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Commission presented its 418-page report to the British Parliament. Declaring "half a loaf is better than no bread," Peel and his fellow commissioners recommended Palestine be partitioned into two states—one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. "Partition offers a prospect," the Peel Commission concluded, "of obtaining the inestimable boon of peace." Hundreds of Arab villages, and at least 225,000 Palestinian Arabs, were inside the proposed boundaries of the new Jewish state; some 1,250 Jews resided on the Arab side of the partition line. An "arrangement" would have to be made "for the transfer, voluntary or otherwise, of land and population . . . if then the settlement is to be clean and final, this question of the minorities must be boldly faced and firmly dealt with," the Peel Commission declared.
    The Zionist leadership accepted Lord Peel's recommendations despite internal dissension. Many Jewish leaders did not want to give up the idea of a Jewish homeland across the whole of Palestine, and some leaders even considered Transjordan, the desert kingdom across the Jordan River, as part of an eventual Jewish state. For them, acceptance of the Peel Commission's report was a major compromise, and their disagreement reflected ideological divisions that would manifest for decades. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Mapai Party and the most influential of the Zionists in Palestine, had argued in favor of the plan. At the core of the Peel Commission plan was the idea of transferring the Arabs, a concept that had been advanced for decades by fellow Zionists. In 1895, Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, had written that in purchasing land from the indigenous Arabs for a Jewish homeland, "we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
    Forty years later, during Lord Peel's investigation, Ben-Gurion had instructed Jews who met with the commission to recommend the transfer plan. After the release of the commission's report, the Zionist leader wrote: "We have to uproot from the roots of our hearts the assumption that it is not possible. Indeed it is possible. . . . We might be losing a historical chance that won't return. The transfer cause, in my view, is more important than all our demands for additional territory . . . with the evacuation of the Arab population from the valleys, we get for the first time in our history a real Jewish state." A year later, Ben-Gurion would declare, "I support compulsory transfer." Others sympathetic to the Zionist cause had warned against such measures. Albert Einstein and Martin Buber, for example, had long advocated what Einstein called "sympathetic cooperation" between "the two great Semitic peoples," who "may have a great future in common."
    The Arabs were as stunned by the Peel Commission's proposal as Ben-Gurion was excited. The Arab Higher Committee, led by the mufti of Jerusalem, promptly rejected it, not only because of the transfer plan, but because of the partition itself. The Arabs would fight for a single, independent, Arab-majority state.
    In September 1937, the Arab Rebellion erupted again when Arab assassins gunned down a British commissioner on a winding, narrow road in Nazareth. The British response was swift. The military took control from the civil authorities. Military courts stepped up execution of suspected rebels. Thousands were jailed as British forces occupied cities across Palestine, including al-Ramla. British gunners hunted bands of insurgents from the air, at one point employing 16 airplanes west of al-Ramla to kill more than 150 rebels. "Terrorism has called for severe counter measures," wrote the district commissioner for al-Ramla in October, "and these, inevitably, have exacerbated feelings still further. Moderate