Among Vladimir Jabotinsky's voluminous papers housed in the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv is a handwritten note from November 1939, which has not been discussed in the scholarship in Jabotinsky, catalogued as ‘Population exchanges – notes in Jabotinsky's handwriting, in English.’ This note, written some two months after the outbreak of the Second World War, offers a rare glimpse into the way Jabotinsky – who passed away in New York just eleven months after the Nazi invasion of Poland – had envisioned the post-war world and the position of Jews in it. In Jabotinsky's assessment, there would remain no ethnic minorities in eastern Europe after the war. Ten to twenty million European minorities would be forced to evacuate from their pre-war homes and those who would choose to remain would have to assimilate to the majority culture. Millions of Jewish refugees would have to be transferred to Palestine after the war. As for the Arab population in Palestine, Jabotinsky argued, ‘they will have to make room’ for the Jews and leave, perhaps to Saudi Arabia with the support of an international loan. ‘If Balts may be moved’, Jabotinsky argued, referring to a population exchange agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for the resettlement of Baltic Germans in occupied Poland, then ‘Palestinian Arabs certainly’ could be relocated too. Jabotinsky's model for his proposed ethnic transformation of Palestine was the 1923 Greek–Turkish population exchange agreement that sanctioned the transfers of some 1.5 million Orthodox Greeks from Turkey and about 500,000 Muslims from Greece, many of whom had been displaced during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22). Jabotinsky took notes from an authoritative study on the agreement written by a renowned expert on the question of refugees, John Hope Simpson. He copied from the study a diagram describing how Greece had become ethnically homogeneous in the aftermath of the agreement as well as details about its financial stipulations. Jabotinsky copied at length only one paragraph from the study, revealing how favourably he viewed the idea of population transfers and the similarities he drew between Greece and what he hoped would be a future Jewish state in Palestine:
The exchange of populations, though at the time it caused infinite misery and was an element of crisis for Greece, at least resulted in the solution of a difficult political situation…It has unquestionably strengthened the Greek state by the influx of a stable and hard working element…the disappearance of irritating minority questions has made it possible for Greece to live on good and even friendly terms with her ancient enemies.Footnote 1
Jabotinsky's 1939 note is an astonishing document for it is at odds with his lifetime political thought. Indeed, though Jabotinsky, founder and leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement, was repeatedly derided in his lifetime as a fascist and right-wing radical, ‘perhaps the most controversial public figure in the Jewish life of his day’, as Michael Stanislawski put it, he had been staunchly committed to the protection of the rights of minorities in Europe and Palestine throughout his career.Footnote 2 Jabotinsky was keenly aware of the contrast between his public image as a radical nationalist and his steadfast commitment to the principles of minority protection. ‘This writer, as some readers may have heard, is a chauvinist and an extremist and generally a political cannibal’, he cynically noted in a 1930 essay, ‘but he can produce documentary evidence of always having been a staunch adherent of the bi-national, even the multi-national state idea.’Footnote 3
Indeed, from the very first days of his political engagement with Zionism and until the late 1930s, Jabotinsky was deeply invested in the politics of minority rights. Jabotinsky was one of the architects of the 1905 Helsingfors programme that for the first time placed the fight for collective rights for Jews in the Russian Empire at the centre of the political agenda of Russian Zionists. In the years preceding the First World War, Jabotinsky was consumed by the struggle of minorities for national rights within Europe's multi-ethnic empires. Jabotinsky wrote a dissertation on Austrian socialist Karl Renner's concept of national cultural autonomy. He carefully followed and reported as a journalist on Ottoman nationalities policy during several trips to Constantinople following the 1908 Young Turk revolution. And he consistently advocated for the cause of Jewish as well as Ukrainian national autonomy within the Russian Empire.Footnote 4 Jabotinsky remained committed to the cause of minority rights well into the interwar years. In one 1928 essay, he urged Jews not to give up on the ‘minorities dream’ despite the various failures of the League of Nations’ system of minority protection.Footnote 5 And even as Jabotinsky famously advocated for the mass evacuation of Jews from eastern Europe in the mid-1930s, he insisted on continuing the fight for Jewish equality in Europe.
Jabotinsky's commitment to minority rights in Europe also shaped his outlook on the future of Palestine. From 1917 until the outbreak of the Second World War, Jabotinsky envisioned a majority Jewish state in Palestine with elaborate guarantees for the protection of the Arab minority. This vision was premised on a major moral leap that characterized many Zionist leaders – conceiving of Palestine's Arab majority as a future minority subject to minority protections.Footnote 6 Still, few other Zionist leaders had written with as much passion and zeal on the rights of the Arab population in the future Jewish state. In 1918, Jabotinsky laid out a proposal for the creation of a bi-national state in Palestine. In 1922, he proposed the establishment of a multi-confessional Middle Eastern federation with extensive autonomy for Jews and Arabs. In a proposed constitution first drafted in the early 1930s, Jabotinsky called for full equality, cultural autonomy, and an equal share in government administration for the Arab minority. For every Jewish minister, Jabotinsky proclaimed, there should be an Arab deputy, and vice versa. Both Hebrew and Arabic should be used in all official capacities as the languages of the state. The state budget should be shared proportionally between Jews and Arabs. A joint Arab–Jewish court should regulate the distribution of land. Jews and Arabs should be recognized as separate autonomous bodies that would independently regulate matters relating to culture and religion.Footnote 7
Given Jabotinsky's staunch commitment to minority rights in Europe and Palestine, how are we to explain his 1939 – and, as we shall see, subsequent – calls for the expulsion of Arabs from Palestine? As this article will demonstrate, shortly after the outbreak of war Jabotinsky abandoned his lifelong commitment to the principle of minority rights. Jabotinsky predicated there would be three to five million Jewish refugees in post-war Europe. Millions of Jews had been displaced from their homes and professions in Nazi-occupied Europe, he argued, and they would not be allowed to return to their homes even after an Allied victory. Eastern European states had been advocating for Jewish emigration in the 1930s and would not let masses of Jews return after the war and reclaim property already taken by members of the ethnic majority. The only solution to this unprecedented Jewish refugee problem in Europe would be the large-scale transfer of millions of Jews to Palestine within a few short years. In 1936, Jabotinsky laid out his ‘Evacuation plan’, a proposal for the immigration of 1.5 million Jews from eastern Europe to Palestine over the course of ten years. In early 1940, Jabotinsky argued that two million Jews would have to be transferred to Palestine in the first year after the war alone. The settlement of such a large Jewish population in Palestine, he argued, could only succeed if land and homes were made available to these refugees, and this would have to take place at the expense of the local Arab population.
Jabotinsky's shift from support for minority rights to an endorsement of population transfers was also shaped by his conviction that the era of minority rights in Europe had come to an end. Jabotinsky carefully followed the disintegration of the system of minority protection in Europe in the 1930s and the growth of support for the idea of population transfers among both liberals and fascists. On the eve of the war, commenting on a population exchange agreement between Nazi Germany and Italy, Jabotinsky argued that European states would soon attempt to solve their minority problems through a series of bilateral population exchange agreements. The outbreak of war augured in his view a radical acceleration of this process. The interwar minority rights order had been irrecoverably shattered. After the war, eastern European states would carry out large-scale transfers of minorities, and few states would be willing to go back to a system of minority protection. After Jabotinsky's death in September 1940, three of his closest associates in the Revisionist Zionist movement – Benjamin Akzin, Joseph Schecthman, and Eliyahu Ben-Horin – recognized their leader's newfound support for population transfers, and envisioned themselves as an avant-garde movement that would help popularize the idea of population transfers as a solution to the problem of minorities in Europe and Palestine.
In the past decade, scholars have begun to reassess the legacy of Jabotinsky and emphasize the centrality of minority rights to his political thought. Jabotinsky is increasingly portrayed in scholarship as an idiosyncratic figure, at once the founder and leader of right-wing Zionism and an unrelenting ‘champion of the rights of minorities to his dying day’.Footnote 8 By tracing Jabotinsky's wartime political transformation, this article seeks to challenge the prevailing portrayal of Jabotinsky as an unwavering defender of minority rights. The purpose of this historical revision is not simply to replace one image of Jabotinsky – a defender of minority rights, with another – a supporter of population transfers – but rather to offer a more contextualized and nuanced understanding of his political worldview and its development in time. In recent years, scholars have shown that during the interwar period prominent Zionist leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann also supported extensive federalist and autonomist plans for the future of Palestine.Footnote 9 Sceptical that Jews could achieve a significant majority in Palestine in the near future, their political visions were always based on an assumption of some form of power sharing between Jewish and Arab autonomous communities. During the 1940s, however, both Ben-Gurion and Weizmann abandoned these visions and sought to establish a Jewish majority state in Palestine. Jabotinsky is continuously portrayed as a defender of minority rights not because we know his vision for Palestine would have markedly differed from theirs in the 1940s, but because his death in 1940 fossilized him in the interwar period. By recovering his early wartime writings, this article thus seeks for the first time to place Jabotinsky in the 1940s – a period of his life other scholars have either overlooked or discussed only in passing.
Recovering Jabotinsky's wartime writings is pursued here also in order to address a larger historiographical issue in the history of Zionism, namely, the impact of the 1940s on Zionist thought. In the past decade, scholars of Jewish nationalism have revised our understanding of Zionism by carefully studying the history of diaspora nationalism. Scholars have shown that from the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the interwar years, Zionism was not aimed exclusively, or even primarily, at the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.Footnote 10 Indeed, most Zionist leaders were committed to the promotion of a thriving Jewish national centre in eastern Europe based on autonomy and minority rights alongside the development of a Jewish national centre in Palestine. Moreover, even those Zionists who focused their work on Palestine were not exclusively committed to the creation of a Jewish nation-state. Realizing that a significant Jewish majority in Palestine would require decades of immigration, and believing that Palestine ought to set an example of the minority rights philosophy Jews were clamouring for in eastern Europe, Zionist leaders from left to right embraced federalist, autonomist, and various other visions of Jewish–Arab power sharing.
Yet while scholars have successfully underscored the centrality of diaspora nationalism to Zionist thought, what we are missing in scholarship is an understanding of precisely when and why those diaspora nationalist visions vanished. When and why did Zionist leaders stop thinking about Palestine in federalist and autonomist terms and begin to advocate for a Jewish nation-state? When and why did Zionist leaders stop thinking about two Jewish national centres – in eastern Europe and Palestine – and begin to advocate exclusively for a Jewish national centre in Palestine? Jabotinsky's swift wartime transformation – from one of the architects of the Helsingfors programme and a staunch defender of minority rights to a supporter of population transfers – offers a lens through which to explore these questions.
In embracing a Jewish nation-state model during the war, Jabotinsky and other Zionist leaders were not only responding to a specifically Jewish plight but also to broader transformations in eastern European nationalism during the 1940s. Scholars have recently underscored how during the 1940s east central European states, particularly Poland and Czechoslovakia, pursued policies of ethnic homogenization, expelling and nationalizing their minority populations after the war. Scholars have studied these expulsions in the context of changing international norms regarding minorities in that decade. Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and east central European states all viewed the ‘minority question’ as one of the root causes of interwar instability, and from the start of the war promoted population transfers as a means of solving the ‘minority question’ in Europe once and for all.Footnote 11
Despite the significant parallels between the transformations of Jewish and eastern European nationalism in the 1940s, scholars have not yet fully explored the relationship between these developments. This is surprising given the fact that scholars of Jewish nationalism have traditionally emphasized the importance of situating their studies in the context of east-central Europe. This elision is a result of the almost exclusive focus on the Holocaust in the study of Zionism in the 1940s. Scholars have mainly sought to determine what Zionist leaders knew about the Holocaust and how they responded; if they were concerned with explaining ideological change at all, it was posited as a reaction to (or an anticipation of) the destruction of European Jewry. But as Jabotinsky's case shows, his ideological transformation predated the mass murder of European Jewry. Indeed, Jabotinsky's transformation calls upon us to pay attention to an important wartime period, spanning roughly between September 1939 and late 1942 – that is, before knowledge of the extermination of European Jews had been registered by Zionist leaders, and during a moment in which Zionist leaders expected the war would end with millions of Jewish refugees. It was within this moment that Jabotinsky and other Zionist leaders had abandoned the diaspora nationalist political models that dominated their political thinking in the interwar years, and began conceiving of an ethnic nation-state with a Jewish majority larger than they had ever previously conceived was possible. Jabotinsky's new vision for the future of Palestine, this article argues, needs to be contextualized as part of broader wartime debates over the future of nationalism and ethnic minorities in eastern Europe after the war.
I
Jabotinsky's endorsement of population transfers in his 1939 note is striking not only because of his lifelong commitment to the principles of minority protection, but also because Jabotinsky had repeatedly rejected the idea of population transfers throughout the interwar years, even as some Zionist leaders endorsed it.
As Jabotinsky reminisced in a 1926 obituary for British Zionist leader and playwright Israel Zangwill, he first learned about the idea of population transfers in 1917 – during a speech by Zangwill and a subsequent exchange between the two.Footnote 12 In a party convened in London to celebrate the Balfour declaration, Zangwill had shared his great hope that the Arabs could be convinced to leave Palestine and provide Jews with a greater area for settlement. After the party, Jabotinsky recalled, he walked with Zangwill through the streets of London, asking him whether he truly believed that a million Arabs would voluntarily agree to leave their homes. Zangwill replied that this Arab population transfer would occur as part of a general remaking of the world, the ‘unmixing of races’. In Europe and the Near East, Zangwill claimed, ethnic hatreds were too ancient and endemic: the Turks could never overcome their hatred to the Armenians and Greeks; Poles and Ukrainians in Galicia; and Germans and Czechs in Moravia could never live together. Where no clear separation between such races existed, an international mechanism should be set up to separate them. All the Greeks from Anatolia, Zangwill insisted, should emigrate to Greece and the Turks from Macedonia to Turkey. Writing in the mid-1920s, Jabotinsky ascribed to Zangwill a great degree of foresight. Six years after their conversation, Jabotinsky reminisced, Zangwill's prediction regarding Greece and Turkey had come true. Yet while Zangwill had foreseen the population exchange in the Balkans, Jabotinsky noted, he was wrong in his assumption that such transfers could be carried out in a voluntary and peaceful manner. The Greek–Turkish exchange of populations was ‘brutal, carried out through hunger and tears’. Indeed, Jabotinsky was astonished that the League of Nations and what he called the ‘enlightened world’ had at all given support and credence to this policy.Footnote 13 Just a few months after publishing the piece on Zangwill, Jabotinsky repeated his critique of population transfers. When a paper misquoted Jabotinsky as speaking in favour of the expulsion of Arabs from Palestine, Jabotinsky quickly sent a letter of correction to the editor. ‘I did not say those words or any words that could be interpreted along these lines.’ ‘My opinion’, Jabotinsky emphasized, is the contrary ‘that if anyone tried to push the Arabs out of Palestine, all or a part of them – he would be doing, first of all, something immoral and – impossible’.Footnote 14
Jabotinsky's staunch rejection of population transfers in the 1920s was premised on his strong commitment to the ideals of minority protection and belief that majority–minority relations in states could ultimately be made more harmonious. In his 1928 essay ‘The minorities dream’, Jabotinsky called on Jews to continue to fight for the realization of minority rights in eastern Europe, despite the many shortcomings and failures of the system.Footnote 15
Though in his writings from the 1920s Jabotinsky had decried the Greek–Turkish exchange of populations as brutal, he nonetheless shared an admiration for the Greek state's success at resettling the 1.5 million refugees in the wake of the Greek–Turkish War. This mixture of repulsion at the moral consequences of the Greek–Turkish agreement with an admiration for its enormous success as a settlement enterprise would later shape, as we shall see, Jabotinsky's attitude toward the idea of population transfers in Palestine. In his 1927 essay, ‘How a state colonizes’, Jabotinsky contrasted the failure of the colonization efforts of the mandatory regime in Palestine with the remarkable success of the Greek state.Footnote 16 The essay emerged as part of a larger intra-Zionist debate over the causes and consequences of the 1926–7 financial crisis in the Yishuv. The Yishuv experienced a major financial crisis at the time that led to a large wave of Jewish out-migration and instigated fears about the future of Jewish colonization efforts in Palestine. Jabotinsky sought to dispel fatalistic attitudes among Zionist leaders and the Jewish public over the future of Jewish settlement in Palestine by highlighting the Greek example: a state that successfully settled more than ten times the amount of immigrants than had come to Palestine in the 1920s, with much less funds per capita and within a significantly shorter time frame. Jabotinsky listed many reasons for the Greek success. In particular, he noted the five million dunams of land, vacated by expelled Muslims and redistributed to incoming Greek refugees, as a significant factor that positively influenced the resettlement efforts.Footnote 17
II
At a September 1935 convention of the Revisionist Zionist movement in Vienna, Jabotinsky laid out his ‘Evacuation plan’, a scheme for the large-scale transfer of 1.5 million Jews from eastern Europe to Palestine over the course of ten years. Jabotinsky conceived of the ‘Evacuation plan’ in the context of increasing political and economic marginalization of Jews in the region and growing demands by Poland, Romania, and Hungary that their ‘surplus’ Jewish population emigrate. Jabotinsky's vision was based on the idea that the alliance of interests between the Zionist movement and governments in eastern Europe could greatly benefit the Zionist cause. As part of this alliance, the Revisionist Zionist movement would organize and seek financing for the emigration of Jews from eastern Europe, while the Polish and other governments in the region would apply pressure on Britain to open the gates of Palestine to Jewish immigration. As Jabotinsky framed it, the plan would be a step in the direction of completely transplanting Jewish life from eastern Europe to Palestine. The plan never materialized, to a large extent because Jabotinsky overestimated the degree of support he could gain from Poland. After 1935, the Polish government certainly wanted the majority of its Jewish citizens to emigrate, but it mattered to it little where the Jews would go – and the British mandatory authorities limited Jewish emigration to Palestine. The Polish government was not willing to risk a fight with Britain for the sake of opening Palestine for Jewish immigration.Footnote 18
It is important to emphasize the differences Jabotinsky saw between the ‘Evacuation plan’ and the idea of population transfers. In Jabotinsky's view, population transfers was a compulsory act, carried out by a majority against a minority. The ‘Evacuation plan’, in contradistinction, was to be organized by Jews for Jews. Moreover, Jabotinsky repeatedly emphasized that the ‘Evacuation plan’ ought not be compulsory. To ensure that the voluntary component was meaningful, Jabotinsky insisted on continuing the fight for equality for Jews in Poland alongside his campaign for the ‘Evacuation plan’. Indeed, at the same time as Jabotinsky advocated for the ‘Evacuation plan’ he also demanded that Poland issue a new declaration vouching for Jewish equality.Footnote 19 At the outset of the first speech in Warsaw in which Jabotinsky laid out the ‘Evacuation plan’, he reminded his audience about his role in drafting the Helsingfors programme. The ‘Evacuation plan’, he argued, was in fact not so different from the programme he had formulated in 1905: both envision Palestine as the solution to the ‘Jewish question’ alongside a fight for the rights of Jews in Europe.Footnote 20
Scholars have generally overlooked Jabotinsky's continued commitment to Jewish equality in eastern Europe in the second half of the 1930s. In this reading, Jabotinsky was a prophet-like leader who foresaw the impending catastrophe and was the first to urge all Jews to leave east central Europe. But a careful reading of the ‘Evacuation plan’ reveals it was in fact consistent with the Zionist interwar worldview that advocated for the development of two Jewish national centres, in eastern Europe and Palestine. For even if the ‘Evacuation plan’ had been realized according to Jabotinsky's wildest dreams – which appeared to be fantastical at the time – it would have managed to bring to Palestine 1.5 million Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, primarily from Poland and Romania. The Jewish population of Poland alone, however, was three million on the eve of the war. At most, then, Jabotinsky could assume that the ‘Evacuation plan’ could offer a solution to only a third of eastern European Jewry within a decade. As for the remaining two-thirds – they necessitated that Jewish leaders continue to fight for meaningful equality.
Such a reading of the ‘Evacuation plan’ as consistent with Jabotinsky's support for Jewish equality and minority rights in Europe can also be ascertained by examining Jabotinsky's writings on antisemitism from the 1930s. In several essays, Jabotinsky argued that antisemitism in eastern Europe, unlike antisemitism in Nazi Germany, stemmed from objective economic factors, a reaction to the over-preponderance of Jews in the middle class. Radically reducing the size of eastern European Jewry through immigration to Palestine would decrease Jewish representation in the middle class, and, consequently, could significantly abate anti-Jewish sentiments and policies.Footnote 21
III
One year after Jabotinsky first presented the ‘Evacuation plan’ in Warsaw, the question of population transfers emerged at the centre of the debate over the future of Palestine. To quell the 1936 Arab revolt, Britain had sent to Palestine a commission of inquiry charged with formulating recommendations for British policy. In July 1937, the Peel Commission laid out a proposal for the partition of Palestine and for a mutual population exchange between Arabs and Jews. According to the plan, 200,000–300,000 Arabs were to be transferred from the territory of the proposed Jewish state while 1,250 Jews were to be transferred from the territories allotted to a proposed Arab state. In advocating for population transfers in Palestine, the Peel Commission approvingly cited the 1923 Greek–Turkish exchange of populations as a political model.
The Peel Commission recommendations were a topic of incessant debate in Zionist circles. After prolonged deliberations, the Zionist executive endorsed the plan. Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, among other Zionist leaders, approved of the transfer component of the plan. Jabotinsky, carefully following the debate, repeatedly and unequivocally criticized and rejected the partition plan. The main grounds on which Jabotinsky based his opposition to the plan was that a partitioned Palestine would be too small to absorb the millions of Jewish immigrants he hoped would settle in Palestine in the coming decades. But Jabotinsky also rejected the plan on moral grounds, fiercely opposing the idea of transferring the Arab population from Palestine. Jabotinsky underscored this point in several letters and speeches from 1937, and expanded on it in an article published in the Revisionist Zionist publication Hayarden:
From a Jewish perspective it [population transfers] is a crime. When the Royal commission is chatting about ‘the great precedent’ (that is, the expulsion of about one million Greeks from Turkey), it is one of those instances in which it plays around with a term not one of its members has any clue about…Until this day, we remained steadfast about one principle…do not expel a single person!…and now a commission, consisting of six biased gentlemen…proposes what seems to them like a trifling matter: ‘non-Jews’ should be expelled from the future Jewish territory. What a ‘great precedent’ indeed for all the enemies of the Jews!Footnote 22
Jabotinsky could not have been more clear about his opposition to transferring a single Arab from Palestine. He also argued that the Peel Commission drew the wrong lesson from the Greek–Turkish case. It was not a ‘great precedent’, as the commission noted in its report, but a tragedy that involved the expulsion of one million Greeks from Turkey. Most revealingly, Jabotinsky argued that the idea of expelling the Arabs from Palestine should be rejected because it could serve as a precedent for ‘the enemies of the Jews’, namely Nazi Germany as well as to eastern European governments which were actively promoting the emigration of their Jewish citizens at the time. In Jabotinsky's view, the fate of the Arabs in Palestine and that of the Jews in Europe were intertwined. Jews could not continue to fight for equality in Europe if they sanctioned the transfer of Arabs from Palestine. As late as 1937, Jabotinsky continued to believe in the fight for Jewish equality in Europe, and feared that support for the transfer of Arabs from Palestine could undermine this struggle.
IV
Only on the eve of the war do we find initial evidence of Jabotinsky's subsequent support for population transfers. In the summer of 1939, just a few months before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini had reached an agreement that stipulated the transfer of some 250,000 German speakers from the Alto Adige region in the Italian Alps, known in German as South Tyrol, to Germany. The agreement did not receive much international attention at the time, but Jabotinsky nonetheless viewed it as a momentous development. The South Tyrol agreement, he argued in a June 1939 essay, had set a precedent ‘the world will feel and never forget’.Footnote 23 The novelty of the agreement, Jabotinsky explained, was that for the first time population transfers had been sanctioned not as a result of war but as part of a bilateral peacetime agreement. Jabotinsky hinted that this was an omen of things to come. Noting conversations he held with League of Nations officials about the agreement, Jabotinsky concluded that population transfers was no longer considered merely a fascist idea but had now become popular even among the ‘circles of intelligentsia…in Geneva’. Recalling his 1917 conversation with Zangwill, Jabotinsky noted how Zangwill's theory about ‘the redistribution of races’ had become increasingly popular. In the near future, Jabotinsky argued, the South Tyrol precedent could serve as a method for solving other minorities problems throughout Europe. Indeed, Jabotinsky feared that states in Europe might increasingly draw on the South Tyrol precedent to expel their unwanted minorities. It is important to note that in early 1939 Jabotinsky rejected the notion – prevalent among many observers in Europe – that Europe was headed inevitably toward war. Instead, as this article reveals, he believed that states in eastern Europe would move to solve their conflicts by shifting minority populations and replacing the multi-ethnic European order enshrined in Versailles with a new order in Europe based on the principle of ethnic homogeneity.Footnote 24
Was the growth of support for population transfers good or bad for the Jews? Jabotinsky posed this question in the essay but refrained from taking a conclusive position. The expulsion of Greeks after the Great War, he reminded his readers, constituted ‘a rejection of all our previous concepts of justice and injustice, of the distinction between humanity and barbarism’.Footnote 25 Indeed, Jabotinsky pointed out, the rising legitimacy of population transfers in Europe would no doubt play into the hands of the Jews’ enemies, who had long hoped to strip Jews of their rights and expel them. Yet this development could also promote the Zionist dream. For the first time, Jabotinsky introduced the thought that population transfers could be beneficial for Jewish aspirations in Palestine: perhaps, he noted, the South Tyrol precedent ‘had been set in order to fulfil, in the future, an important role in our own Jewish history’.Footnote 26
Though Jabotinsky presented his views in the essay as a reaction to the South Tyrol agreement, there is reason to believe his increasingly positive views on population transfers crystallized a few weeks earlier as part of an intellectual exchange with Ben-Zion Netanyahu, a historian, journalist, and Revisionist Zionist activist. Several weeks before Jabotinsky wrote his essay on the South Tyrol agreement, he had met Netanyahu in his London home. Netanyahu gave Jabotinsky a copy of a volume of speeches by Zangwill he had edited, and Jabotinsky promised to read it during his subsequent trip to Poland.Footnote 27 The volume contained many of the Zangwill essays Jabotinsky had been familiar with, and was prefaced by an introduction in which Netanyahu elaborately praised Zangwill for his support for population transfers. Zionist leaders had mocked Zangwill's proposal for the expulsion of Arabs from Palestine during the First World War, Netanyahu noted in the introduction, but Zangwill's vision of population transfers had now become a widely accepted solution in Europe. Indeed, Netanyahu argued, many Zionist leaders embraced Zangwill's vision when they accepted the Peel Commission recommendations. Though Netanyahu ascribed to Zangwill great foresight, he lamented the fact that his call for population transfers in Palestine was no longer feasible. Jews could have carried such a programme out during the turmoil of the First World War, he believed, when Arabs had won new territories and independence throughout the Middle East, but these conditions were no longer tenable.Footnote 28 After Jabotinsky's arrival in New York in March 1940, Netanyahu would play a key role in organizing Revisionist Zionist activities in the United States.
V
After the Nazi invasion of Poland and the outbreak of war in Europe, Jabotinsky radically changed his views and turned to endorse population transfers as a solution to the Jewish future in Europe and to the Arab future in Palestine. Speaking to a Jewish audience shortly after his arrival in New York, Jabotinsky declared that the war in Europe would bring about ‘a thorough shake-up, a world-wide revision of all international and national conditions’. This, he predicted, would have a particular impact on the Jews: it would be impossible to restore Jewish rights in eastern Europe after the war. The Nazis were ‘sending the Jews to Lublin (or to the next ditch) and letting Poles inherit their miserable jobs’. Jews were losing their economic positions in Poland – and they would never be allowed to reclaim their pre-war jobs. The only solution for the ‘Jewish question’ after the war lay in a large-scale immigration plan of the vast majority of eastern European Jews from Europe to Palestine – an ‘Evacuation plan’ on a far grander scale than he had previously imagined. Jabotinsky now called for ‘dumping the first million in the first year [after the war], the rest to follow at a slower but still accelerated pace’. Reversing his longstanding critique of the Greek–Turkish exchange of populations, Jabotinsky now invoked it as a political model: ‘The Turco-Greek experiment of 1923, [which involved the resettlement of] 1,300,000 immigrants within a few months, have proved that such miracles are not impossible.’Footnote 29
Jabotinsky's framing of the future emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine along the model of the Greek–Turkish agreement went hand in hand with a newfound support for the transfer of Arabs from Palestine. Jabotinsky's 1939 note discussed above was most likely a draft or initial sketch of one of the chapters of his subsequent book The Jewish war front, which he published just a few months later, in early 1940. In this book, Jabotinsky for the first time publicly proposed expelling Arabs from Palestine, even as he still noted that population transfers was by no means a necessary solution and repeated his promise for minority rights in the future Jewish state. The departure of 900,000 Arabs from Transjordan, he wrote in the book, should not be regarded as a ‘tragedy’ or viewed with ‘dismay’. ‘Any Arab country which should find the courage…for inviting such an immigration of trekkers’, he promised, ‘would immediately have unlimited sums of capital and the world's best experts at its disposal for the most ambitions schemes of land reclamation and irrigation.’Footnote 30 The very title he chose for the chapter in which he discussed this scheme, ‘The Arab-angle – undramatized’, reflected the aloofness with which Jabotinsky now approached the moral question regarding Arab transfer. Reversing his repeated interwar criticisms of population transfers, Jabotinsky now portrayed this method as a just political solution. The 1937 Royal Commission's proposal for the transfer of Arabs from Palestine was no longer ‘dangerous chatter’, as he originally claimed, but a ‘courageous’ and morally ‘contagious’ proposal. Even ‘Herr Hitler – detested as he is’, Jabotinsky argued in the chapter, was at fault not for transferring the Germans from the Baltic states but only for dispossessing the Poles in the process.Footnote 31 In the spring of 1940, just months before he would pass away, Jabotinsky worked on a second book in which he sought to lay out in greater detail his vision for the future of Jews after the war. According to the book outline preserved in Jabotinsky's papers, the Revisionist Zionist leader intended to write a chapter that borrowed directly from his conversation with Zangwill back in 1917. The section of the book dedicated to the Jewish future after the war was to begin with a chapter titled: ‘Re-distribution of races as a general line of world policy’, embracing Zangwill's philosophy after at least twice having vigorously rejected it in the past.Footnote 32
Jabotinsky's change of heart was first and foremost a result of his predictions regarding the enormity of the Jewish refugee problem in Europe after the war. Jabotinsky concluded that the aftermath of the war would necessitate a far more radical emigration plan than he had previously envisioned – millions of Jews would have to be transferred to Palestine within a few short years. These radically different emigration plans called for different colonization plans. In the 1930s, Jabotinsky believed that with the support of international loans the Yishuv could facilitate the integration of about 100,000 immigrants per year into Palestine. The influx of millions of Jews within such a short time, however, would require clearing up arable land and providing homes for the refugees at the expense of the Arab population – a lesson he drew, as discussed above, from the Greek–Turkish exchange of populations.
Jabotinsky's wartime embrace of population transfers was also a result of his predictions regarding the future ethnic make-up of Europe after the war. On the eve of the war, Jabotinsky was startled by the degree of support population transfers had come to enjoy among liberals and fascist alike; after the outbreak of war, he noted that it had become even more popular, winning the support of US President Roosevelt who spoke about the need for the post-war resettlement of millions of refugees.Footnote 33 Indeed, Roosevelt's statement fitted within a broader wartime intellectual clamour in Europe and the United States in favour of population transfers as a solution for the minority question in Europe. Already in October 1939, Swiss ethnologist George Montandon, who first laid out a proposal for large-scale population transfers in Europe during the First World War, called on the pages of the influential French journal Merkur for the creation of a ‘Poland of the future’ after the war that would annex east Prussia and parts of west Prussia and expel German minorities from those territories.Footnote 34 ‘Everything leads us to believe’, noted a French scholar several months later, ‘that the [transfer of populations] would be one of the major innovations of the peace treaties of the future.’Footnote 35 C. A. Macartney, a leading British scholar of the minority question, lamented in the summer of 1940 how population transfers had become ‘the present fashionable panacea for all difficulties connected with national minorities’.Footnote 36 Jabotinsky was also aware of the 1939 Nazi–Soviet population exchange agreement according to which thousands of ethnic Germans were resettled in the expanding German Reich. Based on these developments, Jabotinsky predicted that the aftermath of the war would bring about a massive reshuffling of minorities throughout Europe. For Jabotinsky, the era of minorities and minority rights in Europe – for which he fought for decades – had finally come to an end. As he put it in a 1940 essay ‘Shall we try?’, there was to be no return to the status quo ante of minority protection in post-war Europe. Jabotinsky was particularly dismissive of Jewish leaders in London and New York who pressed the Polish government-in-exile to issue a declaration promising Jewish equality. In a major about-face, Jabotinsky now publicly rejected all struggle for Jewish rights in Europe as a meaningless battle that distracted from the goal of fighting for a Jewish state in Palestine:
To no avail I look for a voice of wisdom in this desert of foolishness: Enough with the lie! It is as if Jews have become mad, and have begun plotting their own destruction…[Jews] are taking part in spreading the illusion…that a day after victory, a clause on equality will be inserted into the Peace Treaties, and it would be agreed that enough had been done for the Jews, that the Jews had been saved.Footnote 37
VI
In September 1940, Jabotinsky passed away in upstate New York. After his death, several of Jabotinsky's confidants in the Revisionist Zionist movement recognized Jabotinsky's transformation, and made population transfers a cornerstone of their own general and specifically Zionist wartime politics.
The first Revisionist Zionist leader other than Jabotinsky to make support for population transfers a central element of his political activism was Benjamin Akzin (1904–85). Born in Latvia and trained in law in Vienna and at Harvard, Akzin served during the 1930s as head of the Revisionist Zionist political office in London. In this capacity, Akzin helped Jabotinsky reach out to various government legations to promote the ‘Evacaution plan’.Footnote 38 After Jabotinsky's arrival in New York, Jabotinsky tasked Akzin with setting up a mission on behalf of the Revisionist Zionist movement in Washington, DC.Footnote 39 In May 1940, Akzin met with State Department official William Pell to discuss the Allied stance on population transfers and lobby for a large-scale Jewish immigration scheme after the war. Pell explained that the Allies were in disagreement over this issue: the British saw population transfers as ‘one of the methods of Hitlerism against which they fight’ while President Roosevelt believed that ‘such shifts will be necessary’. Akzin then proposed the help of the Revisionist Zionist movement in popularizing the idea of population transfers ‘by getting American journalists to take it up as the last word in constructive liberalism’ and by ‘increasing the political pressure for it by cooperating with the central European states’.Footnote 40 In April 1941, Akzin met with Józef Retinger, personal secretary of Władysław Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, and asked him to raise the issue of post-war Jewish evacuation from eastern Europe in future talks with President Roosevelt.Footnote 41
When in August 1940 Jabotinsky suffered a fatal heart attack, Akzin was among a small group of followers who spent the final few hours with him on his deathbed.Footnote 42 In the following months, Akzin's mission in Washington, DC, beset by poor funding from the start, crumbled and he soon left the movement. But Akzin nonetheless remained committed to the Revisionist Zionist cause. In September 1941, fulfilling his promise to Pell, Akzin published an essay in the influential Harper's Magazine entitled ‘The Jewish question after the war’, the first public Jewish defence of population transfers written in Jabotinsky's spirit.Footnote 43 Referring to Jabotinsky as the ‘the most brilliant thinker and leader in contemporary Jewry’, Akzin offered a distillation of the views Jabotinsky had articulated early in the war. The Nazis had removed Jews in eastern Europe from their homes and professions, and the local population quickly occupied their former positions. Eastern European governments had been clamouring for Jewish emigration in the 1930s – there was no reason to believe that after the war they would ‘reintegrate the Jews in their possessions and jobs, throwing out the non-Jews who in the meantime had occupied them’.Footnote 44 The aftermath of the war, Akzin argued, would see the emergence of an unprecedented Jewish refugee problem. The only solution lay in the large-scale transfer of millions of Jewish refugees to Palestine, which would take place as part of a general reorganization of the European order along ethnically homogeneous lines.
While Akzin did not specifically write about the transfer of Arabs, this second aspect of Jabotinsky's vision would be elaborated on by another prominent Revisionist Zionist activist, Eliyahu Ben-Horin. A publicist, editor of a Revisionist Zionist daily and a close associate of Jabotinsky, Ben-Horin would run the Revisionist Zionist movement's executive from 1935 until 1943. For a few years after Jabotinsky's death, Ben-Horin effectively served as the head of the Revisionist Zionist movement and its office in New York. In 1942, Ben-Horin took part in drafting the new Zionist organization resolution on the post-war order declaring that Palestinian Arabs who did not wish to live in a Jewish state should be offered ‘full compensation for the immovable property left behind them’ if they choose to immigrate.Footnote 45 A year later, Ben-Horin authored a detailed plan for the transfer of the Arab population from Palestine as part of a larger book on the future of the Middle East.Footnote 46 Ben-Horin's plan mirrored Jabotinsky's vision: millions of Jews would have to be settled in Palestine after the war; to resettle and absorb such a large Jewish population successfully, a transfer of the local Arab population to Iraq would be required; and such a transfer would ultimately lead to better relations between Jews and Arabs.Footnote 47 Such a large-scale transfer, Ben-Horin argued, should take place within eighteen months, the same time period during which the Greek–Turkish exchange of populations was executed. ‘If both the transfer and colonization of the Arabs and the colonization of the Jews in Palestine are carried out with firmness and justice’, Ben-Horin concluded, ‘the time is not far off when the Jews and Arabs in the Middle East will live in peace and amity.’Footnote 48 Ben-Horin made clear that this ethnic transformation of Palestine would take place alongside and be legitimized by other planned population transfers in post-war Europe. Ben-Horin further distilled these ideas in a 1944 article for Harper's Magazine in which he argued that ‘millions of people still have to be shifted after this war: Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia to Germany, Germans from east Prussia to Germany, Poles from provinces which will be incorporated into Russia to Poland, Italians from the Fiume-Trieste region to Italy, and many more’. ‘Why not apply similar measures in the world's orphan area in the Middle East?’Footnote 49
In 1943, Ben-Horin became executive director of the American Resettlement Committee for Uprooted European Jewry, an offshoot organization of the Revisionist Zionist movement in the United Sates. In this capacity, he worked closely with Ben-Zion Netanyahu to gain support for the Revisionist programme. The committee was short-lived, but it left a mark by publishing an ad in The Times that advocated for the resettlement of Palestinian Arabs in Iraq.Footnote 50 In 1945, Ben-Horin met with former US President Herbert Hoover, a Zionist sympathizer who also supported the idea of population transfers during the war, in order to push his Arab resettlement plan. A few years prior, Hoover had advocated the resettlement of European Jews in Alaska, but now he took up Ben-Horin's vision and started publicly advocating for the transfer of Jews to Palestine and the removal of Palestinian Arabs to Iraq.Footnote 51
The staunchest defender of population transfers to emerge from Jabotinsky's circle, however, was Joseph Schechtman. Schechtman's intellectual trajectory mirrored that of Jabotinsky: both were born in multi-ethnic Odessa and spent the early years of their Zionist careers fighting for Jewish minority rights. In 1925, Schechtman took part in founding the Revisionist Zionist movement together with Jabotinsky, and served for a period as his personal secretary. Between 1936 and 1939, at the height of the campaign for the ‘Evacuation plan’, Schechtman acted as Jabotinsky's ambassador in Poland. In this capacity, Schechtman published a proposal for the large-scale transfer of eastern European Jews to Palestine, ‘The self-evacuation of the diaspora’, a study that examined the financial, political, and moral aspects of dealing with the problem of the lack of Jewish ‘Lebensraum’, as he put it, in Europe.Footnote 52 In 1941, Schechtman arrived in the United States and quickly made himself a name as an expert scholar on European population transfers in Europe. Shortly after his arrival in New York, Schechtman had begun researching and writing a comprehensive study on wartime population transfers in Europe, published in 1946 as European population transfers. Footnote 53 Schechtman also served as an adviser for Henry Field's ‘Migration Project’ (M-Project), commissioned by President Roosevelt to explore avenues for large-scale post-war migrations of refugees. In 1944–5, Schechtman was employed as an expert on migrations by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA.Footnote 54
Though Schechtman presented his work as a product of objective scholarship, his interest in population transfers was tied to his Revisionist Zionist politics. In his works, Schechtman sought to legitimize and popularize the idea of population transfers. His 1946 study concluded with a long survey of the writings of contemporary intellectuals and leaders who voiced support for such a solution. Schechtman also outlined various guidelines for the execution of successful transfers – noting the importance of speed in its execution as well as proper planning with regard to the distribution of evacuee properties.
Schechtman drew on his expertise in European population transfers to justify and promote plans to resettle the Arab population in Palestine. In 1945, Schechtman advocated for a population exchange agreement that would provide for the resettlement of Palestinian in Iraq and of Iraqi Jews in Palestine along the lines of Ben-Horin's vision.Footnote 55 And after the war, Schechtman continued to advocate for population transfers in Palestine, serving as a consultant for the Israeli government's transfer committee. Established during the 1948 war, the committee's main function was to provide the new Israeli government with advice on how to formulate policy regarding Palestinian refugees who were expelled and fled during the war. In this capacity, Schechtman drafted a new and detailed proposal for a population exchange agreement between Israel and Iraq.Footnote 56 Unlike his 1945 plan, this new plan sought to deal with the reality of a massive Arab refugee problem in the wake of the 1948 war. ‘The question is no longer that of transferring a sedentary, deeply-rooted Arab population’, Schechtman observed, but rather that of the reality of some 500,000 to 600,000 already displaced Palestinian Arabs.’Footnote 57 Rather than resettling those refugees in their former homes – where they will live as a minority among a Jewish majority – Schechtman proposed their resettlement in Iraq in exchange for the departure of Iraqi Jews to Palestine. Schechtman also called for the transfer of some of the remaining Arab minorities in Israel as part of the plan.Footnote 58
As we have seen, following Jabotinsky's death, three prominent Revisionist Zionist activists began to promote the idea of population transfers as a solution to minority questions in Europe and Palestine. All three believed that they were following the legacy of Jabotinsky in doing so, and responding to the rise of population transfers as a widespread solution to minority problems after the war. As Ben-Horin wrote in a 1942 special issue of Zionews, the organ of the Revisionist Zionist movement in the United States, marking the third anniversary of Jabotinsky's death, ‘our main responsibility is to live up to the standards and ideals of the man who entrusted us’ with his legacy. And though ‘there is obviously no way of determining whether our interpretations of his will are correct or not…we must constantly be on guard against misrepresentations of his legacy’.Footnote 59 It is thus remarkable to note that Schechtman had dedicated his own contribution to the volume to the subject of Jabotinsky's newfound support for population transfers. Schechtman's piece hailed Jabotinsky's ‘courage to face realities’. ‘On more than one occasion’, Schechtman observed, Jabotinsky ‘made effective revisions in our methods and tactics.’ Perhaps the most telling example, Schechtman argued, was seen in Jabotinsky's ‘reaction to the idea of transfer and exchange of populations’. Schechtman recalled how Jabotinsky expressed ‘complete disapproval’ of such methods when he learned about the 1937 Royal Commission's proposal to expel the Arab population of Palestine. Yet only two years later, in response to the South Tyrol agreement, Jabotinsky had completely changed his views on the subject. Jabotinsky had recognized that the transfer of populations had now become the ‘reality’ across Europe and revised his position accordingly. ‘It is noteworthy that even the greatest enemies of World Jewry’, Schechtman concluded, ‘were deemed worthy of emulation by him if there was any basis of truth in their actions.’Footnote 60 More than a decade later, Schechtman returned to the subject of Jabotinsky supported population transfers in his 1961 biography of Jabotinsky The life and times of Vladimir Jabotinsky, ii: Fighter and prophet: the last years. Yet whereas in 1942 Schechtman had argued that Jabotinsky had begun to support population transfers in 1939, in his biography Schechtman argued that Jabotinsky had in fact first supported this vision in 1937.Footnote 61 Schechtman also noted that in Jabotinsky's last book, The Jewish war front, he had ‘fully endorsed the idea of a voluntary Arab transfer from Palestine’, though he still insisted that such transfers were not a mandatory requirement for future Jewish immigration to Palestine.Footnote 62 Schechtman's insistence that Jabotinsky's support for population transfers already in 1937 does not match with the historical record. As Schechtman himself noted in his 1942 essay, Jabotinsky had fiercely rejected the Peel Commission's transfer proposal at the very same time.Footnote 63 It seems that Schechtman sought to read back Jabotinsky's support for population transfers into the mid-late 1930s in order to portray his mentor as a steadfast supporter of population transfers like he himself had become.Footnote 64 This portrayal of Jabotinsky as a supporter of Arab expulsion has vanished from the historical memory and subsequent historiography. Scholars and the public overlooked the Jabotinsky Schechtman portrayed in his writings and instead privileged the memory of Jabotinsky of the pre-Second World War period as a defender of minority rights.
