Transfer of population as a solution to international disputes. Population exchanges between Greece and Turkey as a model for plans to solve the Jewish-Arab dispute in Palestine during the 1930s

The transfer of population as a tool for conflict resolution between nations, was adopted in a drastic fashion during the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey at the start of the 1920s. Since then, the Greco-Turkish case turned into a model that was adopted in various places throughout the world, especially during the course of the Second World War and immediately afterwards. Still prior to the war, the model was embraced by the British Royal Commission which was dispatched to Palestine in 1936, to propose solutions to the protracted Jewish-Arab dispute in Palestine. The central recommendations made by the Committee were to implement a partition of Palestine and to separate the Jewish population from the Arab one by means of an exchange of population. A Zionist committee guided by the Jewish Agency attempted to infuse content into the abstract British proposal by providing principles governing the proposed population transfer and drafting a detailed proposal on the matter. However, this committee was no more successful than the British, in implementing the Greco-Turkish model in Palestine. A number of reasons over and beyond the moral question accounted for this failure. As the Arabs would not consent to voluntary transfer, implementation hinged on finding a party capable of coercing an exchange of population and no such party existed (contrary to what had occurred in the Greco-Turkish case). The Zionist plans which assumed that one could encourage voluntary transfer by creating attractive economic conditions in the target areas, did not take into account the factors of nationalism, ties to place of residence, religion, etc. These factors carried no less weight than the economic factor and they could effectively prevent any voluntary transfer of the Arab population.