|
Back
to Studies page
*
Israel and the Palestinian right of return
*
Israeli expansion creates more
Palestinian refugees
1. Israel and the Palestinian right of return
At the
heart of the breakdown of the Middle East talks lies the refusal of
the Zionist state to accept the right of return for the Palestinians
who lost their homes and country after the establishment of the
state of Israel in 1948. The following is the first of a two-part
article on this subject. The second and concluding part—“Israeli
expansion creates more Palestinian refugees”—will appear tomorrow.
According to
the United Nations, there are presently some 3.5 million Palestinian
refugees. They are comprised of those expelled, or their
descendants, following the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49 and the
1967 “Six-Day War”, as well as countless others who have since been
expelled from the Occupied Territories or Israel. The majority have
lived their lives in wretched conditions in refugee camps in the
Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Many now live
elsewhere in the Middle East, while others have moved to the West.
Israel
adamantly refuses to acknowledge the principle of the right of
return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants because this
would be tantamount to accepting responsibility for what happened to
them. Moreover, since it would end the Jewish majority in Israel, it
has been repeatedly denounced as a threat to the very survival of
the Zionist state.
Outgoing
President Bill Clinton tried to find a face-saving formula that
could accommodate the Israelis and enable Yassir Arafat, the
Palestinian Authority chairman, to sell a “framework” for a final
agreement to his people. Clinton has proposed that Israel accept the
return of 100,000 refugees as part of a policy of reuniting
families; that the Palestine Authority accept several hundred
thousand; and that an international fund be set up to provide
compensation for the rest. While the final numbers would be subject
to negotiation, the deal on offer does not address the fundamental
issue of Palestinian rights.
Even this
proposal is unacceptable to the Israeli political elite, which
refuses to accept more than a handful of refugees back into Israel.
Neither would a Palestinian state with a population substantially
enlarged by a massive influx of refugees be tolerated on its
borders.
The origins
of the Israeli state
The state of
Israel was founded in 1948, following the catastrophe that overtook
European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s, and which culminated in the
extermination of 6 million Jews in the Nazi concentration camps. The
Zionist movement was able to channel the despondency felt by Jews at
what had happened behind a perspective for creating a separate
Jewish state through the partition of Palestine, which had been
controlled by Britain since 1917. A Jewish state would build, it was
claimed, a just and democratic haven for a people who had faced
discrimination and oppression for centuries. It would be a state
defined uniquely, not in geopolitical terms, but by religion. Its
doors would be open to all who subscribed to Judaism.
The formation
of such a state inside Palestine, a country where Jews were in the
minority, inevitably led to what today would be called ethnic
cleansing. Zionism's central slogan was: “A land without people for
a people without land.” Thus the very foundation of the state was
based on profoundly undemocratic principles: the denial of the
rights of non-Jews already living there. It would also sanction
control by religious authorities, something that modern states had
rejected and overthrown centuries ago.
The sympathy
felt throughout the world for the plight of the Jews following World
War Two lent support for the creation of such a state. In addition,
the major powers, and particularly the United States, saw the
establishment of Israel as a means of enhancing their own strategic
interests in the region, or at least blocking those of Britain,
which was then the dominant power in the Middle East. As a result,
in November 1947, the Zionists were successful in persuading the
United Nations General Assembly—to the fury of the Arab world—to
vote for the partition of Palestine into two states: one Palestinian
and one Jewish.
In May 1948,
Ben Gurion (who was to become Israel's first prime minister)
proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel. War immediately
broke out between the Jews and the Palestinians, who were supported
by neighbouring Arab countries. The fighting was to last until
January 1949.
The 1948-49
war and the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians
The take-over
of Palestinian land was the essential prerequisite for the founding
of the state of Israel.
Although the
UN had expected London would help implement the partition plan,
Britain hastily pulled out its administrative and military forces
from Palestine, wanting no part in implementing the proposals. This
was not out of any consideration for the rights of the Palestinians,
but for fear of losing the support of its client states in the
region, notably Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, and jeopardising its not
inconsiderable assets in Iran and the Gulf states, then under
British rule.
To this end,
the British secretly arranged that King Abdullah of Transjordan, now
Jordan, would use the Arab Legion, which still had British officers
and funding, to take up positions in the areas allotted to the
Palestinians.
Apart from
Abdullah, most Arab leaders had assumed that their combined forces
would easily defeat the Hagana, the forerunner of Israel's Defence
Force. But it soon became clear that Israel had a numerical and
military advantage, armed as they were with Czech weapons, courtesy
of the Soviet Union. Over the next seven months the Hagana drove the
Palestinian population from their homes and into neighbouring Arab
countries, gaining control of territory far larger than that
proposed by the UN, including part of Jerusalem and the Negev
desert.
A British
census had recorded the population of Palestine in 1947 as 1,157,000
Palestinian Muslims, 146,000 Christians and 580,000 Jews. Two years
later, only about 200,000 Palestinians remained in the parts of
Palestine that had become Israel. The take-over of Palestinian-owned
land was even more dramatic: in 1946 Jews had owned less than 12
percent of the land in what became Israel; this rose to 77 percent
after the 1948-49 war.
While many
Palestinians fled to avoid the war, most left out of fear of what
might happen to them at the hands of Zionist terrorists. One of the
most notorious incidents was the Deir Yassin massacre where 250 men,
women and children were murdered in cold blood by Menachem Begin's
Irgun group, as it went from house to house to drive out the
Palestinians. While it was always known that the massacre was a
deliberate attack, it was assumed until recently to be a random act
of terrorism by a group that was “out of control”. Benny Morris's
book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949
sets the record straight.
Morris, one of
Israel's “new historians”, makes it quite clear that the Hagana
aided and participated in the massacre. More importantly, Deir
Yassin was also part of an overall Zionist plan to systematically
empty Palestine of its Arab population. As Morris explains, the
sheer horror of its brutality had “the most lasting effect of any
single event of the war in precipitating the flight of Arab
villagers from Palestine”.
It was more
than just a few Arab villagers who fled. More than 800,000, or
two-thirds of the entire Palestinian population, left. Later the
Israelis were to build Givat Shaul, now a suburb of Jerusalem, on
the ruins of Deir Yassin.
A Conciliation
Commission established by the UN estimated that 80 percent of the
land gained by the Jews was taken by force. In 1950 the Zionist
state legalised the expropriation of land through the Absentees'
Property Law, which also prevents its return to the original
Palestinian owners, the Law of the State's Property, and the Land
Ordinance (the Acquisition of Land for Public Purposes).
In later
years, Israel claimed that the Palestinians had fled of their own
accord, or due to the incitement of their Arab leaders. Its public
relations machine worked long and hard to portray Israel as a
country built on empty, neglected or uninhabited land. Censorship
was used to ensure that any evidence challenging such a view was
suppressed. Any criticism was denounced as anti-Semitism.
In his book
Pity the Nation, British journalist Robert Fisk explains in some
detail the way the land laws operated and to what effect. When
interviewed by Fisk, the Custodian of Absentee Property admitted
that “about 70 percent” of land in the state of Israel might have
two claimants—an Arab and a Jew—holding respectively a British
mandate and an Israeli deed to the same property. When Fisk's
articles were published, they provoked a storm of protest from
Israel and its supporters in Britain.
Even Israel's
own leaders were censored as part of the suppression of the truth.
To cite but one example: as late as 1979, the memoirs of military
leader and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's were censored. In one
passage, where Rabin tells of a meeting where he and Yigal Allon,
another Jewish commander of the Harel Brigade, had asked Ben Gurion,
“What is to be done with the population?” Ben Gurion waved his hand
in a gesture that indicated, “Drive them out!” The Brigade
subsequently rounded up 50,000 Arabs from the towns of Lod and
Ramlah and drove them out of Israel, with some forced to walk up to
15 miles to an area controlled by the Arab Legion. One of these was
George Habash, who later became leader of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine. Rabin himself described the operation as
“harsh and cruel”, but defended it as a military necessity.
The passage
was cut because it showed that the expulsion of the Palestinians was
sanctioned at the very highest level and contradicts the assiduously
cultivated myth of the Zionists fighting like David against an Arab
Goliath.
In the event,
the Zionists were able to take control of the central area of what
is now Israel because King Abdullah's British-led troops evacuated
the area without consulting his Arab counterparts. The other Arab
armies were thus cut off, particularly the Egyptians, and easily
defeated. As a result, Israel became a state of 8,000 square miles,
one third larger than the UN resolution of 1947 had intended.
The US
intervened and arranged a cease-fire. But by this time the UN
regarded the Israeli victory and its enlarged territory as a fait
accompli and henceforth it treated the Palestinian issue as a
refugee problem. A UN resolution passed in December 1948 stated that
displaced Palestinians should have a choice between repatriation and
compensation and instructed the Conciliation Commission to implement
the resolution. But after an initial meeting, Israel stayed away to
avoid defining its borders, as some wanted the state to include the
entire area of biblical Palestine.
King Abdullah
thwarted any possibility of the Palestinians establishing a state on
the Palestinian land that had not been conquered by Israel, by
annexing the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the old Walled City,
incorporating them into Jordan, while Egypt took over administration
of Gaza.
Although
Britain recognised this annexation by its client states, the rest of
the world formally condemned it. However, nothing was done to stop
it. Although a UN General Assembly resolution had previously called
for Jerusalem to become an internationally administered city under
UN control, Israel ignored it and Ben Gurion moved Israel's
government offices from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem.
At a cabinet
meeting in June 1948, called to discuss what to do about the
Palestinian population, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharrett
described the Palestinian exodus as “A momentous event in world
history and Jewish history. They are not returning and that is our
policy.” Ben Gurion's attitude was equally callous. He said, “They
[the Palestinians] lost and fled. Their return must now be
prevented.... And I will oppose their return also after the war.”
With that, the cabinet sealed the fate of the 800,000 displaced
Palestinians. They and their families were to become permanent
refugees
Top
2. Israeli expansion creates more Palestinian
refugees
While Israel
continues to deny Palestinians the right of return, one of the first
pieces of legislation passed by the new state was the “Law of
Return”, enabling Jews from all over the world to come and live in
Israel.
In the
aftermath of the Second World War there were hundreds of thousands
of Jews living in desperate conditions in displaced persons camps
throughout Europe, as well as many others facing rampant
anti-Semitism and discrimination. With few countries willing to take
them, Israel provided their only possibility of a home.
The Israeli
legislation was not simply a humanitarian measure aimed at providing
a refuge for Jews facing persecution, however. Immigration to
provide manpower was vital if the fledgling state was to survive and
its businesses were to have access to cheap labour. The Zionist
state therefore actively encouraged the immigration of Jews to
Israel and between 1948 and 1952 the Jewish population doubled.
After an
initial huge influx of Jews from Eastern Europe, Stalin initiated a
vicious anti-Semitic campaign; Jews faced frame-up trials and the
doors were closed to Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. So
Israel turned to the Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa
for new sources of immigration.
It used all
means at its disposal to achieve this, going far beyond what would
generally be considered “encouragement”.
The case of
the Iraqi Jews is the most well known, and is documented in several
books (see Moshe Gat's The Jewish Exodus from Iraq 1948-1951
and Shlomi Hillel's Operation Babylon). The Zionist
underground, backed by Mossad le-Aliya, the forerunner of the
Israeli security service, sent agents provocateurs abroad to
create conditions whereby Jews would leave their homes and come to
Israel. As a result of Mossad activities, in the space of a few
weeks more than 120,000 Jews—almost the entire community in
Iraq—were forced to leave their homes and possessions for Israel.
Until the onset of Zionist-Palestinian conflict and the inflaming of
political tensions by Britain's stooge regime under King Feisal and
Prime Minister Nuri Said in Iraq, Jews had lived there without
incident for 2,500 years, since the Babylonian exile from biblical
Palestine.
Israel was not
the destination of choice for the Iraqi Jews. A privileged few,
those with money and connections, went to the West. But the majority
lived in Israeli camps, where food and medicines were in short
supply, until homes in “development” towns could be built on the
ruins of Palestinian villages.
In subsequent
years, entire communities of Jews from all over the Middle East and
North Africa, who had had no interest in Zionism and had not faced
discrimination or the anti-Semitism so prevalent in Europe, came to
Israel They now form the majority in Israel. Both the size and speed
of this exodus gives rise to the suspicion that in some cases at
least, deals were done. Morocco's King Hassan was subsequently able
to call on Mossad's services in Paris to dispose of Ben Barka, a
political opponent, in circumstances that have never been clarified.
The Royalist forces in Yemen received support from the Israeli
Defence Force in their murderous civil war against the Republicans
who were backed by Egypt's Nasser.
Thus,
irrespective of their stated motives and intentions, and despite
their anti-Israeli rhetoric, the viability of the Zionist state was
crucially dependent upon the actions of the Arab bourgeoisie.
Today the
population of Israel has grown to over 6 million, including more
than 1 million Russians who left after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. It is widely believed that many of these are non-Jews, who
were desperate to escape the widespread poverty and misery that
followed Russia's economic collapse. This in turn has infuriated the
religious authorities, who fear the diminution of their power.
At the very
least, the enormous expansion of Israel's population refutes any
claim that there was not enough room in Israel-Palestine or the
means to support an enlarged Palestinian citizenry. The crucial
question for Zionism was that the expansion has been Jewish and at
the expense of the Palestinians. Those Palestinians who continued to
live inside Israel have been treated as second-class citizens:
Israeli Palestinians do not have the same rights as Israeli Jews.
Ninety-three percent of the land is now characterised as Jewish
land, meaning that no non-Jew is allowed to lease, sell or buy it.
Thus the Land Rules have not just made the Palestinians into
refugees, they have also worked to dispossess them of their property
within Israel itself. Furthermore until 1966, Palestinian Israelis
were ruled by military ordinance.
The Six-Day
War and Israeli military occupation
After the
Six-Day War in June 1967, when Israel seized East Jerusalem, the
West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights in Syria, many Palestinians
became refugees for a second time. They were forced to leave their
homes and flee to Jordan and the Lebanon. Palestinian resistance to
the military occupation that followed the war provoked a brutal
response from the Israeli army. Whole villages were razed to the
ground and families expelled. This vicious sequence was repeated
over and over again as the Israelis drove the Palestinians further
away from their original homes.
The
Palestinian-Israeli scholar Nur Masalha details how the Zionists
planned and implemented programmes to rid the “Promised Land” of its
native people in his book A Land without a People:
Israel,
Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949-96. He explains that
this policy continued well after the 1948-49 war and involved not
just the politicians and military forces, but also Israeli
intellectuals. It included transfer, massacres—as in the case of
Kfir Qasim—housing demolitions and expulsions.
Jewish
settlements were established in the newly occupied lands within
weeks of the war, not by right-wing zealots but by the party of
government, the Labour Party. As Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell
explains in his book The Founding Myths of Israel, “Despite
the impression that some of the founders of the labour movement,
motivated by internal political struggles, have attempted to create,
everyone in the coalition—both the founders and their
successors—were united in pursuing a policy of fait accompli in the
occupied territories. Despite the divisions in the Mapai [Labour]
since the mid-1940s, the family of Mapai remained true to the
doctrine of never giving up a position or a territory unless one is
compelled by a superior force.”
As Sternhell
explains, while the then Prime Minister Levi Eshkol feared the
consequences of such a move, he had no ideological alternative to
offer. His failure to prevent the colonising of the Occupied
Territories stemmed not from personal weaknesses, but from the fact
that he had no response to the Zionist argument that if Jews could
live in the Arab towns and neighbourhoods of Jaffa and Haifa and
consider them their legitimate homes, there was no reason to prevent
them living in Palestinian Nablus or Hebron.
According to
Sternhell, Golda Meir, who followed Eshkol as prime minister, was
chosen precisely because she wholeheartedly embraced the nationalist
perspective of the Labour Zionists and appealed to history as proof
of the legitimacy, morality and exclusivity of the Jewish people's
right to the country. For her, there was room for only one national
movement in Palestine—a Jewish one. This was why she prohibited the
use of terms such as “Palestinian national movement” and
“Palestinian state'' on Israeli state radio and television.
The
promulgation by the government of literally hundreds of “occupiers'
laws” directly contravened not only the tenets of the United
Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights but the Geneva
Conventions as well. These violations of basic democratic rights
included administrative detention, mass land expropriations, forced
movement of populations, and torture.
Palestinians
were made homeless and whole areas were ethnically cleansed so that
Israelis, often new immigrants, could be housed. Initially it was
only the right-wing zealots, determined to colonise the West Bank
(known as Judea and Samaria in biblical Palestine), who came to the
new settlements. But it was only possible to populate them by
offering financial inducements, in the form of subsidies and tax
rebates, to encourage poor Israelis to settle there who otherwise
had no chance of obtaining decent, affordable housing. Even after
talks to reach a negotiated resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict resulted in the 1993 Oslo Accords, settlement building did
not abate. The opposite occurred, it increased, transforming the
demography of the West Bank and Jerusalem.
As a result of
the 1967 Six-Day War and Israeli reprisals against those suspected
of supporting the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), many
Palestinians fled to Jordan. Three years later, many were hounded
out of Jordan in a military campaign by King Hussein, aided by
Israel, in what became known as Black September, and fled to
Lebanon.
The Israeli
invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 created further displacements
as the Palestinians left their homes in southern Lebanon and moved
to Beirut to avoid Israeli air raids. Many Palestinians thus became
refugees several times over. Israel's 18-year occupation of southern
Lebanon was accompanied by frequent aerial bombardments that
destroyed countless Arab homes and villages. The Palestinians,
despite their expulsion from their homes in 1948 and 1967, were
never safe from the extended arm of Israel's military and secret
service, even in their place of refuge.
Palestinian
homes were no more sacrosanct in Jerusalem—“the eternal and
undivided capital of Israel,” according to the Zionists. Under
vaguely defined and discriminatory rules, Palestinians who live
there lose their residency rights if they are unable to prove that
Jerusalem is the “centre of their life”. The loss of residency
rights means expulsion from Jerusalem and exile to a village in the
West Bank, where access to Jerusalem is denied.
The 1993
Oslo Accords
The Labour
politicians Shimon Peres—who played a major role in securing the
Oslo agreement in 1993—and Yitzhak Rabin—who signed the accords—did
not do so because of some Damascene conversion to the legitimacy of
Palestinian national rights. An agreement offered the most rational
solution to the conflict from the perspective of Israel's own
national interests. They postponed the resolution of the most
difficult issues—the “refugee question” and the status of
Jerusalem—to later talks, in the hope of first getting agreement on
borders and land transfers.
The right-wing
opposition within Israel has obstructed every step of the protracted
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In the final analysis, despite the
majority of Israelis supporting an end to the conflict, the Labour
Party and its liberal and secular supporters have been unable to
oppose the right-wing fundamentalists. The relationship between the
secular Labourites, the peace movement and the religious
nationalists is much closer than might appear on the surface. All
share a perspective based on upholding claims to an historical and
religious Jewish right to Palestine, which dictated the Palestinian
expulsions and precludes the recognition of similar rights for the
Palestinians.
The liberal
historian Benny Morris, who has quite correctly exposed the way
Israel forcibly ejected the Palestinians from their homes in order
to establish the Zionist state, exemplifies this outlook. His
nationalist perspective renders him blind to the logical
implications of his own work. He wrote in Britain's Guardian
newspaper: “The spectacle of Palestinian rejection of the
reasonable terms offered by President Clinton and the Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Barak (Israeli withdrawal from 95 percent of the
West Bank and the Arab half of Jerusalem, and Palestinian
statehood), and the insistence on the refugees' right of return to
their homes, towns and villages in pre-1967 Israel, is alienating
most Israelis and undermining the sympathy that the past decades of
suffering and peace negotiations have engendered.”
He concluded
his article by saying, “Almost all Israeli Jews, including myself,
believe that whatever the rights and wrongs of 1948, and whoever was
to blame for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, a
solution based on their repatriation to Israel would spell the
destruction of the Jewish state” (emphasis added throughout).
United
Socialist States of the Middle East
This brief
review of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows that
any recognition of the Palestinians' right of return, however
circumscribed, immediately raises the undemocratic character of the
Zionist regime and its essential inviability.
As this
article has sought to show, it is a myth to say that the state of
Israel was established in a land without people. On the contrary,
the state of Israel was created as a result of the planned and
systematic expulsion of the Palestinian people.
Moreover,
Israel cannot be regarded as any kind of progressive society,
committed to social equality and the advancement of all its peoples.
The Zionist state enshrines discrimination on the basis of religious
beliefs. It is a society riven from top to bottom with social and
political divisions of a most explosive character.
Despite
posturing as a new form of society, founded on equality and
quasi-socialist principles, from its origins Israel has been a
garrison state, surrounded by hostile neighbours, with the army
serving as the central pillar of society.
The tragic
irony of the Zionist solution to the oppression of the Jewish
people—traditionally and historically connected with a struggle for
tolerance and freedom—has been the brutal suppression of another
oppressed people. In consequence, the right-wing forces cultivated
by the Zionist state now threaten to reproduce within Israel the
same conditions of dictatorship and civil war from which an earlier
generation of Jews fled.
The only way
out of the current dead end is the development of a political
movement to unite Arab and Jewish workers and intellectuals in a
common struggle against capitalism and for the building of a
socialist society. This also offers the only means of genuinely
redressing the historic iniquities suffered by the Palestinian
workers and peasants, and ending the twin evils of oppression and
war that are fuelled by the profit drive of international capital
and the native ruling elites. The creation of a United Socialist
States of the Middle East would remove the artificial borders that
presently divide the peoples and economies of the region, enabling
its plentiful resources to be utilised in order to fulfil the
social, economic and democratic aspirations of all its peoples.
Top |
