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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
Events immediately before and during the War of Independence
and during the first years of independence remain, so far as those
events involved the Arab residents of Palestine, matters of bitter
and emotional dispute. 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. Forty years after the event,
advocates of Arabs or Jews continue to present and believe
diametrically opposed descriptions of those events.
According to British Mandate Authority population figures in
1947, there were 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 line, 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. By the summer of
1949, about 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were living in squalid
refugee camps, set up virtually overnight in territories adjacent
to Israel's borders. About 300,000 lived in the Gaza Strip, which
was occupied by the Egyptian army. Another 450,000 became unwelcome
residents of the West Bank of the Jordan, recently occupied by the
Arab Legion of Transjordan.
The Arabs who remained inside post-1948 Israel became citizens
of the Jewish state. They had voting rights equal to the state's
Jewish community, and according to Israel's Declaration of
Independence were guaranteed social and political equality. Because
Israel's parliament has never passed a constitution, however, Arab
rights in the Jewish state have remained precarious
(see Minority Groups
, ch. 2;
Arab Parties
, ch. 4). Israel's Arab residents were
seen both by Jewish Israelis and by themselves as aliens in a
foreign country. They had been waging war since the 1920s against
Zionism and could not be expected to accept enthusiastically
residence in the Jewish state. The institutions of the new state
were designed to facilitate the growth of the Jewish nation, which
in many instances entailed a perceived infringement upon Arab
rights. Thus, Arab land was confiscated to make way for Jewish
immigrants, the Hebrew language and Judaism predominated over
Arabic and Islam, foreign economic aid poured into the Jewish
economy while Arab agriculture and business received only meager
assistance, and Israeli security concerns severely restricted the
Arabs' freedom of movement.
After independence the areas in which 90 percent of the Arabs
lived were placed under military government. This system and the
assignment of almost unfettered powers to military governors were
based on the Defense (Emergency) Regulations promulgated by the
British Mandate Authority in 1945. Using the 1945 regulations as a
legal base, the government created three areas or zones to be ruled
by the Ministry of Defense. The most important was the Northern
Area, also known as the Galilee Area, the locale of about twothirds of the Arab population. The second critical area was the socalled Little Triangle, located between the villages of Et Tira and
Et Taiyiba near the border with Jordan (then Transjordan). The
third area included much of the Negev Desert, the region traversed
by the previously apolitical nomadic beduins
(see
fig. 4).
The most salient feature of military government was restriction
of movement. Article 125 of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations
empowered military governors to declare any specified area "offlimits " to those having no written authorization. The area was then
declared a security zone and thus closed to Israeli Arabs who
lacked written permission either from the army chief of staff or
the minister of defense. Under these provisions, 93 out of 104 Arab
villages in Israel were constituted as closed areas out of which no
one could move without a military permit. In these areas, official
acts of military governors were, with rare exceptions, not subject
to review by the civil courts. Individuals could be arrested and
imprisoned on unspecified charges, and private property was subject
to search and seizure without warrant. Furthermore, the physical
expulsion of individuals or groups from the state was not subject
to review by the civil courts.
Another land expropriation measure evolved from the Defense
(Emergency) 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.
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 lying fallow
because the owner of the land or other property was not allowed to
enter the zone as a result 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.
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 (see Glossary).
Between 1948 and 1953,
about 370 new Jewish settlements were built, and an estimated 350
of the settlements were established on what was termed abandoned
Arab property.
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), Lydda (Lod), and Ramla, plus "338 towns and
villages and large parts of 94 other cities and towns, containing
nearly a quarter of all the buildings in Israel."
To the Israeli Arabs, one of the more devastating aspects of
the loss of their property was their knowledge 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 nonJew . 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. 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. This denied Israel's nonJewish , mostly Arab, population access to about 95 percent of the
land.
Data as of December 1988
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