Yosef Weitz

Yosef Weitz (1890 – 1972) was the director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund. From the 1930s, Weitz played a major role in acquiring land for the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine.

Biography

Weitz was born in Burmel, Volhynia in 1890. In 1908, he immigrated to Palestine with his sister, Miriam, and found employment as a watchman and an agricultural laborer in Rehovot. In 1911, he was one of the organizers of the Union of Agricultural Laborers in Eretz Yisrael. . Weitz married Ruhama and their eldest son, Ra'anan, was born in 1913. Two years later, in 1915, he was appointed foreman of the Sejera training farm (now Ilaniya) in the Lower Galilee. Weitz helped to found Yavniel, one of the first pioneer colonies in the Galilee, and later, the Beit Hakerem neighborhood in Jerusalem. Another son, Yehiam (Hebrew for "Long Live the Nation") was born in October 1918. Yehiam joined the Haganah and was killed in a Palmach operation on June 16, 1946. Kibbutz Yehiam was established in his memory.

Forestry

As head of the JNF Forestry Department, Weitz put his visions of Israel as a forested country into practice.He was spurred on by David Ben-Gurion, who told Weitz he wanted a billion trees planted within a decade.

In 1966, Yatir Forest was planted in the Negev at Weitz's urging. He described the project as "rolling back the desert with trees, creating a security zone for the people of Israel." Named for the biblical town of Yatir, it is now Israel's largest forest.

Political views

Weitz was an advocate of population transfer. On June 22, 1941 he wrote in his diary: "The land of Israel is not small at all, if only the Arabs will be removed, and if its frontiers would be enlarged a little; to the north all the way to Litani, and to the east including the Golan Heights. ... while the Arabs be transferred to northern Syria and Iraq. ... From now on we must work out a secret plan based on the removal of the Arabs from here ... to include it into American political circles. ... today we have no other alternative... We will not live here with Arabs."

According to Ilan Pappe, passages in Weitz's diary in April 1948 show his support for the transfer of Arabs during the 1948 war": "I have drawn up a list of Arab villages which in my opinion must be cleared out in order to complete Jewish regions. I have also drawn up a list of land disputes that must be settled by military means." According to Efraim Karsh, Ben-Gurion rejected the idea, and no such committee was ever established. Nevertheless, Nur Masalha and Benny Morris claim an unofficial Transfer Committee was established in May 1948 composed of Weitz, Danin and Sasson.

Published works

• My Diary and Letters to the Children, vols 1-6, Masada, Ramat Gan, 1965, 1973 (the original diaries are in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem).
• HaYa'ar V'haYiur B'Yisrael (The Forest and Forestry in Israel), Masada, Ramat Gan, 1970 p. 140-141.
• Journal entry from June 26, 1946 published in Tlamim Ahronim, Jerusalem, Keren Kayemet, 1974, p. 24-25.
• From Small to Large - The History of Land Reclamation in Eretz-Israel, Ramat Gan, 1972
• Creating a Land Legacy - Chapters from a Diary, Tel Aviv, 1951
• Our Settlement Activities in a Period of Storm and Stress, 1936-1947, Tel Aviv, 1947

Bibliography

• Nur Masalha (1992). Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, Institute for Palestine Studies, ISBN 0-88728-235-0
• Benny Morris: 1948 and after; Israel and the Palestinians, 1994, chapter 4: Yosef Weitz and the Transfer Committees, 1948-1949.
• Alon Tal, Pollution in a Promised Land, An Environmental History of Israel, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002.
• Tom Segev, 1949, The First Israelis, New York, The Free Press, 1986, p. 29-30.