by Erskine Childers in his 1971 article, "The wordless wish". In 1961 Walid Khalidi referred to the transfer idea to support his idea that the Yishuv followed an expulsion policy in April and May 1948. In the 1980s, historian Benny Morris became the most well-known advocate of the existence of the "transfer idea". According to Morris, while not discounting other reasons for the exodus, the "transfer principle" theory suggests that this prevalent "attitude of transfer" is what made it easy for the Jewish population to accept it and for local Haganah and IDF commanders to resort to various means of expelling the Arab population. He also notes that the attempt to achieve a demographic shift through aliyah (Jewish immigration to the land of Israel) had not been successful. As a result, some Zionist leaders adopted the transfer of a large Arab population as the only viable solution. Morris also points out that "[if] Zionist support for 'Transfer' really is 'unambiguous'; the connection between that support and what actually happened during the war is far more tenuous than Arabs propagandists will allow." (Morris, p. 6) To this he adds that "From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created." Origins of the "Transfer Idea" Benny Morris identifies two major strands of historiography on this question. On the one hand, anti-Zionists such as Nur Masala and Norman Finkelstein claim that "what happened in 1948 was simply a systematic implementation of Zionist ideology and of a Zionist ‘master-plan’ of expulsion"; on the other, Zionists such as Anita Shapira and Shabtai Teveth claim that "the sporadic talk among Zionist leaders of ‘transfer’ was mere pipe-dreaming and was never undertaken systematically or seriously". Morris himself suggests that, on the one hand, the idea of a population transfer was "in-built into Zionism" to the extent that it involved "transform[ing] a land which was 'Arab' into a 'Jewish' state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population"; but that, on the other, "there was no pre-war Zionist plan to expel ‘the Arabs’ from