Chapter 5: Deciding against a return of the refugees, April - December 1948
"The exodus confronted the Yishuv with a major problem:
Whether or not to allow those who had fled or been expelled to return. Already during the spring, refugees in various localities began pressing to return. Local Haganah and civic leaders had to decide, without having national guidelines, whether to allow this – and almost invariably ruled against.1 In May, the Arab states, led by Jordan, began clamouring for a refugee return. From early summer, the Yishuv’s leaders came under intense international pressure – spearheaded first by Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish United Nations Mediator for Palestine, and later by the United States – to repatriate the refugees. At the same time, the government was subjected to lobbying by army and local authorities in various parts of the country to bar a refugee return. In mid-June the Cabinet discussed the matter and a consensus emerged to prevent a return, at least so long as the hostilities continued. The consensus turned into a formal Cabinet decision in July. Without doubt, this was one of the most important decisions taken by the new State in its first formative months.
The decision, taken against the backdrop of the pan-Arab invasion and the intensification of the fighting, had crystallised over April–June. Already in early April, as the Haganah switched to the offensive, local commanders and Arab affairs advisers in predominantly Jewish areas decided to bar a return to their areas. For example, Alexandroni’s Arab affairs advisers, responsible for a large section of the coastal plain, formally decided ‘not to allow the return of the Arabs who evacuated the area’. They were driven mainly by calculations of Jewish security, but also by a desire to protect the Arabs from Jewish depredations and by considerations of economic advantage (preventing a refugee return to harvest crops would translate into Jewish economic gain). 2"
"Golda Myerson (Meir), the acting head of the JA-PD, visited Arab Haifa a few days after its conquest. She reported on 6 May:
It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]’.
The situation, she said, ‘raised many questions’. Should the Jews
make an effort to bring the Arabs back to Haifa, or not [?] Meanwhile, so long as it is not decided differently, we have decided on a number of rules, and these include: We won’t go to Acre or Nazareth to bring back the Arabs. But, at the same time, our behaviour should be such that if, because of it, they come back – [then] let them come back. We shouldn’t behave badly with the Arabs [who remained] so that others [who fled] won’t return. 3
A few days later, Myerson spoke about the issue within the context of general policy toward Palestine’s Arabs. She told the Mapai Central Committee that the Jews could not treat villagers who had fled because they did not want to fight the Yishuv, ‘such as [those of] Sheikh Muwannis’, in the same way as hostile villagers. But while implying that she thought ‘friendly’ villagers should be allowed back, Myerson avoided saying so outright. Rather, she posed questions:
What are we to do with the villages . . . abandoned by friends? . . . Are we prepared to preserve these villages in order that their inhabitants might return, or do we want to wipe out every trace that there had been a village on the site?
She then turned to Haifa:
I am not among those extremists – and there are such, and I applaud them, who want to do everything that can be done in order to bring back the Arabs. I say I am not willing to make extraordinary arrangements to bring back Arabs.
The question remained of how the Yishuv should behave toward those who had remained. Ill-treatment might both prompt those who had remained to leave and discourage those who had left from returning – ‘and we would [then] be rid of the lot of them’. She concluded by saying that the party and, by implication, the Yishuv, had entered the war without a clear policy regarding Palestine’s Arabs. She called for a comprehensive discussion of the ‘Arab Question’ in the central committee. 4 But the call went unheeded.
Myerson’s line was an amplification of the policy sketched by Ben- Gurion during his visit to Haifa on 1 May: The Jews should treat the remaining Arabs ‘with civil and human equality’ but ‘it is not our job to worry about the return of [those who had fled]’. Clearly, neither he nor Myerson was interested in their return (though Myerson implied that she was willing to make an exception of ‘friendly’ Arabs). Ben-Gurion had already said as much back in early February, specifically regarding the depopulated Arab neighbourhoods of west Jerusalem. 5
The crystallisation in the national leadership of the policy against a return was heralded on 25 April – as the exodus from Haifa and Jaffa was under way – in a cable from Shertok, in New York, to his officials in Tel Aviv: ‘Suggest consider issue warning Arabs now evacuating [that they] cannot be assured of return.’ 6
Pressure for a return began to build up in early May as, for their part, the Arab leaders began to contemplate the political, economic, and military implications of the exodus. At a meeting in Amman on 2 May, Arab officials and notables from Haifa agreed that ‘the Arabs should return to Haifa’. There was, apparently, coordination with the British as the following day, the British Army removed several Haganah roadblocks in the town and took up positions in the abandoned Arab neighbourhoods. Immediately afterward, ‘Azzam Pasha, ‘Abdullah and Qawuqji all issued well-publicised calls to the refugees to return, while the Mandate Government proclaimed, on 6 May: ‘In the view of the Government, the Arabs can feel completely safe in Haifa.’ 7 The day before, ‘Abdullah had called on ‘every man of strength and wisdom, every young person of power and faith, who has left the country [i.e., Palestine], let him return to the dear spot. No one should remain outside the country except the rich and the old.’ ‘Abdullah went on to thank ‘those of you . . . who have remained where they are in spite of the tyranny now prevailing’, and went out of his way to cite the JA condemnation of the Deir Yassin Massacre. 8 By the end of the month, HIS-AD was reporting that ‘in the Arab states the pressure on the refugees to return’ was ‘building up’.9
This joint Arab–British effort, aiming at a general repatriation and not only to Haifa, came to nought. The Haganah was not allowing Arabs to return and, given the continued fighting and confusion on the ground, the call to return may not have generated much enthusiasm among the refugees themselves. In Haifa itself, where initially the local Jewish civilian leadership had not been averse to a return, a major change of heart took place. One participant (expressing the general view) in a meeting of local officials in Haifa’s town hall on 6 June, put it this way: ‘There are no sentiments in war . . . Better to cause them injustice than that [we suffer] a disaster . . . We have no interest in their returning.’ 10"
Anti-return lobby and transfer committee
"The talk and diplomatic movement in May surrounding a possible re- turn helped trigger the consolidation in Israel of an effective, if loosely coordinated, lobby against repatriation. The lobby consisted of local authorities, the kibbutz movements, the settlement departments of the National Institutions, Haganah commanders and influential figures such as Yosef Weitz and Ezra Danin.
Weitz regarded the exodus, which he had helped to promote in a number of places, as an implementation, albeit unplanned and largely spontaneous, of the transfer schemes of the late 1930s and early and mid-1940s, which had envisaged the movement of the Arab minority out of the future Jewish State so that it would be homogeneous, politically stable and secure against subversion from within. He and his colleagues realised that, for Israel’s sake, the exodus must be expanded by nudging or propelling more Arab communities into flight and the post- exodus status quo consolidated and shored up. A return would endanger the Jewish State. Weitz considered that the matter was sufficiently important to merit the establishment of a special state body to supervise what he defined as the ‘retroactive transfer’. During March and April, Weitz energetically sought political backing and help to implement the transfer. From May, Weitz pressed Ben-Gurion and Shertok to set up a ‘Transfer Committee’, preferably with himself at its head, to oversee ‘transfer policy’, which in the main was to focus on measures that would assure that there would be no return. More guardedly, the committee was also to advise the political leadership and the Haganah on further population displacements.
The first unofficial Transfer Committee – composed of Weitz, Danin and Sasson, now head of the Middle East Affairs Department of the Foreign Ministry – came into being at the end of May, following Danin’s agreement to join and Shertok’s 28 May unofficial sanction of the committee’s existence and goals.
In mid-May, Danin resigned from the Committee for Arab Property. Danin wrote Weitz that what was needed was ‘an institution whose role will be . . . to seek ways to carry out the transfer of the Arab population at this opportunity when it has left its normal place of residence’. Danin thought that Christian organisations could be found, acting under the rubric of helping the refugees, which would assist in their resettlement in the Arab countries. ‘Let us not waste the fact that a large Arab population has moved from its home, and achieving such a thing would be very difficult in normal times’, he wrote. To prevent a refugee return ‘they must be confronted with faits accomplis’. Among the faits accomplis Danin proposed were the destruction of Arab houses, ‘settling Jews in all the area evacuated’ and expropriating Arab property. 11
On 28 May, Weitz went to Shertok and proposed that the Cabinet appoint himself, Sasson and Danin as a Transfer Committee ‘to hammer out a plan of action designed [to achieve] the goal of transfer’. Shertok, according to Weitz, congratulated him on his initiative and agreed that the ‘momentum [of Arab flight] must be exploited and turned into an accomplished fact’. 12 On 30 May, Weitz met Finance Minister Kaplan, number three in the Mapai hierarchy, and, according to Weitz, received his blessing.13 That day, the Transfer Committee met for its first working session, and Weitz began preparing a draft proposal for its activities.
But official authorisation by Ben-Gurion and\or the full Cabinet continued to elude him. Nonetheless, from the beginning of June, with JNF funds and personnel, the committee set about razing villages in various areas. On 5 June, Weitz, armed with a three-page memorandum, signed by himself, Danin and Sasson, entitled ‘Retroactive Transfer, A Scheme for the Solution of the Arab Question in the State of Israel’, went to see Ben-Gurion.
The memorandum stated that the war had unexpectedly brought about ‘the uprooting of masses [of Arabs] from their towns and villages and their flight out of the area of Israel . . . This process may continue as the war continues and our army advances.’ The war and the exodus had so deepened Arab enmity ‘as perhaps to make impossible the existence of hundreds of thousands of Arabs in the State of Israel and the existence of the state with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants who bear that hatred’. Israel, therefore, ‘must be inhabited largely by Jews, so that there will be in it very few non-Jews.’ ‘The uprooting of the Arabs should be seen as a solution to the Arab question . . . and, in line with this, it must from now on be directed according to a calculated plan geared toward the goal of “retroactive transfer”.’
To consolidate and amplify the transfer, the committee proposed:
‘(1) Preventing the Arabs from returning to their places.
(2) [Extending] help to the Arabs to be absorbed in other places.’
Regarding the first guideline, the committee proposed:
(1) Destruction of villages as much as possible during military operations.
(2) Prevention of any cultivation of land by them [i.e., the Arabs], including reaping, collection [of crops], picking [olives] and so on . . .
(3) Settlement of Jews in a number of villages and towns so that no “vacuum” is created.
(4) Enacting legislation [geared to barring a return].
(5) [Making] propaganda [aimed at non-return].
The committee proposed that it oversee the destruction of villages and the renovation of certain sites for Jewish settlement, negotiate the purchase of Arab land, prepare legislation for expropriation and negotiate the resettlement of the refugees in Arab countries. 14
Weitz recorded that Ben-Gurion ‘agreed to the whole line’ but thought that the Yishuv should first set in train the destruction of the villages, establish Jewish settlements and prevent Arab cultivation, and only later worry about the organised resettlement of the refugees in the Arab countries. Ben-Gurion agreed to the idea of a supervisory committee but was opposed to Weitz’s ‘temporary committee’. At the same time, he approved the start of organised destruction by the committee of the villages, about which Weitz had informed him. 15
According to Ben-Gurion’s account of the meeting, he had approved the establishment of a committee to oversee ‘the cleaning up [nikui ] of the Arab settlements, cultivation of [Arab fields] and their settlement [by Jews], and the creation of labour battalions to carry out this work’. Nowhere did he explicitly refer to the destruction of villages or the prevention of a refugee return. 16
The following day, 6 June, Weitz wrote Ben-Gurion:
I . . . take the liberty of setting down your answer to the scheme proposal I submitted to you, that: A) You will call a meeting immediately to discuss [the scheme] and to appoint a committee . . . B) You agree that the actions marked in clauses 1, 2 [i.e., the destruction of villages and the prevention of Arab cultivation] . . . begin immediately.
Weitz continued: ‘In line with this, I have given an order to begin [these operations] in different parts of the Galilee, the Beit Shean Valley, the Hills of Ephraim and Samaria.’ 17 Weitz, of course, was covering himself. He sensed that on this sensitive subject, Ben-Gurion might prefer not to commit anything to paper, and he did not want to leave himself open to charges that he had acted without authorisation. Probably he also wanted to prod Ben-Gurion to set up the committee.
Then, using his JNF branch offices, Weitz set in motion the levelling of a handful of villages (al Mughar, near Gedera, Fajja, near Petah Tikva, Biyar Adas, near Magdiel, Beit Dajan, east of Tel Aviv, Miska, near Ramat Hakovesh, Sumeiriya, near Acre, Buteimat and Sabbarin, southeast of Haifa). His agents toured the countryside to determine which other villages should be destroyed or preserved and renovated for future Jewish settlement. He remained hopeful that official Cabinet-level endorsement of his actions would be forthcoming and that an official letter of appointment would be issued for the Transfer Committee.
But, at least initially, Weitz was unaware that his semi-covert activities had been noted by Mapam and that Mapam, together with Shitrit, had launched a counter-campaign to halt the destruction of the villages and to resist the atmosphere of transfer of which this destruction was a manifestation. This campaign was probably at least in part responsible for Weitz’s inability to obtain formal, Cabinet-level authorisation for the Transfer Committee. At the beginning of July, Weitz suspended the destruction operations, effectively terminating the activities of the first, unofficial, self-appointed Transfer Committee."
"Justice Minister Felix Rosenblueth (Pinhas Rosen) had spoken out against transfer and criticised ‘the plunder of [Arab] property’ and the destruction of villages as designed to prevent a refugee return. 19 And on 29 May the official state radio station, Kol Yisrael (the Voice of Israel), had proclaimed that Israel would allow a refugee return.20
Weitz had notified Foreign Minister Shertok of the broadcast and Shertok had minuted his director general, Walter Eytan:
We must avoid unequivocal statements on this matter. For the moment, only [use] a negative formulation. That is, so long as the war continues, there should be no talk of allowing a return. [But don’t let it appear] from our statements that at the war’s end, they will be allowed back. Let us keep open every option. 21"
Settlement lobby
"From around the country, local leaders demanded that the government bar a return. The more distant from the centre of Jewish population or isolated the settlement, and the more vulnerable, the stronger was the clamour against a return."
"In the first days of June, the notables of the Safad Jewish community attempted to appeal directly to the Cabinet. They journeyed to Tel Aviv and got as far as Shlomo Kaddar, the Principal Assistant at the Cabinet Secretariat. He reported that they had demanded that the government bar a return, set up a ring of Jewish settlements around the town and settle Jews in Safad’s abandoned houses. ‘The Jewish community will not be able to withstand the pressure of the returning Arabs, especially in view [of the fact] that most of the Arab property in Safad has been stolen and plundered since the Arabs left’, they said. If the Arabs were allowed to return, the Jewish community would leave, they warned. A similar message was conveyed by Safad’s leaders to a visiting delegation of Yishuv officials on 5 July. If Jewish settlers were not brought to Safad, then it were best that ‘the Arab houses . . . be destroyed and blown up lest the Arabs have somewhere to return to’. 26 If the Jews did not quickly fill the abandoned villages, they would be ‘filled with returning Arabs with hatred in their hearts’, Weitz concluded after visiting the Safad area. 27"
Army lobby
"The input of the military lobby may have weighed even more heavily with the Cabinet. IDF intelligence regarded the prospect of a mass refugee return as a major threat to the war effort. As the First Truce approached, local commanders began to press GS\Operations for guidelines. ‘Waiting for exact instructions regarding the ceasefire, for fear of a return of Arabs to the villages’, ‘Oded’ of Northern Front radioed on 2 June. 31 ‘The problem of the return of the refugees is increasing’, Northern Front radioed six days later. 32 On 16 June, the head of the IDF Intelligence Service wrote to Reuven Shiloah, the director of the Foreign Ministry’s Political Division:
There is a growing movement by the Palestinian villagers who fled to the neighbouring countries [to] return now, during the days of the [First Truce]. There is a serious danger [that returning villagers] will fortify themselves in their villages behind our front lines, and with the resumption of warfare, will constitute at least a [potential] Fifth Column, if not active hostile concentrations.
If nothing was done, there was a danger that at the end of the truce, the IDF would have ‘to set aside considerable forces again to clean up the rear and the lines of communication’. 33 Some officers thought that the piecemeal refugee return was part of a deliberate policy by the Arab states with clear political and economic goals. 34
Officials from government departments also weighed in. At the start of the First Truce, the Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Department noted the Arab leaders’ calls for the return to Palestine of ‘the 300,000 refugees’. Already, a trickle of refugees had infiltrated back. The department conjectured that a major reason for this return was the desire ‘to harvest the [summer] crops . . . The Arabs in their places of wandering are suffering from real hunger.’ But this harvest-geared return, the department warned, could
in time bring in its wake [re-]settlement in the villages, something which might seriously endanger many of our achievements during the first six months of the war. It is not for nothing that Arab spokesmen are . . . demanding the return . . . [of the refugees], because this would not only ease their burden but weigh us down considerably. 35"
The Truce: Developing a harder line
"Matters came to a head in mid-June. The institution of the truce had stilled the guns along the front lines, posing the physical possibility of a refugee return. A trickle of refugees began making their way back to villages and towns. At the same time, the truce enabled the Arab states to ponder the enormous burden that they had unexpectedly incurred; solving the refugee problem became a major policy goal. Similarly, as the dust of battle temporarily settled, the international community at last took note. Public opinion in the West began to mobilize and refugee relief drives were inaugurated. The newly appointed Mediator, Bernadotte, who in World War II had worked on refugee assistance, having successfully orchestrated the inauguration of the truce made clear his intention to focus on a final settlement, in which a solution to the refugee problem would, it was believed in Tel Aviv, figure prominently. 37 He was due back in Israel on 17 June.
The Cabinet met on 16 June. In a forceful speech, Ben-Gurion set out his views, which were to serve as the basis of the consensus that emerged. ‘I do not accept the version [i.e., policy] that [we] should encourage their return’, he said, in an obvious response to the resolution of Mapam’s Political Committee the day before, to support the return of ‘peace-minded’ refugees at the end of the war.38 ‘I believe’, said Ben- Gurion, ‘we should prevent their return . . . We must settle Jaffa, Jaffa will become a Jewish city . . . [Beisan and Abu Kabir must not be resettled with Arabs.] To allow the return of the Arabs to Jaffa would be . . . foolish.’ If the Arabs were allowed to return ‘and the war is renewed, our chances of ending the war as we wish to end it will be reduced . . . Meanwhile, we must prevent at all costs their return’, he said, and, leaving no doubt in the ministers’ minds about his views on the ultimate fate of the refugees, he added: ‘I will be for them not returning also after the war.’ He added that he favoured a ‘treaty’ between Israel and the Arab states and said that the Turkish-Greek experience proved that it was possible: They were
enemies for more than four hundred years – and after the last war in which the Turks won and expelled the Greeks from Anatolia – they became friends and signed a treaty of peace, and it is also possible between us and the Arabs.39"
"Shertok spoke against a return with equal vehemence. A return to the status quo ante was inconceivable. Jaffa, a ‘Fifth Column’ and ‘pest’ in the heart of Israel, must not revert to becoming an ‘Arab city’. Israel had managed to ‘clear of Arabs’ a continuous line from Tel Aviv to Romema, in west Jerusalem. Most of the country was now clear of Arabs. There was now
a need [for the government] to explain [to the Israeli public] the enormous importance of this [demographic] change in terms of [possibilities of Jewish] settlement and security, and in terms of the solidity of the state structure and [of] the solution of crucial social and political problems that cast their shadow over the whole future of the state. Had anyone arisen among us and said that one day we should expel all of them – that would have been madness. But if this happened in the course of the turbulence of war, a war that the Arab people declared against us, and because of Arab flight – then that is one of those revolutionary changes after which [the clock of] history cannot be turned back, as it did not turn back after the [sic] Syrian-Greek [i.e., should be Turkish-Greek] war, [or] after the war in Czechoslovakia . . . which caused revolutionary changes, in the social or ethnic composition in those countries . . . The aggressive enemy brought this about and the blood is on his head and he must bear [the consequences] and all the lands and the houses that remained . . . all are spoils of war . . . all this is just compensation for the [Jewish] blood spilled, for the destruction [of Jewish property] . . . This compensation is natural . . .
Nonetheless, Shertok felt that Israel must be ready to pay compensation for the land ‘and this would facilitate the [refugees’] resettlement in other countries’. But ‘this is [i.e., must be] our policy: That they are not returning’, he said. 42
Cisling said that ‘at this time [i.e., during the war] we must not give the Arabs back even a shoelace. If I have reservations it is only about places where we left [Arabs in place] and we shouldn’t have, because this endangers peace.’ At the same time, he warned that the refugees would breed hatred toward Israel in their places of exile in the Arab world. ‘They will carry in their breasts the desire for revenge and for a return . . . This orientation, of prohibiting a return of the Arabs . . . will be to our detriment.’ 43 He implied, though did not say explicitly, that the refugees should be allowed back after the war – but added that the villagers of Qumiya, which overlooked his own home in the Jezreel Valley kibbutz of ‘Ein Harod, should not be allowed back.44
No formal vote was taken or resolution passed by the ministers. But the line advocated by Ben-Gurion and Shertok – that the refugees should not be allowed back – had now become Israeli policy. Orders immediately went out down the IDF chains of command to bar the re- turn of refugees. 45 During the following weeks, again and again orders reached the brigades manning the lines to prevent a return, ‘also with live fire’.46 The military’s opposition to a return was to remain firm and consistent through the summer"
Balancing rhetoric
"In the diplomatic arena, this policy was given a somewhat less definitive, more flexible countenance. At their meeting on 17 June, Bernadotte asked Shertok whether Israel would allow back ‘the 300,000’ refugees ‘and would their proprietary rights be respected?’ Shertok responded that ‘they certainly could not return so long as the war was on’ 48 or, alternatively, that ‘the question could not be discussed while the war was on’ and that the government had not yet ‘fixed its policy on the ultimate settlement of the matter’. Shertok added that Arab ‘proprietary rights would certainly be respected’.49
Shertok appeared to leave open the possibility that Israel might allow back the refugees after the war. This clearly eased the task of Israeli officials meeting with United Nations and American representatives. But it seems to have been the product less of diplomatic expediency than of the exigencies of coalition politics and the need to maintain national unity in wartime. The nettle in the garden was Mapam, Mapai’s chief coalition partner in the Provisional Government. Mapam opposed transfer and endorsed the right of ‘peace-loving’ refugees to return after the war. Had Ben-Gurion definitively closed the door to the possibility of a return, a coalition crisis would have ensued, undermining national unity and isolating Mapai in the Cabinet, where Ben-Gurion would have been left, embarrassingly, with only non-socialist and religious parties as partners. Moreover, the top echelons of both the military and, to a lesser degree, the civil bureaucracies of the new state were heavily manned by Mapam cadres.
During the summer, Mapam’s Political Committee, after weeks of debate, at last formulated the party’s Arab policy. The party – as its co- leader Meir Ya‘ari said – was agreeable to deferring a refugee return until the termination of hostilities, 50 but it opposed ‘the intention [megama] to expel the Arabs from the areas of the emerging Jewish State’ and proposed that the Cabinet issue a call to peace-minded Arabs ‘to stay in their places’. As to the Arabs already in exile, the party declared: ‘The Cabinet . . . should [announce] that with the return of peace they should return to a life of peace, honour and productivity . . . The property of the returnees . . . will be restored to them.’ 51"
Jaffa
"ppeals on behalf of Jaffa’s refugees also began to reach the authorities, within weeks of their exodus. The petitions, presented by the remaining notables, were anchored in the surrender agreement signed with the Haganah in mid-May. That agreement had stated that those wishing to leave were free to do so;
likewise, any male Arab who left Jaffa and wishes to return to Jaffa may apply for a permit to do so. Permits will be granted after their bona fides has been proven, provided that the [city] commander of the Haganah is convinced that the applicants will not . . . constitute a threat to peace and security. 53
The notables thus had good grounds for their appeal to allow back refugees, men, women and children. 54 Yitzhak Chizik, the town’s military governor, passed on the appeal to Shitrit, with a covering letter: ‘You will certainly recall’, he wrote, ‘that in Clause 8 of the surrender agreement it states that every Arab who left Jaffa and wishes to come back, can do so by submitting a request, on condition, of course, that their presence here [in Jaffa] will not constitute a security risk.’ 55 Chizik’s letter triggered a debate in the upper reaches of the government. Shitrit wrote to Ben-Gurion and Shertok that similar appeals were reaching him from Haifa. 56 Replying for Ben-Gurion, Shlomo Kaddar wrote:
I have been asked to tell you that the prime minister is opposed to the return of the Arab inhabitants to their places so long as the war continues and so long as the enemy stands at our gates. Only the full Cabinet, the prime minister believes, can decide on a change of approach. 57
Shertok, for his part, passed on Shitrit’s letter to Yehoshua Palmon for comment. Palmon, perhaps to Shertok’s surprise, proposed:
I think that we should adopt a public posture that we do not oppose the return of the Arab inhabitants of Jaffa, and even to announce this in a [radio] broadcast to the Arabs – but, in practice, their return should be contingent on certain conditions and restrictions.
Palmon thought that the returnees should be asked to sign a loyalty oath and fill out detailed questionnaires. This, he argued, ‘would leave in our hands complete supervision of their actual return. We shall have the ability to let back mainly [non-Moslems] . . . something that could be of use [to us] in the future.’ 58
But Palmon’s letter drew a blunter rejoinder from Ya‘akov Shimoni, the acting director of the Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Affairs Department. Shimoni was prepared to allow exceptions in special cases of hardship. But in general he supported the ‘no return during the war’ line. 59 Shertok came down solidly behind Shimoni, adding: ‘I fear a loosening of the reins . . . Permission [to return] should be forthcoming only in a limited number of special cases.’60"
International pressure
"But Israel’s main problem was to be not the uncoordinated, individual or communal Arab attempts to return or requests to return but the increasing international pressure, spearheaded by Bernadotte, for Israeli agreement to a mass repatriation. After several rounds of meetings with Israeli and Arab leaders, Bernadotte, on 27 June, demanded that Israel recognise ‘the right of the residents of Palestine who, because of conditions created by the conflict there, have left their normal places of abode, to return to their homes without restriction and to regain possession of their property’. 61 The Israelis responded on 5 July, rejecting Bernadotte’s other ‘suggestions’, that Palestine and Jordan be joined in economic ‘Union’, that immigration to Israel be subject to that Union’s – or UN – jurisdiction, that Jerusalem be given over to Arab rule, and that – in Shertok’s phrase – a settlement be ‘imposed’ from the outside on the parties rather than reached through direct negotiations ‘between the interested parties’. (Bernadotte had not explicitly made this last ‘suggestion’.) Tergiversating, the Israeli reply did not specifically refer to the demand that Israel recognise the ‘right of return’, but suggested somewhat vaguely that the Mediator should reconsider his ‘whole approach to the [Palestine] problem’. 62
But the refugee problem could not be dismissed by a sleight of hand, and the Israeli Cabinet understood that Bernadotte’s ‘suggestion’ would eventually have to be directly addressed. By the second half of July the United States, too, was pressing for an Israeli answer. In the course of July – when another 100,000 or so Arabs became refugees (see below) – the Cabinet hammered out the official line.
Yet even before the final formulation was agreed upon, Shertok instructed his diplomats as follows:
Our policy: 1) Arab exodus direct result folly aggression organized by Arab states . . . 2) No question allowing Arabs return while state of war continuing, as would mean introduction Fifth Column, provision bases for enemies from outside and dislocation law and order inside. Exceptions only in favour special deserving cases compassionate grounds, subject [to] security screening . . . 4) Question Arab return can be decided only as part peace settlement with Arab State[s] and in context its terms, when question [of] confiscation property Jews [in] neighbouring countries and their future will also be raised. 5) Arabs remaining [in] Israel [to be] unmolested and receive due care from State as regards services. 63
The Cabinet consensus of mid-June had thus undergone a significant reshaping. The Cabinet had formally resolved against a return during the hostilities, leaving open the possibility of a reconsideration of the matter at war’s end. But Shertok was now saying that there would be no return during the war and reconsideration and a solution of the problem only within the framework of talks aimed at a general peace settlement and with a linkage to the confiscation of the property, and the fate, of the Jewish communities in the Arab world. Thus links were forged between (a) a full-fledged peace settlement and Israeli willingness to consider a return, making the refugees a bargaining counter in Israel’s quest for recognition and peace in the region, and (b) the fate of the refugees and that of the Jews in the Arab states. 64"
"Bernadotte recalled that Shertok had once told UN Secretary General Trygve Lie that displaced Arabs would be allowed to return home. Shertok responded (so he told his Cabinet colleagues) that he may once have said this, but it was under different circumstances, when there were only a handful of refugees. But since then, ‘circumstances have radically changed’. The matter should not be treated, or resolved, solely on a humanitarian basis – ‘it is a matter for political and military calculation’. Moreover, long-term humanitarian considerations may indicate that resettlement in the Arab countries may well be the best solution, as with the Greek–Turkish population exchanges. Shertok told the Mediator that there could be no return during the war – such a return would be a ‘warlike measure’ against us, ‘the introduction of a Fifth Column . . . and of an explosive to blow us up from within’. But Bernadotte, according to Shertok, stuck to his guns and ‘showed little flexibility’: Indeed, he pointed out that a population of long standing had been uprooted and was being replaced by new Jewish immigrants.
To his fellow ministers Shertok now proposed the following formula:
We cannot agree to a mass return of Arab refugees so long as the war continues. We are ready to discuss exceptional cases, be it involving extraordinary suffering or special privilege – each case on an individual basis.
Bernadotte, said Shertok, had argued that the ‘world would not understand’ Israel’s position. He, Shertok, disagreed: ‘The world, which understood the uprooting of the Sudeten [Germans] from Czechoslovakia, would also understand this.’ Moreover, the Arab states were demanding that Israel pay for the upkeep of the refugees in their places of exile. Shertok suggested that Israel demand compensation from the Arab states for the destruction and expenditure inflicted on the Yishuv by the war they had launched. Ben-Gurion seconded the motion. Interior Minister Grunbaum endorsed the Shertok–Ben-Gurion line: No return during the war. Shitrit agreed, but supported the return to their homes of refugees still inside Israeli-held territory – such as refugees from Jaffa living in Lydda. Peretz Bernstein, minister of commerce and industry, agreed with Shitrit. Ultra-orthodox Social Welfare Minister Yitzhak Meir Levin wasn’t so sure about flatly rejecting the call for a refugee return: ‘Every gentile has a bit of anti-Semitism in him, but we may yet need the Mediator’s [good will].’ Levin, supporting Immigration and Health Minister Moshe Shapira, called for allowing a partial return, of women and children. But the Ben-Gurion–Shertok line won the day. At the end of the meeting the Cabinet decided, by nine votes to two, that ‘so long as the war continues there is no agreement to the return of the refugees’. 67"
"Kohn pinpointed Israel’s main potential problem – the United States, not Bernadotte. Kohn surmised that the growing American concern was a result of pressure by American ambassadors in Muslim countries, who were arguing that the ‘pauperized, embittered’ exiles were a seedbed for ‘communist revolution’ in the host countries, and that it was best that the refugees return to Palestine. 73 Israel’s chief fear was that Washington would soon openly back the Mediator’s position. American diplomats were already bluntly describing – even to Israelis – Israel’s positions as ‘rigid and uncompromising’. 74 They had begun to sense that Israel was never going to allow the refugees back. ‘There is little if any possibility of Arabs returning to their homes in Israel or Jewish-occupied Palestine’, wrote the American Consul General in Jerusalem, John MacDonald."
"Shertok reported that Bernadotte had asked for an Israeli ‘gesture’. He had replied, he told the Cabinet, that perhaps it would raise Israel’s stock
among idealists and the naive, but not among men of action . . . And the rulers in the world at this time are not idealists but men of action. They would say that the Jews are fools – they hold an important card and are discarding it [to no purpose] . . . Bernadotte laughed and did not respond.
Shertok told his colleagues that he had said that
the Arab minority in our state should be made as small as possible . . . If there was a large Arab minority . . . as much as we would pamper them, they would charge us with discrimination, and these charges would serve as a pretext for intervention by the Arab states in our affairs.
On the other hand, for these states, three hundred thousand refugees were but ‘a drop in the ocean’, and easily assimilable. ‘Bernadotte thanked me for the explanation.’ 81
Only one dissenting voice emerged from the higher reaches of Israeli officialdom, that of Eliahu Sasson, the peripatetic director of the For- eign Ministry’s Middle East Affairs Department. Sasson, a Syrian-born Arabist with a liberal outlook, wrote to Shertok:
I would advise reconsidering the refugee problem . . . I do not by this advice mean, heaven forbid, the return of all the refugees. No, and again no. My meaning is to the return of a small part of them, 40 to 50 thousand, over a long period . . . [starting] immediately, to silence a lot of people in the next meeting of the UN [General Assembly]. 82
Through late 1948 – early 1949, Sasson was to remain a consistent (and isolated) advocate of this position. He was prompted both by a desire to brighten Israel’s image in the West and to facilitate peace (he resided for much of this time in Paris, where he tried to initiate secret talks with Arab leaders). 83"
"Weitz (once again) proposed the appointment of a non-governmental authority to formulate a ‘plan for the transfer of the Arabs and their resettlement’. 89 Although no formal decision was reached, a committee – the second and official Transfer Committee – with far narrower terms of reference than Weitz had originally sought, was at last appointed by Ben-Gurion. 90
The 18 August gathering at the Prime Minister’s Office had been defined as ‘consultative’. The participants had been united on the need to bar a return and there was general, if not complete, agreement as to the means to be used to attain this end – destruction of villages, settlement in other sites and on abandoned lands, cultivation of Arab fields, purchase and expropriation of Arab lands, and the use of propaganda to persuade the refugees that they would not be allowed back. The same day, orders went out to all IDF units to prevent ‘with all means’ the return of refugees. 91
On 22 August, Shertok explained the government’s position to Zionism’s elder statesman and president of the Provisional Council of State, Chaim Weizmann:
With regard to the refugees, we are determined to be adamant while the war lasts. Once the return tide starts, it will be impossible to stem it, and it will prove our undoing. As for the future, we are equally determined - without, for the time being, formally closing the door to any eventuality – to explore all possibilities of getting rid, once and for all, of the huge Arab minority which originally threatened us. What can be achieved in this period of storm and stress will be quite unattainable once conditions are stabilised. A group of people from among our senior officers [i.e., the Transfer Committee] has already started working on the study of resettlement possibilities [for the refugees] in other countries . . . What such permanent resettlement of ‘Israeli’ Arabs in the neighbouring territories will mean in terms of making land available in Israel for the settlement of our own people requires no emphasis. 92
Serious American pressure over the plight of the refugees began to be felt only in late August. Israel’s representative in Washington, Eliahu Epstein (Elath), reported: ‘American public opinion gradually being undermined . . . All hostile forces unite in publicizing and shedding crocodile tears regarding plight Arab refugees.’ 93 America’s representative, McDonald, met Ben-Gurion for the first time on 20 August and warned that the United States was contemplating measures on the refugee question that would prove unpalatable to Israel, and that Washington might even be prepared to impose sanctions to enforce its will. Ben-Gurion replied that Israel would not compromise on its ‘security and independence.’ Returning the refugees, ‘so long as an invading army’ was on Israeli soil, was hazardous. ‘We could not allow back one who hates [us], even if sanctions were imposed on us’, he concluded. 94
Israel’s two senior diplomats in the United States were recalled for consultations and in early September briefed the Cabinet. Epstein quoted Robert Lovett, the deputy secretary of state, as saying that the refugees constituted a ‘severe problem’, public opinion-wise, though he ‘did not make any threats’. 95 Abba Eban, the Israeli observer (soon ambassador) at the United Nations, said that Britain had failed to mobilize the United Nations ‘to act’ in support of a refugee return. 96"
"A specific American initiative was launched in early September, with the submission to Tel Aviv of ‘suggestions’ to facilitate the peace process. Western Galilee (in Israeli hands since mid-May but originally allotted to the Palestine Arab State) should go to Israel and a ‘large portion of desert land’ in the Negev (still largely in Egyptian hands but allotted to the Jewish State) should go to the Arabs (implicitly, to Jordan) and the problem of Jerusalem should be solved on the basis of ‘internationalization’ (or anything else acceptable to both the Jews and the Arabs). Moreover, Washington said very hesitantly, it ‘would like the Israeli government to consider some constructive measures for the alleviation of Arab refugee distress.’ 97
Ben-Gurion, Shertok and McDonald met on 8 September to discuss the ‘suggestions’. Ben-Gurion left it to Shertok to deliver the response on the refugee question. ‘[Shertok] said that we were [willing] to consider the return of individual refugees now, and the return of part of the refugees after the war, on condition that most of the refugees would be settled in Arab countries with our help.’ This marked a substantial softening of Israel’s official and public position, but McDonald apparently failed to realise this. He asked whether ‘the door is shut’ to discussing the matter and Ben-Gurion responded: ‘In my opinion, the door is not shut – if we discuss the arrangement of a solid, stable peace with the Arabs. As part of such an arrangement, one can discuss anything.’ 98 Briefing the Cabinet later that day, Shertok said that it was ‘unclear’ whether the Americans had presented their d ´emarche (the ‘suggestions’) off their own bat or whether they had been put up to it by ‘someone’ else. 99"
"On 12 September, the Cabinet approved Shertok’s draft instructions to the Israel delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. The instructions, dated 10 September, read:
No return before the end of the war save for individual cases; a final solution to the refugee problem as part of a general settlement when peace comes. In informal conversations, the delegation will explain that it were better that the problem be solved by settling the refugees in the neighbouring countries than by returning them to the State of Israel – for their own good, for the good of the neighbouring countries, for the good of Israel and for the good of [future] Israeli relations with her neighbours.
...The ministers then voted. By seven votes to three, it was decided ‘not to discuss the return of the refugees until a peace settlement’. 101"
"On 27 September, a senior Israeli diplomat, Michael Comay, apprised the Israel Delegation to the United Nations General Assembly meeting in Paris of his meetings on 23–24 September in Haifa with Bunche and two of his aides, Reedman and Paul Mohn. While the United Nations’ officials had reiterated Bernadotte’s commitment to securing recognition of the right of return, ‘they were all of the opinion that for the most part the Arabs did not want to go back and live under Jewish domination’. he reported. The middle-class exiles were definitely unenthusiastic about returning, and some of the villagers who wanted to return would, once back, no doubt ‘drift off again when they saw some of the things that were alleged to be going on in Israel, such as destruction of villages and taking over of land’. Comay reported that, according to Reedman, Bernadotte had first thought in terms of a general return ‘but had retreated from this position when he came to realise the deep-rooted and permanent complications’. Bernadotte, in the end, had sought only a partial return, for political and humanitarian reasons – agreeing that the main solution must be found through organised resettlement in the Arab countries. 108
Henceforward, while lip-service was still occasionally paid to the concept of ‘the right of return’, and while the General Assembly, in December, endorsed the refugees’ ‘right of return’ in Resolution 194 (see below), the international community was to focus more and more on the necessity, desirability and possibility of a partial repatriation coupled with the re-settlement of the bulk of the refugees in Arab lands. Israel, it would later be seen, had successfully rebuffed the pressures for a mass return."
Huj
"Meanwhile, a new wave of ad hoc appeals from exiled communities to be allowed back reached Shitrit. Shitrit generally referred them to Ben-Gurion, the IDF and Shertok for a ruling. By nature and politically a softliner, Shitrit, by the end of August, had more or less come around to Ben-Gurion’s and Shertok’s view. Allowing any Arabs back might serve as a precedent and might constitute a security problem. As Machnes, his director general, put it: ‘Over time, views have changed, and now the Minority Affairs Ministry is doing all in its power to prevent the Arabs who have gone from returning to the country.’ 104
A major debate, in which the various arguments re-surfaced, erupted over the refugees from Huj, near the Gaza Strip. Its inhabitants had been expelled eastwards, to Dimra, on 31 May (see above). Nothing was to demonstrate so convincingly the inflexibility of the crystallising Israeli resolve against a return.
In September, the exiles, noting that the Second Truce (19 July–15 October 1948) was holding and that the area around Huj was quiet, appealed to Israel to allow them back. The appeal, as usual, made the rounds of the bureaucracies – the IDF, the Military Government, the Foreign Ministry Middle East Affairs Department and the Minority Affairs Ministry. Shimoni wrote that the Huj appeal deserved ‘special treatment’ because the inhabitants had been ‘loyal collaborators’, ‘because they had not fled but had been expelled’, and because they had not wandered far afield and were still living near the village. His department, therefore, in view of ‘the commonly held opinion that an injustice had been done’, would be willing to recommend that the IDF permit the villagers to return to Israeli territory, not necessarily to Huj itself but rather to another ‘abandoned village’.
But, Shimoni added: ‘The problem of precedents arises. If we allow them [to return], hundreds and thousands of others may perhaps come, each with his own good reasons [to be allowed back].’ So he concluded his qualified recommendation by writing that ‘if the Defence Ministry could find a way’ to prevent the Huj case from becoming a precedent, ‘then we withdraw our opposition [to a return] in this particular case’. 105 Shitrit found Shimoni’s reservations irksome. He wrote that he did ‘not believe that allowing some . . . to return would [necessarily] serve as a precedent’. After all, there was a firm Cabinet decision that so long as the war continued, ‘there could be no talk of a return . . .’. So if the Middle East Affairs Department supported allowing the return of the inhabitants of Huj, ‘there will be no opposition on our part’, he wrote. But Shitrit, too, thought that the villagers would have to be resettled ‘inside’ Israel rather than in their home village, which was near the front lines. 106
But these (hesitant) recommendations proved unavailing. The de- fence authorities overruled Shitrit and Shimoni, and the inhabitants of Huj, whether because of arguments of security or precedent, were never allowed back. The flare-up of hostilities between Israel and Egypt a few weeks after this exchange sealed the fate of the villagers."
Conclusion
"The political argument against having a 40 per cent Arab minority inter- meshed with the strategic argument against retaining or bringing back hundreds of thousands of Arabs who would or might constitute a Fifth Column. The fighting provided both the opportunity and the reason for creating or at least maintaining an Arab-free country.
A mass return of refugees would have created grave problems for all the Israeli agencies prospectively involved in their repatriation – the IDF, the police, the civilian bureaucracies and the Jewish settlements – at a time when their energies and resources were being strained to capacity by the war and by the influx of masses of Jewish immigrants. To this, as the weeks and months passed, were added the ‘positive’ arguments of the Yishuv’s settlement and immigration absorption bodies. To expand (and it had to expand to meet the needs of the burgeoning Jewish population), Jewish agriculture had to have the abandoned lands. Jewish settlements, in general, needed more land. And the immigrants (and the many more potential immigrants) required land and houses. Moreover, some of the immigrants who reached Israel in 1948–1949 and, more so, during the 1950s, hailed from Arab coun- tries (Yemen, Iraq, Morocco) – enabling the Israeli leaders, with some justification and logic, to view what had happened as an (unplanned, uncoordinated) ‘exchange of population’. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs had left Palestine, losing almost all their belongings, and hundreds of thousands of Jews had left their native, Muslim countries, generally leaving their property behind. History had created an equation that helped Israel rebuff efforts and pressures for Palestinian refugee repatriation.
The political decision to bar a return had matured over April–June, had become official policy in July, and had been repeatedly reaffirmed by the Cabinet in August and September. It was reaffirmed at various levels of government over the following months as successive communities of exiles asked to be allowed back. During the second half of 1948 and the first half of 1949, developments on the ground worked to harden the status quo and certify the refugeedom of Palestine’s Arabs."