Chapter 10

Chapter 10 Separation - Only Separation A double miracle occurred in 1948. The Alm-ghty saved the Jews of the new State of Israel from the Arabs -- and from themselves. The greatest blessing to befall the Jews as their state came into being was the wild, panic-stricken, apparently illogical, irrational flight of the Arabs from the territory of the fledgling state. Against all reason and contrary to their own interests, more than 500,000 Arabs fled, ridding the State of Israel of a huge minority that would have destroyed it from within. The blessing was a particularly difficult one for the G-d of Israel to shower upon His people, since, as so often in the past, they went to extraordinary lengths to attempt to reject it. Had the Arabs remained, fully 40 percent of the new nation would have been Arab. The pitiful economic machinery of the state could not possibly have absorbed a million refugees in a decade. Between a quarter and a third of the Knesset would have been immediately Arab. A fifth column and social tensions of massive proportions would have developed. Many, many Jews who eventually did come to live in Israel would not have, in view of the bombings and civil strife that would have resulted. It was a divine blessing, an unexpected gift that even a child could understand and be grateful for. But the Jews of Israel? Consider. The mixed Arab-Jewish city of Haifa fell to the Haganah, the Jewish defense force, on April 22, 1948. Panic seized the Arabs; the first exodus began. The Jews pleaded with them to stay, offering to continue the equal binational municipal council. The Arabs would not listen. The exodus became a wild and irrational flight. Haifa Jews faced the joyful prospect of a Jewish city, free of tension and communal war. Their reaction was recorded on April 26, 1948, by the British chief of police of Haifa, A. J. Bridmead: "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives . ..." It had become a race between two irrational groups, each working against its own interests. The question was: Who would win by losing? On April 28 the Jews made a determined effort to prove that they were madder than their enemies. The Workers' Council printed thousands of fliers to be distributed to the fleeing Arabs which read, in part: "Do not destroy your own homes with your own hands and do not bring unnecessary tragedy upon yourselves by unnecessary evacuation and self-imposed burdens. By moving out you will be overtaken by
poverty and humiliation. But in this city, yours and ours, Haifa, the gates are open for work, for life, and for peace, for you and your families.” No amount of Jewish suicidal tendencies could help them. Haifa's Arabs were determined to destroy themselves, and they fled with no one in pursuit. Marie Syrkin, writing in Commentary magazine (January 1966), described the incredible scene: "... 60,000 Haifa Arabs began to flock wildly toward the port, seeking to escape by any craft available. Families crouched for days on the docks. ... This was a headlong stampede in which people seem to have jumped suddenly from a dinner table, from bed, or from their work, driven by an impulse to flee.” In town after town, the glorious, irrational Arab flight occurred. Tiberias's 6,000 Arabs stunned the 2,000 Jews on April 18 by suddenly fleeing. The Jewish community council issued a statement declaring: "We did not dispossess them ; they themselves chose this course. But the day will come when the Arabs will return to their homes and property in this town. In the meantime, let no citizen touch their property.” Hal Lehrman attests to this general Jewish attitude: "In the beginning, no one could conceive of a new Israel without a large Arab population. Even when they were already in full flight, the eventual return of most of the Arabs was taken for granted." Indeed, every official Israeli information sheet and all the Zionist writers go out of their way to emphasize that the Arab flight was neither caused by nor desired by the Jews. An inexplicable people. In 1978 Israel was rocked by a bitter debate over a film called Hirbet Hiza, which depicted the expulsion of Arabs from their village in 1948. The debate raged over whether such a thing could actually have happened. One side said it did happen; the other vigorously denied it or said that if it had occurred, "it was unrepresentative, not typical." The underlying assumption of both camps was that such an expulsion was "immoral." It is that kind of perverted "immorality" that has brought Israel to the brink of catastrophe. If there is any room for the wringing of hands, it is over the fact that the Jews did not understand the need for Hirbet Hiza. They, by their misplaced mercy, have brought potential cruelty and tragedy down on Israel and its Jews. The G-d of Israel continued to compel His foolish children to accept miracles. In Safad no fewer than 14,000 Arabs faced 1,500 Jews, mostly elderly religious Jews. One night the Arabs were there and the next morning they were gone.
All kinds of reasons for the flight of the Arabs are given by the very secular Jews, who in their own brand of irrationality wished them to remain: the Arab leaders ordered it; the British instigated it; the Irgun "massacre" at Dir Yassin panicked them; they left to make it easier for the Arab armies to sweep through. There were a hundred different "explanations," but not one explains the real, irrational panic that swept areas in which Arabs controlled the countryside and in which there was no fighting. It is hard for the secularist to recognize a miracle, since in running from it his back is usually to it. By May 15, 1948 -- the end of the British Mandate and the proclamation of the Jewish state -- some 200,000 Arabs had left. Jaffa added 70,000 who joined the panicky flight, and the city of Tel Aviv was thus saved from the perpetual nightmare of having more than 80,000 bitter enemies on its doorstep. In the next few months another 300,000 joined the rest. A miracle had indeed taken place; the majority of the Arabs had fled. A golden opportunity was at hand to clear the country of its enemies and save it from the tragedy of today. After all, what more natural thing than to rid the land of people who massacred Jews throughout the twenties and thirties and who had vowed to wipe the Jewish state off the map as soon as it was born? What would any other people have done under the same circumstances? We need not look very far for the answer. The German Minorities in Europe The European states of Poland and Czechoslavakia are classic examples of those that harbored in their midst a dangerous minority that brought them misery and grief. In both cases the minority was German, and both Poland and Czechoslavakia, having barely survived the catastrophe that their German minorities had brought them, at the first opportunity solved any potential future problems by firmly expelling them. The Poles had been a people without a state for well over a century. Their land having been divided among Russia, Austria, and Prussia, they finally attained independence again after World War I. A sizable group of Germans remained in the new Polish state, especially in its western provinces of Pomorze, Poznania, and Upper Silesia. Almost from the start, despite formal protestations of loyalty, the German minority did not change its true attitude toward the Polish state. There were many cases of spying in which the leaders of the German minority were often involved. In 1926 a spy ring was discovered in Upper Silesia, closely connected
with the Volksbund, the leading German Silesian organization. Ten prominent members of the organization were sentenced to imprisonment for treason. The Polish-German non-aggression pact of 1934 did not bring about any change in this attitude. Quite the opposite. Hitler was using his German ethnics for his dream of a "German Reich." The agents of the German government in Poznan, Pomorze, and Silesia offered secret credits on very favorable terms to German farmers, traders, and artisans in return for a promise to work for the return of the lands to the Reich. Things came to such a pitch in 1936 that the Polish government closed thirty branches of the Deutsche Vereinigung. In the following year the subversive activities of the organization Rat der Deutschen in Polen became so obvious that its president, Gero von Gersdorff, was arrested. In the same year the conspiracy of the National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei in Silesia was discovered. Its members swore loyalty to Adolf Hitler personally. In this trial 109 Germans were prosecuted, the majority being found guilty of treasonable activities and sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment. The existence of a German fifth column in Poland was the direct result of the Nazi doctrine. This doctrine refuted the idea that Germans living abroad owed any loyalty to the states of which they were citizens and stressed the exclusive importance of the blood link with the German nation. The consequences of such a doctrine were obvious enough: every German abroad, concious of his nationality, was an agent of the German Reich, of a Reich preparing for war. Poland was a victim of the work of the German fifth column. Hitler was immeasurably aided by the German minority in Poland and used it as an excuse to attack the Polish state. Not only were the Poles accused of mistreating the German minority, but the war was touched off by German demands for the annexation of Polish Pomerania, the "Polish Corridor," in order to obtain territorial continuity between Germany and East Prussia. With the speedy Nazi conquest of Poland, the western provinces were incorporated into the German Reich on October 26, 1939 as part of the German policy of annexing land on its borders that contained sizable numbers of ethnic Germans. (Other areas were Austria, through the Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Memel, and Danzig, as well as certain contiguous lands that were not in any way German [such as the rest of Poland and Czechoslavakia]). Hitler planned to remove all non-Germans from those areas over a period of ten to twenty years and replace them
with Germans. This led to the second part of the plan, the resettlement in this "Greater Germany" of all the ethnic Germans then living outside the Third Reich. Agreements to this effect were made with the various states involved to resettle Germans from Latvia, Estonia, the South Tyrol, East Galicia, Volhynia, Rumania, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Between 1938 and 1941 the German Reich increased its German population from ten million to nearly twenty-two million. Millions of Germans were settled in what had been Polish territory. At the end of the war the Poles counted their dead in the millions (not including its Jews), and the rape of the country by the Germans would never be forgotten. When the Soviets informed the Poles that they intended to annex a huge chunk of eastern Poland up to the Curzon Line (and, to ensure tranquillity for itself, expel some three million Poles westward), the Polish government demanded compensation. Stalin agreed that eastern Germany up to the Oder-Neisse River line would be given to Poland. The Yalta Conference gave its approval to the fait accompli. The Poles, having learned to their eternal grief what a hostile minority meant, determined that the German population in Poland would go. Never again would they allow the state to be subverted from within. They were joined by the Czechs, who had a similar problem and determined upon a similar solution. Three million Germans found themselves citizens of the new Republic of Czechoslavakia after the defeat of the Germans and AustroHungarians in World War I. They lived in an area that came to be known as the Sudetenland. When the area had been part of the AustroHungarian Empire, the Germans had looked with disdain and contempt on the supposedly inferior Slavic Czechs. All manner of political, economic, social, and cultural discrimination was practiced against them. The blow to German pride, therefore, when they found themselves a minority in a Czech Republic, was shattering. Many Sudeten Germans made no effort to conceal the fact that they were first and foremost Germans. In the Czech Parliament, when a speaker challenged their desire to belong to the Reich, Josef Mayer interpolated that the Sudetens would go to Germany "in the night and barefooted.” The rise of Hitler brought a tremendous upsurge of Sudeten German nationalism, and demands for autonomy along with all kinds of stories of persecution laid the ground work for Hitler's plans to annex the area and eventually seize all Czechoslavakia. The presence of the Germans in the Sudetenland gave Hitler his excuse. And so, in reference to Germans in Austria and Czechoslavakia, Hitler said on February 20, 1938: "Over ten
million Germans live in two of the states adjoining our frontier," and that it was Germany's duty to "protect" them. The German Nationalist Party in the Sudetenland, under Konrad Henlein, was an eager fifth column. On April 24, 1938, in a speech in Carlsbad, Henlein demanded "autonomy" for the German border regions. The Czechs, instead of acting forcefully, negotiated, giving both Hitler and the Sudetens greater boldness. Brazen protests and riots against the Czech government took place. On September 16 Henlein demanded annexation of the Sudetenland by the Reich. This was followed by Munich, the separation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslavakia, and the eventual collapse of the Czech Republic. After the terrible war, with humiliation and destruction the cost of its German minorities, the Czechs, too, understood the lesson. There would never again be a large number of Germans in the country to dream of separation and to give anyone an excuse to destroy the country. With or without anyone's permission, the Poles and Czechs were determined to get rid of their Germans. At Potsdam, however, in August 1945, Truman, Attlee, and Stalin informally agreed (adding Hungary, too) and thus provided an internationally legal basis for the expulsions. The "Big Three" agreed as follows: XIII. ORDERLY TRANSFERS OF GERMAN POPULATIONS The Conference reached the following agreement on the removal of Germans from Poland, Czechoslavakia and Hungary: The Three Governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German population or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslavakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner. The Poles and Czechs, with the memories of German atrocities fresh in their minds, were interested in rapid expulsion, "orderly and humane" or not. Large-scale expulsions had begun before the Potsdam Conference had ever convened, and millions were given twenty-four hours to leave. Billions of dollars in property was left behind. Not a penny of compensation was offered. The refugees arrived destitute and in misery. Time magazine (October 22, 1945) wrote: "It is a tale of horror. ..." In the West Pope Pius protested; an American Committee Against Mass Expulsion was formed; General W. Bedell Smith called it "repugnant and unacceptable." The Poles and Czechs could not have cared less.
Neither Pius nor the committee nor Smith was a Czech, or a Pole, or a European who had harbored a snake in his house and been bitten for his pains. An inscription on the gate of the Czech Internment Center at Budweis read: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." The same Time magazine article admitted: "But the Poles and Czechs who expel them will be thinking of the past and of the future. The German minorities in eastern Europe were not harmless, either as guests or, later, as masters.” Hungary, which also received "approval" at Potsdam, immediately expelled some 260,000 of its Germans. Rumania, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union did not bother even to raise the question - they simply acted. By 1950 the following number of Germans had been removed by their host countries: 6,817,000 Oder-Neisse Territories 2,921,400 Sudetenland 1,865,000 Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Memel-Danzig) This total of 11,603,400 does not include the German ethnics within the Soviet Union whose fate was not fully clear. In pre-World War II Europe, a huge German population had brought misery to the countries in which they resided as a minority. They would never do so again. The period between World War I and II in Eastern and Central Europe had seen the curse of the national minority groups. Each felt a far greater loyalty to its communal, ethnic people across the border than to its host country. Every area in which they lived in sizable numbers became a hotbed of irredentist calls for "autonomy" and separation. At least in the case of the Germans, the nations of the region determined to eliminate the problem. It is interesting to note, however, that in February 1946 Hungary and Czechoslovakia eliminated the mutual minority problem that had plagued them for decades. They agreed on a voluntary exchange of their respective minorities, transferring 31,000 Magyars to Hungary and 33,000 Slovaks to Czechoslovakia. When two people are heirs to wide and fundamental differences - ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural -- and when those differences
have led to decades of hate, hostility, and war, the most drastic solution is sometimes the most obvious and most easily accepted. In order to save both peoples the inescapable and permanent killings and suffering which are the fruits of the conflicting claims to the land, governments sometimes realize that the only solution is -- once and for all -- permanent separation. Sometimes this is done, as with the Germans, unilaterally; rarer are the instances of governmental agreement and cooperation. But there are outstanding instances in modern times in which logical, hardheaded governments understood that the existence of a large, hostile minority within its borders was a guarantee of future disaster and misery. Acting on that assumption, the enemy minority, the potential time bomb, was defused through removal. Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Balkans and Asia Minor were raging pits of nationalist intrigue. The Ottoman Empire was in an advanced state of decay and disintegration. In 1821, the Greeks had already succeeded in liberating part of the peninsula and had set up an independent state. Other nationalities followed, setting up their own independent states -- Rumania, Serbia, Montenegro, and, in 1878, Bulgaria. But other nationalities still seethed under the Ottoman yoke; parts oi the nationalities that had won their independence were still living as minorities within other national states, and the new nations still had claims not only against the Ottomans but against each other. Bulgaria was born thanks to its Great Power protector, Czarist Russia, which sent the Ottomans to a crashing defeat. The Turks were forced to sign the Treaty of San Stefano (1878), which called for a "Greater Bulgaria" extending from the Black Sea on the east to the Aegean on the south and as far west as Saloniki. This area took in not only Turkish territory and population but that claimed by Greeks and Serbs. When the Congress of Berlin (1878) forced the Bulgars to give back much of the territory, that now became in their minds "Unredeemed Bulgaria," including the whole of Macedonia and most of Thrace. The inevitable occurred. When the Balkan states in secret alliance defeated Turkey in the First Balkan War (1912), all of European Turkey was conquered except for the area around Constantinople (Istanbul). The victorious powers immediately began to quarrel over the spoils, and in the Second Balkan War (1913) Bulgaria was humiliatingly defeated. It vowed vengeance and the "redemption" of land and people.
As a result of the two wars and the Treaties of Bucharest and Constantinople, massive emigrations took place. More than 100,000 Turks fled the Balkans; 15,000 Bulgarians fled Macedonia for Bulgaria; 10,000 Greeks left the area of Macedonia ceded to the Serbs and Bulgars; 10,000 Greeks fled western Thrace, then occupied by Bulgaria. These fled on their own, but under the Treaty of Constantinople (1913) 48,570 Muslims emigrated from western Thrace to Turkey and 46,764 Bulgarians left Turkey's eastern Thrace for western Thrace. The Turkish-Bulgarian emigrations, although spontaneous, were nevertheless recognized by Turkey and Bulgaria in a protocol annexed to their 1913 peace treaty. For the first time the idea of an exchange of populations was formulated. It actually confirmed a fait accompli, but both states realized the ultimate wisdom of being rid of dangerous minorities. The Balkan - Asia Minor caldron bubbled on. The Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire came to the very correct conclusion that any of its territory inhabited by a strong national group guaranteed rebellion and separation. The Turks chose to solve the problem by giving the minorities the choice of being "Turkified" or eradicated. The Armenians suffered the most, with some two million massacred and many others expelled. But there was a general determination by the Turks to make the empire a homogeneous Turkish state. In 1914, 115,000 Greeks were expelled from eastern Thrace to Greece; 150,000 Greeks were sent from the Turkish coast of western Anatolia to Greece; and Turkey accepted 115,000 Muslims from Greece in exchange. Turkish propaganda calling upon Muslims living in other Balkan countries to come "home" to Muslim Turkey brought 135,000 more refugees. Meanwhile, the Bulgarians, seething with irredentist vengeance, joined the Central Powers in World War to regain land and people -- and once again lost. By 1919, after the war, 139,000 Bulgarians lived in land held by Greece. Greek Premier Venizelos understood that no permanent peace with Bulgaria could ever be achieved as long as a sizable Bulgarian population remained in land looked upon as "unredeemed" Bulgarian territory. It was therefore agreed by the Convention of Neuilly (1919) that for the sake of peace and stability, there would be reciprocal emigration of the Greek minority in Bulgaria and the Bulgarian minority in Greece. The treaty spared oceans of blood.
But the Greek-Turkish hatred raged on. During World War I some 600,000 Greeks and 300,000 Muslims had been separated. Turkey was now a defeated power, and Greece in 1920 initiated the Greco-Turkish War by occupying Smyrna and western Asia Minor. The Turks, however, under Ataturk, decisively defeated the Greeks in 1922, and the Greek army retreated from the area. In rapid succession, within a few months, almost the entire Greek population of western Asia Minor, Pontus, Eastern Thrace, and much of Constantinople - one million people - fled to Greece. To halt the apparently endless wars, the Turks and Greeks met and concluded the Lausanne Convention in 1923, on "compulsory population exchange" It was a triumph of good sense. Under it the flight of the Greeks was formalized, and under the auspices of a League of Nations international commission, the remaining 150,000 Greeks in Turkey (except for Constantinople) were forcibly repatriated. The convention provided for the compulsory transfer of most of Greece's Muslims - 400,000 people - to Turkey. The same international commission continued its work in this and other population exchanges. By the time it had completed its work in 1932, more than four million people in the Balkans and Turkey had been involved in deportations, flights, and forced exchanges. But no wars. In much the same manner, the very last Greek-Turkish problem, on Cyprus, was finally resolved. Decades of bitter hostility, communal riots, wars - there was, again, apparently no end to it. And then came the Turkish invasion and the flight of Turks north and Greeks south. The hostility remains, but the opponents are separated by a border. Today there is hate, and that is sad. But there is no bloodshed. India and Pakistan As Indian nationalism, led by men like Gandhi and Nehru, inexorably pushed Britain out of the subcontinent, the nation that was India, nearly 400 million people, was divided into scores of languages, religions, and sects. But, in particular, it was the broad category of Hindus versus Muslims that made the original British decision to grant the country independence impossible. In 1942 the British had proposed freedom for India with a pledge by the new country "for the protection of social and religious minorities.” The Muslims adamantly refused to rely on this promise. They made up only some 22 percent of the total population and did not trust the 68 percent Hindu majority. The reason? Difference; major and fundamental
difference. Under Muhammad AN Jinnah, they won the battle to partition the subcontinent into a Hindu "India" and a Muslim "Pakistan." But that clear understanding of the impossibility of living together in one state did not solve the problem of the minorities who would be living in a smaller version of an unpartitioned state. The nineteen million Hindus and Sikhs who would now become minority citizens in a fiercely nationalist Islamic Pakistan began nervously to consider the resentment that the Muslims, mostly poor farmers, had borne against the Hindu merchants and storekeepers. In turn, Choudharry Rahmat AN, founder of the Pakistan national movement, wrote: "To leave our minorities in Hindu lands is ... to forget the tragic fate that overwhelmed our minorities which - in more favorable times - ... we left in Sicily, Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, Austria, and Hungary. Where are they now?” The reality was not long in coming: massacres and communal riots. In the Punjab, where Muslims made up 57 percent of the total population. In Lahore and Amritsar, mobs, knives, and fires swept the cities. By June 23, 1947, at least 3,200 people had been killed in the Punjab alone. The Hindus and Sikhs began to flee. By July a quarter of a million Hindus had fled to India. Panic spread to other parts of the subcontinent. Hindus began to flee in terror from East Bengal. By 1948, 100,000 had run from Pakistan's capital of Karachi -- the fear of minority status, the fear of being strangers, the desire for sanctuary among their own people. The most horrible kind of murder and looting took place. It has been estimated that 200,000 people were killed in the Punjab alone. To quote one observer, "There was a positive lust for blood. ... Casualties resulted not merely from chance encounters but from systematic butchery and hunting down of victims.” People fled in every possible way: trucks, trains that were jammed beyond belief. Thousands died along the way. Nothing could stop the flight. Hindus and Muslims knew that only among their own people would they find safety. The largest single refugee column in history began arriving in October from Pakistan, more than 800,000 Hindus and Sikhs on foot, forming a forty-five-mile-long procession. A month later a column of 600,000 Muslims marched in the opposite direction. Official figures list 6 million Muslims as having fled India for West Pakistan and 4.5 million Hindu refugees from the latter. In addition, a total of some 8 million Hindus and Muslims moved between India and East Pakistan, a staggering exchange of population of 18 million people!
Their flight saved them from the horrors of communal savage strife. The existence in one land of people with deep hatred for one another, a history of mutual wars and killing, different in every way, could have led only to never-ending strife. Had the instinct of the people not driven them to flee, eventually they would have been expelled on an agreement reached between the two governments for compulsory exchange of populations. But the Jews did not do what common sense and Jewishness cried out for. Given the opportunity to complete that which the Alm-ghty had begun for them, the Jews of Israel failed to realize the vision and, in their failure of nerve and understanding, planted the seeds for the tragedy of today - and tomorrow. The pity is that there was beginning to be an understanding of the opportunity and the need. During the second half of the War of Independence, after May 1948, the magnificent "luck" of the flight of Arabs from Haifa, Jaffa, and West Jerusalem was correctly translated by Israelis into the difference between a "Jewish" state with 40 percent of its population composed of rapidly breeding Arabs versus a state with few or no hostile Arabs. And so, there were instances when that understanding gave birth to the good sense of self-preservation. The Arabs of Ramie and Lydda, two large and hostile towns, were expelled after their brief resistance had caused heavy Jewish casualties. Had they remained as an Arab concentration between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel's demographic and strategic situation would have been infinitely worse. There remained now the largest and most dangerous concentration of Arabs, those of the Galilee. And it appears that the Israelis gave serious thought to the expulsion of those Arabs, too. But they faltered. The all-Arab city of Nazareth is the capital of Arab Galilee and the heart of the Arab opposition to Israel. Its mayor, Tewfik Zayad, is the chief hater of Zionism in the country and the potential leader of the dangerous Israeli Arab minority. It is Nazareth that is the political and intellectual center for the Arabs. It is Nazareth that is the largest Arab town in Israel. It is there that the Land Day Rebellion of 1976 was hatched. Without a Nazareth and its numbers, leaders, and intellectuals, the Arab threat to Israel from within would be far less. And it was Nazareth that in 1948 was the key to the expulsion of Arabs from all the Galilee. The truth is that Israel, today, would be free of the Arabs of both Nazareth and the Galilee if not for the actions of a Canadian Jew who now resides in Canada with his Sabra wife, Yael. The name of the Canadian is 199 Ben Dunkelman. He, and all others who believe the Arabs should remain, caused Israel immeasurable damage. In his own words he claims to have saved the Arabs of Israel. By July 1948 the Jews of Israel, after bloody fighting, succeeded in turning the tide. Arabs had fled in panic from Jaffa, Lydda, Ramie, Haifa, and other cities, and the Jewish armies, which until just a few weeks earlier had been fighting to save the Jewish state and its Jews from the "massacre" promised by the Arab League director, were on the move. Now, the Galilee, the heart of the Arab resistance, was beginning to collapse. Dunkelman was the head of the Seventh Army Corps, the unit that captured Nazareth. Three years ago, he decided to capitalize on his experience and published a book ghostwritten by Peretz Kidron, entitled Dual Allegiance, which appeared in both English and Hebrew. From it we learn the startling fact that Dunkelman received orders to evacuate the entire Arab population of Nazareth and refused. It was this that "saved" Nazareth, prevented a general Arab flight from the Galilee, and left Israel with a ticking time bomb known as the Israeli Arab minority. Here is the actual account as written by Kidron at Dunkelman's direction: "Two days after the second truce came into effect, we were withdrawn from Nazareth. Avraham Yaffe, who had commanded the 13th battalion in the assault on the city, now reported to me with orders from Moshe Carmel to take over from me as its military governor. I complied with the order, but only after Avraham had given me his word of honour that he would do nothing to harm or displace the Arab population. My demand may sound strange, but I had good reason to feel concerned on this subject. "Only a few hours previously, Haim Laskov had come to me with astounding orders: Nazareth's civilian population was to be 'evacuated': I was shocked and horrified. I told him I would do nothing of the sort -- in view of our promises to safeguard the city's people, such a move would be both superfluous and harmful. I reminded him that scarcely a day earlier, he and I, as representatives of the Israeli army, had signed the surrender document, in which we solemnly pledged to do nothing to harm the city or its population. When Haim saw that I refused to obey the order, he left. "A scarce twelve hours later, Avraham Yaffe came to tell me he was relieving me of my post as military governor and I felt sure this order had been given because of my defiance of the 'evacuation' order. But although
I was withdrawn from Nazareth, it seems that my disobedience did have some effect. It seems to have given the high command time for second thoughts, which led them to the conclusion that it would, indeed, be wrong to expel the inhabitants of Nazareth. To the best of my knowledge, there was never any more talk of the 'evacuation' plan, and the city's Arab citizens have lived there ever since.” The tragedy, of course, is that the Arabs would have slaughtered every Jew they found had finally won. At the same time, they would gladly have accepted any Jewish terms that kept them alive, once they realized they were defeated. It was the disastrous, perverted "humanity" of Dunkelman, who later left Israel, that saved the Arabs and that today threatens Israel from within. The Arabs of the Galilee remained, as did clusters of thousands in Jaffa, Haifa, Ramie, Lydda, and among the Bedouins. Not only did Israel not remove them, but it increasingly began to accept back numbers of Arabs who had fled. Some 70,000 were allowed back under a "family reunification plan." Thousands of others illegally infiltrated and were allowed to remain. The Rhodes Agreement brought some 30,000 Arabs of the Triangle into Israel. They were the Arabs who remained to become the nucleus from which grew the present ticking time bomb. They remained to be the thorns in our eyes and the thistles in our sides of our time. They remained to grow in quantity, in brazenness, in danger to the existence of a Jewish state. They remained, but more than 700,000 Jews from Arab lands came to Israel. There was the opportunity for a multiple blessing: Jews to Zion, Arabs to their own lands. Hundreds of thousands of Jews coming home to their brethren from lands where they had lived for centuries but which were not theirs. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs leaving a land that was not theirs and finding a home among their brethren. In 1948 Jews lived in almost every Arab land in the Middle East and North Africa: Morocco, 300,000 Jews; Tunisia, 25,000; Algeria, 150,000; Libya, 40,000; Egypt, 75,000; Syria, 45,000; Iraq, 145,000; Yemen, 55,000; Lebanon, 20,000; Aden, 5,000. Of these, the overwhelming majority left the land of their birth, where their families had lived as minorities in official Muslim states without equal rights, and came home to their own people. They left behind a fortune in property, today worth billions of dollars, for which the Arabs never gave them a penny in compensation. The Jews from Greater Arabia came home, but the Israelis did not complete the
transfer of the Arabs from the Jewish state. Had they done so, there would have been an exchange of population that would have brought both Jews and Arabs back to their own people. It was a golden opportunity, lost. And in great measure, the failure to realize the opportunity of 1948 led to the catastrophic blunder of 1967, when the G-d of Israel gave His people a second opportunity -- this time to drive out their enemies from all of western Eretz Yisrael. Once again Israel failed -- this time, utterly, miserably. The Six-Day War of 1967 -- what a divine, golden opportunity! What a disastrous failure to seize it! They poured across the ancient land -- theirs. The children of Israel. The soldiers, children of a generation that went to the gas chambers, a thing the Gentile had come to equate with the Jews. Now they burst across the ground from which, just days earlier, the Arabs had boasted of the coming slaughter. The trap, the iron noose, which the Arabs had built around the Jewish state in May 1967 was shattered. "The trap is broken, and we have escaped!" (Psalms 124). Across the land -- theirs -- they poured. Judea, and its hills! Bethlehem, where David was born and where for two millennia Rachel stood weeping for the sons and daughters who now returned. Hebron, where the fathers and mothers of the nation lived and are buried. Samaria, with Shechem and Bet El and Shilo and Jericho and Gilgal and the ten tribes and Elijah and Hosea and -- history. Gaza, where Samson smashed the Philistines. ... And now, the children had returned, incredibly, swiftly, mightily, to free the land from the trespassers, to redeem the stolen homeland. What an opportunity! The Messiah knocked and history smiled and they touched fingers with their ancestors. Now, now was the opportunity to rid the land of those who a bare forty-eight hours earlier had danced in an orgy of Jew hatred, vowing to do unto Jewish men what they had done - partly - in the decades past and to inflict on Jewish women the horrors of which they were so capable. Now, now was the moment whose time had come. Now. How the Arabs expected to be slaughtered! How they knew what they would have done if the roles were reversed! In Hebron white flags flew from every window as the inhabitants shook in terror, remembering 1929. The sixty-seven murdered Jews rested heavily on their heads as they waited for Jewish vengeance.
Eight years later an Arab resident of the territories, Muadi AbuMinsha, told an Israeli reporter: "I could not bear the crushing defeat we suffered. I even feared a mass slaughter. But thank G-d, the Israeli soldiers did not slaughter us. ...” No, the Israeli soldiers did not slaughter them - and how they expected it! And how they would have fallen and kissed the soldiers' boots had they been told: "You know what you deserve. You know what you did and what we should do to you. You know what you would have done in our place. But we are not you: we are Jews, and we give you a chance to live. You have forty-eight hours to take all that you can and cross the Jordan. Out! They would have kissed Jewish feet and fled. Israel would have been free of them, and the ugly world that just days earlier had waited in expectation and anticipation of Jewish tragedy would have remained silent, so thunderstruck was it at the miracle of the SixDay War! And Israel would have been free of the cancer, the terrible specter of 800,000 more Jew haters. And Jews could have settled the length and breadth of the land, and we could have brought the redemption so much closer. ... But no, the gentilized and the Hellenists -- whose terror of man is an article of faith replacing awe and faith in G-d -- fled from greatness. It was the same fear of world reaction that saw orders given not to shell the Old City lest Christian and Muslim holy places be damaged. Jewish soldiers had to pick their way through the narrow streets and alleyways. Dozens were killed by sniper fire -- all needlessly, all murdered by Arab bullets and Jewish timidity. The Arabs were neither killed nor driven from Hebron. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, one of the architects of Jewish disaster, raced to the city to assure the Muslim Khadi ("priest") that the Cave of the Machpela would remain in Muslim hands. The cave in which are buried Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, and which had been barred for centuries to Jews, now would continue to be a Muslim site. Hebron would remain Arab, thanks to Dayan. It was the policy of a man who opposed attacking the Golan Heights for fear that the Soviet allies of Syria would intervene. It was the fear of a man who not only refused to expel the Arabs, but forcibly returned those who had already fled! The Arab village of Kalkilya, which touches Kfar Saba, was for years one of the most vicious nests of terrorists. Regularly,
the vipers would slither from Kalkilya to murder Jews. For years, Jews watched with gritted teeth and waited for the day ... In 1967 it came. The populace fled in panic. Thousands abandoned their village and swarmed eastward to the Jordan. Dayan ordered paratroopers to catch them and bring them back -- lest the world think that Israel was preparing a new wave of refugees. Heaven forbid! The miracle came and was rejected. The gold was turned by reverse alchemy into dross. Rather than being free of 800,000 enemies, the Jews allowed them to remain -- them and their endless number of children. They drain us of our money, kill our children, steal our land. In 1967 Muadi Abu-Minsha feared a slaughter. In 1975 he said: "Israel has no choice. ... I think the whole world recognizes the justice of the Palestinians. ... Arafat's plan is a good one and I think Israel should adopt it.” History will never forgive Israel its failure of nerve and fear of world opinion. The nation as a whole is already paying the price. Why did Israel -- why does she to this day -- steadfastly refuse to allow the Arabs who fled in 1948 to return? Because she understood that each is a foreign body opposed to the Jewish state and committed to a "Palestinian" people and country. Israel knew that the Arabs who would return were a fifth column both in the sense of their potential to act violently against the Jewish state and in their very numbers that could someday tilt the population scale in favor of an Arab majority. The idea of allowing these people to return was unthinkable. There is not the slightest logical, moral, or rational reason to allow the same thing to occur through the Arabs we did not have the good sense or courage to remove. The keeping of Arabs in Lebanon lest they destroy Israel from within and the refusal to move others now in Israel to Lebanon, despite the same danger, is utter madness. There is no moral obligation to allow one's home to be taken from him merely because the one who seeks it is already in the house. There is nothing unjust in removing those who would rob you of your own land before they can accomplish their desire. The question is not how can we remove the Arabs, but rather how can we not? To do nothing is the simplest and most simplistic policy. It will certainly spare this government, and perhaps the next, both the agony of having to take the bold and excruciating step and the price of not taking it. The deluge, the flood, will not come tomorrow. But come it certainly will, and sooner than we think. This generation already feels the first
searing heat that will become the terrible flood of fire. No, the question is: How can we possibly sit and not rid ourselves of the Arabs who seek to destroy us from within? What inexplicable loss of national preservation, will, and sanity makes the Jews of Israel hesitate to save themselves? We know that the Arab believes that we are thieves who stole his land. We know that he murdered Jews in the land from the beginning of the Zionist revival and attempted to destroy the Jewish state at birth. We know that under the best of circumstances he is a defeated enemy who suffered a humiliating disaster that turned him from a majority in the land into a minority in a Jewish state ruled by the Jewish people and whose character and destiny are stated de jure as being Jewish. We know that the Arab differs from us in every possible way -- ethnically, religiously, culturally, linguistically -- and that everything about the Jewish state is foreign to him. We know that he grows explosively in quantity (even as Jews do not), and that in the face of his huge population growth and the pitiful Jewish birthrate, aliya figures, and abortions, he will be a powerful and dangerous minority tomorrow, aiming -- under the democratic rights of the state -- to be a majority in the future. We know that he is educated and ever more radical, and that his students and intellectuals openly call for support of the PLO and a "Palestine" state rather than Israel. We know how many Arab Knesset members will be democratically elected and how, together with the Jewish left, they will be a force in the land. We know the Arab call for "proper" representation in the Knesset and cabinet. We know that whole regions of Israel have an Arab majority today and that there are cries for "autonomy," cries that escalate as they border on areas of the liberated lands that have been promised "autonomy." We know that calls have been made, and will grow louder, for annexing those parts of Israel to a "Palestine" entity that will emerge alongside them. We know that this is merely a prelude to demands to implement the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and to call for the return of the refugees who fled in 1948. We know that we dare not give up an inch of Jewish land of either the state or the liberated lands, for this would only bring the enemy closer to the heartland and the event for which he waits - - the destruction of Israel. We know that with the growth of a large enough minority, Israel will be turned into another Northern Ireland and Cyprus with regular bombings, demonstrations, riots, killings. We know that there will be no escape from worldwide condemnation and sanctions. We know the economic and social disintegration to which the Arab contributes.
We know the vast amounts of funds spent on the Arab sector at a time when the economic burden on the state is a staggering one and Jewish social and economic problems worsen for lack of money. We know the vast amounts of state land taken by the Arab and the thousands of illegal buildings he has put up. We know the corrupting influence of cheap Arab labor and the ever-growing reliance on the Arab worker whose strikes can paralyze whole sections of the economy. We know the ugliness of intermarriage, prostitution, and sexual contacts between the Arab and Jewish women. We know the support the Arab has in the form of the Arab states and universal world opinion. We know how he senses Israeli weakness, division, and retreat. We know the confidence he has that time is on his side and the boldness that he displays. We remember the horrible rape of Jewish women and the brutal mutilation of Jewish men when he was the majority. We know the sheer hate he feels for the Jews and the state and what he would do if ever, G-d forbid, he would have the opportunity. All this Israel knows, and yet she fails to leap to her feet and rid herself of the danger to her very existence. The most basic sense of selfpreservation calls for a policy of making life as difficult as possible for the Arabs to induce them to leave. Israel, however, for more than thirty years, has done precisely the opposite. Israel has made every possible effort to make life in Eretz Yisrael better and better for the Arabs. The Arab of Israel receives national insurance and welfare; Israel subsidizes his babies and encourages him to have more; he is not force to do any national service whatsoever and so can make money from the ages of eighteen to twenty-one while the Jew must serve in the army. He pays little or nothing in taxes while the Jew groans under the burden. He squats on government land and builds houses illegally, and the authorities look the other way. Is it any wonder that he prefers to remain and plot to destroy Israel from within? The liberated lands of 1967 are the classic example. Not only did the Israeli government, and Dayan in particular, throw away the golden opportunity of ridding Eretz Yisrael of the Arabs of Judea-Samaria-Gaza, but they announced a policy that guaranteed that they would happily remain. An "open-bridge" policy was implemented, allowing Arab farmers of the area to ship their products to Jordan and other Arab countries. This not only saved the Arab farmers from ruin but opened the door to an era of affluence they had never known. Immediately after the war a huge agricultural surplus existed which had always been shipped to Jordan and the Persian Gulf. The entire rural population of JudeaSamaria depended on this. Had the surplus spoiled, it would have been an
economic disaster for the Arab farmers and a less-than-subtle signal that life under the occupation would be very difficult. But the Israelis, incredibly, saved Judea-Samaria Arabs from economic collapse. Joel Marcus, dovish writer for the liberal paper Ha'Aretz, painted an idyllic picture of all this in the Jewish Agency's publication Midstream (June-July 1968): "Thanks to the trade ... the West Bank was saved from economic collapse. Since the war, over $40 million worth of goods have passed over the Jordan in both directions. Everywhere in the West Bank trucks can be seen loading the harvest; when they get to the Allenby bridge, they change their Israeli license plates for Jordanian ones and continue on to Amman where their cargo is sold to its traditional customers.” The government has made the Arabs of Judea-Samaria-Gaza richer than they ever dreamed they could be. Large sums of money have been poured into these areas, and the best of Israeli technology has trained and advanced the Arabs there. And so, Israel was delighted to learn on April 4, 1976, that "agricultural production in the administered territories [sic] has grown at a faster rate than anywhere since 1968!" The speaker was Reuven Eiland, director general of the Ministry of Agriculture. He gladdened Jewish hearts by announcing that in eight years the average per capita income of Judea-Samaria farmers grew from $133 to $666 (a jump of 500 percent!) and that this income was 4.5 times higher than the average Egyptian farmer's. He added that "apart from receiving professional help from Israel, they also get credit, loans, and export incentives.” Workers from the territories poured into Israel to work for cheap wages, eliminating Jewish jobs, creating a steady pool of cheap "dirty labor" that destroyed the Jewish work ethic, and making Israel dependent on them. They did not pay taxes, and the territories became boom areas with houses built right and left, appliances filling homes that now had electricity, toilets, and things never imagined before the Israelis came. And the Arabs were allowed an incredible amount of local autonomy and freedom. In Marcus's words, "Was there ever an occupation under which people could move so freely ... and not encounter a single armed soldier?" Marcus's bliss was shared by Peace Now sympathizer Shiomo Avineri, former director-general of the Foreign Ministry. Writing in Commentary magazine (June 1970), he exclaimed: "The kind of military administration set up by Israel ... was a brilliant improvisation. ... The general idea was that the less the military administration meddled in the daily affairs of the population, the better, and the result is that today Arab 207 municipal self-government on the West Bank and in Gaza remains intact and Jordanian and Egyptian laws are still the law of the land.” Of course, the real result of this "brilliant improvisation" was that Israel's failure to declare sovereignty over what it told the world was Jewish territory merely convinced one and all that the Jews were indeed "occupiers" and thieves. And the low profile of the Jews and their leaving in place Arab laws and municipal self-rule were convincing proof to the local Arabs that the Israeli's presence was only temporary. It was this disastrous policy that kept the Arabs from leaving, that blocked Jewish sovereignty, and that eventually led to the riots, killings, and rebellion of today. The architect of the disastrous policy was Moshe Dayan, whose contributions to Israeli tragedy will yet be fully outlined in the history that will be written of our times. Dayan is a man with an extraordinary ability to adopt contradictory positions. In a 1968 newspaper interview on the occasion of Israel's Independence Day, Dayan gave the following insight into his views on the territories - and himself. After calling for ensuring that contact with the Arab countries not be cut off, he continued: "We Jews must not interfere too much in their domestic affairs, such as their educational system, their law courts, the way they elect their leaders, and representatives, their newspapers, etc. We must let them live their own lives. If these two conditions are met, I don't think that the Arabs of the West Bank would mind if Jews were to live in Hebron. ... All in all, in terms of the Arabs' readiness to live side by side with us, I believe that the prospects are better today than they have ever been before." No comment is necessary at all. The results of the enlightened and "brilliant improvisation" can be seen in the years of riots, rebellion, hatred, and murder of Jews. The massacre of six Jews in Hebron, the stoning of soldiers, the bombing of buses -- all these occurred because of the policy. Israel's liberal policy went so far as to allow elections for mayors in Judea-Samaria in April 1976. The results were a sweeping victory for PLO supporters in almost every municipality. "The Israelis are shocked -- they didn't expect such results," crowed Ramallah's Karim Khalaf. Rioting and uprising became so bad that the foreign minister of Israel on January 23, 1979, warned the Arabs of Judea-Samaria and Israel that if they allowed themselves to be "carried away by the mood of fanatical Islam," they would "pay very dearly for it." Strange words from Mr. Begin's foreign minister, whose name was Moshe Dayan. ... 208 Bankruptcy -- an Israeli policy that is worse than total failure. It is a heartbreaking tragedy. An opportunity was granted Israel in 1967 to rid itself of all the Arabs of the territories, who even a child could understand would be a bone in Israel's throat. Dayan, the government, Israel -- in fear of world opinion -- rejected it. Israel today pays the price. A policy of liberalism that allows the Arabs a life of material gain and freedom guarantees their remaining in the land and attempting to destroy Israel from within. They must leave the country for their own lands -- that must be Israeli policy. As part of that policy, life must be made very difficult for them. That is the way to encourage emigration and spare Israel tragedy. I urge the adoption of a program to deal with the Arab problem in Eretz Yisrael, with its basis the real rational and Jewish relationship of citizen, nation, and state. I urge the adoption of the following program to clarify the character of the nation, the state, and its citizens and the position of its noncitizens; and to prepare the framework for the transfer of Arabs from the Land of Israel (the state and the territories liberated in 1967): The land, the state, exists to serve the people. Only tyrants say the opposite. In the beginning there was the family, tribe, clan, people. They have a common origin, history, heritage, destiny. The land has a definite, specific function. It exists to serve the people as a vessel to hold them and to allow them to live their unique way of life, to achieve their national purpose and heritage. The state is a tool to serve that purpose and to enable the people to achieve their fulfillment. Neither state nor land has a will or authority of its own. The identity and character of the land and state are decided upon and granted by the people. The land and state do not command, they obey; they do not order, they serve; they exist only for the purpose of the people whose name is attached to them. The people are the masters and proprietors of the land, and as such they are the citizens of it. Those who are not members of the family, tribe, clan, people, nation, clearly have no ownership, proprietorship, or legal ties to the land. They cannot be citizens since they are not members of the people, the nation. Strangers can, of course, become part of the people and nation through the process and discipline of Judaism and halakhah. But that is the only way they can become citizens of the state. What rationality is there to claim that a piece of land has the will, authority, and power to convey to those who live on it citizenship, regardless of who they are? It is human beings who define the land, not 209 the land that defines the human beings. One does not become an "Israeli" because one lives in the land. For the land itself is defined by the will, ownership, and title to it of the people of Israel. One can be an "Israeli" when belonging to the people of Israel, when joining the nation, the people, not simply by living on the piece of land that is the mere servant and vessel of the people. And so, the right of non-Jews to live in the Land of Israel is a thing to be decided upon by the owners of the land, its citizens - the Jews, under the Jewish concept of resident stranger (ger toshav). Residence or removal of noncitizens is decided by the owners of the land according to that concept and what is good and right for the people and nation whose land and state it is. With this as a basis, let it be declared that: 1. The identity between the state and the nation shall be the sole basis of citizenship in the State of Israel. The State of Israel belongs to and exists only for the Jewish nation and is therefore the Jewish state, the home in which the Jewish nation lives. It is therefore only membership in the Jewish nation which gives citizenship in the Jewish state. All members of the Jewish nation -- without exception and whoever they may be -- are entitled to automatic citizenship in the Jewish state, and no one who is not a member of the Jewish nation can acquire such citizenship. Membership in the Jewish nation and people can be acquired through the process and discipline of Judaism and halakhah. Non-Jews can live in the land without citizenship and political rights, up to a number whose maximum is limited by the security consideration of the state and Jewish people. No state, no matter what the attitude of the noncitizens, can allow unlimited numbers of them to live in the country. The resident permits of all resident strangers shall be good for one year and shall be reviewed at the end of every year. 2. Every Arab resident of Eretz Yisrael shall be offered a voluntary transfer to an Arab or, if possible, a non-Arab land. Those who accept shall be given full compensation for property, plus a cash bonus, as well as first priority for visas for the West (with occupational training if necessary). Fair compensation for property shall be fixed by an impartial body with payments to be made in regular, reasonable installments. The body shall include members of the Jewish and Arab communities. Payments to Arabs for their property shall be made with consideration for the debts owed those Jewish communities. Arab oil states shall be asked to contribute the money they received for the property expropriated without compensation from the Jews who were expelled from Arab lands. This offer of compensation and bonus shall be good for two months so as to 210 enable all Arabs in the land to consider it carefully. After that, step 3 of the program will take effect. 3. Arabs who decline the offer shall be asked to make a pledge of their loyalty to the Jewish state in which they accept the Land of Israel as the home of the Jewish people and recognize total Jewish sovereignty ove r it, as well as the absolute and exclusive right of the Jewish people to it Those who do so shall remain as residents and noncitizens of Israel with no national sovereignty and no political and voting rights, since they are not members of the Jewish nation. They shall have individual rights to live their own cultural, economic, religious, social, and communal lives, without those government benefits available only to citizens. The state shall limit the number of noncitizens in accordance with security considerations. 4. Those who refuse to accept noncitizen status shall be compensated for property, but not given a bonus, and shall be transferred only to Arab - not Western - lands. The transfer shall be effected peacefully, if possible, but if the Arab still refuses, then forcibly and without compensation. The Arabs who are transferred shall be taken to the Lebanese or Jordanian borders or to the area separating Israel and Egypt. 5. Remaining Arabs who have pledged loyalty to the Jewish state, but who shall subsequently be found guilty of national or security offenses, and all those who knowingly aid such people shall not be imprisoned but shall be deported without compensation. 6. The world Jewish community shall be thoroughly informed on the problem and especially on the consequences of failing to carry it out World Jewry shall be asked to mount an emergency campaign to finance the emigration program. 7. In the meantime, there shall be a campaign to persuade the Arabs to leave voluntarily. Arabs shall be required to serve for three years in a work corps beginning at the age of eighteen, and for one month every year thereafter. No Arab shall be allowed to study in a university without a declaration of loyalty to the Jewish state. 8. Taxes shall be collected fully from the Arabs of Israel, unlike the present policy which allows a vast amount of tax evasion. Similarly, a firm and vigorous policy will prevent land seizure and illegal building by Arabs. 9. National insurance payments shall be limited to Jews only.
10. There shall be created, within the context of national army service, labor battalions for Jews, which will train them in physical, manual labor and occupational vocations. A campaign to hire Jewish workers shall be given top priority. The question of the poor and deprived in Israel is one that is loaded with potential for explosion. The desperate problem of young couples unable to find decent housing because of the staggering costs; the pitiful state of education; the lack of schools and centers to impart values and training; the escalating costs of food and all basic items -- all add up to a social problem that could erupt into riots and civil war. The shchunot ("neighborhoods") are centers of conflict between rich and poor, Sephardim and Ashkenazim. Money is needed for housing, jobs, basic needs. There simply has not been enough money until now. The transfer of the huge bulk of Arabs from the country will enable the government each year to transfer many billions in funds previously spent on the Arab sector to the impoverished Jewish classes. The left bemoans the fact that there is not enough money for both the poor and the new settlements. Nonsense! The moneys that are today spent on Arab national insurance, welfare, schools, health facilities, roads, sanitation, and all the other services can be made available for Jewish needs. Removal of the Arabs will be a giant step toward removal of both enemy and poverty. There are many benefits. The Arab property -- homes, fields, and villages -- that will be bought by the government can be made available to young couples under a population-dispersal program, which will be a boon to the country strategically, socially, and economically. The exodus of the Arabs will put an end to the wholesale seizure of state land, which would then become available for settlements of all kinds. The exodus of Arab workers, far from being a permanent blow to the economy, will prove a blessing. Because of the availability of plentiful and cheap Arab labor, Jews began to shun manual, physical labor. The result was a sick, unhealthy society in which Jews used and then came to depend on Arabs to do the vital but unsavory tasks without which no society can exist. Not only did the Arabs create a crisis in terms of a dangerous Jewish disdain of physical labor, but as a result Jews stopped working, and this created a critical shortage of Jewish labor. This, in turn, made Arab labor no longer a luxury but a necessity. The reliance on Arab labor is both a national disgrace and a danger. In addition, the hiring of Arab children and women to work for slave wages and in outrageous conditions not only
takes jobs from Jews who cannot work for such low wages, but is a moral shame and outrage that corrupts the Jewish character. In addition, of course, there is the stark fact of growing physical strength on the part of Arabs who do hard manual labor while Jews grow soft. This had led to the attacks on Jews in cities of "mixed" population. And the very fact that factories hire Arabs brings them into the cities, where the incidence of crime and sexual attacks soars. All this will, of necessity, be changed. When there are no Arab workers, the Jews will be forced to work. When there is no choice, Jewish employers will be forced to pay decent wages. When there is a national work shortage, the government will be forced to adopt an emergency policy of Jewish labor. "Work battalions" will be created within the army or other national service. Every young soldier will be given intensive training in occupational vocations and experience in basic manual labor. No student will be able to graduate high school or enter a university without having spent part of each year giving national service in the form of manual labor. The removal of the Arabs from the land will throw open the territories as a challenge to world Jewry, especially the young. The opportunity to settle everywhere in the biblical portions of Israel and, thus, truly meet Jewish historic destiny can be presented to them as it has never been until now. Opponents of Arab emigration call such plans "incitement to revolution." But the truth is that the very existence of the State of Israel already assures that. It is the presence of Jews and Jewish institutions in East Jerusalem, the government's plans to "Judaize" the Galilee, the very existence of Tel Aviv and an "Israel" in place of a "Palestine," that incite and assure Arab hatred and dreams of revenge. The idea of transferring Arabs out of Eretz Yisrael is not new. Joseph Weitz of the Jewish National Fund saw the Arab problem clearly and wrote: "It should be clear that there is no room for both peoples to live in the country ... and in that case there is no alternative to moving the Arabs to the neighboring countries, moving them all, except, perhaps, those living in Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the Old City of Jerusalem. ..." (Joseph Weitz, Diaries and Letters to the Cliildren, Tel Aviv, 1965, p. 181). Weitz was a strong proponent of the Judaizing of the Galilee and was influenced by veteran Joseph Nahmani of the Jewish National Fund. Nahmani's understanding of the problem is seen in the memorandum sent to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion in January 1953 concerning the
problem of the Arabs in the Galilee: "The very existence of a unified Arab group in this part of the country is an invitation to the Arab states to press their claims to the area. ... When the time comes, it will play the part played by the Germans in Czechoslavakia at the beginning of World War II. ...” An angry Professor Ephraim Urbach told a symposium on the Arabs in 1968: "I read an interview with the author Haim Hazaz [one of Israel's most prestigious writers], in which he simplistically suggested solving the problem of the Arabs as follows: the war cost us three billion pounds -- let's take three billion more pounds and give them to the Arabs and tell them to get out" (Midstream, April 1968). Urbach is a well-known dove. He did not find Hazaz's views, in his words, "edifying." Perhaps not, but Urbach has no answer at all. In 1937 the British Royal Commission under Lord Peel proposed as a possible solution to the Jewish-Arab conflict the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. As part of this plan the transfer of some 200,000 Arabs from the proposed Jewish state to the Arab one was proposed. A great debate arose in the Zionist movement over this, and especially in the largest of the groups, the Laborite Mapai. Two of the central figures in the party, who were also among the leading figures in the Zionist movement, came out strongly for the transfer. Berl Katzenelson, ideologician and spokesman, declared: "The question of the transfer of population has aroused controversy: Is it permitted or forbidden? My conscience in this is perfectly clear. A distant neighbor is better than a close enemy. They will not lose by their transfer and we certainly will not. In the last analysis, this is a political reform settlement for the benefit of both sides. For a long time I have felt that this is the best of the solutions, and during the times of trouble I understand even more strongly that one of these days this thing must come about. I did not, however, imagine that the transfer 'outside of Eretz Yisrael' would mean to the area of Shechem. I believed and still believe that they will yet move to Syria or Iraq ..." (1937). The other proponent of removal of the Arabs from the proposed Jewish state was the future first prime minister of Israel. On July 29, 1937, David Ben-Gurion said: "If it is possible to move Arabs from village to village to village within the boundaries of the British mandate - it is difficult to find any political or moral reason not to transfer the same Arabs from an area under Jewish rule to one that will be under Arab rule. ... Even under the maximum moral scruples it is impossible to object to a transfer that guarantees the transferees both satisfactory material conditions and maximum national security. For the Arabs who will be 214 settled in an Arab state, this transfer will be a full and total satisfaction of their national aspirations.” Some of the best-known early Zionist spokesmen discussed the transfer of Arabs. Arthur Ruppin, in May 1911, suggested that the Zionists buy land near Aleppo and Homs in northern Syria for the resettlement of Palestinian Arabs. Both Leo Motzkin and Nahum Sokolow, later to become president of the World Zionist Organization, considered the idea of transfer. The most consistent and persistent advocate of the concept was the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, who sought a state for the Palestine Arabs in Arabia. There is the beginning of an awakening. In 1972, when I first raised the issue in public in a speech at Haifa University, universal reaction was hotly negative. Prime Minister Golda Meir publicly charged that had offended the sensibilities of the Arabs, and editorials and columnists vilified me. One of the most bitter attacks was by nationalist "hawk" Moshe Shamir. In 1973 charges of incitement were filed against me when the Jewish Defense League of Israel (Kach) launched a campaign among the Arabs of Israel offering to aid those who wished to emigrate. Not only did Arabs from all over Israel and the territories respond, but an Israeli Arab from the Galilee village of Fasuta, Emanuel Khoury, worked fulltime in the region and gathered many names. The lesson to be learned from this is that a sizable number of Arabs would be eager to leave the country for some Western state. This should hardly surprise anyone, for are there not many Israeli Jews who happily do the same? In the years that followed, difficult years for myself and the Kach movement, persistence and determination in the face of arrests and vilification were rewarded. Not only is there a dramatic change in the attitude of the general public vis-a-vis the need to transfer the Arabs, but various personalities have begun to speak out on the subject. To be sure, they have not yet the courage or understanding to call for a compulsory transfer of all Arabs who will not accept conditions of noncitizen residency, and they still speak of "voluntary emigration," but they are beginning to move in the right direction. They are proof of the power of small but determined catalysts. And so in January 1979 Meir Har-Zion, one of the best-known heroes of the Israeli army, wrote concerning the Arabs: "I do not say we should put them on trucks or kill them. ... We must create a situation in which for them, it is not worth living here, but rather in Jordan or Saudi or any other Arab state.”
Har-Zion was applauded by Israel's most famous songwriter, Naomi Shemer ("Jerusalem of Gold"), in an article in the Labor newspaper Davar (February 9, 1979): "Arab emigration from Israel, if done with mutual respect and positive agreement ... can be the correct answer.” And during a debate in the Knesset on Arab terrorism in the territories, Likud Knesset member Amnon Linn said (May 18, 1976): "We should begin mass expulsion of entire communities that participated in demonstrations and riots - and transfer them across the border. This is said for women, men, and children.” They are still a minority of public voices and have not yet understood the totality of what must be done or lack the courage to say so. But they have come a long way. Above all, many Israelis, particularly in the Sephardic communities, do understand and will support a policy of Arab transfer under voluntary or compulsory conditions. In the meantime, life for the Arabs of Israel must cease to be one of avoiding obligations while enjoying material wellbeing and waiting for demography to put an end to Israel. Life must be made difficult for them as part of a definite campaign to induce them to leave the country. There must be an end, first of all, to the wholesale evasion of taxes and land laws. There should be set up an efficient governmental office, working with the Border Patrol, to track down every piece of state land that has been the target of squatters. All illegal buildings must be demolished and stiff fines and prison terms levied, but with the possibility of their being waived in return for a promise to emigrate. All state lands that were leased to Arabs under the government's change of policy in the late seventies should have their leases terminated. The "Judaizing" of the Galilee and the Triangle should be openly admitted - with all its good and sufficient reasons - and expropriation of land with compensation vigorously executed. The large number of Bedouins and Arabs from Judea-Samaria-Gaza who have illegally entered Israel must be heavily fined and then deported. In addition, a special tax department working with the police must see that every Arab pays his fair share of taxes - income, value-added, and others. Stiff fines and levies on property should be the punishments, and justice should be swift and sure. The Arab youth must prepare to serve for three years in a work corps at the age of eighteen, and for a period of a month each year after that, just as his Jewish counterpart serves in the armed forces and national service. The freedom of the Arab from such service enables him to work
and save money during the long periods that the Israeli Jew must sacrifice while in national service. This consideration of no national service, little or no taxes, and land seizure is intolerable, and, of course, it goes far to defeat any incentive for the Arab to leave. This must change, as must the present system of university education for the Arab, regardless of his views. The process whereby Jews allow their universities to be production lines and training grounds for the intellectual leaders of the PLO cannot continue. Any Arab who wishes to study at a university will have to pledge his acceptance and support of the Land of Israel as the exclusive and permanent home -- of the Jewish people. If he is not willing, he has no place in a Jewish university. The governmental funds that now go to scholarships for Arab students should be shifted to the Jewish Agency, which will give the money to deserving, needy Jews. Stiff punishments should be exacted on all employers who hire Arab workers for less than the official or going wage. Similar heavy fines and jail sentences should be meted out for hiring young children and for keeping workers in unhealthy and dangerous working conditions. Morally such things are indefensible, and from an economic standpoint they encourage the hiring of Arabs because of the lower expense to the employer. These employers should be encouraged in every way to hire Jews. And finally, national insurance, which among other things subsidizes the high Arab birthrate, must be transferred to the Jewish Agency, which as a nongovernmental organ will give benefits only to Jews. The process of encouraging the huge Arab birthrate that is designed to put an end to the Jewish state smacks of irrationality. The goal of a fair and humane transfer of Arabs from Eretz Yisrael, with full compensation and as part of an exchange of populations, will be immeasurably advanced through the ending of conditions that only encourage Israeli Arabs to remain and comfortably wait for their "Palestine" state to replace "Israel." Life must be made difficult and uncomfortable so that emigration will ultimately be the better of the Arab's choices. The program of Arab transfer will be the target of unprecedented hate and vilification from both inside and outside Israel. Even so, the greatest obstacle to its success does not lie in the reaction of the Gentiles, but in the anticipated fanatical extremism of its Jewish opponents. There is a loud and influential contingent of Israeli Jews who would sooner see Israel come to an end as a Jewish state than transfer the Arabs 217 out of the country. They will be joined by large numbers of American Jewish liberals and the Jewish Establishment. These will be driven both by their gentilized, liberal concepts and by fear of the repercussions of such a move for them as a minority in the Exile. Their presence is already noted in their shrill attack on the Jewish settlements and demands for retreat from large sections of the liberated lands. They are essentially non-Zionists, despite their vigorous denials. Their basic tendencies are toward universalism, not nationalism, and their very ties to Jewishness are tempered with guilt as the contradictions between the particularism and separatism of Judaism conflict with nonbarrier universalism and nonsectarian brotherhood. These contradictions have been sorely tested in the past decade over the Arab issue, in any event. The question of transferring Arabs out of the land will drive them to a frenzied condemnation of Israeli policy. Their danger is their influence on large numbers of simple, good American and Western Jews. The simplistic and demagogic use of labels such as "immoral," "inhumane," "un-Jewish," and "Nazi-like" is likely to find a troubled, sympathetic ear with the ordinary, decent Jew. Thus, we will pay for all the years of deceit and delusions. For all those decades Jewish and Israeli leaders refused to tell the truth about the remedy of the Arab problem in the Land of Israel. They preferred to avoid it and to lie to world Jewry. It is not surprising that any sudden policy that calls for transfer of the Arabs will meet with astonishment and guilt. It is imperative that there begins, today, a campaign among world Jewry to explain the full extent of the Arab hatred and danger. The complete truth must be told to the masses of good Jews both to justify the need to remove the Arabs and to expose the dangers of the liberal Establishment bloc. The Jewish opposition from within - that is the obstacle to successful transfer of Arabs and the saving of the Jewish state. There is no gentile problem, only the Jewish one of self-destruction. The problem is the Jew who stupidly equates the transfer of Arabs with Hitler's genocide of the Jews, as if we were advocating gas chambers or the killing of the Arabs in any form! As if the separation of Jews and Arabs will not save Arab and Jewish lives both! As if it is not precisely the policy of the perverted moralists that will lead eventually to the horrible bloodbath the Jewish realists see all too well! How outrageously dishonest is the equation. How they cheapen and demean the terrible historical uniqueness and horror of the Holocaust, 218 those intellectual dwarfs who equate it with any event they cannot abide! Did the Jews of Germany say that the land was really theirs, stolen from them by the Germans, and that they would work until the day they became the majority and take the land and make it "Judea"? If they did, the Jews of Hitler's time can be equated with the Arabs. Did the Jews of Europe massacre Germans, rape their women, burn their settlements, and vow to drive them into the sea? If they did, Europe's Jews and Israel's Arabs are the same. And if they did -- if Germany's Jews killed Germans and sought to take their state from them -- Germans would have been justified in removing them from Germany and saving their country. But if, as really happened, the Jews sought, not to destroy Germany, not to separate from Germany, not to be independent of Germany, but to be good, loyal, fervent, assimilated Germans, then what the Germans did was horrible, and what the Jews who equate the murderous Arabs with the murdered Jews do is obscene. With no apologies, no defensiveness, no hesitation, the Jew rejects with contempt the gentilized Hebrews and the neoHellenists. He knows the Jewish response to threats to destroy people and state: "If one comes to slay you, slay him first" (Sanhedrin, 72d). "Do not be overly righteous" (Ecclesiastes 7). "Said Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish: He who becomes merciful unto the cruel is destined to be cruel unto the merciful.” How cruel are the overly righteous, the carriers of perverted morality, the unthinking, the gentilized. How many Jewish women and children will die because of the mercy of the overly righteous to the cruel? The foolish children, the twisted adults, all calling in the name of "humanity" for the destruction of the Jewish state – they will be the problem, nothing else. But there are questions: How can we persuade the Arabs to leave? The answer is: We do not come to the Arabs to request, argue, or persuade. The government that comes to power will remember the past and the hopes of the Arabs to repeat it. It will not request. The Arab will be given the choice of accepting non-citizenship and the difficult new conditions that status will entail, of leaving willingly with compensation, or of leaving unwillingly without compensation. He has no other options, and the election of a strong, iron-handed government whose reputation and determination to implement this program at all cost are known to the Arab will keep resistance to a minimum. There will be a small percentage who will agree to the conditions of the noncitizen resident stranger. They will be mostly elderly people.
They will remain. The majority, however, will accept reality. Knowing that eventually they will have to leave in any event, the largest group will accept the compensation, bonus, and hoped-for visa to the West. They will leave willingly. Ideally, the Western nations will be convinced that it is both the most humane thing and in their own interests to accept Arabs in their countries. A decade ago the United States took in more than a quarter of a million refugees from Cuba. It was more than a display of generosity. Having moved to the brink of nuclear war during the KennedyKhrushchev confrontation, Washington saw in the growing tension and anti-government agitation within Cuba a danger that the United States would become involved yet again in a showdown with the Soviets. This time there was not a chance that the Russians would back away, and America was no longer prepared to go to war for principles. The decision was made to take in large numbers of anti-Castro Cubans who might rise up against the government. It was a political decision intended to defuse a potential time bomb. The same lesson should be taught the Western powers in regard to the Middle East. The Israeli government must make strenuous efforts to convince them that if they truly seek peace and tranquility in the region so as to ensure stability and the orderly flow of oil, the problem of the Arabs within Israel must be solved. There will be no peace in the region, no matter what agreements are reached with outside Arab governments, if the Arabs remain within the Land of Israel. They must inevitably rise up, forcing the Arab states to come to their aid. Any and all agreements reached between Israel and her neighbors will be worthless as the region explodes in war. Oil boycotts will be declared as the anger of the Arab world is directed against the West, and the shaky thrones of the pro-Western, feudal Arab monarchs will come crashing down, with all that that implies for the West. There will be no peace as long as the Arab-Jewish problem festers in Eretz Yisrael, and it is to the vital interests of the Western nations to agree to accept Arab emigrants from Eretz Yisrael. The United States, though theoretically bound by quotas, makes much immigrant policy on an ad hoc basis. In the past quarter-century more than a million refugees from Cuba, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and other countries have been allowed into the United States under the attorney general's "parole" power. Congress has also made exceptions to the law in response to particularly critical events as they have occurred.
The Arabs of Eretz Yisrael are intelligent and good workers, and there is need in the West for those willing to do the important but unsavory jobs that go begging for lack of local hands. In addition, the shortage of skilled workers in particular sections of the economy is acute, and a careful survey by Israel of the peculiar needs of each Western country could lead to a training program for Arabs tailored to specific skills in demand in the West. There will be those who will refuse to leave willingly. They will be the worst of haters and the most dangerous of the Arabs, those whose transfer is most urgent. Their removal from the country must be accomplished quickly and without hesitation. These Arabs will be transported to the Lebanese or the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which joins all the rest in working toward the elimination of Israel. "But what will the world say!?” That is the question that makes Jews tremble. What will the world say? They will condemn Israel universally. And today, of course, they love her. ... Dear Jew, look about you; listen. The voices you hear and the hatefilled faces you see are those that prove the wisdom of the rabbis who, millennia ago, pronounced: "It is law; know - Esau hates Jacob." The coat of Jew hatred is of many colors, woven in jealousy, produced in deeply ingrained primeval emotions, now stretching from Mexico to Korea. It is a magical coat. It expands to hold people of all colors and creeds; First, Second, Third and Twelth Worlds; Communists and Nazis; Soviets and Chinese; Vietnamese and Cambodians; Ayotollah Muslims and Vatican Christians. It is an ecumenical miracle, bringing the worst of enemies together under the unifying banner of Jew hatred. Let those who fear the gentile world's anger and condemnation know that even without this program Israel faces, in the years to come, international hatred, viciousness, and threat such as no nation, not even South Africa, has encountered. There is nothing Israel can do about this; for the demands of the world are essentially nothing less than the disappearance of Israel. Nothing that Israel does or does not do affects this hatred. It is a pathological hate that has its roots in the existence of the Jew. If the nations feel that they can, they will move against Israel, no matter how "kind" the Jewish state is to her Arabs. If they understand Israel's fierce determination to use all its deadly weapons against whatever enemy dares to come against her, they will limit themselves to raving.
Israel took in the Jews from the Arab lands; it will give them Arabs from the one Jewish land: an exchange of populations; separation for peace. In the end, let the Jew forever bear in mind two things. The first is that Israel has no choice. To sit and allow the Arabs to grow and destroy Israel from within is unthinkable. Let the Jew never forget the utter and complete hatred of the Arabs for Israel and their determination to destroy her. It may take years, decades, centuries - the Arab will wait. He will use every possible means, but he is obsessed. It was always so, from the beginning of Zionism. It is so today. It will be so tomorrow. Remember the voices: "Today I am in the minority. The state is democratic. Who says that in the year 2000 we Arabs will still be the minority? ... Today, I accept the fact that this is a Jewish state with an Arab minority. But when we are the majority I will not accept the fact of a Jewish state with an Arab majority" (the teacher Na'ama Saud at the Israeli village of Araba). Is the Jew prepared to sacrifice his only state on the altar of the democracy the Arabs will use to destroy Israel? And another voice, that of one of the most famous Arab scholars in his classic 1938 work The Arab Awakening. Thus wrote "Palestinian" George Antonius: "The logic of facts is inexorable. It shows that no room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession.” That is what the Arabs believe and have in mind for us. Never. There is no room for a second nation in Eretz Yisrael. The Arabs must leave. We have no choice, for it is either they or the Jews. It will not be the Jews. On the day following the Land Day Rebellion in 1976, MaanV reporter Menachem Talmi (April 2, 1976) reported a conversation between two Jews whose cars had been halted near the Arab village of Kfar Kassem by an Arab roadblock. One of the men said that the only way to deal with the Arabs was with force. The other replied that with such an attitude "we will never reach understanding and settlement with the Arabs.” It is instructive to listen to the reply of the first Jew: "Don't worry, my friend, they have no desire at all to reach understanding and settlement with you. What they want is to see you swimming in the sea. They say it openly, but we don't want to hear. "There were two villages here in the Triangle, Miski and Tira. All the gangs used to come from there to attack the Sharon plain. We wiped
Miski off the map but spared Tira. I have no idea why. The members of Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh, who ate dung because of them as far back as 1936 and later in the War of Independence, pleaded that they should be expelled after they were captured. But no one listened to them. Now the Arabs there 'thank us.' They throw stones at us and burn police cars.” This is a simple Jew who understands that there will be no "understanding and settlement," that only the transfer of the Arabs out of the country will save us heartbreak. That it is either they or we. That it cannot and will not be the Jews. And the second reply to frightened Jews. What has happened to you? Have you forgotten who the Jewish people are? Have you not the slightest idea of the historical destiny and immutability of the State of Israel? Have you become so gentilized that you so utterly forget the G-d of Israel?