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Transfer, now and then The week of shiva for Rechavam Ze'evi is now over, but the impact of his murder still reverberates. It is felt in the field, where Israeli troops continue to encircle Palestinian towns. It is heard in the demands of Israel's leaders that the grip on those towns will not be eased until the assassins of Ze'evi are in our hands. And it is seen in a survey taken by a leading pollster in the wake of his assassination, indicating that fully two-thirds of the Israeli population supports the murdered minister's plan for "voluntary transfer" of Palestinians out of Israel in the framework of a political agreement. To be fair, emotions were stirred after such a brutal murder, and the pollsters did not ask detailed questions about what exactly was meant by "voluntary." But even if the timing exaggerated the results, the extent of popular support for "transfer" is stunning. Most Israelis appear to believe that peaceful coexistence is impossible, and that only a total physical separation can succeed in bringing stability. Israel is suing for divorce in which there is a total division of property and a total separation of warring populations. The call for "unilateral separation" today comes from primarily from the center and the left. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who saw himself as Rabin's spiritual heir, introduced the idea into Israel's political lexicon last year following the collapse of peace talks with the Palestinians. Without a deal, Israel would withdraw to security lines that it could "live with" until peace would someday come. Advocates of separation suggest the border would be similar if not identical to the pre-1967 armistice lines. The goal, wherever the lines would be drawn, would be, in Barak's memorable slogan, to leave "us here, them there." Implied is that Jewish settlements falling outside those new separation lines would be abandoned and their residents forced to move within the new borders -- or be left to the tender mercies of the Palestinian Authority. But what about Arab villages situated on the Israeli side of the new separation lines? To leave them behind the new border would negate the purpose of separation. Both right and left wing Israeli Jews now want to separate from the Arabs: the only question is where to draw the territorial line. The bottom line is that just about everybody in the neighborhood wants to or, under certain circumstances, is willing to "transfer" somebody else, someone they consider to be the "other." The right supports evacuating some or all Arabs while the left supports evacuating some or all of the Jewish "settlers." Most if not all Palestinians express the desire to "transfer" most if not all Israelis from "occupied Palestine" -- which most, if not all, define as all of Israel. Left-wing Israelis tend to deny that forcing Jews to leave their homes in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is a form of "transfer." They argue that the settlers knew the risks of moving to "occupied land" even though successive right and left wing governments approved their actions. Three generations of Israelis have now grown up there in the Biblical heartland. There are places, like Hebron and Jerusalem, where Jewish settlement goes back centuries and even millennia, interrupted only by periodic expulsions and massacres. A transfer of Jewish settlers (no doubt to be dubbed "repatriation" or "resettlement") would be devastating from a psychological or moral standpoint on the national scale. Families would be uprooted from their homes, whole communities destroyed. Israel would risk widespread disobedience or civil war. While the world would applaud settlement evacuation, unilateral Israeli border setting would be universally condemned. Nor would right-wingers easily stomach the reality of transferring Arabs: men, women and children, magnified by TV cameras from all directions. Even if carried out in "the fog of war," the moral stain and political strain on Israeli society would be unbearable. The world would rapidly coalesce to compel Israel to take back those displaced. Then there is the painful question of the "Israeli Arabs": those residents of Palestine who did not flee in 1948. At first Israel imposed martial law on this hostile and vanquished population. Later they were accorded, on paper, the rights of citizens, but they were never really treated as equals by Jewish Israelis. For the most part, their social and economic conditions remain second-class. They no not fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship, such as mandatory military service, and they have no allegiance to a Zionist entity. What troubles many Israelis today is that even if "the Palestinian problem" is solved by drawing new lines, this will not address "the Israeli Arab problem," since these voting citizens of the State, increasingly hostile and allied with Palestine, with a growth rate more than twice that of the Jewish fellow citizens, will be left behind the Israeli border. That dovetails with unrequited Palestinian demands for the "right of return" to flood Israel with refugees, tipping the demographic and democratic balance in their favor. What is becoming evident is that the Palestinian Arab problem can no longer be treated as separable from the Israeli Arab problem. Self-defined "Palestinian" Knesset Members compete to express extremities of support for the external enemies of Israel including, most recently, Osama bin Laden. Some Israeli Arabs are planting bombs, assisting terror acts and even, for the first time, becoming suicide bombers themselves. Polls show that most Arab citizens no longer identify themselves as Israelis. They express the intention to change Israel, democratically if not violently, by ballots if not by bullets, into Palestine. Ze'evi long accused Rabin's political forebears and contemporaries, including David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan and other Zionist icons, of being the originators of a "transfer" policy. After the UN approved the partition of Palestine, Israel was attacked by five surrounding nations and by the local Arab population. Some resident Arabs were advised to leave by their leaders and others fled the war zone. But Israel's fledging army also forced or encouraged tens (some claim hundreds) of thousands Arabs to flee their communities -- in Haifa, Jaffa, Lydda, Ramla, Jerusalem (where Rabin fought) and scores of other locations -- and then prevented most of them, by force and by law from returning. If they had stayed, there would have been no viable Israel, since the new "Jewish state" would have been at least 40% Arab. Ze'evi always claimed to have learned "transfer" from the founders of the state, and merely sought to carry on this Zionist tradition. The time has come for Israelis to stop considering "transfer" to be a taboo. A consensus now believes the map must be redrawn in a way that fosters long-term stability. Israelis and Palestinians must exchange populations, not just land, sooner rather than later. As even Ariel Sharon expresses qualified support for a demilitarized Palestinian state, "land for peace" must accompany the urgent consideration of "people for people - for peace." The population exchange framework, ideally, should be wholly voluntary. Wherever the lines are drawn, each citizen must have the right to choose to which nation he or she pledges allegiance. Israeli Arabs loyal to Israel could opt to remain citizens. And this freedom of choice need not require forced dislocation or relocation. People residing peacefully on one side of the border could be citizens of the neighboring nation, provided that they respect the host nation's laws. Israeli Jews could opt to remain residents of Palestine, with the Palestinian Authority responsible for their security. In practice, naturally, Arabs and Jews would tend to migrate to their respective national homelands. Will Israel at last address the existential questions raised by the idea of voluntary transfer? Or will we continue to deny or demonize the messengers, from left and right, who ask them? It may salve our consciences to pretend that Arabs were never expelled, or that evacuating Jewish settlements is not transfer. If it only "happens to us," rather than our choosing to "do it," perhaps it will be possible to fool ourselves that we are only subject to irresistible, and inevitably violent, events, rather than protagonists with the freedoms and responsibilities of choice. But we would thus disgrace the legacy of Zionism, which asserts that the Jews are no longer helpless victims of fate but actors on the world-stage, victors with the burden of helping perpetuate a secure and decent state. The assassinated statesmen whom we commemorate today did not run from that choice. Courageous action to ensure a viable Jewish democratic state is a legacy that binds forever Rabin and Ze'evi. The stands they took and the decisions they made were not always popular, nor morally free and easy, but they were principled and forthright. By honestly learning the lessons of the lives of these brave and pragmatic Zionist leaders -- one the son of a generation that executed "transfer" so that Israel could be born and thrive, and the other who advocated "transfer" so that Israel may survive as a nation both Jewish and democratic -- we may yet avoid repeating the follies and failures of history. Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
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