The Unmaking of Israel (6 page)

The partition map was based not only on the 1947 population of Palestine. It assumed that the Jewish state would absorb up to half a million European Jewish refugees, who did not want to return to their pre-Holocaust homes and were not wanted there. In this sense, the argument that the Palestinians paid for Europe’s crimes is correct. Nor were the European refugees the only prospective immigrants; the founders of Israel hoped to “ingather” Jews from around the world. Their most basic belief was that the proper place for Jews was their homeland. Practically speaking, they expected immigration to create the necessary Jewish majority.

Even so, Zionist leaders were concerned about the expected size of the Arab minority. A good example of that concern is a telegram from the Jewish Agency’s “foreign minister,” Moshe Shertok, to Ben-Gurion, then head of the agency, in October 1947. Shertok (later Sharett) was in New York, where the final version of the partition plan was being hammered out. The plan allowed Arabs living in the Jewish state to opt for citizenship in the Arab state, and vice versa. (Jerusalem residents could also choose to be citizens of one of the states.) Shertok told Ben-Gurion of a U.S. proposal requiring anyone who chose citizenship in the other state to move there within a set time. Shertok opposed the idea because it would “not result [in] transfer but discourage Arabs [from] opting out.” The Zionist interest was to “reduce [the] Arab political minority even if [the] economic minority [is] irreducible.” Were the UN plan to include a population transfer, that would be ideal, Shertok implies, but this was not in the cards. Since the Arabs would stay put, it would be best if they chose citizenship in the Arab state, so that they would not be able to vote in the Jewish one. Meanwhile, the Jewish political majority would be boosted by Jews living outside the state.

It should be no surprise that Zionist leaders thought about transfer. Population transfer—less politely, the forced uprooting of men, women, and children in order to create ethnically homogenous states—was part of the zeitgeist. The original British proposal for dividing Palestine, submitted by the Peel Commission in 1937, included the transfer of Arabs from the Jewish state, and cited the forced exchange of 1.3 million Greeks and 400,000 Turks in 1923 as a positive precedent. After World War II, that precedent became the brutal norm in Europe, as Tony Judt writes: 160,000 Turks expelled from Bulgaria to Turkey; 120,000 Slovaks sent from Hungary to Slovakia in exchange for the same number of Hungarians going the opposite way; nearly 3 million Germans expelled from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, with the approval of Britain, Russia, and the United States. The full list is much longer. “The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ did not yet exist, but the reality surely did,” Judt writes. It was a crime against humanity, described as such at the time by morally awake observers, yet accepted by “pragmatic” statesmen as a necessity.

All the same, the evidence is missing to back up the claim that the Jewish leadership planned from the start to expel the Arabs. In fact, there is strong evidence for the opposite: that the leaders of the state-to-be expected and planned for the Arab population to stay put. That evidence comes from the report of the opaquely named body known as the Situation Committee.

In October 1947, even before the UN partition vote, it was clear to the heads of the Jewish Agency and Va’ad Le’umi that the British Mandate would soon end. They needed to plan how to run a country—build roads, deliver mail, provide health care, maintain sewage lines. The Situation Committee was created in order to draw up a blueprint. Ben-Gurion chaired it. Other senior politicians, including Golda Meir and Jewish Agency treasurer Eliezer Kaplan, headed subcommittees that designed ministries, down to the number of district veterinarian officers and school inspectors, and the precise budget needed to pay them.

In the Situation Committee’s final report, the chapter on education notes that the state will be responsible for the eleven existing Arab schools in the partly or completely Arab towns of Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, and Beit Shean, and the ninety-two schools serving the 248 Arab villages in the area of the Jewish state. The health chapter states that government clinics established by the British in Arab villages will keep operating; villages without clinics will be served by the Histadrut labor union’s clinics in neighboring Jewish communities, under government contract. The Interior Ministry, in charge of local administration, will have twenty-four district officers—sixteen Jewish and eight Arab. The report is in Hebrew. It is not intended to impress outsiders; it is intended for use.

The pre-independence musings among Zionist leaders about population transfer represented one political inclination. The Situation Committee report represented an opposing inclination, among the same people, for integrating a large Arab minority into the Jewish state. Events on the ground tipped the balance.

The committee completed its report sometime between April 10 and April 30, 1948, though most of the work was obviously done earlier. By then, the sections referring to the Arab population were already dated, rendered obsolete by gunfire. Fighting between Arabs and Jews in Palestine had broken out the day after the United Nations approved partition and steadily escalated. It was a war of communities, not of states. Both sides believed their survival was at stake. In the first months, the Arab middle and upper classes began fleeing their homes. Local Arab village militias cut the road to Jerusalem; starvation loomed in Jewish areas of the city.

In April—perhaps while a typist in Tel Aviv was working on the mimeograph stencils of the Situation Committee report—the Haganah went on the offensive. It aimed at taking control of the land assigned to the Jewish state, opening the road to Jerusalem, and preparing for defense against the coming Arab invasion. In some places, Jewish commanders expelled Arabs from conquered villages. In many more, panic led to mass flight, especially after Irgun and Lehi fighters perpetrated a massacre in the village of Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem.

By early May, Shertok was speaking of the “astounding” and “unforeseen” Arab exodus, as if describing an unexpected inheritance. Going back to the status quo ante was unthinkable, he said. When the provisional government discussed the issue in June, the consensus—supported by Ben-Gurion—was to keep the refugees from returning. A later cabinet decision said that “a solution to the refugee problem” would have to be part of a formal peace agreement. The policy was partly defensive, to avoid a fifth column. But in the June cabinet meeting, Shertok also described all “the lands and the houses” as “spoils of war,” and as compensation for what Jews had lost in a war forced on them.

Afterward, as the fighting continued, cases of the IDF expelling Arabs grew more common. The decision to prevent return was the turning point, transforming what began in the chaos of war into a choice.

To understand later events, it’s worth noting that Arab forces also expelled or massacred Jews or prevented their return to places they had fled. But they could do so rarely, because the Arabs were losing on the battlefield. Nonetheless, Transjordan’s Arab Legion emptied the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City; Arab fighters massacred about 150 Jewish defenders of Kfar Etzion, a religious kibbutz south of Bethlehem, after they surrendered. Several other isolated Jewish farming communities were abandoned. Though relatively small, those losses would help shape Israeli policy nineteen years afterward.

With the war’s end and the signing of the armistice agreements, the Situation Committee’s blueprint for coexistence was less than a memory. Tiberias, Safed, and Beit Shean were empty of Arabs, as were 350 or more villages that had existed in 1947. In Haifa, only a fraction of the Arab population remained. The same was true in Jaffa, Akko, Lod, and Ramleh, towns that partition had assigned to the Arab state but were now part of Israel. About 150,000 Palestinian Arabs lived in Israel, less than a fifth of the number who had lived in the same territory beforehand. The laws and policies adopted in Israel’s first years marked those who remained as citizens, and at the same time as outsiders and potential enemies. They were Israeli Arabs, or Arab citizens of Israel, or as they would be more likely to say decades later, Palestinian citizens of Israel—but not Israelis.

In 1952, the Knesset belatedly passed a law on citizenship. One section said that residents of British Palestine who had remained continuously in Israel, or who had been given legal permission to reenter the country, would be citizens. The law thereby accomplished two things. It defined citizenship in universal, liberal terms: everyone who lived in the state’s territory qualified. It also defined Palestinian Arabs who had left as noncitizens.

Another section of the law granted citizenship to any Jew who immigrated to the country. That fit together with an earlier piece of legislation, the 1950 Law of Return, which gave every Jew the right to immigrate.

Together, the two laws pointed to a lasting conundrum about the meaning of statehood. For Jews, one piece of self-determination was being able to gather in one territory and create a national community. The second piece was achieving political independence. Independence made free immigration possible, but it didn’t complete the job by any means. When it came to repatriation, the Israeli government’s constituency was the same as the Zionist movement’s: the Jews, including those who lived elsewhere, and especially those who needed refuge.

But in every other way, independence meant that the liberation movement had fulfilled its purpose. In their historical homeland, Jews now had a state in which the daily rhythms, the language and public culture, were Jewish, where their furious argument about what it meant to be Jewish was a debate of the general society, not the parochial concern of a minority. But the political community to which the democratic government rightfully owed responsibility was the citizenry of Israel, the people inside its borders, Jewish and non-Jewish.

When it came to accepting this change, Ben-Gurion and everyone around him did poorly at making the psychological and political shift from national movement to statehood, from revolution to institution. In key ways, they continued to act as if the community they led and served comprised the Jews in Israel and, more widely, the Jews in general, including the almost-citizens around the world. The borders of the polity shimmered and shifted. Seen from one angle, they were the lines on a map. Seen from another, they were the social boundaries of an ethnic group.

The policy on land ownership expressed the attitude that the state served Jews. From the start of Zionism, purchasing real estate in Palestine was central to its efforts. The goal, especially on the Zionist left, was to bring Jews back not only to their homeland but to the soil itself. So Jews needed places to live and, just as important, to cultivate. To buy land, the Zionist Organization created the Jewish National Fund, which held the property it acquired in perpetuity for the Jewish people. But British legal restrictions, an Arab nationalist campaign against selling land to Jews, and a lack of cash slowed the buying effort. At independence, the JNF owned less than 5 percent of Israel’s land; total Jewish landholdings were less than a tenth of the country. Land previously owned by the British government was now the property of the Israeli government, but most of that was unusable. As for the rest of the country, the government was sovereign, but sovereignty doesn’t mean holding property rights.

But there were the abandoned fields, orchards, and houses of Arabs who had fled. In 1950 the Knesset passed the Absentees’ Property Law, which put such real estate in the hands of a government custodian. An “absentee,” according to the law, wasn’t only someone now living on the far side of the border. It was anyone who had left his home after November 29, 1947, for another country or for a part of Palestine then held by Arab forces. You were an absentee if you had been expelled and came back. You were an absentee if you had fled from your village to the nearest town, which was conquered afterward by Israel. If you had been born in the village of Taybe, moved to Jaffa to seek work, bought a house there, and returned to Taybe for refuge during the fighting, you were an absentee—even though Taybe was in a strip of land turned over to Israel under the armistice with Transjordan. If you returned to Taybe and moved into the home of your brother or cousin who had meanwhile left for Tul Karm, just across the armistice line, you were living in absentee property, and had to pay rent to the custodian, as handwritten records from the time show. An “absentee” who happened to be present in Israel was a “present absentee.” By one estimate, 75,000 Arab citizens fit into that category.

The law allowed the custodian to sell absentee property to a newly created Development Authority, which under another law could sell land to the JNF. By the end of 1950, title to nearly 12 percent of the country’s land had been shifted to the JNF in this way. The JNF leases rather than sells land. It does not lease to non-Jews. The state was using its considerable power to accomplish the Zionist movement’s goal of acquiring land for Jews. In the process, it treated Israeli Arabs as ethnic adversaries, rather than citizens to be integrated into a new, shared civic community.

In its day-to-day functioning, the state related to Arab citizens as a suspect population. The memory of communal war was fresh. Most Arabs lived for years under military government. At first, the military government was a temporary arrangement to control areas outside the partition lines that were conquered during the war. In 1949, the decision was made to continue using military government to rule Arab-populated areas. The legal basis, again, was a draconian British-imposed law—in this case the Emergency Regulations of 1945, originally enacted to deal with the Jewish revolt. The military government was the channel for all state services. Arabs needed permits from local military governors in order to travel legally inside the country. One function of that system was to limit Arab competition with Jews for jobs at a time when the country was flooded with Jewish immigrants. The military government, the police, and the Shin Bet security agency all recruited informers to track the Arab population, control political activity, and suppress Arab nationalism. The Communist Party served as the main public opposition to military rule. The army and security agencies encouraged support of Mapai and its Arab satellite parties, offering incentives such as permits to travel and own guns. In this case, Mapai’s use of the machinery of state to serve party interests was glaring.