Thanks. This demonstrates a world view that I don’t agree with, but it doesn’t really read to me like a justification of ethnic cleansing. The mention of removal is of poor people, and it doesn’t mention Palestine at all.

This is in marked contrast to Jabotinsky, who says these things explicitly[1]:

> Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonialization.

And:

> We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached

This isn’t to somehow excuse Herzl; he’s still an essentially colonial thinker. But from what I can tell he never thought deeply about the political mechanics of Israel/Palestine itself, in part because of European colonial assumptions around a lack of Palestinian connection to the land.

(Or in other words: Jabotinsky’s “innovation” is realizing that the Palestinians are a people with real attachments, not just realtors. It’s from there that he concludes, decades later, that displacement is the only workable strategy. He is, needless to say, also wrong.)

Edit: or another framing is that Herzl was too racist and provincializing in his limited view of Arabs/Palestinians to see where his movement would go.

[1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ze%27ev_Jabotinsky