With an Arab population in Palestine under Israeli control about to reach parity with Jewish numbers, all good Zionists are returning to their roots in search of a solution to their demographic problem: separation or transfer.
"In 1895 Theodor Herzl, Zionism's chief prophet, confided in his diary that he did not favour sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to 'try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.'
"He was proposing a programme of Palestinian emigration enforced through a policy of strict separation between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous population. In simple terms, he hoped that, once Zionist organisations had bought up large areas of Palestine and owned the main sectors of the economy, Palestinians could be made to leave by denying them rights to work the land or labour in the Jewish-run economy.
"His vision was one of transfer, or ethnic cleansing, through ethnic separation."
What sort of "vision" of national liberation requires building its very existence on the colonization of another people?
One that in each and every case allies itself with the powers of world imperialism.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Israel/Zionism's_Dead_End.html
There is just enough truth in this post to mask that the majority of its assumptions are blatantly false. Herzl's assumptions regarding the Arabs were based on the fact that Islam has a historical enmity towards Jews and Judaism, going back to its foundational documents, and as a result, any peaceful coexistence would be almost impossible, but fortunately, there was very little in the way of Arab population. In fact, the original Jewish settlers bought their land from absentee landlords who lacked tenants for farming. The land was fallow and with the exception of a few cities, unpopulated. The Ottoman censuses for the 19th century showed this, and also recorded an important fact, which the Arab apologists ignore, which is that Jerusalem was a Jewish-majority city, despite centuries of dhimmi status. The Arab population began to increase as the Jewish settlers began to irrigate deserts and drain swamps, creating economic opportunities. This is why the Jewish majority cities saw the highest rate of growth in Arab populations, more so than in Arab majority cities.
Another critical point is that the Israelis did not seek to expel the Arabs. Jews actively avoided purchasing populated land, concentrating on uncultivated swamps and deserts, which were cheaper and less likely to displace tenant farmers. In 1920, David Ben-Gurion called the Arab fellahin “the most important asset of the native population,†and “under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them.†“Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement, should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.†The Partition plan would have created Jewish majority enclaves within the borders of what became Israel, in areas where Jews were already a majority. It was Arab intransigence, the refusal of Muslims to allow any Jewish state, no matter how small, that forced the issue. The Peel Report, issued after the 1936 Arab revolt, identified the causes of the Arab riots:
Chapter IV. - The Disturbances of 1936
These disturbances (which are briefly summarized) were similar in character to the four previous outbreaks, although more serious and prolonged. As in 1933, it was not only the Jews who were attacked, but the Palestine Government. A new feature was the part played by the Rulers of the neighbouring Arab States in bringing about the end of the strike.
The underlying causes of the disturbances of 1936 were--
(1) The desire of the Arabs for national independence;
(2) their hatred and fear of the establishment of the Jewish National Home.
These two causes were the same as those of all the previous outbreaks and have always been inextricably linked together. Of several subsidiary factors, the more important were--
(1) the advance of Arab nationalism outside Palestine;
(2) the increased immigration of Jews since 1933;
(3) the opportunity enjoyed by the Jews for influencing public opinion in Britain;
(4) Arab distrust in the sincerity of the British Government;
(5) Arab alarm at the continued Jewish purchase of land;
(6) the general uncertainty as to the ultimate intentions of the Mandatory Power.[/i]
Peel concluded that partition was necessary to keep the peace, but the Arab Muslims (Arab Christians were not hostile to partition) refused.
The neighboring Arab states directed the Muslim population to vacate their homes so that they would have a free hand in their genocidal campaign against the Jews. They weren't driven out by Israelis, they abandoned their homes in order to facilitate genocide. And what you failed to mention was that in the period immediately after the establishment of Israel, the Arab states expelled most of their Jewish populations, usually with just the clothes on their backs, and the property left behind by these refugees could have easily been used to assimilate the Arab refugees, but those states made a deliberate decision to keep the Palestinians in camps, and use them as a propaganda tool. Part of this was based on crass economics. The UN took on the responsibility for feeding the refugees and issued ration cards, and since this was bringing food and money into the camps, the regimes decided to milk this. One trick was to open their jails and transport their indigent to the camps, where they immediately became "Palestinians" (despite never having set foot in Palestine), thus swelling the refugee population. Another was to register people under multiple names, which allowed them to hold multiple ration cards (further swelling the number of refugees). Deceased persons were not declared, so their ration cards remained active (any Cook County voter registrar can tell you how that trick works), and births were falsified.
Finally, there was no such thing as a "Palestinian" until the nomadic Arabs found themselves in camps in the Jordanian and Egyptian occupied zones. The name Palestine came from Roman maps of the region that the British used when they accepted the League of Nations mandate, and that name was the result of the Roman suppression of the last Judean revolt. After the Romans sacked Jersusalem and killed as many Judeans as they could, they imposed a series of punitive measures on the survivors, one of which was the renaming of the province after the hereditary enemy of the Judeans, the Philistines. Thus, Judea became Syria Palestina, or Syrian Palestine. The Jewish presence remained, uninterrupted, in the major cities.
