The Zionist Mentality and Method
Whatever public pronouncements they might have made on the
subject, the Zionist leaders, from the beginning right up to the present day,
have had the intention of supplanting the non-Jewish
resident population of Palestine, to be replaced with Jewish immigrants.
In deliberations among themselves there has been little dissent from this goal;
the differences have arisen only in how the goal should be accomplished.
There has also been a serious disconnect between what they have said among
themselves and what they have said for public consumption.
Those are the main conclusions that one reaches from Nur Mashalha’s 1992 book, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The
Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, published by the Institute
for Palestine Studies in Washington, DC. The ideal Jewish state as
envisioned by Zionist leaders was one that was essentially cleansed of the
longtime resident Muslims and Christians or anyone else who could not be defined
as a Jew. Taking that view, they recognized that the hundreds of
thousands of residents of Palestine, with their farms, towns, and cities represented a
serious problem for them. Some interesting insight into Zionist thinking
in general is provided by examination of the transfer ideas of Edward A. Norman
(1890-1955), a Jewish millionaire living in New York City.
Norman, who was a governor of Hebrew University and from
1939 to 1943 was president of the Zionist American Economic Committee for
Palestine, “was preoccupied with the idea of transfer and left considerable
documentation concerning the vigorous efforts he made between 1934 and 1948,
with the collaboration of the most important Yishuv and Zionist leaders to bring about its
implementation.” His plans went through a number of
changes, but they boiled down essentially to conspiring with the king of Iraq
and paying off the Palestinians to move to his country.
…Norman concluded: “If the Jews must have Palestine, but cannot have it while more than 800,000 Arabs
live there, the Arabs must be induced to give it up and a considerable
proportion of them to move elsewhere,” possibly to the “Shatt-el-Gharaff” area of Iraq.
He ruled out Transjordan (now called just Jordan ed.) because it was “not
conceded by the Jews as being permanently outside their colonizing area, and in
view of the number of Jews requiring emigration from Europe they can be expected
to need it, and therefore it would be wasteful and unintelligent to think of
settling the Palestine Arabs in Transjordan.”
Norman exhibited a good deal of prescience as he contrasted
his inducement scheme with the brutish alternative that was eventually
instituted:
If the Jews ever succeed in acquiring a major part of
Palestine a large number of Arabs perforce will have
to leave the country and find homes elsewhere. If they are forced out
inexorably as the result of Jewish pressure they will
go with ill-will and probably will cherish an enmity towards the Jews that
might persist for generations and that would render the position of the Jewish
homeland precarious. The rest of the world, too, easily might come to
sympathize with the Arabs.
Note that his problem with what he euphemistically calls
“pressure” is purely tactical. It is not out of any basic humanitarian
considerations.
Norman’s plans received favorable attention from various
Zionist leaders in the United States. Among them was the powerful Wall
Street banker, Felix Warburg. Warburg encouraged him to go to England to
pitch his transfer plans to Zionist leaders there and to find someone who could
gather the additional information needed on the ground in Palestine and
Iraq. Norman heeded Warburg’s advice and in late November and early
December of 1937 met with several top Zionists, including the intellectual
godfather of today’s Likud Party in Israel, Vladimir [later Ze’ev] Jabotinsky. Here is what Norman
wrote in his diary after the Jabotinsky meeting:
He [Jabotinsky] has already read a copy of my memorandum on
Iraq…He is very much in favor of the idea. He said, however, that it will
be very difficult to move the Arabs to leave the Land of Israel…Jabotinsky
raised an original idea according to which, if the plan will reach a point at
which Iraq would be willing to collaborate and issue an invitation for the
Palestinian Arabs to it, the World Zionist Organization would be clever if it
pronounced itself publicly to be against Arab immigration, then the Arabs will
be certain that the plan is not originally Jewish, and that the Jews want them
to stay in the country in order to exploit them, so they will be very eager to
go to Iraq. There is a very Machiavellian nature to this, but this could
be a healthy policy towards suspicious and ignorant Arab public.
Jabotinsky said that if his Revisionist New Zionist Organization will issue an
announcement at the right moment against Arab transfer from the Land of Israel,
this will create a very great impact on the Arabs to the extent of creating the
opposite and they will get out.
Yes, “Machiavellian” is one word for it.
“Duplicitous” and “perfidious” are two other adjectives that come to
mind. This suggestion, directly from Jabotinsky’s own mouth, spoken to a
Zionist confidant, should be kept in mind when one reads that he actually
believed in integrating the Arab minority (majority at the time)
into the public life of his proposed Jewish state. Those who suspected a
Zionist trick at the time may now be forgiven.
Notice as well the tone of smug superiority as this revered figure in the creation of
the state of Israel, this man who has more streets, parks and
squares named
for him in Israel than any other person, speaks of the “suspicious and ignorant
Arab public.” Substitute the word “gullible” for “suspicious” and
“American” for “Arab,” and the utterance might have been made yesterday by one
of Jabotinsky’s intellectual heirs, although some other adjectives like “powerless” and “docile” might also be thrown in.
Jabotinsky must have known that his suggested deceit would
find a sympathetic audience in Norman. Deception, as he details in his
own report, was integral to the planning of his project:
Warburg encouraged me to go to England and find someone who
would be capable of obtaining the information still needed. It was
assumed that I could not obtain the information by going to Iraq myself, since
under the prevailing conditions in the Near East, the motives of any Jews would
be suspect, and instead of obtaining information he probably would arouse
antagonism. Therefore, it was essential to send a man who was not a Jew
and who at the same time would be “persona grata” to the Iraqians
[sic].
The man selected for the job—and no doubt handsomely paid
for it—was H.T. Montague Bell, former editor-in-chief of the British
weekly Great Britain and the East. As a recognized journalist
he was an ideal person for gathering information, but he did a good deal more
than that. He went to Iraq with the public objective of writing some
articles on the progress of the country since independence in 1932. He
had been advised by Norman not to promote to the Iraqis the plan of bringing
Palestinian agricultural immigrants into the country but to “make it seem that
the idea had originated in their own minds.” He was to accomplish this by
asking “searching questions of all the leading people, and thus cause them to
formulate the answer along the lines we desired.”
Bell pulled off his subterfuge in exemplary fashion, though
to little eventual effect. He had an audience with the king and was
entertained at a dinner by the prime minister that was attended by the entire
cabinet of the Iraq government, all the while planting Norman’s ideas in the
guise of gathering information for articles in Britain.
Upon his return to London, while still on Norman’s payroll,
Bell duly wrote the articles, which appeared in The Times. Their
common thrust was that Iraq’s economic future depended upon the encouragement
of more immigration into the country. The articles were sent to all the
leading politicians in Iraq.
Unfortunately for Norman and his fellow schemers no one was
buying his “amateurish and impractical” plan, as it was characterized by J.S.
Bennett of the British Colonial Office. In due time more direct and barbaric means for driving the people of
Palestine from their ancestral land, which Norman had realized could cause
long-term problems, had to be resorted to. Such measures continue to the
present day. The main thing they have in common with the Norman project
is the accompanying duplicity.
December 20, 2010
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