The earliest Zionist leaders understood that Palestine was a land with a resident population—a people they intended to dispossess

From the beginning of the Zionist enterprise to find a Jewish national home, or state, in Palestine, Zionists have been confronted with what was called the “Arab problem” — the fact that the “Land of Israel” was already populated. Nur Masalha examines solutions to that problem — the transfer of the indigenous Palestinian population to neighbouring Arab lands. Masalha’s book is the most comprehensive study to date on the concept of “transfer” in Zionist thinking from the late 1800s to the 1948 war. Expulsion of the Palestinians is invaluable for the light it throws on the attitudes towards the Palestinians of the Israeli political and military decision-makers on the eve of the exodus of some 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war.