The Zionist Scholar Who First Explored the Benefits, and Ills, of Population Transfer

Since President Trump’s announcement in February of a plan to remove the population of Gaza, little has been done to implement it. Israel’s renewed offensive, however, again raises the question of the fate of the Gaza Strip, and its people, after the fighting ends—and the question of population transfer may again return to the fore. Brian Horowitz examines the career and work of Joseph Schechtman, a disciple and biographer of the great Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky and a serious student of the organized mass migrations of the first half of the 20th century. While today caricatured by his detractors as an unquestioning supporter of such policies, Schechtman was in fact a subtle and humane historian, acutely aware of both their terrible effects and of the stability they brought to much of Europe: