Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0025/00257.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 25KB | 401 lines

$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).