country that is an Arab target. The tactics of the period from WWII through the Gulf War are now ancient history.
Geography
Since it should be obvious that the internal Arab enemy is intended to play a significant role in future Arab-Israeli conflicts, we are forced to consider the neutralization of the internal foe, no matter what the treaty boundaries may be in the future.
Israel's geographic problem is the stage on which its demographic problem is being enacted. The Russian paradigm was to transfer the inhabitants of places like the Baltic states and exchange them for other Russian nationalities. Israel does not have a Gulag. There is no equivalent to the Siberian Far East. The Middle East land situation has been subject to continuous media distortion. Most frequently, published maps show only a large Israel and several fragments of proto-Palestinian territory. (By the way, Arab maps do not show an Israel at all -- ALL of Israel, the entire area west of the Jordan, is called Palestine and is the property of the "Palestinians".)
Few are aware of the real facts. Joseph Farah ("Shattering the Myths of the Middle East", Whistleblower, June, 2002, p. 10) points out that:
"Arabs already control 99.9 percent of the Middle East Lands whereas Israel represents one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) of the land mass. But even that little speck is too much for the Arab potentates and powers. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the fighting in Israel is about today. No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make, it will never be enough."
Often, the idea of population transfer is summarily rejected as a racist and reactionary solution to a problem that could be solved by goodwill. However, opinion on the possibility of transfer seems to be changing. This editorial is from the New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/199905100001.htm), which is usually left of center:
"............. The West must therefore do one of two things: police the region indefinitely, or preside over a series of partitions and population exchanges. And if humanitarian intervention is to become the norm, as Tony Blair suggests, the West is likely to face similar choices in parts of Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and south Asia. Yet the western liberal mind will not be comfortable with either alternative."
The only alternative to population exchange as seen by this article:
"........ If policing is to be effective in areas of ethnic division, it must be armed and it must be ruthless. Otherwise, the population will continue to fear the local police and the ethnically based gangs more than they fear the outside authorities, so that hatreds continue to build. The security must also be offered without any fixed time limit; local police officers will not act against their own ethnic group if they think they would be left unprotected from revenge a year later. These lessons, in different ways, can be learnt from both Bosnia and Ulster."
Why apply this just to Bosnia and Ulster? An irretrievably deep division exists between the Palestinians Arabs and the Israelis.
The New Statesman continues:
"The second alternative -- partition and population exchange -- was most famously adopted by the British in India. It was clumsily done, with horrific short-term results, yet the Indian subcontinent, by international standards, has stayed mercifully free of serious ethnic conflict. Population exchange has happened in Europe, too, notably between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s. Though never officially recognised, partition has been the solution for Cyprus........."
This omission of the possibility of a Arab-Israeli population exchange is only a further indication that Israel is treated differently than other nations.
Farah in his Whistleblower article says:
"Keep in mind that most Palestinian refugees today were born well after 1948. They never lived in the land called Palestine. And the reason is that their Arab neighbors have been so inhospitable to them. They have not allowed them to resettle because Arab leaders are determined to fan the flames of hate toward Israel. They want to keep this scapegoat issue of a Palestinian homeland alive so that the Arab people don't turn their enmity toward their own leadership and begin questioning why they are deprived of their own human rights."
An Israeli-Arab Population Exchange
Public discussion of an Israeli-Arab population exchange has only recently resurfaced but the proposition as a solution for the Middle East conflict has a long history, as shown in Transfer of Arabs from Palestine: A Historical Survey of Proposals to Transfer Arabs from Palestine 1895-1947 by Dr. Chaim Simon. This remarkable web-browsable book (http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7854/archives/oldindex.html) contains a wealth of detailed accounts of the views and activities of Chaim Weizmann, Herzl, Zangwill, Jabotinsky and more than a score of other prominent Jews. Non-Jews, such as Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, Senator Claude Pepper, and several British Foreign Office officials such as Col. Meinartzhagen, are noted. There were also some pro-Arab non-Jews such as Harry St.John Philby who were in favor of population exchange. Philby felt it would be favorable for the Arabs to be outside of a Jewish State. Dr Simon's book is a work in progress, of which 59 "fascicles" are available. It also treats in extensive detail the Norman Plan(s) of the mid 1930's and the Peel Report, which advocated a population exchange in 1939.
WWII put a temporary hold on considerations of a population exchange. The British mandate was renewed by the United Nations. However, it soon became clear that conflict between the British pro-Arab policy and the Jewish resistance to the British curtailment of Jewish immigration and land holding would, sooner or later, force the end of the Mandate. But even before its end, many of the Arab states instituted Nazi-like anti-Semitic laws and began the process of forcible ejection of their Jewish population.
Details of the history of the Jewish phase of the transfer are available on the internet. The material on The Wings of Eagles Exodus from Yemen is more familiar, but the Iraqi transfer is also of interest because, though less well known, it proves the earlier Arab agreement with the principle of exchange. This quotation, taken from "Progressive News and Views, PNEWS-L, Population Exchange", href="http://validator.w3.org/check?, clearly asserts that the Population Exchange is a fait accompli, at least from the Jewish side. The full posting includes conclusive evidence of the fate of Syrian, Lybian Egyptian and Yemeni Jews, particularly on their forced evacuation.
"In 1948 Iraq added an amendment to the Penal Code of Baghdad which made Zionism equal to the behavior of Communism, Anarchism, and Immorality, all punishable offenses. Laws in 1950 and 1951 deprived Jews of their Iraqi nationality and their property in Iraq, respectively. [Cohen, Jews of the Middle East, 1860-1972 (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1973) pp. 29-35: Hillel, Ruah Kadim, (Jerusalem: 'Idanim, 1985) p. 244. This book is available in English as Operation Babylon, trans. Ina Friedman (New York: Doubleday, 1987) pp. 135-42]. In 1949 on September 29th a member of the British embassy in Baghdad reported the Iraqi's government wish `to force an exchange of population under U.N. supervision and the transfer of 100,000 Jews beyond Iraq in exchange for the Arab refugees who had already left the territory in Israeli hands.' [Ruah Kadim (Jerusalem: 'Idanim, 1985) p. 244. This book is available in English as Operation Babylon, trans. Ina Friedman (New York: Doubleday, 1987)] And on October 14, 1949, the Iraqis spoke with U.N. officials about the exchange of < `100,000 Baghdad Jews and 80,000 other Jews in Iraq for [an] equivalent number [of] urban Arab Palestinian refugees.' [Telegram from the American embassy in Baghdad to Washington, D.C., Oct. 15, 1949] And, to the Clapp Mission in 1949, the Iraqis presented that the Jewish expulsion from Iraq was part of a population exchange. [Formally, the Economic Survey Mission, a U.N. effort headed by the Tennessee Valley Authority chairman, Gordon R. Clapp, which led to the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency] Iraq expelled hundreds of thousands of Jews which Israel absorbed. The Iraqis also massacred Jews by bombing the Mas'uda Shem Tob Synagogue in Baghdad on January 14, 1951, as Jews who were being expelled were there to register."
Following a likely 2nd US-Iraqi war, especially if the US is unencumbered by so-called Arab allies, obviously necessary changes in American policy toward Israel will take place. But Israel must start planning now.
And America's cooperation is critical. As Joseph Farah says (ibid, p. 17):
"The U.S. has just one dependable ally in the Mideast. It is Israel....If Israel is neutered, if it is cut up and dismembered, if it is forced to fight an endless series of skirmishes for years to come, America's one dependable alliance will, in effect, be destroyed...... If Israel loses, the Islamic revolution goes world wide. The target is no longer Jerusalem. It's Washington...... America can take the handcuffs off Israel today and let that nation fight or we can do the fighting ourselves later..... Now it's time to let Israel respond in the same way the U.S. responded to terrorist attacks Sept 11. ....It's time for the U.S to expect no more from a friend and ally than we ourselves could endure."
Advantages
It hardly needs to be said that settling Arabs in decent homes in Arab lands is to their benefit.
We consider here the benefit to Israel. An Israel that completed the population exchange would gain several advantages:
Historical Footnote
An enforced population transfer was fairly standard policy of the
Babylonians and Assyrians -- they would enslave the conquered, transfer
most of them to a distant point in the empire and replace the
population with another group, usually those with a longer history of
loyalty. The classic example is the so-called Babylonian exile of the
Jews.
In ancient times conquest of a city during war between states
usually resulted in either mass enslavement or, after sieges of long
duration, in wholesale slaughter. A multitude of cases are well
documented (c.f. A.E. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, Oxford
1925). The Romans tended to be even more draconian, except in those
cases where political expediency prevailed.
In the Middle Ages and early Rennaisance, the treatment of warring
populations in defeat was so varied and conditioned by so many
religious and economic factors that it is impossible to see very many
clear patterns. Certainly the early Crusades were savagely destructive
of the vanquished with enslavement of survivors as a particularly
Moslem favored option (cf Steven Runciman A History of the Crusades, 3
vols, Harper Torchbook edition, 1964), but perhaps most significantly for
Modern Europe was the state in which the Renaissance found
it -- Germany and Italy jigsaw puzzles of fragmented church and secular
states, the eastern frontier fluid and the southern frontiers Ottoman
occupied. The century and a half of warfare from 1680 to 1815 saw the
games of political chess played by the Great Powers (England, France,
Austria, Russia and later, Prussia) change and remake the network of
petty states of central and eastern Europe. The fruits of these
changes would be seen a century later in terms of enforced population
exchanges and territorial annexations.
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