Clearly Israel should also be doing much more to encourage the growth of its Jewish population. Aliyah is one tool and I believe that, just as we have encouraged immigration from the former Soviet Union, so we should also be allocating resources to encourage aliyah from the United States, England and other industrialized nations. Israel can also encourage a higher birth rate: it can do this by transferring the responsibility to the Jewish Agency, which is not bound to encourage a higher birth rate by all sectors of the population and can focus exclusively on the Jewish community. We can also follow the example of Singapore, which established a ministerial office for marriage that provides counseling for young couples, even dating services.

The ideas presented here are just a few the Herut Party has to offer for dealing with the demographic problem. For us, the principle of a demographic wall is the present day equivalent of Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall" between Arab and Jew.

Michael Kleiner is a Member of Knesset representing the Herut Party.

Historical Roots of
the Idea of Transfer

Ilana Sternbaum

The idea of transferring Arabs from Eretz Yisrael to the surrounding countries has attracted support among prominent Jews and non-Jews for more than a century. Its backers have included Zionist leaders from left to right, two presidents of the United States, and a wide range of other international dignitaries.

Relocating Palestinian Arabs was never an official part of the Zionist movement's agenda. The resolutions adopted at each World Zionist Congress proposed building a Jewish state by bringing Jews in, not by taking Arabs out. The movement's declared assumption was that large numbers of Jews from around the world would emigrate to the Holy Land and gradually create a Jewish majority in the country. The Arab residents would be permitted to remain as a minority with equal political rights and complete religious freedom, although they would be expected to accept the fact that Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, and many of its official national symbols, such as its flag and anthem, clearly pertain only to the Jewish part of the population.

Nonetheless, some of the earliest Zionist leaders privately regarded the Arab population as an obstacle to the emergence of a Jewish state, and expected that some or all of them would have to be resettled elsewhere. In his diary entry for June 12, 1895, Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement, wrote: "When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently, the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country." (The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, trans. Harry Zohn [New York, 1960], Vol. 1, p.88)

Similarly, the leader of the socialist Zionists in Russia, Nachman Syrkin, wrote in his 1898 pamphlet, Die Judenfrage und der socialistiche Judenstaat: "In places of mixed settlement, there will be a peaceful population migration...Palestine, which is very sparsely inhabited, and where the Jews, even today, comprise ten percent of the population, must be vacated for the Jews."

And the British Zionist leader Israel Zangwill stirred controversy throughout the Jewish world in the early 1900s with his calls to "make the Arabs trek" so that Palestine would be clear for Jewish settlement.

The number of Zionist voices endorsing the transfer idea multiplied as the years passed. This occurred for several reasons. First, the relative trickle of Jewish immigrants coming to Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century left many Zionists worried that immigration alone would not suffice to overcome the huge Arab majority in the country. Second, the Jewish development projects were attracting large numbers of illegal Arab immigrants from Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. They came to enjoy the prosperity that the Jews brought to the country, and they stayed on, thus tilting the demographics further against the Zionist movement.

The number of Zionist voices endorsing the idea of transfer multplied as the years passed.

Third, beginning in the 1920s, the Palestinian Arabs increasingly resorted to mass violence against Jews. It was becoming clear that the idea of "Jewish-Arab coexistence" was a Jewish fantasy to which the Arabs did not subscribe. Arab nationalists and Muslim fanatics -- often they were one and the same -- could conceive of only one kind of "coexistence" with Jews: the kind that kept Jews in an oppressed, third-class status of dhimmi, a humiliated minority group at the mercy of their Arab overlords.

It was in the aftermath of the 1929 Palestinian Arab pogroms that Menachem Ussishkin, head of the Jewish National Fund, asserted: "We must continually proclaim our demand that our land be returned to our possession. If the land is empty of inhabitants--good! If,

October 2002               - 7 -               Outpost