JERUSALEM, NOV. 3 -- Israel's likely new rightist government would include among its members a significant minority that favors the forced expulsion of some or all of the Arab population of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip -- a cause that is gaining popularity among Israeli Jews.
One of its advocates is Rehavam Zeevi, a former military commander of the occupied West Bank, whose small Moledet, or "homeland," party won two Knesset seats in Tuesday's election by campaigning on a platform whose slogan asked Israeli Jews: "Who will go -- us or them? The choice is still in your hands."
Zeevi met today with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and said he would support a Shamir-led government. So did former Army chief of staff Rafael Eitan, whose Tzomet party advocates a more limited form of expulsion and also won two seats.
Shamir, in an interview today, dismissed the idea of expelling Arabs, saying it is "the idea of a very small group and is not an important factor." But if Shamir can form a right-wing governing coalition following his narrow electoral victory over the left-of-center Labor party, it is likely that the Cabinet will include at least one person each from Moledet, Tzomet and Tehiya, which seeks "resettlement" abroad of Arabs.
Zeevi calls expulsion by the euphemism "transfer." It was once a dirty word, taboo in Israeli political circles and used only by supposed fanatics such as ultrarightist Meir Kahane. Kahane last month was banned from running for the parliament, but the transfer idea he championed has gained enough legitimacy to become part of the list of options politicians here discuss.
Israel was built upon the
principle of expelling the Arabs who lived
here first, Zeevi argues. "We came to
conquer land and settle it," he told a small
crowd in Jerusalem last week. "If transfer
is not ethical, then everything we have done
here for 100 years is wrong."
His small Moledet party may be the most extreme, but it is not alone. Eitan's Tzomet says many of Israel's Arabs should be resettled in Libya and calls for government steps to have them leave "voluntarily."
The rightist Tehiya party, winner of three seats, calls for "resettlement" in Arab nations of the estimated 800,000 Palestinian refugees of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And although Shamir professes to oppose mass expulsion, there are many members of his own right-of-center Likud who have spoken publicly in favor of it.
"Whoever cannot live with us and whoever wants to destroy us should get philosophically used to the idea that he cannot stay here," said Michael Dekel, Likud's deputy defense minister, in a recent interview.
The rising popularity of removal of Arabs has been charted in various public opinion surveys. One of the more scientific, by the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research, reported in August that 49 percent of Jewish Israeli adults believed transfer would allow the democratic and Jewish nature of the state to be preserved.
By contrast, only 20 percent believed that giving Arabs equal rights would help preserve Israel's democratic and Jewish nature and 30 percent said relinquishing the occupied territories would do so.
The institute cited one main reason for increased popularity for "transfer" of Arabs: the 11-month-old Palestinian uprising, which institute leader Elihu Katz said has "shattered the longstanding complacency of the right and the academic illusions of the left and opened a Pandora's box of ideas ranging from transfer and annexation to direct talks with Palestinians and unilateral withdrawal."
Many Palestinians contend the expulsions would be a war crime committed against a civilian population, but many also see it as the logical extension of the growing hostility between themselves and the Israelis. They contend that the harsh security measures taken by the Army against the uprising in recent months, including the expulsion of some 60 activists, are the first step toward expelling thousands.
Zeevi is a political newcomer whose ability to win two seats shows the popularity of the transfer concept. He is in many ways the most interesting of the transfer advocates because he emerged from the mainstream Labor Zionist tradition and traces his ideas directly back to Israel's founding fathers.
During the campaign, he would outline his credo in an hour-long stump speech delivered in low-key fashion without notes. As he sees it, there are two elements to Israel's security problem: too many Arabs on too much valuable real estate.
Both major parties grasp part of the problem, according to Zeevi. Labor recognizes that Arab population will overtake that of Jews and turn Israel into a Jewish-minority state within a few decades. Shamir's Likud, by contrast, sees the need for Israel to maintain control of the occupied West Bank for both historic and strategic reasons.
But Zeevi contends that both offer the wrong solutions, although philosophically he is far more comfortable with Likud. Labor wants to return most of the land, while Likud wants to keep the land but give political autonomy to its people. Either solution would inevitably lead to a Palestinian state and future wars, he argues, and so the only solution is to remove the Arabs.History, Zeevi argues, is on his side. He was a young soldier in the Palmach Jewish militia during Israel's war of independence in 1948, and he recalls for listeners the conquest of Lydda, a large Arab town in the heart of Israel, now known as Lod.
When Zeevi's unit asked their assistant commander, Yitzhak Rabin, what to do with the Arab population it had just conquered, Zeevi said, Rabin's answer was, "Expel them."
It was done "smoothly and
simply," said Zeevi. He said Rabin told his
men that "it was an order from {David}
Ben-Gurion himself" -- who later became
Israel's first prime minister.
Rabin, who is now the Labor-appointed defense minister, described the expulsion of the Arab residents of Lydda and nearby Ramleh for his 1979 memoirs, but the sections were deleted by an official censorship committee. Israeli historians have confirmed similar accounts.
Where Zeevi and other transfer advocates grow vague is on the question of just how the mechanics of expulsion would work. The prospect of Arab families forced at gunpoint into open trucks for the journey to the Jordanian or Lebanese border is one that even many right-wing Israeli Jews find nightmarish.
Instead, Zeevi, Eitan and others prefer to talk about the "incentives" that might persuade Arabs to leave. The first step, according to Zeevi, would be to cut off work to the 110,000 West Bankers and Gazans who travel to Israel daily for jobs.
Eitan suggests special taxes and screening for non-Israelis seeking work here. He also suggests squeezing Israel's own 750,000 Arab citizens into leaving by disenfranchising the vast majority who do not serve in the Army and by cutting off scholarships and government jobs to them.
"It's true that they won't want to leave," says Zeevi. "At first there will be just a trickle, and then a stream, and then finally they'll all want to go."