The Arab version of the tragic fate of Arab
refugees who fled from the Palestinian Mandate before and during the 1948
war and from Israel immediately after the war, has so thoroughly dominated
the thinking of even well-educated historians, commentators, journalists and
politicians, that is almost a given that the creation of the State of Israel
caused the flight of almost a million hapless, helpless, and hopeless Arab
refugees. Israel caused the problem and thus Israel must solve the problem.
This assertion, although viscerally engaging
and all but canonized by the anti-Israel propaganda which makes it the core
of its narratives of the Middle East conflict, is unequivocally and totally
false.
Origins of the Problem
The State of Israel was created in a
peaceful and legal process by the United Nations. It was not created out of
Palestinian lands. It was created out of the Ottoman Empire, ruled for four
hundred years by the Turks who lost it when they were defeated in World War
I. There were no "Palestinian" lands at the time because there were no
people claiming to be Palestinians. There were Arabs who lived in the region
of Palestine who considered themselves Syrians. It was only after World War
I that the present states of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were also
created - and also created artificially out of the Turkish Empire by the
British and French victors. Jordan was created on about 80 percent of the
Palestine Mandate, which was originally designated by the League of Nations
as part of the Jewish homeland. Since then, Jews have been prohibited from
owning property there. Two-thirds of its citizens are Palestinian Arabs, but
it is ruled by a Hashemite monarchy.
In 1947, the UN partition plan mandated the
creation of two states on the remaining 20 percent of the Palestine Mandate:
the State of Israel for the Jews, and another state for the Arabs. The Arabs
rejected their state, and launched a war against Israel. This is the primal
cause of the Arab refugee problem.
The Arab refugees were roughly 725,000
people who fled because of the war that the Arab states - not Palestinian
Arabs - started. The Arab states - dictatorships all - did no want a
non-Arab state in the Middle East. The rulers of eight Arab countries whose
populations vastly outnumbered the Jewish settlers in the Turkish Empire,
initiated the war with simultaneous invasions of the newly created state of
Israel on three fronts. Nascent Israel begged for peace and offered
friendship and cooperation to its neighbors. The Arab dictators rejected
this offer and answered it with a war of annihilation against the Jews. The
war failed. But the state of war has continued uninterruptedly because of
the failure of the Arab states - Saudi Arabia and Iraq in particular - to
sign a peace treaty with Israel. To this day, the Arab states and the
Palestinians refer to the failure of their aggression and the survival of
Israel as an-Nakba - the catastrophe.
Had there been no Arab aggression, no war,
and no invasion by Arab armies whose intent was overtly genocidal, not only
would there have been no Arab refugees, but there would have been a state of
Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza since 1948.
In the war, Israel acquired additional land.
In the absence of a peace treaty between belligerents, the law of nations
allows the annexation of an aggressor's land after a conflict - although the
land in question belonged to the Turks and then the World War I victors.
Israel actually offered to return land it had acquired while defending
itself against the Arab aggression in exchange for a formal peace. It made
this offer during the Rhodes Armistice talks and Lausanne conference in
1949. The Arab rulers refused the land because they wanted to maintain a
state of war in order to destroy the Jewish state. Had Israel's offer been
accepted, there could have been prompt and just resolution to all the
problems that have afflicted the region since. The only problem that
wouldn't have been resolved to the satisfaction of the Arabs was their
desire to obliterate the state of Israel.
After their victory, Israel passed a law
that allowed Arab refugees to re-settle in Israel provided they would sign a
form in which they renounced violence, swore allegiance to the state of
Israel, and became peaceful productive citizens. During the decades of this
law's tenure, more than 150,000 Arab refugees have taken advantage of it to
resume productive lives in Israel. Jews do not have a similar option to
become citizens of Arab states from which they were banned.
It should be completely obvious to any
reasonable and fair-minded observer of this history, therefore, that it was
not Israel that caused the Arab refugee problem, nor Israel that obstructed
its solution.
On the contrary, the Arab refugee problem
was the direct result of the aggression by the Arab states, and their
refusal after failing to obliterate Israel to sign a formal peace, or to
take care of the Arab refugees who remained outside Israel's borders.
The Jewish Refugees
There were other refugees from the
Arab-Israeli conflict that everyone on the Arab side of the argument chooses
conveniently to forget. Between 1949 and 1954, about 800,000 Jews were
forced to flee from the Arab and Muslim lands where they had lived for
hundreds and even thousands of years - from Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan
and Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and other Muslim countries. These Jews were
peaceful citizens of their Arab countries and in no way a hostile
population. Nonetheless, they were forced at gun-point to flee with nothing
but the clothes on their backs. The only reason for their expulsion was
revenge against the Jewish citizenry of Arab countries for the shame of the
Arab defeat in their war of aggression.
Most of these Jewish refugees came to
Israel, where they were integrated into normalcy by the tiny fledgling
Jewish state. The Arab states (and later the PLO) refused to do this for the
Arab refugees because they preferred to keep them an aggrieved constituency
for their war against Israel.
Some observers have suggested that the dual
refugee situation should be understood as a "population exchange" - Arab
fled to Arab countries as Jews fled to the Jewish country, both as a result
of the 1948 war, both under conditions which their side regards as forced
evacuations. On the other hand, no one on the Arab side has suggested the
obvious: if Jewish refugees were resettled on land vacated by fleeing
Arabs, why not resettle Arab refugees on the lands of Jews who were forced
to flee the Arab countries. One reason no one has suggested this is that no
Arab state with the exception of Jordan will even allow Arab refugees to
become citizens.
Taking into account the Jewish refugees'
assets that were confiscated when they fled from Arab and Muslim lands, one
can conclude that the Jews have already paid massive "reparations" to the
Arabs whether warranted or not. The property and belongings of the Jewish
refugees, confiscated by the Arab governments, has been conservatively
estimated at about $2.5 billion in 1948 dollars. Invest that money at a
modest 6.5% over 57 years and you have today a sum of $80 billion, which the
Arab and Muslim governments of the lands from which the Jews were expelled
could apply to the benefit of the Arab refugees. That sum is quite
sufficient for reparations to Arab refugees. There is no way of accurately
assessing the value of Arab property left in Israel's control; but there are
no estimates as high as a 1948 value of $2,500,000,000. So, hypothetically,
the Arab side has already gotten the better end of the deal.
During the many wars of the 20th century,
tens of millions of refugees were created in Europe and Asia. In 1922, 1.8
million people were relocated to resolve the Turkey-Greece war. Following
World War II, some 3,000,000 Germans were forced from countries of Eastern
Europe and resettled in Germany. When the Indian sub-continent was divided,
over 12 million people were transferred between India and Pakistan.
All such refugee issues have been resolved,
except the roughly 725,000 Arabs who fled Israel during the 1948 war and
whom the Arab states and the Palestinian Authority have kept in refugee
camps.
The Arab Refugee Problem
Another irony must be considered in the
context of the refugee issue. Israel handled its Jewish refugee problem by
devoting massive resources to the education and integration of the Jewish
refugee population into its society. These refugees never became a burden on
the world, never needed the assistance of the United Nations, and never had
their civil and human rights denied by their new host country. Instead,
despite great hardship, early discrimination, difficult adjustments and
initial privations, they and their offspring have become productive citizens
of the Middle East's only democracy, and substantive contributors to tone of
the most technologically and socially advanced countries in the world.
The fate of the Arab refugees has been the
diametric opposite of this obvious positive solution to their problem. Arab
leadership has purposely kept their Palestinian brethren in refugee slums,
at times approaching the status of concentration camps, with their misery
perpetuated by Machiavellian rulers to be used as a propaganda weapon
against Israel and against the West.
The Palestinian refugees in Gaza were forced
there in 1948 not by Israel, but by the Egyptians, kept there under guard,
shot if they tried to leave, and never given Egyptian citizenship or
Egyptian passports. (These facts are recorded by Yassir Arafat himself in
his authorized biography by Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker?
1982). Refugees in Lebanon were kept under similar but less draconian
repression. They were barred by law from almost 70 professions, not granted
citizenship, and not allowed to travel. only in Jordan were the refugees
granted citizenship.
Senior Fatah Central Committee member Sakher
Habash succinctly explained the reason for the calculated refusal of the
Arab rulers including the Palestinian rulers to help the Palestinian
refugees to return to normal lives. During a 1998 lecture at Shechem's
An-Najah University, Habash said, "To us, the refugee issue is the winning
card which means the end of the Israeli state."
In other words, war, terrorism, diplomatic
isolation of Israel, world-wide PR campaigns to demonize Israel all may fail
(and most have, so far); but as long as this last trump card is still alive,
hope for the destruction of Israel still pulses in the hearts of Arab
revanchists.
Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948 and are
still alive have no ligal right to return to Israel because the Arab
leadership representing them (Arab nations until 1993, and since then the
Palestinian Authority) are still, de jure and de facto, at war
with Israel; and these refugees, therefore, are still potential hostiles.
International law does not require a country at war to commit suicide by
allowing the entry of hundreds of thousands of a potentially hostile
population. in the context of a peace treaty, in 1949, the Arab refugees
could have taken advantage of Israel's offer; but their leadership refused.
Of course the present Palestinian claim of a
"Right of Return" is accompanied by the claim that there are not 725,000
refugees (minus those who have died in the interim) but 5 million.
This number serves many political agendas but from the point of view of
international law, generations born into a refugee population that has been
resettled and living in exile do not have the legal status of refugees. That
means that the legal refugee status today applies only to those few
surviving Arabs who fled in 1948, among whom most are advanced in age.
A Summary of The Salient Facts
The protracted Arab refugee crisis is an
artificial crisis maintained for 57 years by Arab rulers in order to exploit
their own people's suffering - to create a "poster child" for Palestinian
victim-blood; a staging ground for anti-Israel propaganda; a training center
for Arab terrorists; and a trump card for the anti0-Israel jihad (per
Sakher Habash) when all else (war, terrorism, international diplomacy)
fails.
"Haq el-Auda," the "law of return," for
Palestinian Arabs to their own homes and farms and orchards that have been
part of Israel for the past 57 years is a sham.
Sixty years ago there were nearly a million
Jews in the Arab states of the Middle East: honest hard-working citizenry,
contributing to the culture and economy of their countries of domicile,.
Today, there are almost no Jews in the Arab countries of the Middle East,
and racist apartheid laws prohibit even Jewish tourists from entering some
Arab countries.
In Israel, on the other hand, the Arabs who
did not flee numbered about 170,000 in 1949; and now number more than
1,400,000. They have 12 representatives in the Israeli Parliament, judges
sitting on the Israeli courts and on the Israeli Supreme Court benches, and
PhD's and tenured professors teaching in Israeli colleges and universities.
They are a population that enjoys more freedom, education, and economic
opportunity than do any comparable Arab populations anywhere in the Arab
world.
The Arab rulers caused the Arab refugee
problem in 1948 by their war of aggression against the infant state of
Israel, a legal creation of the United Nations; the Arab rulers have since
maintained the Arab refugee population and denied it any possibility of
normal life in Arab countries in order to use the suffering they themselves
have caused, as a weapon in their unending war against Israel.
During all these decades the refugee camps
and their Arab exploiters have been funded by billions of dollars from the
United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union
and others.
The flight of Arabs from what would soon
become Israel took place in eight stages:
1) As early as the Fall of 1947, months
before the UN partition plan of November 29, 1947, it was clear that
there would be a war no matter how the partition lines were drawn. In
anticipation of this war, many of the well-to-do Arabs (the effendi)
of Western Galilee, from Haifa to Acco and villages in between, closed
down their houses and went to Beirut or Damascus. With their wealth and
connections, they could wait out the war in safety. No one imagined the
infant state of Israel could win a war with the Arab states. The Arabs
who left though that they would be out of the way of danger, and when
the war was over they would come back to their homes. Current estimates
by objective observers (Conor Cruise O'Brien, in his book The Siege,
being perhaps the most objective) is that about 70,000 fled.
2) These refugees caused a sudden absence
of political and social leadership among the Arabs of Galilee, and thus
as the hostilities developed in the winter of 1947, many of the Arab
peasantry (Felahin) fled as well, following their leaders'
example. They lacked the money and connections to make a comfortable
trip out of the way of danger, as their effendi had done. So many
of them simply walked with whatever they could carry to Lebanon or
Syria. Their leadership had fled, which led them to assume that things
must be pretty bad, so they figured they had better leave too. They too
were sure, based upon documentation from Arab press at the time, that
when the war was over and the Jews were all dead or driven from Israel,
they would come back to their homes.
There are no solid numbers for this exodus, but estimates range around
100,000 people. There were so many exiting that the Arab states had a
special conference in Beirut to decide how to handle all the Arabs that
were pouring across the borders. They set up special camps, later to be
known as refugee camps. These Arabs were fleeing of their own free will.
No one, neither Israel nor Arab states, were encouraging, frightening,
or ordering them to do so. The war had not yet even begun.
3) After November 29, 1947, warfare
between the Israeli Haganah and para-military Arab volunteers numbering
in the tens of thousands began in earnest.
The Arab press and public speeches made it clear that this was to be a
war of annihilation like those of the great Mongol hordes killing all in
their path. The Jews would be either dead or out. Israel was fighting
not a war of independence, but a war of survival.
In order to defend some areas where Jews were completely surrounded by
Arabs (like the Jews of Jaffa, Jewish villages or kibbutzim in parts of
Galilee and the central hill country, and in Jerusalem)(, the Haganah
adopted scare-tactics that were intended to strike terror into the Arab
population of those areas, so that they would retreat to safer ground.
Then, it would be possible for the Haganah to defend those Jews who
would otherwise be inaccessible and thus vulnerable to genocidal Arab
intentions.
Many Arabs in parts of Western Galilee, Jaffa, and parts of Western
Jerusalem, fled because of tactics such as rumors that a huge Jewish
army from the West was about to land on the coast, hand-grenades thrown
on front porches of homes, jeeps driving by and firing machine guns into
the walls or fences of houses, rumors circulated by Arabic-speaking Jews
that the Haganah was far bigger than it really was and was on the verge
of surfacing with a massive Jewish army, etc.
Here it is important to note that Jews were responsible in this part of
the Arab flight. But it was not because they wanted to ethnically
cleanse the country, or to wipe out the Arabs. it was because they knew
that outnumbered Jews, undefended in Arab enclaves would be slaughtered
(as in fact was the case of Jews in the Gush Etzion villages and in the
Jewish Quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem, and as had happened in
Hebron in 1929). It was the exigency of their fighting a war of
survival against a bigger and better armed enemy that drove them to the
tactics described above.
It is also important not to forget these facts: Had the Arab leadership
accepted the UN partition plan, there would have been a state of
Palestine since November 29, 1947, for the Arabs, alongside of Israel.
Had the Arab armies not invaded, there would have been no refugee
problem. Keeping in mind these two facts, it is clear that the total
onus of culpability for the start of the refugee problem rests squarely
and solely upon the Arab states that invaded, in clear disregard for the
UN resolution 181 and international law.
4) Arab leadership from among the para-military
forces and the forces and the forces of Syria were vociferous in their
announcements that they wanted Arabs to leave so that the armies would
have a clear field in which to perpetrate their genocide of the Jews.
When the war was over and the Jews were driven out or killed, the Arab
residents could come back and have both their own lands and those of the
Jews.
We cannot know how many Arabs fled because of these announcements; but
since a number of Arab spokespersons after the war admitted to having
done this, and wrung their hands publicly in painful repentance of
having created the refugee problem, it is clear that the Arab
leadership's own message to many Arabs in the area was a major factor in
the Arab flight. ["The first group of our fifth column consist of those
who abandon their homes...At the first sign of trouble they take to
their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle" --Ash-Sha'ab,
Jaffa, January 30, 1948]
It is also important to point out at this time that there were a number
of cases where Jewish leaders got out in public and pleaded with Arabs
not to leave. The mayor of Haifa is the best example of this. At the
risk of his own life, he drove through the Arab section of Haifa with a
loudspeaker on his jeep, and in Arabic called out to the residents of
his city to disregard the Arab propaganda.
Nonetheless, tens of thousands fled. The incredulous British officers
who witnessed this, documented it in a variety of sources. Those Arabs
who stayed were unharmed and became citizens of Israel. ["(The fleeing
villagers)...are bringing down disgrace on us all... by abandoning their
villages" --As-Sarih, Jaffa, March 30, 1948]
The British also documented for the world a similar phenomenon in
Tiberius (a town in which the Arab population vastly outnumbered the
Jewish). The Arabs quite literally chose to leave even though they were
under no direct threat from the Jews and asked the British to assist
them. Tens of thousands left under British guard, while the Jews, both
civilian and Haganah, looked on. In a slightly different twist, the
Arabs of Safed (Tzefat) fled before the Haganah attack, even though the
Arab forces in Safed outnumbered the Jews about 10 to one.
Wherever Arabs chose to stay, they were unharmed and later became
citizens of Israel.
There have been a number of essays written by later historians
contesting the truth of the assertion that Arab leaders told their
people to flee. But Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Siege and Mitchell
Bard's Myths and Facts of the Middle East Conflict offer
irrefutable proof of the existence of such pronouncements.
5) Deir Yassin: The events that took place
at Deir Yassin are still hotly disputed. But by their own admission,
Arab leadership today acknowledges that the lies created by the Arabs
about the fictitious "massacre" were concocted in order to shame the
Arab armies into fighting against the Jews, frighten the Arabs, and
encourage them to flee. [PBS: The Fifty Year War - Israel and the
Arabs (DVD 1993)] The village sits near Jerusalem, overlooking the
road from Tel Aviv. Jewish Jerusalem was under siege, and its only
lifeline was this this one road to Tel Aviv. A contingent of Iraqi
troops had entered Deir Yassin on March 13, 1948. Some sources suggest
that they were asked to leave. Apparently they did not, since their
armed bodies were numerous among the dead after the battle. It was
obvious that they were going to try to cut off that road. Doing so would
spell the end of Jewish Jerusalem. So on April 9, 1948, a contingent of
the Irgun (a para-military splinter group) entered the village. This
operation was completely legitimate in the context of rules of
engagement, since the Iraqi presence made the village a legal military
objective.
Their intent, to capture the village and drive out the Iraqis, was
completely clear from the onset, because they entered with a jeep and
loudspeaker telling the civilian population to flee the village.
Unfortunately, this jeep slid into a ditch, so some of the villagers may
not have heard the message; however, many did and fled before the Irgun
got to the village. Rather than surround the village and prevent their
escape, the Irgun left several routes open for the civilians to flee,
which hundreds of villagers used. however, the Iraqis had disguised
themselves as women -- it is easy to hide weapons beneath the flowing
robes of the burqa -- and had hidden themselves among women and children
in the village. So, when the Irgun fighters entered, they encountered
fire from "women!"
When the Irgun fighters fired back, they killed innocent women because
the Iraqis were dressed like women and hiding behind them.
