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The Palestinian Exodus (Arabic: الهجرة الÙ?لسطينية al-Hijra al-Filasteeniya) is the refugee flight of some 711,000 Palestinian Arabs (UN estimate[1]) during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and is called the Nakba (Arabic: النكبة) by Palestinians. The Israeli estimate of the refugees is 520,000 and the Palestinian estimate is 900,000. They fled or were expelled from their homes in the part of Palestine that would become the State of Israel to other parts of Palestine or to neighbouring countries.
The degree to which the flight of the refugees was voluntary or involuntary is hotly debated, with some citing attempts by the surrounding Arab governments to evacuate women and children, and the attempt by some Jewish leaders, especially in Haifa, to stem flight, and others citing a score of the well-documented direct expulsion of the residents of some towns and villages, including Lydda and Ramle.
In 1949 at the Lausanne conference, Israel proposed to allow 100,000 refugees to return, this number including an alleged 25,000 who had returned already surreptitiously and 10,000 projected family-reunion cases. The offer was conditional on a full peace treaty that allowed Israel to keep all the territory it had captured and on the Arab states agreeing to absorb the remaining refugees. The offer was rejected by the Arab states.
The refugee population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is 1.65 million according to UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, with the entire local population estimated at 3.76 million by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (The CIA World Factbook estimates the populations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as of July 2005 at 2,385,615 and 1,376,289 respectively). There are also approximately 500,000 to 800,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan (Bowker, 2003, p. 72). The Palestinian population of Israel was previously estimated at 840,000 or 990,000 including the population of East Jerusalem, which was annexed by Israel in 1967 (Artz, 1997, p. 50). The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics most recent estimate is 1.19 million [2]. The Palestinian population in Israel is 76% Muslim, 15% Christian and 9% Druze (Kanaaneh, 2002, p. 5). The fertility rates in Israel by religion in 1995 were Jews (3.64), European/American born Jews (2.63), Asian/African born Jews (5.86), Muslim (7.96), Christian (4.85) and Druze (6.58) (Kanaaneh, 2002, p. 57). At current growth rates the total Palestinian population will increase to around 9 million by 2010 (Bowker, 2003, p. 62).
Although there is no accepted definition of who can be considered Palestinian refugees for legal purposes, UNRWA defines them as "persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict... UNRWA's definition of a refugee also covers the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. The number of registered Palestine refugees has subsequently grown from 914,000 in 1950 to more than four million in 2002, and continues to rise due to natural population growth."
Under UNWRA's definition the total number of Palestinian refugees is estimated at 4.9 million, one third of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza; slightly less than one third in Jordan; 17% in Syria and Lebanon and around 15% in other Arab and Western countries. Approximately 1 million refugees have no form of identification other than an UNWRA identification card. (Bowker, 2003, pp. 61-62).
Nakba or Al-Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, pronounce An-Nakba) is a term meaning "cataclysm" or "catastrophe". It is the term with which Palestinians usually refer to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
The term Nakba was coined by Constantine Zurayk, a professor of history at the American University of Beirut, in his 1948 book Ma'nat al-Nakba, The Meaning of Disaster. Zurayk wrote a continuation book, The New Meaning of the Disaster (also in Arabic) in 1967 but the term Nakba is reserved for the 1948 war.
Together with Naji Ali's Handala (the bare foot kid always drawn from behind), and the symbolic key for the house in Palestine carried by so many Palestinian refugees, the Nakba is perhaps the most important symbol of Palestinian discourse.
Nakba Day (May 15th) is considered an important day on the Palestinian calendar, and is traditionally observed as a time to learn about the history of Palestine and to remember the event.
The history of the Palestinian Exodus is closely tied to the events of the war in Palestine that lasted from 1947 to 1949. Many factors must have played a role forming it. But what they are and how they affected it is still today a very debated issue.
From the start of the Zionist endeavour in Palestine, Zionist Jews wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine built on Jewish traditions and culture. The demographic reality of Palestine, which was populated mostly by Arabs, was the major obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state.
The most important means to achieve that change was through aliyah, Jewish immigration to the land of Israel. However, the Palestinian Arab population had a much higher birthrate than the Jewish counterpart, as well as some immigration.[3] Even with Jewish immigration, the Arab population firmly outnumbered the Jewish one and no part of Palestine, with the exception the Tel Aviv area, Jerusalem, and some northern districts, would be able to produce a Jewish majority. To make matters worse, Jewish immigration was restricted by both the Ottoman Empire and the British while Arab immigration was unchecked, and relatively few diaspora Jews actually wished to immigrate to Palestine, most preferring to move to North America.
The only viable solution seemed to be a partition of Palestine. But however the land was partitioned, the part belonging to Jews would contain an Arab majority or at least a very large Arab minority. For some of the Zionist leadership, the "transfer" of a large Arab population appeared to be the only solution.
The idea of transfer was not, in 1947-1949, when it actually happened, a new one. In June 12, 1895 Theodore Herzl wrote in his diary:
In 1937 the Peel Commission placed transfer on the political agenda. It recommended that Britain should withdraw from Palestine and that the land should be partitioned between Jews and Arabs. It also recommended that 225,000 Arabs should be transferred out of the proposed Jewish state. This was a huge step forward for the Zionists. Until then, transfer hadn't been discussed as an option with outsiders but now "the Royal Commission" had proposed a solution to the Zionist problem. David Ben-Gurion didn't spare the superlatives when he wrote in his diary:
Despite the fact that the notion of transfer had been proposed by a royal commission and that David Ben-Gurion had seen fit to speak of it in the plenum of the Zionist Congress, the subject was still very sensitive.
To Zionists it was of uttermost importance that the transfer plans not be publicized as a Zionist plan as that would lower international support for Zionists.
Moshe Sharett, director of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, declared:
From the aforementioned prevalent transfer thinking and from the actual expulsions that took place in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, some historians have concluded that the Palestinian Exodus was a preplanned act, despite the lack of central expulsion orders found in any archives.
They argue that there was an omnipresent understanding during the war that as many Palestinian Arabs as possible had to be transferred out of the Jewish state, and that that understanding stood behind many of the expulsions that the commanders on the field carried out.
Other historians are sceptical of that conclusion. They emphasize that no central directive has surfaced from the archives and that if such an omnipresent understanding had existed, it would have left a mark in the vast amounts of documentation the Zionist leadership produced at the time. Then, too, Yosef Weitz, strongly in favor of expulsion, had explicitly asked Ben-Gurion for such a directive and was turned down. Last, settlement policy guidelines drawn up between December 1947 and February 1948, meant to handle the absorption of the anticipated first million immigrants, planned some 150 new settlements, about half of them in the Negev, with the rest along the lines of the UN partition map (29 November, 1947) for the north and centre of the country.
Supporters of the "Master Plan" theory argue that the missing central directives have not been found because they were deliberately omitted or because the understanding of the significance of explusion was so widespread that no directive was necessary. They claim that the Zionist leadership in general and Ben-Gurion in particular were well aware of how historiography worked. What would be written about the war and what light Israel would be presented in was so important that it was worth making an intentional effort to hide those of their actions that might seem reprehensible.
Additionally, some historians have interpreted clauses from Plan Dalet as the central directive, the "master plan" - specifically the section instructing commanders to destroy and depopulate villages that contained a hostile and/or difficult to control population.
During these months the climate in Palestine became volatile. Hostilities between Jews and Arabs increased and general lawlessness spread as the British declared to end their mandate in May 1948. War was seemingly inevitable. Middle and upper-class families from urban areas withdrew to settle in neighbouring countries such as Transjordan and Egypt. Perhaps as many as 75,000 left in those months. There was also cases of outright explusions such as in Qisarya where roughly 1000 Palestinian Arabs were evicted in February. Irgun and Lehi played an important role in intimidating the Palestinian Arab population.
Most of the refugees from this period probably thought that they soon would return, just as they had done after the Great Arab Uprising 1936-1939.
This first flight contributed to the demoralization of the Palestinians and left them virtually without any leadership.
The fighting in these months was concentrated to the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv area, where consequently, most depopulations took place. The Deir Yassin massacre in early April, and the exaggerated rumours that followed it, helped spread fear and panic among the Palestinians.
By the estimates of Morris, 250,000-300,000 Palestinians became refugees during this stage.
The largest single expulsion of the war began in Lydda and Ramla July 14, in which 60,000 inhabitants were forcibly expelled on the orders of Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin wrote in his memoirs:
Additionally, widespread looting and several cases of rape (12 total throughout the war, per Benny Morris[4]) took place during the evacuation. In total, about 100,000 Palestinians became refugees in this stage according to Morris.
This period of the exodus was characterized by Israeli military accomplishments which was met with resistance from the Palestinian Arabs to be made refugees. The Israeli military activities limited itself to the Galilee and the sparsely populated Negev desert. It was clear to the villages in the Galilee, that if they left, return was far from imminent. Therefore far fewer villages were spontaneously depopulated than previously. Most of it was due to clear, direct cause: expulsion and deliberate harassment.
Operation Hiram, which was the Israeli military operation that conquered the upper Galilee, is one of the examples in which a direct expulsion order was given to the commanders:
Altogether 200,000-230,000 Palestinians left in this stage, according to Morris.
From Israeli official sources it has long been claimed that the refugee flight was in large part instigated by Arab leaders. For example, Yosef Weitz wrote in October 1948:
During the period preceding the 1948 war and particularly during the invasion of Arab powers into Palestine, it is claimed that the Arab High Command called for portions of the Palestinian population to leave their homes.
When asked whether in Operation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order Morris replied,
The claim that Arab leaders endorsed the refugee flight has always been rejected by Palestinian writers and by some Israeli and Jewish writers. In the 1980s when the Israeli archives about the war opened to researchers, the Israeli New Historians began to question this view. For example, concerning the alleged evacuation order, or orders, issued by Arab leaders, Benny Morris wrote in 1990:
After the war, a few Arab leaders tried to present the Palestinian exodus as a victory by claiming to have planned it. None of them provided any evidence for this claim. An oft-quoted example from the untranslated Arabic memoirs of Khalid al-`Azm, who was prime minister of Syria from December 17, 1949 to March 30, 1949 (a period after most of the exodus was complete), has a different explanation, however. In his memoirs, Al-Azm listed a number of reasons for the Arab defeat in an attack on the Arab leaders, including his own predecessor, Jamil Mardam Bey:
However, as Yehoshua Porath, Professor Emeritus of Middle East History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues "Neither . . . is the admission of the Syrian leader Khalid al-Azm that the Arab countries urged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their villages until after the victory of the Arab armies final proof that the Palestinian Arabs in practice heeded that call and consequently left." [6]. In his re-examination of the Palestinian exodus Benny Morris is even more skeptical, concluding:
Morris goes on to speculate that, although al'Azm may have been referring to the minor Syrian order mentioned above, it is more probable that "he inserted the claim to make some point within the context of inter-Arab polemics (i.e., blaming fellow Arab leaders for the exodus)."
The UN was from the very beginning involved in the conflict. In the autumn of 1948 the refugee problem was a fact and how it should be settled was discussed. Count Folke Bernadotte said on September 16:
UN General Assembly Resolution 194 which was passed on December 11, 1948 and reaffirmed every year since, was the first resolution that called for Israel to let the refugees return:
In 1950, The Absentee Property Law was passed in Israel. It was the law that made it domestically legal in Israel to confiscate the property and land that the departed Palestinians had left behind them, so called "absentees". Even Arabs who never left Israel, and received citizenship after the war, but stayed for a few days in a nearby village had their property confiscated. About 32,000 Palestinians became "present absentees" - persons that were present at the time but considered absent.
How much of Israel's territory consists of land confiscated with the Absentee Property Law is uncertain. According to the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property, 70% of the territory:
The Jewish National Fund's estimate quite a bit higher at 88%:
The absentee property played an enormous role in making Israel a viable state. In 1954 about one third of Israel's population lived on absentee property. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established 1948-1953, 350 were on absentee property. As Moshe Dayan put it in an often quoted speech before students at the Israeli Institute of Technology in 1969:
In February 1954, Jordan amended its Nationality Law to include "any Arab person born in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or in the occupied part of Palestine and emigrated from the country or left - including the children of this emigrant wherever they were born - who would submit a written application and renounce their former nationality" (quoted in Plascov, 1981, p. 47). The Arab League promoted the extension of full civil rights to Palestinian refugees but advised that host governments should not offer nationality because this could weaken the political rights of refugees (Schulz, 2003, p. 235). To date, no Arab country with the exception of Jordan has granted citizenship to Palestinian refugees living on its soil or their descendants.
Categories: 1948 Arab-Israeli War | Israeli-Palestinian conflict | Arab-Israeli conflict | Refugees | Forced migration
Source: en.wikipedia.org