The diaries were a working journal where Herzl thought out loud across thousands of pages; the 1895 entry appears in the middle of a speculative passage written six weeks into his first serious engagement with the idea of a Jewish state, not in any document he prepared for others to read or act on.
In June 1895, Herzl wrote that the landless poor should be "spirited across the border" through employment elsewhere while land was quietly purchased. It is not a statement of the Zionist movement's eventual goal.
The entry predates the founding of the Zionist Organization by two years. Herzl never repeated it in any programmatic document. His public position, including his response to Yusuf al-Khalidi's 1899 letter warning that Zionism could only be achieved by force, was that Jewish settlement would benefit the Arab population economically and that no one would be compelled to leave.
His 1902 novel Altneuland depicted Arabs as equal citizens in the future Jewish society, with an Arab character explicitly rejecting the claim that Jews had dispossessed anyone. As Dowty documents, Herzl's declared position was that forced departure was not the plan, and the 1895 entry was not repeated.
Transfer as a serious internal Zionist policy discussion developed in the 1930s, not through Herzl but through figures like Ussishkin and Ben-Gurion, and through the debate around the Peel Commission's partition proposal.
The al-Khalidi letter is cited because it documents that Arab opposition to Zionism on national grounds was articulated early and clearly. Herzl's response was to emphasize economic benefit rather than engage with the national question. That exchange is directly relevant to how Zionists understood their project.
A private diary entry is evidence of what someone was thinking at a particular moment, not of what a movement adopted as its program. His public programmatic writings, the Basel Program, Der Judenstaat, and his subsequent diplomatic correspondence contain no transfer language. The Zionist Organization was not founded on that diary entry.
It is also worth pointing out that Herzl did not "found" Zionism, Hovevei Zion, the Hibbat Zion movement, had been organizing Jewish settlement in Palestine since the early 1880s, more than a decade before Herzl published Der Judenstaat. Leon Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation appeared in 1882. Ahad Ha-Am was already developing cultural Zionism independently. When Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897 he was organizing a movement that already existed in various forms, and much of what he proposed, including the Uganda scheme, was rejected by the movement he nominally led. He died in 1904 after failing to secure the charter he spent his career pursuing, and the movement continued without him and did not follow his ideology.
