Wayne O'Leary

Refugee Roulette in Israel

As the latest Arab-Israeli bloodletting wends its way toward what will almost certainly be an unsatisfactory conclusion, the war’s principal collateral damage, the Gaza populace trapped under relentless bombardment in Israel’s “open-air prison,” have generally been treated as incidental to the conflict. Who they are and why they exist in a kind of political netherworld are questions that need to be addressed.

Gaza, or more properly, the Gaza Strip, is a slim, mostly desert piece of land 25 miles long and 7.5 miles wide, fronting the Mediterranean Sea on the west, Egypt on the south and Israel proper on the north and east. Within this narrow space reside slightly over two million Palestinians, roughly half of the Arab population living under occupation inside the broad confines of Israel. The remaining half, another two million, reside on the so-called West Bank (of the Jordan River), bordering the Kingdom of Jordan.

Altogether, these subjects of forced occupation make up two-thirds of Israel’s total Palestinian population. The other third is comprised of Arabs who hold a tenuous Israeli citizenship. These Arab Israelis can vote, but have limited landholding rights and no open-ended “right of return” from abroad, as do Jewish citizens.

According to a New York Times report (10/12/23), an overwhelming majority of the Gazan Palestinians are people who either are, or are descended from, those dispossessed and expelled from their lands, homes and villages during the war of Israel’s founding in 1948. They mostly live in eight large refugee camps consisting of makeshift buildings scattered throughout Gaza, where they’ve been effectively interned for more than two generations. Much the same is true of the West Bank Palestinians, though they exist under less dire circumstances in terms of crowding and poverty.

Gaza itself was originally Egyptian, a result of the peace settlement ending the 1948 war. It was then seized and occupied by Israel, along with the Jordanian West Bank, during the 1967 Six Day War pitting Israelis against their Arab neighbors. Israel continued to occupy these conquered territories in defiance of United Nations Resolution 242 (calling for a reversion to the pre-war status quo), but in 2005 it did grant Gaza, a resource-poor and almost worthless piece of real estate, limited self-government.

Under purported self-rule, Gaza continued to resemble an occupied colonial possession rather than an independent state, characterized as it was (and is) by a restrictive separation wall replete with Israeli checkpoints, limited permissible contact with the outside world, and a total lack of economic or diplomatic autonomy. In 2006, visiting ex-President Jimmy Carter described Gaza as being effectively “strangled.” This was the Eden-like garden in which Hamas blossomed after winning localized power in 2007.

Gaza was the end of the line (along with the West Bank) for Palestinian refugees, whose trek into political purgatory began with the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, when 60% of Palestinians fled, or were expelled from, their former homes. In recent years, a generation of “revisionist” Israeli historians far enough removed from actual events has been able to look beyond the celebratory romanticism surrounding the founding of the Jewish state and objectively examine the roots of the Arab refugee story that lays at the heart of today’s Middle East problem.

Especially valuable is the work of Benny Morris (“The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” 1987) and Tom Segev (“One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate,” 1999). The essence of their findings is that Israel’s refugee dilemma derives from a deliberate policy choice made by its pioneering Zionist leaders well before established statehood. Further, it was based on mythology — that the land of Palestine was essentially empty, a neglected, underdeveloped patrimony awaiting “secular redemption,” as the Zionist ideal phrased it.

If Palestine was not, in fact, empty — there were over 1.2 million Arabs inhabiting it in 1947, the year before Israel’s creation — it would be made empty to accommodate incoming Jewish settlers, especially (after 1945) Holocaust survivors. Starting as early as the 1930s, the notion of “disappearing” the Arabs from the land (Segev’s wording) began to percolate; the process would be carried out gently at first (through aggressive purchase of native property), then more forcibly, and in the end violently.

Though Arabs and Jews had lived together in Palestine since the initial arrival of Zionist settlers in the late 19th century (many towns and cities had mixed populations), elements of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist government-in-waiting, sought by the 1940s a demographically homogeneous state via “Judaization” of the mostly agricultural Arab lands.

Initially, it was thought, territorial monopoly would serve to make any proposed UN partition of Palestine unnecessary and irrelevant; the Arabs would be gone. Later on, an eventual return of displaced Palestinians (such as that proposed by UN Resolution 194 in December 1948) would be rendered impractical or impossible by “facts on the ground” — an approach still used on the West Bank.

This was the controversial concept of “transfer” endorsed by the Jewish Agency Executive, including such eminent leaders as David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s future first prime minister. Morris quotes one of them as affirming “there is no room in the country for both peoples.” If the British wouldn’t carry out a transfer or expulsion policy under the Balfour Declaration, the new Jewish state would. The 1948 war establishing Israel allowed this to happen as a by-product.

Sanctioned tactics of removal employed by the official Israeli militia the Haganah (predecessor to the IDF) under so-called Plan D included starving out Arab urban centers, levelling captured Arab villages (350 in all, or a third of the total), and inducing the flight of resident populations through fear and intimidation. Less official means included outright terror tactics adopted by such organizations as future Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s Irgun, made infamous by its deliberate massacre of an entire Arab village, Deir Yasssin, containing 250 inhabitants, in April 1948.

The end result was a mass exodus of Palestinian Arabs out of territory earmarked for the new Israel and their conversion into refugees, which most remain. (Numbers vary, but Morris accepts a 1949 British Foreign Office estimate of 760,000 total exiles.) Israel’s next step, implemented with conspicuously little American objection, was to reject every postwar UN demand for a Palestinian right-of-return, thereby blocking refugee repatriation and making Palestinian banishment and marginalization permanent.

This is where things stand today, awaiting the righting of a historical wrong.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2024

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