Rightwing Israelis are talking about 'transfer' - the expulsion of all Arabs. Shocking as it sounds, the idea once had support from British and Arab officials, reveals distinguished Israeli historian Benny Morris. And, continuing our series on the Arab-Israeli conflict, he argues the Middle East might now be at peace if Israel's first leader had driven out all the Palestinians in 1948

Benny Morris
Thursday October 3, 2002
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,803417,00.html

Once again, "transfer" is in the air - the idea of helping resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict by transferring or expelling some or all of the Arabs from Palestine. During recent weeks Israeli newspapers published an interview with Shmuel Eliahu, the chief rabbi of Safad and the son of Israel's former chief Sephardi rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu, in which he called for the transfer, to "Jordan, the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, or Canada," of Arabs who are unwilling to accept Israel as a Jewish state; and a large advertisement, by Gush Shalom (the Peace Bloc), a coalition of ultra-left groups, warning that prime minister Ariel Sharon is pressing the US to attack Iraq and intends to exploit the chaos that will follow "to carry out his old plan to expel the Palestinians from the whole country ("Transfer")."

The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century. And driving it was an iron logic: There could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants, who opposed its emergence and would constitute an active or potential fifth column in its midst. This logic was understood, and enunciated, before and during 1948, by Zionist, Arab and British leaders and officials.

As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the prophet and founder of Zionism, wrote in his diary in anticipation of the establishment of the Jewish state: "We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country ... The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

By the 1930s, matters had crystallised, with Arab gunmen attacking the British Mandate authorities and the Zionist settlers. The Arab Revolt (1936-39) aimed to force an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine and to eject the Jews' British protectors. Whitehall sent out a royal commission, chaired by Lord Peel, to investigate. It published its report in July 1937. Peel was unable to avoid the logic of transfer: The commission recommended that Palestine be partitioned between its Jewish and Arab inhabitants - and that 225,000 Arabs be transferred out of the 20% of the country it earmarked for Jewish sovereignty (and the handful of Jews, some 1,250, living in the Arab areas be transferred to the Jewish state). A "clean and final" solution of the Palestine problem necessitated transfer, the commission ruled.

Both David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Zionist movement and Israel's first prime minister, and Chaim Weizmann, the movement's elder statesman, supported transfer. The background was the Arab revolt and the growing anti-semitic persecutions in Europe which heralded the Holocaust; the need for a safe haven for the Jews in Palestine had become acute just as Arab violence was pushing the British into closing the doors to immigration.

Ben-Gurion hailed Lord Peel's recommendations: "The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had ... during the days of the First and Second Temples ... an opportunity which we never dared to dream in our wildest imaginings." In August 1937 he told the emergency 20th Zionist Congress, convened in Zurich: "We do not want to dispossess, [but piecemeal] transfer of population [through Jewish purchase and the removal of Arab tenant farmers] occurred previously, in the [Jezreel] Valley, in the Sharon and in other places ... Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out ... Transfer is what will make possible a comprehensive [Jewish] settlement programme. Thankfully, the Arab people have vast empty areas [in Transjordan and Iraq]. Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale."

Weizmann also supported a transfer scheme and in 1941 told Ivan Maiskii, the Soviet ambassador in London (according to the envoy's own account): "If half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews [ie, Jewish immigrants] could be put in their place. That, of course, would be a first instalment ..." According to Maiskii, Weizmann had proposed "to move a million Arabs ... to Iraq, and to settle four or five million Jews from Poland and other countries on the land where these Arabs were" When Maiskii queried how 4-5 million Jews could be expected to settle on lands previously inhabited by only 1 million Arabs, Weizmann replied: "The Arab is often called the son of the desert. It would be truer to call him the father of the desert. His laziness and primitivism turn a flourishing garden into a desert.'

But it was not only the Zionist leaders who believed transfer was the solution to the problem of Palestine and its successful partition. In July 1948, midway in the first Arab-Israeli war, by which time about 400,000 Arabs had been displaced from their homes, Britain's foreign secretary (and no Zionist), Ernest Bevin, wrote: "On a long-term view ... there may be something to be said for an exchange of population between the areas assigned to the Arabs and the Jews respectively ...." And he added, in explication: "It might be argued that the flight of large numbers of Arabs from the territory under Jewish administration had simplified the task of arriving at a stable settlement in Palestine since some transfers of population seems [sic] to be an essential condition for such a settlement."

A few days later, London's central intelligence office in the area, the British Middle East Office, chimed in: "The panic flight of Arabs from the Jewish occupied areas of Palestine has presented a very serious immediate problem but may possibly point the way to a long-term solution of one of the greatest difficulties in the way of a satisfactory implementation of partition, namely the existence in the Jewish state of an Arab community very nearly equal in numbers to the Jewish one." It went on: "Now that the initial difficulty of persuading the Arabs of Palestine to leave their homes has been overcome ... it seems possible that the solution may lie in their transference to Iraq and Syria."

By the end of the 1948 war, some 700,000 Arabs had been displaced - to become "refugees", in the jargon of the day. Most came to rest elsewhere in Palestine, in those parts today called the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. According to the UN, there are today close to 4 million Palestinian "refugees", meaning those driven out in 1948 and their descendants - and they constitute the single most difficult and vexing component of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

But Bevin's and the BMEO's understanding that this massive transfer pointed the way to a "solution" of the Palestine problem was by no means a surprising mid-war discovery. Already in the early and mid-1940s Arab leaders and senior British officials understood that transfer (as an accompaniment of partition) offered a way out of the impasse.

In April 1944 the executive of Britain's Labour party published its platform for a postwar settlement. It included full-throated endorsement of the transfer of the Arabs out of Palestine and, indeed, the expansion of the mandatory borders to facilitate the absorption of large waves of Jewish immigrants. The relevant paragraph was formulated by Hugh Dalton, the chancellor of the exchequer.

Earlier, in January 1943, an under-secretary of state at the Colonial Office, the Duke of Devonshire, proposed that Britain set up an independent Arab state in Libya and that, in exchange, the Arabs acquiesce in the establishment of a Jewish state "in Palestine". He added: "The Arab population in Palestine might be dealt with by an offer of assistance to migrate to Libya for those families who find conditions in Palestine unendurable."

General John Glubb, the British commander (1939-56) of Transjordan's army, the Arab Legion, thought there was no evading a partition solution - and that the Arab population in the areas earmarked for Jewish statehood were best transferred to the Arab areas or out of Palestine altogether. In July 1946 he penned "A Note on Partition as a Solution to the Palestine Problem". He wrote: "The best course will probably be to allow a time limit during which persons who find themselves in one or other state against their wishes, will be able to opt for citizenship of the other state ... It is not, of course, intended to move Arab[s] ... by force, but merely so to arrange that when these persons find themselves left behind in the Jewish state, well paid jobs and good prospects should be simultaneously open for them in the Arab state ..."

Glubb seemed to be speaking here of a "voluntary" transfer. But in a follow-up note, written a few weeks later, he moved toward the acceptance of some measure of compulsion as well: "When the undoubtedly Arab and undoubtedly Jewish areas had been cleared of all members of the other community ... every effort would be made [in the frontier areas] to arrange exchanges of land and population so as to leave as few people as possible to be compensated for cash." Glubb, of course, envisaged a population "exchange" involving the movement of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and only a few thousand Jews - in effect, a transfer of Arabs.

In his support of partition and transfer, Glubb faithfully mirrored the thinking of Transjordan's and Iraq's leaders. In December 1944, Nuri Said, Iraq's senior politician, told a British interlocutor that if the British imposed a partition solution for Palestine, there would be a "necessity of removing the Arabs from the Jewish state ..." Iraq's foreign minister, Arshad al-Umari, "repeated what Nuri had said ... [regarding] probable [Arab] reaction [to partition] and also the necessity of removing the Arabs from the Jewish state," according to another British official.

Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East, a few weeks earlier reported that both Tewfiq Abul Huda, Transjordan's prime minister, and Mustafa Nahas Pasha, Egypt's prime minister, similarly believed that "a final settlement can only be reached by means of partition". Two years later, in July 1946, Alec Kirkbride, Britain's well-informed representative in Amman, reported that Abul Huda's successor, Ibrahim Pasha Hashim, and King Abdullah of Transjordan both supported partition: "[Hashim added that] the only just and permanent solution lay in absolute partition with an exchange of populations; to leave Jews in an Arab state or Arabs in a Jewish state would lead inevitably to further trouble ... Ibrahim Pasha admitted that he would not be able to express this idea in public for fear of being called a traitor."

A month later, Kirkbride reported: "King Abdullah and prime minister of Jordan consider that partition followed by an exchange of populations is only practical solution to the Palestine problem. They do not feel able to express this view publicly ..." As all involved understood, "exchange of populations" was a euphemism for transferring the Arabs out of the area of the Jewish state-to-be.

In May 1944, the director of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, Moshe Sharett, hesitantly predicted that "once the Jewish state is established - it is very possible that the result will be transfer of Arabs." In the 1948 war, which the Palestinian Arabs and the neighbouring Arab states initiated, a transfer of 700,000 of Palestine's 1.25 million Arab inhabitants duly took place.

Both before and during 1948 all understood the logic of transfer: Given Arab opposition to the very idea and existence of a Jewish state, it could not and would not be established, as a viable, lasting entity, without the displacement of the bulk of its Arab inhabitants. But the transfer of 1948 was incomplete: The overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people, both local inhabitants and refugees, remained in Palestine, many of them in poverty, a quarter of a million in the Gaza Strip, some half a million in the West Bank, and 150,000 in Israel proper. These populations today stand at 1 million, 2 million and 1.2 million respectively.

In 1967 Israel, provoked by Egypt, Jordan and Syria, occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip and today, directly and indirectly, rules over more than 4 million Arabs (alongside the country's 5 million Jews). And the basic problems remain: Infinitely higher Arab birthrates; an intermixed population that cannot live in peace in one multi-ethnic state; and Palestinian opposition both to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and to Israel's very existence (vide what is taught Palestinian children in West Bank and Gaza schools and statements by even so-called Palestinian moderates, such as Marwan Barghouti and Faisal Husseini, not to mention the oft-publicised views of Islamist leaders such as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin). When Israeli rightwingers today speak of "transfer", they think in terms not of facilitating a partition of historic Palestine but of making a clean sweep and ridding the country of its Arab inhabitants.

The Palestinian Arab strategy of suicide bombings and the tone of rejectionism that characterises much Palestinian rhetoric, from Arafat and the Palestinian Authority radio and TV stations downwards during the past two years fuels such thinking. Israel's extreme right, which wants the "whole Land of Israel" for the Jews, ultimately posits transfer as a counterweight to this mainstream rejectionism - which, in effect, endorses a transfer of the Jews out of Palestine, or "throwing the Jews into the sea", as the phrase goes.

One wonders what Ben-Gurion - who probably could have engineered a comprehensive rather than a partial transfer in 1948, but refrained - would have made of all this, were he somehow resurrected. Perhaps he would now regret his restraint. Perhaps, had he gone the whole hog, today's Middle East would be a healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state between Jordan and the Mediterranean and a Palestinian Arab state in Transjordan. Alternatively, Arab success in the 1948 war, with the Jews driven into the sea, would have obtained the same, historically calming result. Perhaps it was the very indecisiveness of the geographical and demographic outcome of 1948 that underlies the persisting tragedy of Palestine.

· This article is based partly on material published in The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews (IB Tauris, London, 2002).

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Monday October 7 2002

In Benny Morris's article on the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel, a number of quotes were removed when the piece was edited to fit the available space. Mr Morris believes that the comments were significant because they revealed that some Arab leaders supported the idea of moving the Palestinians from the Jewish state during the 1940s. The following passage was cut from the piece: "Nuri Said, Iraq's senior politician, told a British interlocutor that if the British imposed a partition solution for Palestine, there would be a 'necessity of removing the Arabs from the Jewish state...' Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East, reported that both Tewfiq Abul Huda, Transjordan's prime minister, and Mustafa Nahas Pasha, Egypt's prime minister, similarly believed that 'a final settlement can only be reached by means of partition'. Two years later, in 1946, Alec Kirkbride, Britain's knowledgeable representative in Amman, reported that 'King Abdullah and prime minister [Ibrahim Hashim] of Jordan consider that partition followed by an exchange of populations is the only practical solution to the Palestine problem. They do not feel able to express this view publicly.' Hashim 'thought that to leave Jews in an Arab state or Arabs in a Jewish state would lead inevitably to further trouble'."

Benny Morris was the radical Israeli historian who forced his country to confront its role in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Later he was jailed for refusing to do military service in the West Bank. But now he has changed his tune. As the cycle of violence in the Middle East intensifies, he launches a vicious attack on the 'inveterate liar' Yasser Arafat - and explains why he believes a peaceful coexistence is impossible

Thursday February 21, 2002
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,653417,00.html

The rumour that I have undergone a brain transplant is (as far as I can remember) unfounded - or at least premature. But my thinking about the current Middle East crisis and its protagonists has in fact radically changed during the past two years. I imagine that I feel a bit like one of those western fellow travellers rudely awakened by the trundle of Russian tanks crashing through Budapest in 1956.

Back in 1993, when I began work on Righteous Victims, a revisionist history of the Zionist-Arab conflict from 1881 until the present, I was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for Middle East peace. I was never a wild optimist; and my gradual study during the mid-1990s of the pre-1948 history of Palestinian-Zionist relations brought home to me the depth and breadth of the problems and antagonisms. But at least the Israelis and Palestinians were talking peace; had agreed to mutual recognition; and had signed the Oslo agreement, a first step that promised gradual Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, the emergence of a Palestinian state, and a peace treaty between the two peoples. The Palestinians appeared to have given up their decades-old dream and objective of destroying and supplanting the Jewish state, and the Israelis had given up their dream of a "Greater Israel", stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river. And, given the centrality of Palestinian-Israeli relations in the Arab-Israeli conflict, a final, comprehensive peace settlement between Israel and all of its Arab neighbours seemed within reach.

But by the time I had completed the book, my restrained optimism had given way to grave doubts - and within a year had crumbled into a cosmic pessimism. One reason was the Syrians' rejection of the deal offered by the prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1993-96 and Ehud Barak in 1999-2000, involving Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for a full-fledged bilateral peace treaty. What appears to have stayed the hands of President Hafez Assad and subsequently his son and successor, Bashar Assad, was not quibbles about a few hundred yards here or there but a basic refusal to make peace with the Jewish state. What counted, in the end, was the presence, on a wall in the Assads' office, of a portrait of Saladin, the legendary 12th-century Kurdish Muslim warrior who had beaten the crusaders, to whom the Arabs often compared the Zionists. I can see the father, on his deathbed, telling his son: "Whatever you do, don't make peace with the Jews; like the crusaders, they too will vanish."

But my main reason, around which my pessimism gathered and crystallised, was the figure of Yasser Arafat, who has led the Palestinian national movement since the late 1960s and, by virtue of the Oslo accords, governs the cities of the West Bank (Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm and Qalqilya) and their environs, and the bulk of the Gaza Strip. Arafat is the symbol of the movement, accurately reflecting his people's miseries and collective aspirations. Unfortunately, he has proven himself a worthy successor to Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who led the Palestinians during the 1930s into their (abortive) rebellion against the British mandate government and during the 1940s into their (again abortive) attempt to prevent the emergence of the Jewish state in 1948, resulting in their catastrophic defeat and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. Husseini had been implacable and incompetent (a dangerous mix) - but also a trickster and liar. Nobody had trusted him, neither his Arab colleagues nor the British nor the Zionists. Above all, Husseini had embodied rejectionism - a rejection of any compromise with the Zionist movement. He had rejected two international proposals to partition the country into Jewish and Arab polities, by the British Peel commission in 1937 and by the UN general assembly in November 1947. In between, he spent the war years (1941-45) in Berlin, working for the Nazi foreign ministry and recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht.

Abba Eban, Israel's legendary foreign minister, once quipped that the Palestinians had never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But no one can fault them for consistency. After Husseini came Arafat, another implacable nationalist and inveterate liar, trusted by no Arab, Israeli or American leader (though there appear to be many Europeans who are taken in). In 1978-79, he failed to join the Israeli-Egyptian Camp David framework, which might have led to Palestinian statehood a decade ago. In 2000, turning his back on the Oslo process, Arafat rejected yet another historic compromise, that offered by Barak at Camp David in July and subsequently improved upon in President Bill Clinton's proposals (endorsed by Barak) in December. Instead, the Palestinians, in September, resorted to arms and launched the current mini-war or intifada, which has so far resulted in some 790 Arab and 270 Israeli deaths, and a deepening of hatred on both sides to the point that the idea of a territorial-political compromise seems to be a pipe dream.

Palestinians and their sympathisers have blamed the Israelis and Clinton for what happened: the daily humiliations and restrictions of the continuing Israeli semi-occupation; the wily but transparent Binyamin Netanyahu's foot-dragging during 1996-99; Barak's continued expansion of the settlements in the occupied territories and his standoffish manner toward Arafat; and Clinton's insistence on summoning the Camp David meeting despite Palestinian protestations that they were not quite ready. But all this is really and truly beside the point: Barak, a sincere and courageous leader, offered Arafat a reasonable peace agreement that included Israeli withdrawal from 85-91% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip; the uprooting of most of the settlements; Palestinian sovereignty over the Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem; and the establishment of a Palestinian state. As to the Temple Mount (Haram ash-Sharif) in Jerusalem's Old City, Barak proposed Israeli-Palestinian condominium or UN security council control or "divine sovereignty" with actual Arab control. Regarding the Palestinian refugees, Barak offered a token return to Israel and massive financial compensation to facilitate their rehabilitation in the Arab states and the Palestinian state-to-be.

Arafat rejected the offer, insisting on 100% Israeli withdrawal from the territories, sole Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and the refugees' "right of return" to Israel proper. Instead of continuing to negotiate, the Palestinians - with the agile Arafat both riding the tiger and pulling the strings behind the scenes - launched the intifada. Clinton (and Barak) responded by upping the ante to 94-96% of the West Bank (with some territorial compensation from Israel proper) and sovereignty over the surface area of the Temple Mount, with some sort of Israeli control regarding the area below ground, where the Palestinians have recently carried out excavation work without proper archaeological supervision. Again, the Palestinians rejected the proposals, insisting on sole Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount (surely an unjust demand: after all, the Temple Mount and the temples' remains at its core are the most important historical and religious symbol and site of the Jewish people. It is worth mentioning that "Jerusalem" or its Arab variants do not even appear once in the Koran).

Since these rejections - which led directly to Barak's defeat and hardliner Ariel Sharon's election as prime minister - the Israelis and Palestinians have been at each other's throats, and the semi-occupation has continued. The intifada is a strange, sad sort of war, with the underdog, who rejected peace, simultaneously in the role of aggressor and, when the western TV cameras are on, victim. The semi-occupier, with his giant but largely useless army, merely responds, usually with great restraint, given the moral and international political shackles under which he labours. And he loses on CNN because F-16s bombing empty police buildings appear far more savage than Palestinian suicide bombers who take out 10 or 20 Israeli civilians at a go.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has emerged as a virtual kingdom of mendacity, where every official, from President Arafat down, spends his days lying to a succession of western journalists. The reporters routinely give the lies credence equal to or greater than what they hear from straight, or far less mendacious, Israeli officials. One day Arafat charges that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) uses uranium-tipped shells against Palestinian civilians. The next day it's poison gas. Then, for lack of independent corroboration, the charges simply vanish - and the Palestinians go on to the next lie, again garnering headlines in western and Arab newspapers.

Daily, Palestinian officials bewail Israeli "massacres" and "bombings" of Palestinian civilians - when in fact there have been no massacres and the bombings have invariably been directed at empty PA buildings. The only civilians deliberately targeted and killed in large numbers, indeed massacred, are Israeli - by Palestinian suicide bombers. In response, the army and Shin Bet (the Israeli security service) have tried to hit the guilty with "targeted killings" of bomb-makers, terrorists and their dispatchers, to me an eminently moral form of reprisal, deterrence and prevention: these are (barbaric) "soldiers" in a mini-war and, as such, legitimate military targets. Would the critics prefer Israel to respond in kind to a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv? Palestinian leaders routinely laud the suicide bombers as national heroes. In a recent spate of articles, Palestinian journalists, politicians and clerics praised Wafa Idris, a female suicide bomber who detonated her device in Jerusalem's main Jaffa Street, killing an 81-year-old man and injuring about 100. A controversy ensued - not over the morality or political efficacy of the deed but about whether Islam allows women to play such a role.

Instead of being informed, accurately, about the Israeli peace offers, the Palestinians have been subjected to a nonstop barrage of anti-Israeli incitement and lies in the PA-controlled media. Arafat has honed the practice of saying one thing to western audiences and quite another to his own Palestinian constituency to a fine art. Lately, with Arab audiences, he has begun to use the term "the Zionist army" (for the IDF), a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s when Arab leaders routinely spoke of "the Zionist entity" instead of saying "Israel", which, they felt, implied some form of recognition of the Jewish state and its legitimacy.

At the end of the day, this question of legitimacy - seemingly put to rest by the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties - is at the root of current Israeli despair and my own "conversion". For decades, Israeli leaders - notably Golda Meir in 1969 - denied the existence of a "Palestinian people" and the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations for sovereignty. But during the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionist movement agreed to give up its dream of a "Greater Israel" and to divide Palestine with the Arabs. During the 1990s, the movement went further - agreeing to partition and recognising the existence of the Pales tinian people as its partner in partition.

Unfortunately, the Palestinian national movement, from its inception, has denied the Zionist movement any legitimacy and stuck fast to the vision of a "Greater Palestine", meaning a Muslim-Arab-populated and Arab-controlled state in all of Palestine, perhaps with some Jews being allowed to stay on as a religious minority. In 1988-93, in a brief flicker on the graph, Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation seemed to have acquiesced in the idea of a compromise. But since 2000 the dominant vision of a "Greater Palestine" has surged back to the fore (and one wonders whether the pacific asseverations of 1988-1993 were not merely diplomatic camouflage).

The Palestinian leadership, and with them most Palestinians, deny Israel's right to exist, deny that Zionism was/is a just enterprise. (I have yet to see even a peace-minded Palestinian leader, as Sari Nusseibeh seems to be, stand up and say: "Zionism is a legitimate national liberation movement, like our own. And the Jews have a just claim to Palestine, like we do.") Israel may exist, and be too powerful, at present, to destroy; one may recognise its reality. But this is not to endow it with legitimacy. Hence Arafat's repeated denial in recent months of any connection between the Jewish people and the Temple Mount, and, by extension, between the Jewish people and the land of Israel/Palestine. "What Temple?" he asks. The Jews are simply robbers who came from Europe and decided, for some unfathomable reason, to steal Palestine and displace the Palestinians. He refuses to recognise the history and reality of the 3,000-year-old Jewish connection to the land of Israel.

On some symbolic plane, the Temple Mount is a crucial issue. But more practically, the real issue, the real litmus test of Palestinian intentions, is the fate of the refugees, some 3.5-4m strong, encompassing those who fled or were driven out during the 1948 war and were never allowed back to their homes in Is rael, as well as their descendants.

I spent the mid-1980s investigating what led to the creation of the refugee problem, publishing The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 in 1988. My conclusion, which angered many Israelis and undermined Zionist historiography, was that most of the refugees were a product of Zionist military action and, in smaller measure, of Israeli expulsion orders and Arab local leaders' urgings or orders to move out. Critics of Israel subsequently latched on to those findings that highlighted Israeli responsibility while ignoring the fact that the problem was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians - and, in their wake, the surrounding Arab states - had launched. And few noted that, in my concluding remarks, I had explained that the creation of the problem was "almost inevitable", given the Zionist aim of creating a Jewish state in a land largely populated by Arabs and given Arab resistance to the Zionist enterprise. The refugees were the inevitable by-product of an attempt to fit an ungainly square peg into an inhospitable round hole.

But whatever my findings, we are now 50 years on - and Israel exists. Like every people, the Jews deserve a state, and justice will not be served by throwing them into the sea. And if the refugees are allowed back, there will be godawful chaos and, in the end, no Israel. Israel is currently populated by 5m Jews and more than 1m Arabs (an increasingly vociferous, pro-Palestinian irredentist time bomb). If the refugees return, an unviable binational entity will emerge and, given the Arabs' far higher birth rates, Israel will quickly cease to be a Jewish state. Add to that the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority.

Jews lived as a minority in Muslim countries from the 7th century - and, contrary to Arab propaganda, never much enjoyed the experience. They were always second-class citizens and always discriminated-against infidels; they were often persecuted and not infrequently murdered. Giant pogroms occurred over the centuries. And as late as the 1940s Arab mobs murdered hundreds of Jews in Baghdad, and hundreds more in Libya, Egypt and Morocco. The Jews were expelled from or fled the Arab world during the 1950s and 60s. There is no reason to believe that Jews will want to live (again) as a minority in a (Palestinian) Arab state, especially given the tragic history of Jewish-Palestinian relations. They will either be expelled or emigrate to the west.

It is the Palestinian leadership's rejection of the Barak-Clinton peace proposals of July-December 2000, the launching of the intifada, and the demand ever since that Israel accept the "right of return" that has persuaded me that the Palestinians, at least in this generation, do not intend peace: they do not want, merely, an end to the occupation - that is what was offered back in July-December 2000, and they rejected the deal. They want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to prise open the Jewish state. Demography - the far higher Arab birth rate - will, over time, do the rest, if Iranian or Iraqi nuclear weapons don't do the trick first.

And don't get me wrong. I favour an Israeli withdrawal from the territories - the semi-occupation is corrupting and immoral, and alienates Israel's friends abroad - as part of a bilateral peace agreement; or, if an agreement is unobtainable, a unilateral withdrawal to strategically defensible borders. In fact in 1988 I served time in a military prison for refusing to serve in the West Bank town of Nablus. But I don't believe that the resultant status quo will survive for long. The Palestinians - either the PA itself or various armed factions, with the PA looking on - will continue to harry Israel, with Katyusha rockets and suicide bombers, across the new lines, be they agreed or self-imposed. Ultimately, they will force Israel to reconquer the West Bank and Gaza Strip, probably plunging the Middle East into a new, wide conflagration.

I don't believe that Arafat and his colleagues mean or want peace - only a staggered chipping away at the Jewish state - and I don't believe that a permanent two-state solution will emerge. I don't believe that Arafat is constitutionally capable of agreeing, really agreeing, to a solution in which the Palestinians get 22-25% of the land (a West Bank-Gaza state) and Israel the remaining 75-78%, or of signing away the "right of return". He is incapable of looking his refugee constituencies in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Gaza in the eye and telling them: "I have signed away your birthright, your hope, your dream."

And he probably doesn't want to. Ultimately, I believe, the balance of military force or the demography of Palestine, meaning the discrepant national birth rates, will determine the country's future, and either Palestine will become a Jewish state, without a substantial Arab minority, or it will become an Arab state, with a gradually diminishing Jewish minority. Or it will become a nuclear wasteland, a home to neither people.

· Professor Benny Morris teaches Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel. His next book, The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, the Jews and Palestine, is published by IB Tauris.

14. Januar 2003,  02:05, Neue Zürcher Zeitung Jordanien zwischen zwei Kriegen Die Sorgen des jordanischen Königs angesichts der amerikanischen Kriegspläne im Irak sind verständlich. Von der britischen Kolonialmacht als Pufferstaat zwischen dem arabischen Osten und dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet in der Levante geschaffen und der Haschemitenfamilie als Trostpreis für ihr Bündnis mit Grossbritannien im Ersten Weltkrieg vermacht, droht sich Jordanien wieder einmal zwischen zwei regionalen Brandherden wiederzufinden: Auf der einen Seite geht der israelisch-palästinensische Krieg weiter, auf der anderen Seite droht die Invasion in den Irak. Abdallahs Sorgen werden einmal von der der Entschlossenheit, der Rücksichtslosigkeit und den Machtmitteln geweckt, mit denen die USA unter Präsident Bush gegen einen arabischen Staatschef vorgehen, der ihnen nicht ins Konzept passt. Angesichts der amerikanischen Kritik selbst an bisher als «Freunde» geltenden Regimen, müssen sich Monarchen und Präsidenten fragen, ob sie nicht auch auf der Abschussliste Washingtons stehen. Dies umso mehr, als zahlreiche Kommentatoren hinter dem amerikanischen Aufmarsch nicht nur den Willen zu einem Regimewechsel im Irak, sondern zu einer umfassenden Neuordnung der ganzen Krisenregion zwischen dem Mittelmeer und dem Persischen Golf sehen. Die amerikafeindliche Stimmung in seinem Volk und die Abhängigkeit seiner Macht vom amerikanischen Wohlwollen zwingt den jordanischen König zu vorsichtigem Lavieren. Bei einem amerikanischen Losschlagen gegen Bagdad werden Fernsehbilder und die Berichte der irakischen Flüchtlinge, die wohl zu Tausenden nach Jordanien fliehen werden, den Antiamerikanismus in der Bevölkerung nähren. Gefährlich für den Haschemitenthron wird die Situation jedoch dann, wenn gleichzeitig mit einem Krieg im Irak auch jener zwischen Israeli und Palästinensern wieder eskaliert. Der doppelte Selbstmordanschlag palästinensischer Attentäter in Tel Aviv, der vor einer Woche 25 Menschenleben forderte, hat in Erinnerung gerufen, dass dieser Konflikt ungebremst weitergeht. Allein im Dezember haben israelische Soldaten 60 palästinensische Zivilisten getötet. Die israelischen Massnahmen - die Razzien, Verhaftungen, Hauszerstörungen und Morde an politischen und militärischen Führern - sind auf Anweisung der Regierung Ende Jahr nochmals verschärft worden. Die Araber vermuten hinter Sharons Besetzungspolitik die Absicht, den Leidensdruck für die palästinensische Bevölkerung so unerträglich zu machen, dass Auswanderung als einzige Alternative erscheint. Jordanische Regierungsvertreter bis hinauf zum König, aber auch palästinensische Politiker und israelische Friedensaktivisten haben in den letzten Monaten immer wieder davor gewarnt, Sharon könnte die Gelegenheit eines Kriegs im Irak zur Deportation von Palästinensern aus dem Westjordanland benützen. Seit dem Ausbruch der zweiten Intifada preisen rechtsnationale Kreise die Idee des sogenannten Transfers als Lösung aller Probleme Israels mit den Palästinensern an; offene Verfechter dieser Idee waren auch in der Regierung Sharon. Die freie Hand, die Washington Sharon gegenüber den Palästinensern gelassen hat, nährt in der jordanischen Führung offensichtlich die Befürchtung, die amerikanische Nachsicht könnte sich auch auf eine «ethnische Säuberung» Palästinas erstrecken. Es ist unwahrscheinlich, dass die USA und der Westen einer gewalttätigen Vertreibung Hunderttausender von Palästinensern tatenlos zusehen würden. Die Ablenkung der Öffentlichkeit durch einen Irak-Krieg könnte die israelische Rechte, die nach den kommenden Wahlen noch fester im Sattel zu sitzen droht, nämlich durchaus dazu verleiten, gewisse Gruppen von besonders unbequemen Palästinensern abzuschieben. Dies könnten Bauern sein, auf deren Land die Siedler ihr Auge geworfen haben, oder die politischen Führer und die Intellektuellen, die den Widerstand der Palästinenser gegen Israel artikulieren. Auch ein beschränkter «Transfer» droht in Jordanien und anderen arabischen Ländern Proteste und Gewalt zu provozieren, welche die ganze Region weiter destabilisieren. Vielleicht wäre es heilsam, wenn Washington und seine Verbündeten sowohl gegenüber Israel wie den Arabern klar bekräftigten, dass ein «Transfer» in jeder Form ethisch, rechtlich und politisch inakzeptabel ist. jbi.

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