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Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948
In this meticulous work, based almost entirely on Hebrew archival material, Nur Masalha examines the Zionist concept of "transfer," or the expulsion of the Palestinian population to neighboring Arab lands. Masalha establishes the extent to which "transfer" was embraced by the highest levels of Zionist leadership, including virtually all the Founding Fathers of the Israeli state.
236 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2012
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About the author
Nur Masalha
19 books164 followersProfessor Nur Masalha is a Palestinian historian and formerly Director of the Centre for Religion and History at St. Mary's University, Twickenham. He is Editor of “Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies”: http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/hls, published by Edinburgh University Press. He is the author of many books on Palestine-Israel. His current work focuses on religion and politics in the Middle East, oral history and social memory theory, subaltern studies, new Palestinian and Israeli historiography, the Bible and Zionism, Holy Land toponymy, Jerusalem archaeology, theologies of liberation in Palestine and Life-Long Learning in Palestine.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
June 11, 2025
Devastating. Belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Israel/Palestine books.
June 17, 2023
دراسة رائعة يضعها في هذا الكتاب البروفيسور نور مصالحة، في قسمها الأول يطرح الافكار والخطط التي كانت مطروحة للتخلص من أكبر عدد ممكن الفلسطينيين وإخلاء البلاد تماما منهم إن أمكن ذلك، وكيف أن المطروح كان أكبر بكثير مما حدث (لحسن الحظ)، وأن موضوع الترحيل القسري لا زال قائما في وجدان الصهاينة إلى هذا اليوم.
في القسم الثاني يقدم توثيقا للمجازر التي ارتكبتها العصابات الصهيونية بين شهر كانون الأول ديسمبر ١٩٤٧ وآخر آذار مارس ١٩٤٨، وما تلاها من عمليات طرد من مختلف المناطق.
دراسة رائعة وكتاب يجب اعتماده مرجعا لمعرفة ما حدث في فلسطين قبل وأثناء النكبة.
مأخذي الوحيد على الكتاب بنسختيه العربية والإنجليزية أن الهوامش كان من الممكن وضعها في صفحاتها بدل وضعها في المصادر آخر الكتاب.
في القسم الثاني يقدم توثيقا للمجازر التي ارتكبتها العصابات الصهيونية بين شهر كانون الأول ديسمبر ١٩٤٧ وآخر آذار مارس ١٩٤٨، وما تلاها من عمليات طرد من مختلف المناطق.
دراسة رائعة وكتاب يجب اعتماده مرجعا لمعرفة ما حدث في فلسطين قبل وأثناء النكبة.
مأخذي الوحيد على الكتاب بنسختيه العربية والإنجليزية أن الهوامش كان من الممكن وضعها في صفحاتها بدل وضعها في المصادر آخر الكتاب.
September 8, 2017
This is an interesting and very fascinating examination into the history of the Zionist Movement and their leadership's vision for an independent state without any Arabs living within its borders. Dr. Masalha will stir up tremendous controversy and conflicting claims and debates with his well written and documented book. His book shows clearly the vision, designs and goals that were the driving forces within the Zionist Movement. I learned and discovered new "facts" surrounding the history of the creation of Israel. This is not a comfortable story. It is however, a story well worth reading and thinking about in order to try and understand the dynamic forces at work today across the entire Middle East. One insight I found to be of great interest is the role played by General Orde Wingate in helping the Jews in Palestine develop their self defense forces that would become today's outstanding Army, the IDF. Wingate is considered the Father of the Israeli Army.
November 12, 2023
An excellent, careful scholarly history of the concept of forced or financially coerced mass expulsion of Arabs from Palestine, from its appearance in Theodor Herzl’s diaries and letters, through decades of its advocacy within Zionist circles and its influence on David Ben Gurion, to its advocates’ influence on Israeli forces’ expulsion of Arabs in 1948. This book is concrete scholarly proof that ethnic cleansing has been at the heart of Zionism from day one.
July 15, 2019
Excellent account of the PLANNED expulsion of the Palestinians.
Read
March 11, 2026Founding zionist leaders (like Ben-Gurion) in their own words discussing how to deal with the “Arab Problem” by harassing and then forcibly removing the native inhabitants of Palestine. The idea that expelling the Palestinians was policy and not merely a “miraculous” byproduct of the 1948 war has been contested. This short little book proves that the goal of an ethnically homogenous state (by ridding Palestine of the Palestinians) was always part of the zionist movement (as early as the 1880s).
STAND-OUT QUOTES
Jabotinsky, another zionist leader, writing in 1925: “If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will maintain the garrison on your behalf…. Zionism is a colonizing adventure and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”
The “benefactor” used to be Britain. Since WWII it has been the US. And tomorrow - if they survive the war they started - analysts say it’s going to be India.
Actually, 1938 is when the focus moved from Britain to the US. The Peel Commission realised they had been too hasty in promising to transfer the natives by force. There were too many people. It just wasn’t feasible.
Ben-Gurion’s agricultural minister: “population transfer” to separate the Arabs from the Jews is a “noble human vision” for “a new world order”.
Golda Meir: “I, too, would want the Arabs out of the country and my conscience would be absolutely clear. But is there a possibility of its implementation without Arab consent and British assistance?”
😂 In other words, I have no qualms about coming over from Kiev, kicking hundreds of thousands of Arabs off the land they’ve lived on for generations and getting the British to do the dirty work.
The zionists knew “population transfer” would never be voluntary - they admitted the Palestinians had absolutely no reason to leave their coastal land with their fruit orchards to go to the dessert (Iraq or modern-day Jordan). The idea that Palestine was some barren waste land with only a few nomadic Arabs before the zionists colonised it is a flat-out lie:
Yosef Weitz (director of the JNF’s Land Department), commented in 1941 seeing “large [Arab] villages crowded in population and surrounded by cultivated land growing olives, grapes, figs, sesame, and maize fields… and once again I hear that voice inside me called: EVACUATE THIS COUNTRY.” Another diary entry that same year: “They [the Arabs] are too many and too much rooted [in the country]… the only way is to cut and eradicate them from the roots.”
Katznelson, the “hero of socialist Zionism”, looked to Stalin as an example, who “transferred” one million Germans from the Volga region to Siberia in 1928.
Rabbi Meir Berlin referring to the entire British Mandate: “The basis of Zionism is that the land of Israel is ours and not the land of the Arabs, and not because they have large territories, and we have but little. We demand Palestine because it is our country.”
While brainstorming ways to get all of these Arabs off of their own land, Vladimir Jabotinsky (founder of the party that turned into the Likud party) suggested: “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… this could be a healthy policy towards suspicious and ignorant Arab public.”
With new neighbours like that, why would the Arabs possibly be suspicious? 😂😂
“Between the Haganah’s 20 May 1947 blowing up of an Arab café in Fajjah and the Stern Gang’s blowing up of the Cairo-Haifa passenger train (forty Arab civilians killed, sixty injured) in March 1948, more than 90 attacks on Arab villages or civilian targets took place. Most of these attacks did not involve an exchange of fire; they included such terrorist acts as burning cinemas, setting off explosives in market places, spraying bullets into crowds gathered at cafés or in the streets, dynamiting houses with people in them and so on.”
When war started in 1948, “many [Arab] evacuees had not actually left Palestine, but had merely sought refuge in safer Arab areas in the country; by the middle of the war, some had begun moving back to their villages and towns in what the Israel government had begun to term ‘infiltration’…. Lifschitz recommended that these peasants should be ‘harassed/intimidated’ into moving out of Palestine.”
The statehood of Israel is no miracle. Unless money, political power and the use of force (and terrorism) are considered miracles. And zionism has never been willing to accept the idea of an Arab minority, except as a temporary inconvenience and a problem to be solved.
STAND-OUT QUOTES
Jabotinsky, another zionist leader, writing in 1925: “If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will maintain the garrison on your behalf…. Zionism is a colonizing adventure and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”
The “benefactor” used to be Britain. Since WWII it has been the US. And tomorrow - if they survive the war they started - analysts say it’s going to be India.
Actually, 1938 is when the focus moved from Britain to the US. The Peel Commission realised they had been too hasty in promising to transfer the natives by force. There were too many people. It just wasn’t feasible.
Ben-Gurion’s agricultural minister: “population transfer” to separate the Arabs from the Jews is a “noble human vision” for “a new world order”.
Golda Meir: “I, too, would want the Arabs out of the country and my conscience would be absolutely clear. But is there a possibility of its implementation without Arab consent and British assistance?”
😂 In other words, I have no qualms about coming over from Kiev, kicking hundreds of thousands of Arabs off the land they’ve lived on for generations and getting the British to do the dirty work.
The zionists knew “population transfer” would never be voluntary - they admitted the Palestinians had absolutely no reason to leave their coastal land with their fruit orchards to go to the dessert (Iraq or modern-day Jordan). The idea that Palestine was some barren waste land with only a few nomadic Arabs before the zionists colonised it is a flat-out lie:
Yosef Weitz (director of the JNF’s Land Department), commented in 1941 seeing “large [Arab] villages crowded in population and surrounded by cultivated land growing olives, grapes, figs, sesame, and maize fields… and once again I hear that voice inside me called: EVACUATE THIS COUNTRY.” Another diary entry that same year: “They [the Arabs] are too many and too much rooted [in the country]… the only way is to cut and eradicate them from the roots.”
Katznelson, the “hero of socialist Zionism”, looked to Stalin as an example, who “transferred” one million Germans from the Volga region to Siberia in 1928.
Rabbi Meir Berlin referring to the entire British Mandate: “The basis of Zionism is that the land of Israel is ours and not the land of the Arabs, and not because they have large territories, and we have but little. We demand Palestine because it is our country.”
While brainstorming ways to get all of these Arabs off of their own land, Vladimir Jabotinsky (founder of the party that turned into the Likud party) suggested: “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… this could be a healthy policy towards suspicious and ignorant Arab public.”
With new neighbours like that, why would the Arabs possibly be suspicious? 😂😂
“Between the Haganah’s 20 May 1947 blowing up of an Arab café in Fajjah and the Stern Gang’s blowing up of the Cairo-Haifa passenger train (forty Arab civilians killed, sixty injured) in March 1948, more than 90 attacks on Arab villages or civilian targets took place. Most of these attacks did not involve an exchange of fire; they included such terrorist acts as burning cinemas, setting off explosives in market places, spraying bullets into crowds gathered at cafés or in the streets, dynamiting houses with people in them and so on.”
When war started in 1948, “many [Arab] evacuees had not actually left Palestine, but had merely sought refuge in safer Arab areas in the country; by the middle of the war, some had begun moving back to their villages and towns in what the Israel government had begun to term ‘infiltration’…. Lifschitz recommended that these peasants should be ‘harassed/intimidated’ into moving out of Palestine.”
The statehood of Israel is no miracle. Unless money, political power and the use of force (and terrorism) are considered miracles. And zionism has never been willing to accept the idea of an Arab minority, except as a temporary inconvenience and a problem to be solved.
September 19, 2019
Libro centrado específicamente en el plan sionista de expulsar a los palestinos de su propia tierra. Una investigación necesaria, pienso yo, porque arroja luz sobre esta cuestión que no es menor en el marco del conflicto árabe-israelí, poniendo en evidencia que existió un plan sistemático de expulsión y que el mismo viene de muy larga data.
December 20, 2023
A tragic story
This book relates the detail of the Zionist policy to clear Palestine of its Arab population. It often reminds one of Hitler’s plans for Lebensraum. It shows clearly that many human beings learn nothing from the past but quit happily imitate the most inhuman policies even if they themselves have suffered under them.
This book relates the detail of the Zionist policy to clear Palestine of its Arab population. It often reminds one of Hitler’s plans for Lebensraum. It shows clearly that many human beings learn nothing from the past but quit happily imitate the most inhuman policies even if they themselves have suffered under them.
June 8, 2025
A remarkable work. It completely dismantles any argument that the Zionist leadership had no intention of expelling the indigenous population of Palestine. It therefore makes untenable the claim that the Nakba was the spontaneous result of Arab flight. If I could only recommend one scholarly volume on the genesis of this conflict, this would be it.
January 22, 2015
Well documeented
March 12, 2025
3’5⭐️
Bastante necesario este libro
Bastante necesario este libro
November 2, 2025
Professor Masalha presents an extensive review of primary source material here
January 28, 2024
Already in 1919, Winston Churchill predicted that Zionism implied the clearing of the indigenous population, he wrote:
There are the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine, and who take it for granted the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.
Page 15.
There are the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine, and who take it for granted the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.
Page 15.
October 6, 2024
Remarkably neutral, even academic style, which helps the rhetoric. Nothing to argue with here - all archival quotes.
March 21, 2026
This book makes absolutely clear that from the beginning, the goal of Zionism was the ultimate expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine. It continues.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews