1/ It is often argued that the expulsion of Palestinians was written into the Zionist programme from its very beginning. A thread on why this is wrong.
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2/ In 1900, the world's Jewish population was 11 million. About half of them lived in Tsarist Russia: dire poverty, no civic rights, persecution. They were Zionism's potential social base, and Zionist leaders assumed millions would be interested to emigrate to Palestine.

3/ The population of Palestine at the time numbered 0.5 million people, more than 90% were Arab Palestinians. Zionist assumption was that this population would be easily outnumbered by mass migration of 3-4 million Jews.

4/ That would inevitably have meant dispossession for Palestinians as land was to be taken over, their likely transformation into landless proletariat, and a small minority, dominated by European Jews (like Maoris in NZ). But expulsion was not necessary part of the project.

5/ While we encounter here and there ideas of forced population removal by some Zionists, they are marginal, and are not discussed seriously, with the assumption that they won't be needed, and very unlikely to be allowed (as Zionism in Palestine required Ottoman approval).

6/ However, this vision for overwhelming majority through mass immigration was never realised. A decade after the Balfour Declaration, Jewish migration was in the tens of thousands. Only in the 1930s, with the rise of Nazism, it intensifies, but still far short of millions.

7/ It is in that period of the 1930s, when Zionists understand they are unlikely to become a majority, even a thin one, that ideas of forced population removal emerge in earnest and are discussed by the British and the Zionist leadership.

8/ After WWII, the interwar European project of minority rights in multi-national states is discredited and abandoned, leading to the idea of ethnically homogenous states - with mass expulsions in central and eastern Europe.

9/ In Palestine, this paved the way to the partition plan, the 1948 war, the mass expulsion of Palestinians and the model of Israel as a Jewish state with Palestinian citizens under military rule (until 66), and later are denied of minority rights.

10/ The success of Zionism inevitably meant the dispossession of Palestinians, but it is the particular history of Zionism in Palestine (1920-30s), the failure to attract mass Jewish migration, and changes in global norms and politics, that led to the expulsion of 1948.

11/ Why is this important? Because if we assume ideology is an unchanging factor driving historical process, rather than something that is produced in relation and by the historical moment, we will fail to understand both the risks and the potential for change.

12/ I say this in a moment when (1) Israel has abandoned even token references to partition (2) reality is of one unequal state (3) Israeli politicians are openly talking about expulsion (4) global political dynamics accommodating such ideas. /end https://twitter.com/YairWallach/status/1383799491300532234?s=20