The Mystery of 1948

Were the U.N. plan to include a population transfer, that would be ideal, Shertok implies, but this was not in the cards. Since the Arabs would stay put, it would be best if they chose citizenship in the Arab state, so that they would not be able to vote in the Jewish one. Meanwhile, the Jewish political majority would be boosted by Jews living outside the state.

It should be no surprise that Zionist leaders thought about transfer. Population transfer?less politely, the forced uprooting of men, women and children in order to create ethnically homogenous states?was part of the Zeitgeist. The original British proposal for dividing Palestine, submitted by the Peel Commission in 1937, included transfer of Arabs out of the Jewish state, and cited the forced exchange of 1.3 million Greeks and 400,000 Turks in 1923 as a positive precedent. After World War II, that precedent became the brutal norm in Europe, as Tony Judt writes in his epic work Postwar: 160,000 Turks expelled from Bulgaria to Turkey; 120,000 Slovaks sent from Hungary to Slovakia in exchange for the same number of Hungarians going the opposite way: nearly 3 million Germans expelled from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, with the approval of Britain, Russia and America. The full list is much longer.

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