When Vienna’s rabbis sent a fact-finding mission to determine the feasibility of Herzl’s idea, the mission sent back a cable reading “The Bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” For Herzl, the solution was self-evident, if a bit problematic. “We must expropriate gently the private property,” he wrote in his diary in June 1895, “[and] spirit the penniless population across the border.” As the Israeli historian Benny Morris has argued, given that “the vast majority of Palestine’s Arabs at the turn of the century were ‘poor,’ Herzl can only have meant some form of massive transfer
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