$Unique_ID{bob00257} $Pretitle{} $Title{Israel Chapter 1D. Problems of the New State: 1948-77} $Subtitle{} $Author{Richard F. Nyrop} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{arab arabs israel jewish state jews land israeli government property see tables } $Date{1979} $Log{See Table D.*0025701.tab } Title: Israel Book: Israel, A Country Study Author: Richard F. Nyrop Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1979 Chapter 1D. Problems of the New State: 1948-77 The Ingathering of the Exiles The first legislative act of the Provisional Council of State was the Law and Administrative Ordinance, 1948, legislation that declared null and void the restrictions on Jewish immigration that had been imposed by the British authorities (see Events in Palestine: 1908-39, this ch.). In July 1950 the Knesset passed the Law of Return, the basic feature of which was set forth in the declaration "Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an olah." (see table D). Additional legislation in 1952 specified that with rare exceptions Jewish immigrants may be granted Israeli citizenship as soon as they arrive in Israel. In 1954 the Law of Return was amended to grant the minister of interior the authority to deny an immigrant visa to "any person with a criminal past, likely to endanger the public welfare." In May 1971 a new amendment provided that Jews intending to immigrate to Israel may claim Israeli citizenship even before departing their country of residence. Implementation of the various laws soon created religious and legal problems centering on the emotionally charged questions of "Who is a Jew?" in terms of secular and religious law. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the Knesset, the courts, the political parties, and interest groups struggled and fought over this issue. In the late 1970s it remained an unresolved and politically and socially divisive question (see The Law of Return, ch. 2). [See Table D.: Chronology of Events: 1949-77] In 1939 the British Mandate Authority estimated that about 445,000 out of the 1.5 million residents of the Mandate were Jews. Israeli officials estimated that as of May 15, 1948, about 650,000 Jews lived in the area scheduled to become Israel under the November 1947 UN partition proposal. Between May 1948 and December 31, 1951, approximately 684,000 Jewish immigrants entered the new state, thus providing a Jewish majority in the region for the first time in the modern era. The largest single group of immigrants was composed of Jews from Eastern Europe. Over 300,000 people came from the refugee and displaced-persons (DP) camps of that region. Another 265,000 arrived during this brief period from neighboring Arab states; over 120,000 came from Iraq. The second largest group of immigrants from Arab countries was composed of the nearly 45,000 Yemeni Jews described by one author as the purest, most authentic Jews who had been living among the purest, most authentic Arabs. The cultural confrontation between these and other Arabic-speaking Jews with the (generally) Yiddish-speaking, Westernized and, as a result of the Holocaust, traumatized Jews from Eastern Europe was very nearly that of alien civilizations. Until the creation of Israel, the Jews in Arab lands had led peaceful, sedentary lives subject only occasionally to various restrictions and even more occasionally to seriously incapacitating discrimination. The task of integrating these disparate communities was in the short run exceeded in importance and gravity only by the nation's security problem; in the long run, it was viewed by many observers as of even more importance and as being less susceptible to solution. Israeli Arabs, Arab Land, and Arab Refugees The events immediately before and during the War of Independence and during the first several years of independence remain, so far as those events involved the Arab residents of Palestine, matters of bitter and emotional dispute. The Palestinian Arab refugees insist that they were driven out of their homeland by Jewish terrorists and regular Jewish military forces; the government of Israel asserts that the invading Arab forces urged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their houses temporarily to avoid the perils of the war that would end the Jewish intrusion into Arab lands. Thirty years after the events, advocates of Arabs or Jews using basically the same data and information continue to present and believe diametrically opposed descriptions of those events. There is no question that for the first time in history the majority population of a specific area became refugees from that area. According to British Mandate Authority population figures, there were in 1947 about 1.3 million Arabs in all of Palestine. Between 700,000 and 900,000 of the Arabs lived in the region eventually bounded by the 1949 armistice lines, the so-called green line. By the time the fighting stopped there were only about 170,000 Arabs left in the new State of Israel. Approximately 119,000 were Muslims, 35,000 were Christians, and 15,000 were Druzes. An estimated 32,000 were urban or town dwellers, 120,000 lived in villages, and about 18,000 were nomads. Of more importance, the Israeli government in 1949 acknowledged that about 30,000 of these Arabs-probably excluding the Druze and nomadic components of the whole-were refugees, "having fled from one part of the state to the other during the fighting." Among the many stories of atrocities committed by both sides only a few can be authenticated beyond doubt. One event with a direct cause and effect relationship was the massacre at Dayr (Deir) Yasin, a small Arab village near Jerusalem. On April 9, 1948, an irregular Jewish military unit known as the Irgun Assault Unit attacked the village and killed almost all inhabitants, over 250 people. In later years the Irgun leader, Menachem Begin, defended the action with the claim that Arab soldiers were hiding in the village and that the deaths resulted from the ensuing house-to-house fighting. Psychological warfare was also used. In his "Book of the Palmach," former soldier and foreign minister Yigal Allon describes some of the methods used to persuade the Arabs to leave: "I gathered all the Jewish mukhtars (mayors), who have contact with Arabs in different villages, and asked them to whisper in the ears of some Arabs, that a great Jewish reinforcement has arrived in Galilee and that it is going to burn all villages of the Huleh. They should suggest to these Arabs, as their friends, escape while there is time." Allon said that the rumor spread rapidly and that "The flight numbered myriads." At about the same time Weizmann, long the head of the Zionist Organization and Israel's first president, voiced his anger at "not only the murderous terrorism of Begin's Irgun but also the clean acts of violence of Ben-Gurion's Haganah." The attitudes of the Jews to the Arabs embraced many contradictory ideas. On the one hand, the Zionist Congress that met in 1947 endorsed resolutions promising full equality of rights to all residents of the proposed state and "full religious, educational, cultural and social autonomy for all its citizens." Similiar resolutions had been passed by most previous congresses. On the other hand, the members of Herut (see Glossary) and other religiously oriented political parties and interest groups made no effort to conceal their goal of a Greater Israel that would include all of the lands of the ancient kingdoms of David and Solomon (see fig. 4, this ch.). Moreover the individuals who assumed the governance of the new state in May 1948 were secularists, but they were secularist Jews. Their beliefs and attitudes were aptly summarized by a later Supreme Court decision that stated that Israel was formed as a "sovereign state for the Jewish people." Despite the assurances of equality adopted by the several Zionist congresses, Zionist ideology focused exclusively on the goal of a homeland for Jews, with little or no provision for the Arabs. But Arabs formed an important minority within the state, and by May 1949 an estimated 711,000 Arab refugees were temporarily camped near Israel's borders, and notice had to be taken of their roles. The notice taken of the Israeli Arabs tended to include a denial of civil rights, social exclusion, and economic repression. An early political decision not to draft a constitution indicated the emerging official position toward the Arab community. A constitution patterned on the American model-an early consideration-would logically include a bill of rights that would apply to all citizens; the majority in the Knesset feared the consequences of guaranteeing civil rights to the Arab minority, and plans for a constitution were scrapped (see The Constitutional Framework, ch. 3). The second official act was to form military governments to rule the areas where the majority of the Arabs lived. The formation of these governments and regions and the assignment of almost unfettered governmental powers to the military governors were based on the Defense (Emergency) Regulations promulgated by the British Mandatory Authority in 1945. The regulations had been enacted to provide a specific and detailed legal framework for governing the rebellious Jewish minority in Palestine. Jewish legal groups and bar associations in 1945 bitterly denounced the regulations. Nevertheless in 1949 Israel's state attorney defended the use of the regulations on grounds of national security. Using the 1945 law as a legal base, the government created three areas or zones to be ruled by the Ministry of Defense. The most important zone was the Northern Area, also known as the Galilee Area, the locale of about two-thirds of the Arab population. The second critical area was the so-called Little Triangle, located between the villages of Et Tira and Et Taiyiba near the border with Jordan (then Transjordan) (see fig. 1). The third area included much of the Negev Desert, then the region traversed by the nomadic, previously apolitical beduin. In addition, Article 125 of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations empowered the military governors to declare any specified area "off-limits" to those without written authorization. The area was then declared a security zone and thus closed to Israeli Arabs who lacked written permission either by the army chief of staff or the minister of defense. In these areas official acts of the military governors were with rare exceptions not subject to review by the civil court system. Individuals could be and were arrested and imprisoned on unspecific charges, and private property could be and was subjected to search and seizure without warrants. Moreover the physical expulsion of individuals or groups from the state was not subject to review by the civil courts. Representative of the incidents that did result in the eventual involvement of the High Court of Justice was the experience of the residents of the Arab village of Iqrit, a former population center in northern Israel described in the United States Gazetteer (1962) as a ruin. On November 8, 1948, the villagers, at the behest of the military authorities and under the leadership of the village elders, vacated their village with supplies for a two-week absence. At the end of the two week period the villagers sought to return but were refused permission to do so for "security reasons." Weeks passed, and the military continued to prohibit the return of the people to their village. Eventually the villagers were able to present their case to the court. The court ruled that between November 8, 1948, and April 27, 1949 (when an armistice was declared for that area), the military was legally justified in its actions. The court noted that under the terms of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations the Ministry of Defense had the right to declare an area a "security zone" from which Israeli Arabs could be excluded but that, because the ministry had not done so until September 26, 1949, the military had acted illegally during the intervening period. The court, in its 1953 ruling, noted that conditions had since changed in the area and took the unusual step of ordering the Ministry of Defense to allow the Arabs to return to their village. The military responded by razing the village; shortly thereafter the land was declared to have been abandoned by its owners and was expropriated by the state. Another land expropriation measure evolved from the Emergency (Security Zone) Regulations, which were passed in 1949 and renewed annually until 1972 when the legislation was allowed to lapse. Under this law the Ministry of Defense could, subject to approval by an appropriate committee of the Knesset, create security zones in all or part of what was designated as the "protected zone," an area that included lands adjacent to Israel's borders and other specified areas. According to Sabri Jiryis, an Arab political economist who based his work exclusively on Israeli government sources, the defense minister used this law to categorize "almost half of Galilee, all of the Triangle, an area near the Gaza Strip, and another along the Jerusalem-Jaffa railway line near Batir as security zones." A clause of the law provided that permanent as well as temporary residents could be required to leave the zone and that the individual expelled had four days within which to appeal the eviction notice to an appeals committee. The decisions of these committees were not subject to review or appeal by a civil court. According to many observers, Arabs and Jews alike, large sections of Arab-owned land in these zones were expropriated by the government. Yet another measure enacted by the Knesset in 1949 was the Emergency Regulations (Cultivation of Waste Lands) Ordinance. One use of this law was to transfer to kibbutzim or other Jewish settlements land in the security zones that was in fact lying fallow because the owner of the land or other property was not allowed to enter the zone because of national security legislation. The 1949 law provided that such land transfers were valid only for a period of two years and eleven months, but subsequent amending legislation extended the validity of the transfers for the duration of the state of emergency, a state that remained in effect in 1978. Another common procedure was for the military government to seize up to 40 percent of the land in a given region-the maximum allowed for national security reasons-and to transfer the land to a new kibbutz or moshav. Occasionally the senior male members of a family were taken to a border and forced to leave the state; their families usually followed, and the land was then declared to be abandoned property. Between 1948 and 1953 about 370 new Jewish settlements were built, and an estimated 350 of the settlements were established on what was defined as abandoned Arab property. According to the 1970 issue of the Statistical Abstract of Israel, which had derived part of its data from British Mandate Authority records, in 1945 there were about 807 Arab villages within Palestine, By 1969 there were 328 villages in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, by that time Israeli-occupied territory, and 105 Arab villages in Israel. The remaining 374 Arab villages and towns, most of which had been in Israel, had simply disappeared, their former sites covered with agricultural crops, orchards or forest, or Jewish settlements. The property of the Arabs who were refugees outside the state and the property expropriated from the Arabs who remained in Israel became a major asset to the new state. According to Don Peretz, an American scholar, by 1954 "more than one-third of Israel's Jewish population lived on absentee property, and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in the urban areas abandoned by Arabs." The fleeing Arabs emptied thriving cities, such as Jaffa, Acre (Akko), Lyyda (Lod), and Ramlah, plus "338 towns and villages and large parts of 94 other cities and towns, containing nearly a quarter of all the buildings in Israel." Peretz estimated that approximately 10,000 stores and business that had been left vacant were taken over by Jewish immigrants in the 1949-53 period. Although estimates and interpretations vary widely, it seems probable that between 1948 and 1968 about 100,000 hectares of land owned by Israeli Arabs were expropriated by the government. American historian Noah Lucas observes in his excellent work, The Modern History of Israel, that Israeli Jews outside the government, most of them recent immigrants only marginally literate in Hebrew, remained largely unaware of "the details of the land policy, and knew little of the depredations suffered by the Arabs who remained in the country." Lucas notes that the multiplicity of laws and regulations and the "complicated legal procedures shrouded the process in obscurity." He comments that although even by the mid-1970s the data were incomplete, it seemed probable that the Israeli Arabs lost between 40 and 60 percent of their total holdings to the Land Development Authority. To the Israeli Arabs one of the more devastating aspects of the loss of their property was that they knew that the loss was legally irreversible. The early Zionist settlers-particularly those of the Second Aliyah-adopted a rigid policy that land purchased or in any way acquired by a Jewish organization or individual could never again be sold, leased, or rented to a non-Jew, i.e., to an Arab. The policy went so far as to preclude the use of non-Jewish labor on the land. This policy was carried over into the new state. At independence the State of Israel succeeded to the "state lands" of the British Mandate Authority, which had "inherited" the lands held by the government of the Ottoman Empire. By 1978 the state, through its Land Development Authority, held about 90 percent of all land. The Jewish National Fund was the operating and controlling agency of the Land Development Authority and ensured that land once held by Jews-either individually or by the "sovereign state of the Jewish people"-did not revert to non-Jews. Directly related to the land that had been "abandoned" by Arabs who had fled during the 1948 war was the question of compensation. At first the Arab refugees rejected any notion of compensation, insisting that they wished to return to reclaim their land and property. Many refugees and their descendants continued to hold that position in 1978. Israel at first also refused to consider any discussion of compensation. In late 1950, however, the government agreed to consider claims. The government also agreed to release to bona fide claimants the approximately 4 million Palestinian pounds (British Mandate currency) that had been frozen in Israeli banks since 1948. The transfer of these funds was accomplished through the offices of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine by 1957. Despite vehement resistance by a sizable minority in the Knesset, the government in early 1951 agreed to the idea of negotiations on the matter of compensation. The agreement was at least implicitly tied to Israel's tentative offer to repatriate 100,000 Arab refugees as part of an overall peace plan. In March 1951, however, the government of Iraq issued a new law that impounded the property and all other assets of Jews emigrating from Iraq to Israel. A law in March 1950 sanctioning such emigration had specified that the Jewish emigrants could dispose of their property as they wished. The new law provided for a Custodian of Jewish Property (analogous to the Custodian of Absentee Property that the Israelis had established), who was granted the power to seize and hold the property of departing Jews. The government of Israel had previously suggested an exchange of populations; simply put, if 100,000 Jews emigrated from Iraq (or any other Arab country) to Israel, that country would absorb and settle 100,000 of the Arab refugees from Israel. The suggestion was angrily rejected by the Arab states, Jordan being the only Arab state that ever offered citizenship to the Arab refugees. In reaction to the Iraqi action on Jewish holdings, the Israeli government asserted that the holdings of the 106,000 Jews who by that time had emigrated from Iraq totaled about 156 IPounds million (for value of the Israel pound-see Glossary) and that this sum would be set off against whatever compensation might be due from Israel to the Arab refugees. Although the UN through the conciliation commission continued for years to work on the problem of compensation for abandoned property little progress was made. In early 1978 the New York Times estimated that there were about 3.5 million Palestinian Arabs living outside Israel. The largest single group consisted of about 1.15 million in Jordan, the only Arab country that has consistently offered its citizenship and nationality to the refugees. Another 700,000 lived in the West Bank of Jordan and 450,000 in the Gaza Strip; both areas have been under Israeli occupation since the 1967 war. An estimated 400,000 Palestinians lived in Lebanon, about 250,000 in Syria, approximately the same number in Kuwait, nearly 50,000 in Saudi Arabia, and another 50,000 in the other oil-producing states of the Arabian Peninsula. Perhaps as many as 200,000 live elsewhere in the world in the continuing Palestinian "diaspora." * * * The literature on the cultural, political, and religious history of the land and its people is immense; the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, for example, possess over three kilometers of shelves of material solely on Zionism. The works noted here and those listed in the Bibliography are not set forth as necessarily the "best," but rather as relatively easily available English-language material that the author believes would be valuable further reading not only for the serious student but also for the interested layman and in somewhat less detail than, for example, the works by Salo W. Baron or the History of the Jewish People, edited by H.H. Ben Sasson. The fifteen short volumes in the Israel Pocket Library contain material condensed from the Encyclopedia Judaica. Roland de Vaux's two-volume Ancient Israel is an excellent survey of that period, and Victor Tcherikover's Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews is a stimulating study of the impact of the Hellenes on Jewish society and culture. Mary Smallwood presents a detailed description of the Roman period in The Jews Under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian. S. D. Goitein's Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through the Ages is a succinct and balanced analysis of past and present interaction between these two peoples. A valuable summary of the origins of Zionism is set forth in Arthur Hertzberg's "Introduction" to The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, which he edited. Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State remains a key document, as do Leo Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation and the writings of Ahad Ha-Am. A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur is a thorough survey of the Zionist movement up to 1948. The first section of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism consists of a wide-ranging, if controversial, review of the origins of anti-Semitism. There are numerous works from many perspectives on the Holocaust. Saul Friedlander's article in The Jerusalem Quarterly considers "Some Aspects of the Historical Significance of the Holocaust." For readers unfamiliar with the trauma of the period, John Hersey's novel The Wall is recommended reading. The Modern History of Israel by Noah Lucas is notable for the author's academic thoroughness and objectivity and his writing skill. In addition, the book contains a superb annotated bibliography of works in English. Another thorough historical survey is Howard M. Sachar's A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. A book of vast scope and provocative interpretations and insights is The Jewish Mind by Raphael Patai. The books by Menachem Begin, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, and Chaim Weizmann contain "eye-witness" accounts by participants in events in the recent past. (For further information see Bibliography).