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…Just to clarify the point. If I understood you correctly, you’re making the claim that transfer expulsion and so on was in fact a very localized phenomenon- Before 48. … resulting from individual land purchases. If I understand you correctly, you’re also making the claim that the idea that a Jewish state requires a removal or overwhelming reduction of the non-Jewish population was- If the Arabs are attacking you. Yes. … But let’s say prior to 1947, it would be your claim that the idea that a significant reduction or wholesale removal of the Arab population was not part of Zionist thinking. Well, I think there’s two problems with that. I think what you’re saying about localized disputes is correct, but I also think that there is a whole literature that demonstrates that transfer was envisioned by Zionist leaders on a much broader skill than simply individual land purchases. In other words, it went way beyond, we need to remove these tenants so that we can farm this land. The idea was we can’t have a state where all these Arabs remain and we have to get rid of them. And the second, I think, impediment to that view is that long before the UN General Assembly convened to address a question of Palestine, Palestinian and Arab and other leaders as well had been warning ad infinitum that the purpose of the Zionist movement is not just to establish a Jewish state, but to establish an exclusivist Jewish state. And that transfer forced displacement was fundamental to that project. And just responding to…. Sorry, was it- Yeah, Steven. … Bonnell or Donnel? Bonnell, yeah. With a B? Yeah. Yeah. You made the point that the problem here is that people don’t recognize is that the first and last result for the Arabs is always war. I think there’s a problem with that. I think you might do well to recall the 1936 general strike conducted by Palestinians at the beginning of the revolt, which at the time was the longest recorded general strike in history. You may want to consult the book published last year by Lori Allen, “A History of False Hope”, which discusses in great detail the consistent engagement by Palestinians, their leaders, their elites, their diplomats, and so on with all these international committees. If we look at today, the Palestinians are once again going to the International Court of Justice. They’re consistently trying to persuade the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to do his job. They have launched widespread boycott campaigns. So of course the Palestinians have engaged in military resistance. But I think the suggestion that this has always been their first and last resort and that they have somehow spurned civic action, spurned diplomacy, I think really has no basis in reality. resistance. But I think the suggestion that this has always been their first and last resort and that they have somehow spurned civic action, spurned diplomacy, I think really has no basis in reality. I’ll respond to that. And then a question for Norm to take into account. I think when he answers Benny, because I am curious, obviously I have fresher eyes on this and I’m a newcomer to this arena versus the three of you guys for sure. A claim that gets brought up a lot has to do with the inevitability of transfer and Zionism or the idea that as soon as the Jews envisioned a state in Palestine, they knew that it would involve some mass transfer population, perhaps a mass expulsion. I’m sure we’ll talk about Plan Dalet or Plan D at some point. The issue that I run into is while you can find quotes from leaders, while you can find maybe desires expressed in diaries, I feel like it’s hard to truly ever know if there would’ve been mass transfer in the face of Arab peace, because I feel like every time there was a huge deal on the table that would’ve had a sizable Jewish and Arab population living together, the Arabs would reject it out of hand. So for instance, when we say that transfer was inevitable, when we say that Zionists would’ve never accepted a sizable Arab population, how do you explain the acceptance of the 47 partition plan that would’ve had a huge Arab population living in the Jewish state? Is your contention that after the acceptance of that, after the establishment of that state, that Jews would’ve slowly started to expel all of these Arab citizens from their country? Or how do you explain that in Lusanne a couple years later that Israel was willing to formally annex the Gaza Strip and make- Of course it was. … 200,000 so people, those citizens, but I’m just curious, how do we get this idea of Zionism always means mass transfer when there were times, at least early on in the history of Israel and a little bit before it, where Israel would’ve accepted a state that would’ve had a massive Arab population in it. Is your idea that they would’ve just slowly expelled them afterwards or? Is that question to me or Norm? To either one. I’m curious for the incorporation of the answer. Yeah. There is some misunderstandings here. So let’s try to clarify that. Number one, it was the old historians who would point to the fact and Professor Morris’s terminology, the old historians, what he called not real historians, he called them chroniclers, not real historians. It was the old Israeli historians who denied the centrality of transfer in Zionist thinking. It was then Professor Morris who contrary to Israel’s historian establishment, who said, now you remind me it’s four pages, but it came at the end of the book. It was- No, no, it’s at the beginning of the book. … Transfer. Yeah, transfer is dealt with in four pages at the beginning of my first book on the Palestinian refugee problem. It’s a fault of my memory, but the point still stands, it was Professor Morris who introduced this idea in what you might call a big way.…

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