1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War Read Online Free PDF Page B

sterling-earning citrus harvest season was kicking in. The British were happy to call it quits and covertly helped Haj Amin al-Husseini suspend the rebellion. London then dispatched to Palestine yet another committee of inquiry, this time a royal commission, headed by Lord Peel. On 7 July 1937 the commission published a 4o4-page report. It exhaustively traced the history of the conflict and present realities and concluded both that the Mandate was unworkable and that the Jews and the Arabs could not live under one political roof. The commissioners recommended partition, with the Jews getting zo percent (the Galilee and much of the Coastal Plain) on which to establish a state, and the Arabs getting more than 70 percent (Samaria, much of Judea, and the Negev), which should eventually be fused with Transjordan to create an enlarged Hashemite state under Emir 'Abdullah. Something less than io percent of the country, including Jerusalem and Bethlehem, with their holy sites, and a strip of territory connecting the capital to the Mediterranean at Jaffa, should be retained by the British. The commission further recommended that the bulk of the three hundred thousand Arabs who lived in the territory earmarked for Jewish sovereignty should be transferred, voluntarily or under compulsion, to the Arab part of Palestine or out of the country altogether. The commission "balanced" this by recommending that the ►,z5o Jews living in areas earmarked for Arab sovereignty be moved to the Jewish area-deeming the proposed transaction "an exchange of population."

    The Peel Commission partition proposal, July 1937
    In their testimony before the commission, the Zionist mainstream representatives had laid claim to the whole of the Land of Israel-the traditional Zionist platform. But in private conversations, Weizmann and others indicated a readiness for compromise based on partition as well as, quite probably, suggesting the "transfer" solution to the demographic problem posed by the prospective large Arab minority in the Jewish area. Zionism's leaders, from Herzl through Menahem Ussishkin and Arthur Ruppin, had periodically proposed-in private letters and diaries-transfer as the requisite solution to the "Arab problem." But transfer had never been adopted by the movement or any of the main Zionist parties (including the right-wing Revisionists) as part of a platform or official policy. Once the Peel Commission had given the idea its imprimatur, however, 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 at the Twentieth Zionist Congress (in August 1937, in Zurich) and in other forums.
    To be sure, these advocates realized and usually acknowledged that the idea was impractical and unrealistic-the British could not be expected to carry out transfer, and the Yishuv, even if willing, was powerless-and transfer was never adopted as official Zionist policy. Yet through the late 193os and early and mid-194os Zionist leaders continued in private to espouse the idea. For example, Weizmann in late January 1941 told Ivan Maiskii, the Soviet ambassador to London: "If half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place.... Weizmann said that ... they would be transferring the Arabs only into Iraq and Transjordan."27 Interestingly, senior British officials and Arab leaders, including Emir `Abdullah and Nuri Said, Iraq's premier politician (the same Nuri Said who in July 1939 called for the destruction of Zionism), shared this view.2I All understood that for a partition settlement to work and last, the emergent Jewish state would have to be ridded of its large and potentially or actively hostile Arab minority. As `Abdullah's prime minister, Ibrahim Pasha Hashim, put it in 194-6: "The only just and permanent solution lay in absolute partition with an exchange of populations; to leave Jews in an Arab state or Arabs in a Jewish