A Letter to His Son: Ben-Gurion’s Transfer Thinking in 1937
In October 1937, David Ben-Gurion wrote a letter to his son Amos that has since become one of the most cited documents in the historiography of Palestinian displacement. The letter, held in the Ben-Gurion Archives at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, was composed in the immediate aftermath of the British Royal Commission’s recommendation that Mandatory Palestine be partitioned. In it, Ben-Gurion articulated what he called the potential of “compulsory transfer” — the organised removal of the Arab population from any future Jewish state — not as a moral problem but as a practical opportunity.
Historian Nur Masalha, in Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies), documents this letter in detail and situates it within a broader tradition. Masalha argues that the idea of removing the indigenous Arab population was not a last-minute improvisation born of wartime chaos in 1948 but a recurring, debated strand of Zionist political thinking that achieved a new explicitness when the Peel Commission provided political cover. For the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who would ultimately be displaced, the significance of this intellectual genealogy is direct and material.
The Peel Commission and the Legitimisation of Transfer
The British Royal Commission of 1937 — commonly known as the Peel Commission — was the first official body to recommend partition of Mandatory Palestine. Crucially, it also recommended a population transfer: Arab residents of the proposed Jewish state and Jewish residents of the proposed Arab state would, where necessary, be moved by compulsion. The Commission explicitly invoked the post-World War I Greek-Turkish exchange as a precedent.
For Ben-Gurion, this was not an unwelcome imposition but a legitimising framework. As Masalha documents, he told the Jewish Agency Executive in June 1938 that he was “for compulsory transfer” and did not see it as “immoral.” Benny Morris, in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004 edition), traces the same trajectory and concludes that Ben-Gurion and much of the Zionist leadership came to regard transfer — whatever its precise form — as both desirable and, under the right conditions, achievable. Morris’s 2004 edition includes substantially more archival material than the 1988 original, drawing on declassified Israeli military and government records to reconstruct how transfer thinking moved from political aspiration to operational planning.
For Palestinian communities living in the fertile valleys and coastal plains earmarked for a Jewish state, these deliberations in colonial committee rooms and Zionist executive sessions were not abstract. They described those communities’ potential erasure.
From Political Aspiration to Operational Orders: Plan Dalet
By March 1948 — weeks before the British Mandate expired and months before Arab states entered the conflict — the Haganah issued Plan Dalet (Plan D), a set of operational orders governing military conduct across the territory. The plan instructed commanders, in areas assigned for Jewish control, to conduct operations against “enemy population centres” which could include “destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and mining the ruins)” and “expulsion of the population outside the borders of the state.”
Morris reproduces and analyses these orders at length in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. He is careful to note that Plan Dalet was primarily a military document responsive to real security pressures — contested ground, supply lines, anticipated Arab state intervention — but he also acknowledges that its operational logic created the conditions in which the removal of Palestinian civilians became systematic. Village after village, from the Galilee to the coastal plain to the foothills of Jerusalem, was depopulated under commanders acting within the framework Plan Dalet established.
The Ben-Gurion Archives and the Israel State Archives, both drawn on by Morris and Masalha, contain the diaries, meeting minutes, and correspondence through which Ben-Gurion tracked, encouraged, and in some instances directly ordered actions that resulted in depopulation. The Institute for Palestine Studies has published primary source collections that allow these records to be read alongside Palestinian testimony and Arabic-language documentation.
A Continuity the Documented Record Sustains
What the archival record shows — across the Ben-Gurion Archives, the work of Nur Masalha, and Benny Morris’s exhaustive reconstruction — is a continuity of intent that stretches from the letter to Amos in 1937 to the military orders of 1948. The word “transfer” changed registers over that decade: from a political idea floated in the excitement of the Peel Commission moment, to an aspiration affirmed in executive meetings, to an operational outcome built into the orders that Haganah field commanders received.
For the approximately 750,000 Palestinians displaced during the 1948 war — a figure documented by UNRWA and consistent with estimates drawn from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics — this continuity is not a matter of historiographical debate. It is the structure of what happened to them, to their villages, and to the world they had known.
Sources
- Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies)
- Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004 edition)
- Ben-Gurion Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev — https://in.bgu.ac.il/bgi
- Israel State Archives (cited via Morris and Masalha)
- Institute for Palestine Studies — primary source collections on 1948
- UNRWA — historical data on Palestinian refugee displacement, 1948
