Such sentiments became increasingly commonplace among most factions in the Zionist movement, from Labor on the left to Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionists on the right. But many believed strongly that such views should be kept under wraps -- that the Zionist movement would lose support around the world if it was perceived as intending to displace the Arabs.

However, when non-Jewish authorities proposed transfer, Zionist leaders felt more comfortable. In 1937, the British government's Peel Commission proposed partitioning western Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, and forcibly transferring 225,000 Arabs out of areas designated for a Jewish state. The Zionist movement was deeply divided over the partition aspect of the plan, because it allocated so little land to the Jews.

In 1937, the British government proposed partitioning western Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, and forcibly transferring 225,000 Arabs out of areas designated for a Jewish state.

That summer's World Zionist Congress was the scene of bitter accusations and shouting matches--but none of them about the proposal to transfer the Arabs, to which there was virtually no Jewish opposition. Among the notable supporters of transfer was the Labor Zionist official Goldie Meyerson -- better known later as Golda Meir -- who strongly endorsed the transfer proposal in her speech at the congress. David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary about the transfer proposal: "We should not assume that it is definitely impossible. If it were put into effect, it would be of tremendous advantage to us...For every transferred Arabs, one could settle four Jews on the land." (David Ben-Gurion, Memoirs [Tel Aviv, 1973], vol. 4, p.297)

Chaim Weizmann, the longtime president of the World Zionist Organization, was one of the most important, yet one of the most coy, supporters of the transfer idea. In his public statements, he urged the Zionist movement to be conciliatory towards the Arabs and the British. He even went so far as to assert that he did not share the goal of achieving a Jewish majority in Palestine.

However, on May 25, 1941, at a private meeting of thirty-three American Jewish leaders at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, Weizmann said: "On our part, what can we offer the Arabs? We can offer them your money. Not bribes. You remember, one of the decisions of the Royal [Peel] Commission carried dynamite, that is, the transfer of the Arab population...We can acquire a great deal of land, in Trans-Jordania or Iraq. We shall see that you are colonized and that you get five dunams of land for every dunam we get."

Another prominent Zionist leader who kept his pro-transfer feelings to himself was Emanuel Neumann, a leading figure in the American Zionist movement who was eventually elected president of the Zionist Organization of America. One of the rare occasions on which Neumann publicly bared his feelings about the subject was in an article in the February 10, 1939 issue of Palestine Review. There he urged that "the masses of Palestinian Arabs be transferred peaceably and in orderly fashion to Iraq and the Iraqian Jews to Palestine."

Neumann was for many years the right-hand man of American Zionist chieftain Abba Hillel Silver. Although he never publicly endorsed transfer, Silver privately worked with former U.S. president Herbert Hoover to promote Hoover's postwar transfer plan. In a November 1945 announcement, Hoover offered his solution to the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine: "My own suggestion is that Iraq might be financed to complete this great land development on the consideration that it be made the scene of resettlement of the Arabs from Palestine. This would clear Palestine completely for Jewish immigration and colonization." (New York World-Telegram, November 19, 1945)

Hoover's plan followed on the heels of a similar proposal made by England's Labour Party. Its 1944 party platform, describing its vision for a post-war world, had this to say about the Arabs and the Jews: "In Palestine surely is a case, on human grounds and to promote a stable settlement, for transfer of population. Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in. Let them be compensated handsomely for their land and let their settlement elsewhere be carefully organised and generously financed."

When the Labour Party took over the reins of government in 1945, however, a familiar political phenomenon ensued. The party platform's plank on Palestine was ignored, and the Attlee government proceeded to implement the most pro-Arab Palestine policy of any British administration.

But by far the most important supporter of the transfer idea, and perhaps the most unlikely as well, was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Solomon Goldman, president of the Zionist Organization of America, wrote to David Ben-Gurion on April 6, 1939, quoting a letter from President Roosevelt to Justice Louis Brandeis: "He wrote about the transfer of several hundred thousand Arabs from Palestine to Iraq. In order to finance this transfer, he suggested the establishment of a fund of three hundred million dollars. He thought that it was possible to collect one hundred million from the Jews, the British Government would loan one hundred and the American Government would loan a third of the required sum."

In a similar vein, Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, wrote in his diary in 1942

Outpost               - 8 -               October 2002