I've got a few questions around the headlining central question. And I also understand that this question may be controversial.
The question came to me when I read this passage in a book review:
"When told that the Zionists intended to establish an independent Jewish nation in Palestine by buying all the land and forcing the fellaheen off the land, Lawrence responded that the Jewish community in Palestine had two choices: coexist with the Arab majority or have their throats slashed."
I came across this when googling for information about T.E Lawrence and his knowledge of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. But I'm also curious about any recorded thoughts of Lawrence's is relationship to Palestine and Zionism.
A few years ago I read Illan Pappe's "Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine". It's a powerful book and a good read. But although I love polemic histories, I also regard them with suspicion.
From my recollection, Pappe's book describes a thread of thought within Zionist leadership that explicitly accepted the possibility and sometimes the inevitability of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. And that this thread was manifested in military actions in 1948 (But it's been a while since I've read it).
I'm generally curious about this topic. But another specific question I've got about it is: is the question of intent to ethnically cleanse Palestine either in the early 1900's or 1947 a settled question as far as historians are concerned?
I guess another question I've got is this: are there any historians working on these or similar questions at the moment?
Thank you.
There is no clarity as to whether or not this was a central idea. It is clear that Israeli leaders were accepting of the possibility that it would be something they saw as necessary, in certain conditions. For example, Ben-Gurion did not really intervene, and gave many battle commanders free rein to make that decision on their own, which is why there is a lopsided distribution of Arab populations remaining in Israel, based on how commanders acted differently in different areas. It was not a settled question, by any means, by 1947, and especially not in the early 1900s. While Herzl proposed encouraging and "spiriting away" the poor Arab population, he was also of the opinion that those who remained and did not wish to leave should be allowed to remain as a minority to benefit from the state. Ben-Gurion was less inclined to push for eviction of Arab populations, and in 1938 said for example:
Hence the question of the Arabs in the Jewish State is not an ordinary minority question - but one of the fundamental questions of our Zionist policy. The state will of course have to enforce order and security and will do this not only by moralizing and preaching 'sermons on the mount' but also by machine guns should the need arise. But the Arab policy of the Jewish State must be aimed not only at full equality for the Arabs but at their cultural, social, and economic equalization, namely, at raising their standard of living to that of the Jews.
Pappe, of course, is a controversial historian and has admitted as much, saying that his ideology often clouds what he writes. I have the book in question in the review, by the way, and Aaronsohn was a controversial character, one not often in line with Jewish thinking at the time. Even so, he was not entirely out of the fold, but he died in 1919 in a plane crash. His opinions were controversial, but his reference to the fellaheen referred to the poor Palestinian serfs, and the author doesn't make it clear if he's referring to all Arabs, such as those living in the cities.