Israel and the Palestinian Conflict, part 4: Refugees

A constant reminder and source of martyrs

Israel and the Palestinian Conflict, part 1: Introduction

Israel and the Palestinian Conflict, part 2: A historical perspective

Israel and the Palestinian Conflict, Part 3: Modern Israel

Israel and the Palestinian Conflict, part 4: Refugees

Israel and the Palestinian Conflict, part 5: Pallywood

Israel and the Palestinian Conflict, part 6: Duplicity as an art form

Israel and the Palestinian Conflict, part 7: Right of conquest

Israel and the Palestinian Conflict, part 8: Conclusion

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One cannot talk about the Palestinian and Israeli conflict without coming across the ‘Nakba’.

Let’s look at the UN’s definition and explanations.

“The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.”

The UN page about the Nakba explains the importance of this event: “The Nakba had a profound impact on the Palestinian people, who lost their homes, their land, and their way of life. It remains a deeply traumatic event in their collective memory and continues to shape their struggle for justice and for their right to return to their homes.”

To this day, the Nakba is used as a bludgeon to hammer Israel. In May 2023, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas used it as the reason why the UN should suspend Israel, as reported by Al-Jazeera: “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas insists that Israel must respect UN resolutions on Palestine or cease as a UN member.”

Meanwhile, “Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has signed a presidential decree that criminalizes denying the Palestinian “Nakba” surrounding Israel’s establishment in 1948.

The decree states that anyone found guilty of denying the “catastrophe” inflicted upon Palestinians by Zionist forces in 1948 will face up to two years in jail. It defines the “Nakba” as “a crime against humanity” carried out by the “Zionist gangs,” Israel’s Channel 12 reported.” (Times of Israel)

That is how fundamental this question is for Palestinians and the Palestinian cause. But what is the truth about this, really?

As we saw in the previous part, the Clinton plan dramatically changed the negotiated peace package in favor of the Palestinians, but was shot down. The main reason was a sudden maximalist interpretation of the right of return of the refugees. Not just to a Palestinian homeland, not even to be compensated, but their right to return to a place of their choosing, even to the homes they had left in 1948 or any of the subsequent years. The ghost of the ‘Naqba’, which is the ‘violent displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, and the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.’ It is commemorated each year by Palestinians on May 15, the day following the Israeli Independence Day, as a day of mourning, and call to action against Israel. Western writers call it ‘ethnic cleansing’, but not everyone agrees.

As a historian, I tend to disagree as well. First all, while there are indeed a number of instances of Palestinians being forcefully removed from their homes (and yes, instances of Arab civilians being killed), either as some form of ‘ethnic cleansing’ or as forced evacuation in light of impending military action in that region, a lot of the evacuations were voluntary. Remember, in those early days in 1948, everyone on Arab side, and likely all over the world, was looking at the fledgling Israeli state, brand new, without a proper army, supplies, income, organization, against the military might of 5 to 7 Arab nations, many times their size, and thought it was from the onset a hopelessly lost cause for Israel. The Arabs in the Mandate territories often just thought they would be leaving for a few weeks or months, only to return in glory after Israel was removed from the face of the earth.

Researchers look at the claims of the amount of refugees as totaling up to a million Palestinians, and shake their head. “The last census was taken by the British in 1945. It found approximately 1.2 million permanent Arab residents in all of Palestine. A 1949 Government of Israel census counted 160,000 Arabs living in the country after the war. In 1947, a total of 809,100 Arabs lived in the same area. This meant no more than 650,000 Palestinian Arabs could have become refugees. A report by the UN Mediator on Palestine arrived at an even lower figure of 472,000, and calculated that only about 360,000 Arab refugees required aid.”

The Israeli Proclamation of Independence from May 14, 1948, made important claims and promises: “In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions....We extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all.”

There is a very interesting revisionist history of Israel in that UN page about the Nakba. First, they state “Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society.” That is it, suggesting that Israel ceased to be multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. Nothing further could be from the truth, as Israel still is home to Jews and non-Jews, Muslims, Christians, and non-religious, Arabs, non-Arabs, ‘Black Jews’ from Ethiopia, Ashkenazi, Sephardim, Mizrahi and other Jewish groups, Orthodox through secular Jews, etc.

Here is the main text in question: “In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under a UN administration. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing that it was unfair and violated the UN Charter. Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee. The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948, with the end of the British Mandate and the departure of British forces, the declaration of independence of the State of Israel and the entry of neighbouring Arab armies. The newly established Israeli forces launched a major offensive. The result of the war was the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population.”

Where to begin...

“The Arab world rejected the plan.” Yes, and had they accepted it, there would be no Nakba.

“Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee.” No, this was not the result of the November 1947 resolution, as attacks against Jews in that area started much earlier. As stated in Part 1: “The first clashes of violence took place, starting with the 1920 Battle of Tel Hai (where Jewish settlers defended their settlement against a raid by Arab militia, in context of the Franco-Syrian war), the Nebi Musa riots, the 1929 Buraq uprising about access to the Western Wall, the 1933 riots, a full on armed Arab revolt in 1936-1939, the 1938 Tiberias massacre where 19 Jews, including 11 children, were killed, and many others.”

“The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948, [...] and the entry of neighbouring Arab armies.” Goodness. ‘The entry’ of the Arab armies. Into a new country that had accepted the UN partition plan. Yeah. Not an invasion, of course. And ‘escalated’ into a full-blown war? Only because one side refused to accept that plan, and chose immediate violence to drive away the Jews, back into the sea, without any other attempt for peaceful or negotiated settlement.

“The newly established Israeli forces launched a major offensive.” Because of course, it was the Israelis who took the initiative here, and ‘launched a major offensive’. That is the cause, folks! The Israelis had to gall to launch a major offensive in response to the mostly peaceful ‘entry’ of the united Arab armies! If this was not on the UN website, it would be laughable. But this is just sad, that such an important and supposedly neutral organization uses such blatantly partisan language. This is beyond ridiculous.

“The result of the war was the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population.” Technically correct, but not a word about the various reasons for this displacement: some indeed forcible removed, others who voluntarily fled (normal human reaction in face of warfare), but a good number also because of official requests and calls by the invading Arab armies themselves, and by high-ranked Arab and Palestinian leaders. And, before we forget, also because of backfiring use of lies about ‘massacres and rape’ to try to elicit help from surrounding Arab nations. A much more complex image emerges.

Next, the amount of current refugees is greatly inflated, as well, for various reasons (including the inescapable human urge for corruption), but mainly as a tool for political pressure on Israel and the UN.

Another important element to note, is that many Arabs from the Israeli area of the partition fled well before Israel proclaimed its independence. I.F. Stone wrote in his book ‘This is Israel’ (p27) that “By the end of January [1948], the exodus was already so alarming that the Palestine Arab Higher Committee in alarm asked neighboring Arab countries to refuse visas to those refugees and to seal the borders against them.”

Other sources show that while Israel did try to provide guarantees that Arabs who chose to remain in their territories would be protected, Arab nations and even the UN failed to do the same, leading to a good number of Arabs leaving Israel after hostilities had ceased.

The article acknowledges that Israel could have done more to inform the remaining Arab population about what they were planning and organizing, even if they also acknowledge that “the Israeli Government has been too busy to propagandize this Arab program.” And yes, Israel wasn’t ‘particularly upset’ when those Arabs left, either. Yet this article stands as a strong witness that Israel did all they could to actually integrate the Arabs in their new country, from the very beginning:

That does not look like the agenda and program of a nation bent towards genocide and ethnic cleansing, or ‘colonial occupation’.

There is more proof, that Israelis DID try to make Arabs stay, where they could.

(Which does not mean that there are no other instances where Israeli forces DID forcibly remove Palestinians, or at other places and occasions shot at and killed civilians.)

What is equally forgotten is the number of Jews in Arab countries, which drastically decreased in the years following 1948. An estimated 820,000 Jews were forced out, over half a million settled in Israel, who paid for all that. None of the Arab states paid any compensation, even after confiscating the belongings of those evicted Jews.

Israel absorbed almost 600,000 Jewish refugees from all those Arab countries. They lost all they had, as those countries simply confiscated all their belongings. This came at a high price for Israel, which saw its population double through this sudden influx of people. It wasn’t just a matter of cost, either. These refugees, called ‘Mizrahi’ (Eastern) Jews, had often lived in their original countries for thousands of years, dating back to the earliest diasporas. They were housed in temporary refugee camps, consisting of shacks and tents in crowded camps, called maabarot.

Compared to the Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Europe, who were entitled to German war reparations, the Mizrahi needed help from an already cash-strapped Israeli government and donations from Jews from all over the world. And where the Ashkenazi were often better educated and had smaller families, the destitute Mizrahi were more religious, hampering their integration into a new, modern and more secular society. Yet that is exactly what they did, and today the only trace of that division is an aging memory. The Mizrahi never spoke of a ‘right of return’, nor even of proper compensation for the theft of their houses and belongings.

When Israel brought up the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees during the Paris UN conference of 1951 and wanted to link the problems of the Jewish refugees with those of the Palestinian refugees, this was completely ignored. As a result, Israel decided to pass laws that allowed them to use the assets of the Palestinian refugees to help settle the Arab Jewish refugees. The agency expanded her efforts to include education, health care and social services, but is not free of criticism. Mainly, their ties with groups like Hamas and political stance against Israel, are seen as a serious problem for an organization should be and remain neutral, under the UN flag. After the October 7 attacks, serious allegations were made that twelve UNRWA employees were involved in those attacks. These allegations were serious enough for the UN itself to start an investigation, as reported by the WSJ. Over 20 countries suspended their support and monetary contributions to the UNRWA.

On a side note: the Palestinian refugees are aided by the UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. In full, this is the ‘United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East’. Established in 1949 by the UN General Assembly, its aims were to provide aid to ALL refugees from the 1948 war, including both the Jewish as the Palestinian refugees. This quickly changed to just the Palestinian refugees. It is the only such agency devoted to a specific region or conflict.

One of the main problems is that the UNRWA has its own definition of a ‘refugee’, different from that of the UN itself (the UN has the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, as their main body to deal with refugees worldwide). According to the UNRWA, ‘Palestine refugees are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”’ For the UNHCR, ‘Refugees are people forced to flee their own country and seek safety in another country. They are unable to return to their own country because of feared persecution as a result of who they are, what they believe in or say, or because of armed conflict, violence or serious public disorder.’
If the UNHCR would take over responsibility for the Palestinian refugees, their different definition would cause almost 5 million out of the 5.4 million current Palestinian refugees to lose their status as refugee.

Another very important element the UNRWA has, lacking in the definition of the UNHCR, is this: “The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including adopted children, are also eligible for registration.” Some charge that this perpetuates the whole problem, as it consolidates a Palestinian’s status as refugee until perpetuity, as his children and his children’s children will ‘inherit’ that status automatically.

 The UNHCR has a well-balanced set of definitions and provisions regarding refugees. For example in Article 34 of the UN Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, it states: “The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and  naturalization of refugees. They shall in particular make every effort to expedite naturalization proceedings and to reduce as far as possible the charges and costs of such proceedings.” The goal, after all, is to help resolve the problem as quickly as possible, and to return the refugee to a protected status so they can resume a proper life. The UNWRA lacks such goal, and only exists ‘to help the Palestinian Refugees’.

James Lindsay, a former UNRWA legal adviser, wrote extensively on this problem, and summarizes it thus: “The scandal, then, is not that refugee status can be passed from generation to generation, but rather that through inaction, refugee status is allowed to persist from generation to generation. For UNRWA Refugees, refugee status persists solely because UNRWA pretends persons who are protected by a state (the oxymoronic “citizen refugees”) are still refugees and, for those who really are refugees, refuses to make any effort to end their refugee status, as (in the absence of the possibility of repatriation) by resettlement or local integration.”

Lindsay also pointed out laxness by UNRWA in applying their own definition, leading to a serious overcount. For example, the UNRWA currently counts 489,292 registered refugees in Lebanon. Yet in December 2017, an article by Ha’aretz reported this: “Around 175,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon, 45 percent of them in 12 refugee camps and 55 percent in 156 population centers throughout the country, according to a census conducted by Lebanon’s Central Administration of Statistics in partnership with the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.” Around that time, in 2017, the UNRWA estimate was around 500,000, as well. Such a serious overcounting results in a huge over-budgeting. Where is all that earmarked money for the missing 320,000 refugees going to?

On August 31, 2018, the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Geneva issued a statement, announcing that the US would halt its funding for the UNRWA: “The Administration has carefully reviewed the issue and determined that the United States will not make additional contributions to UNRWA.” Among the reasons the statement clarified: “Beyond the budget gap itself and failure to mobilize adequate and appropriate burden sharing, the fundamental business model and fiscal practices that have marked UNRWA for years – tied to UNRWA’s endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries – is simply unsustainable and has been in crisis mode for many years. The United States will no longer commit further funding to this irredeemably flawed operation.” Early April 2021, the incoming Biden administration resumed US funding of the UNRWA.

Many of the evacuations were commanded by Arab leaders. A May 03, 1948 article by Time Magazine reported: “The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city. More than pride and defiance was behind the Arab orders. By withdrawing Arab workers, their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa.”

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri a-Said said: "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down." (Myron Kaufman, The Coming Destruction of Israel, (NY: The American Library Inc., 1970), pp. 26-27.)

And ahmoud Abbas wrote in Falastin a-Thaura (official PLO journal), in March 1976:

“The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which Jews used to live.”

Another story, about the Deir Yassin ‘massacre’ (it seems there is more about that story than most think they know about it, color me surprised), has the following admission: “Abu Mahmud, who lived in Deir Yassin in 1948, was one of those who complained. He told the BBC: "We said, 'There was no rape.' He [Hussayn Khalidi] said, 'We have to say this so the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews'.” "This was our biggest mistake," said Nusseibeh. "We did not realize how our people would react. As soon as they heard that women had been raped at Deir Yassin, Palestinians fled in terror. They ran away from all our villages." He told Larry Collins in 1968: "We committed a fatal error, and set the stage for the refugee problem."

While stories about the attack were exaggerated, talking about a ‘massacre’, with massive rape of the women, it was used to discredit the Jewish Agency. Shocked when learning about this attack, they immediately expressed ‘horror and disgust’, and made that know to Jordan’s King Abdullah.

The Arab Higher Committee, knowing that the stories about Deir Yassin was exaggerated, allowed them to be distributed, in the hope they would shock the Arab population of their respective countries into action, pressuring their governments to intervene. Instead, it spurred on a new wave of Arab refugees, leaving Israel.

An Iraqi unit had moved into the village, threatening to cut off the road to Jerusalem, making the village a legitimate target. When Irgun forces attacked, they found Iraqi soldiers dressed in women’s clothing, using the confusion to shoot at the Israeli troops. This caused Israeli fire towards the ‘women’, killing some actual women in the process. When surviving Iraqi soldiers surrendered, some took out concealed handguns and fired at the Israeli troops, triggering a new wave of return fire, killing also those who really surrendered, as well as some other people who were captured. The sight of killed women, or the soldiers dressed like women, when later Hagganah troops entered the town, seemed to confirm the Arab story about a massacre.

A report by David Meir-Levi recounts: “The Red Cross, which was called in to assist the wounded and civilians, found no evidence of a massacre. In fact, even the most recent review of the evidence (July 1999), by Arab scholars at Beir-Zayyit university in Ramallah, indicates that there was no massacre, but rather a military conflict in which civilians were killed in the crossfire. The total Arab dead, including the Iraqi soldiers, according to the Beir Zayyit calculation, was 107.”

That is the true story of Deir-Yassin. A lie, disseminated by the Arabs to bolster support and undermine the new Israeli state, that backfired and caused a new wave of refugees. Which would still be blamed on Israel.

This could have gone very different, as Jordan showed. “In January 1952, a new constitution enacted by the Parliament promoted the equality of all Jordanians before the law, regardless of their race, language or religion. The “Jordanization” process was reinforced through a “de-Palestinization” policy: the term “Palestine” was banned from all official documents in May 1950, and Jordan's official school curriculum promoted the idea of the unified Kingdom as a “little Arab homeland.””

Instead of creating a permanent class of refugees, integrating the Arabs from the lost territories would have been easy, and better long term. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, growing steadily to millions, were forced to live and keep living in ‘temporary’ camps, while the Palestinian Authorities received billions in aid. Lt. Gen. Alexander Galloway, then the director of UNRWA in Jordan, wrote in 1952:

“It is perfectly clear that Arab nations do not want to solve the Arab refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront against the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.”

A lot of very cynical political theater is played on the backs of millions of Palestinians. BY THEIR OWN LEADERS. And this is used as a political bludgeon to club the international world, and Israel the most. It is used to deny the most comprehensive peace plan, catering to just about every demand the Palestinians had. Even worse, it creates millions of very poor people, without a future, a perfect breeding ground for radicalism. Yes, Israel has made policies that could be said to help radicalize Palestinians. Yes, some of the more radical Jewish settlers have done despicable things that only exacerbate the situation, and poison the relations between Jews and Arabs in an already tense environment. But no, it isn’t just the Israelis. A huge portion is on the shoulders of Palestinians.

In a very interesting response to an article by Foreign Policy about Palestinian refugees, Jay Sekulow (yes, THAT Jay Sekulow) wrote, among other things: “The only refugees who do not fall under the UNHCR and instead have their own agency are the Palestinians. While the UNHCR has resettled millions of refugees, since the time it was created, UNRWA has not managed to solve or even diminish the problem at all. Instead, using its own metrics, the number of refugees has grown exponentially, while UNRWA has become one of the larger U.N. agencies, with 30,000 personnel and a $1.2 billion budget. This is despite the fact that many of the UNRWA “refugees” are not actually refugees at all under the standard international definition of that term. For example, of the 2 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, most have been granted Jordanian citizenship.

UNRWA, moreover, is the only refugee agency in the world whose purpose is not to resettle refugees and help them go on with their lives. UNRWA spends more to do less, while perpetuating a problem it was created to help solve. This situation, which does little to advance the interests of actual refugees and much to expand a bloated UNRWA bureaucracy, needs to be addressed.”

The Refugees of Palestine are unique, and maintained by the structures put up by the UN. This flies in the face of equality under the law, of equal treatment. But all this special care is not helping, but only perpetuating and worsening the crisis.

It is time we critically examine all the claims, both by Israel, but, mostly overdue, those of the Palestinians a well. But the foundational lies told by Palestinians about the origins of Israel and their own plight are only the beginning, and today form a well-established practice of deception. The next part will dive deeper into that topic.