Works Cited, Tolerance Is a Wasteland

Here is how Benny Morris himself works through this conundrum, albeit at an earlier historical moment than the one addressed by Lieberman today: faced with the overwhelming Palestinian presence in Palestine in the early twentieth century, the Zionist movement, Morris says, could have pursued four paths toward the establishment of a Jewish state in a country that started the twentieth century with a population that was 93 percent non-Jewish. The first option, Morris says, was further Jewish immigration; but this would not have worked because the indigenous Palestinians would have gone on outnumbering the immigrant European Jews. A second option was apartheid—a Jewish minority lording it over a Palestinian majority; but this would have been bad for public relations with the West. A third option was partition; but there was no way to partition Palestine without leaving too many Palestinians behind in the territory of the putative Jewish state.5 “The last, and let me say obvious and most logical solution to the Zionists’ demographic problem lay the way of transfer,” Morris concludes, using the euphemism that Zionists have used since the 1920s to signify the forcible expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland. “You could create a homogeneous Jewish state, or at least a state with an overwhelming Jewish majority, by moving or transferring all or most of the Arabs out of its prospective territory. And this is in fact what happened in 1948.”

Makdisi, Saree. Tolerance Is a Wasteland (pp. 3-4). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.