Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel and the Internal Refugees: Essays in Memory of Edward W. Said

by Nur Masalha (Editor)

Overview

The 1948 Palestine War is known to Israelis as 'the War of Independence'. But for Palestinians, the war is forever the Nakba, the 'catastrophe'. The war led to the creation of the State of Israel and the destruction of much of Palestininan society by the Zionist forces. For all Palestinians, the Nakba has become central to history, memory and identity. This book focuses on Palestinian internal refugees in Israel and internally displaced Palestinians across the Green LIne. It uses oral history and interviews to examine Palestinian identity and memory, indigenous rights, international protection, the 'right of return', and a just solution in Palestine/Israel.

Contributors include several distinguished authors and scholars such as William Dalrymple, Prof. Naseer Aruri, Dr. Ilan Pappe, Prof. Isma'il Abu Sa'ad and Dr. Nur Masalha.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781848136236
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	04/04/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	623 KB

About the Author

Dr Nur Masalha is a senior lecturer and director of the Holy Land Research Project, St.Mary's College, University of Surrey. His books include: Imperial Israel and the Palestinians (2000) and The Politics of Denial (2003).
Professor Nur Masalha is a Palestinian academic and historian and former Director of the Centre for Religion and History at St. Mary's University, London. He is currently a Member of the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS, University of London. He is the Editor of “Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies,” published by Edinburgh University Press. He is also the author and editor of numerous books on Palestine, including, Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (2018); An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba (with Nahla Abdo, 2018); Theologies of Liberation in Palestine-Israel: Indigenous, Contextual, and Postcolonial Perspectives (2014); The Zionist Bible: Biblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory (2013); The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (2012); The Bible and Zionism (2007); The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem (2003): Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion (2000); A Land Without a People (1997); Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of 'Transfer' in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (1992). Professor Masalha also currently serves as a judge on the panel for the Palestine Book Award (London).

Read an Excerpt

Catastrophe Remembered

Palestine, Israel and the Internal Refugees

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By Nur Masalha

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2005 Nur Masalha
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-058-6

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CHAPTER 1

Present Absentees and Indigenous Resistance

Nur Masalha

Israeli Policies During the Post-Nakba Period

The Military Administration (1948–66)

Historically, a combination of military–strategic, demographic-land settlement, and Zionist ideological considerations governed Israel's land policies during the post-Nakba period towards the Palestinian citizens of Israel, including the internally displaced. The internal refugees, who constitute some 25 per cent of the total of 1 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, are described by Israeli law as present absentees. Land and settlement expansion, in particular, have always been at the heart of the conflict between the Zionist immigrants/settlers and the native Palestinians. Prior to the 1948 Nakba ("Catastrophe") the Palestinian community had been overwhelmingly rural; the Palestinians had been the overwhelming majority in the country and had owned much of the land, while the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) had been (in 1947) about one-third of the total population and had owned about 6 per cent of the land. Hence the quest for land had underpinned the Zionist project in the pre-1948 period. In a sense, in the post-Nakba period the Israeli state's long-lasting battle against the Palestinian community inside Israel was a battle for "more land". This battle essentially was dictated by the Jewish state's premises and fundamentals:

(a) the "ingathering" of the world's Jews in Israel (kibbutz galoyut);

(b) the acquisition, takeover and conquest of land (kibbush haadama);

(c) the consolidation of Jewish demography in a state created exclusively for the Jews — who mostly had yet to arrive in Israel — at the expense of the displaced, "transferred" and internally relocated Palestinians;

(d) Jewish "population dispersion" throughout the country (pezur ochlosiya);

(e) Judaisation of the Galilee (yehud hagalil).

The establishment of Israel in 1948 did not alter Zionism's premisses and fundamentals with regard to the Palestinian community remaining under Israeli control. Indeed, the principal objectives of the Israeli state, as defined in terms of its Zionist ideology, have been the fulfilment of the Jewish majority's aspirations, and those of would-be Jewish immigrants, frequently at the expense of the aspirations of the Palestinian community (including the internal refugees).

For the remaining Palestinian citizens of Israel, their attachment to the land of their ancestors can hardly be overstated. Prior to the Nakba, Palestinian society was overwhelmingly rural, agriculture was the major source of livelihood, and farming the land was the backbone of the Palestinian economy. For the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, the land was a means of livelihood, a symbol of identity, survival and security in the face of the 1948 expulsions, dispossession and dispersal of their compatriots. The issue of land use and development has always been crucially important for the survival of the Palestinian community inside Israel. Dispossession by land expropriation is probably the most significant aspect of the policy of deprivation pursued by Israel against this national community. Predicated on the Zionist premise of more land for the Jewish would-be newcomers and settlers, Israel's policy of land confiscation destroyed the livelihood of many Israeli Arabs, severely curtailed the development of Arab localities, and threatened to undermine the very survival of a territorially based Palestinian community in Israel.

The Nakba brought enormous disruption to the economy of the remaining Palestinian population in Israel, including the internally displaced. The outcome of the 1948–49 war and the cease-fire agreements between Israel and the Arab countries of 1949 left Israel in control of over 5 million acres of Palestinian land, mostly belonging to the external refugees; the property of the internally displaced consisted of about 300,000 dunums of land, which the Israeli state declared to be "absentee property". Soon after the 1948 war, the Israeli authorities confiscated nearly 1 million acres of Palestinian refugee land. First the Israeli state took over the land of the "external refugees", who were barred from returning, whilst the remaining Palestinian community was subsequently subjected to laws and regulations that effectively deprived it of most of its land. The history of expropriation began immediately after 1948. The massive drive to take over Arab land, belonging to Palestinian (internal and external) refugees, has been conducted according to strict legality. The land was expropriated by the authority of laws passed by the Israeli parliament, and transferred to Jewish control and ownership. In 1955, the then Arab affairs editor for the Israeli daily Haaretz, Moshe Keren, described this process as "wholesale robbery in legal guise. Hundreds of thousands of dunams [sic] were taken away from the Arab minority".

The Palestinian citizens inside Israel, including the internal refugees, were subjected to a repressive Military Administration for some eighteen years (1948–66). Many observers do not realise that the state of emergency declared in Israel in 1948 is still in effect. Although direct military government, which had applied to the Arab areas of Israel, was abolished in 1966, the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, originally enacted by the British mandatory authorities in 1945, were retained by the Knesset in a special law, and the state of emergency has never been lifted completely. The Regulations, subject to certain amendments, have remained in force until the present day. Moreover since the termination of the Military Administration, Israeli governments have continued legislative and administrative procedures aimed at confiscating lands of the destroyed villages in order to prevent the return of the internally displaced.

The Defence (Emergency) Regulations, which were the primary legal instrument for political repression inside Israel, provided the legal basis for the system of direct military rule imposed on Arab (and only Arab) citizens of Israel during the post-Nakba period; in fact the Military Administration existed only in the areas in which the majority of Israel's Arab population resided. Under the Regulations the authorities can still declare closed military areas, confiscate land, close down newspapers, detain people without trial, and even expel them. An Emergency Article for the Exploitation of Uncultivated Land (1948) permitted Israel's Minister of Agriculture to seize Arab property that was uncultivated. Seizures were effected by enclosing an area under the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, thus preventing its cultivation and enabling its expropriation. Lands falling under this category were leased by the Custodian of Absentees' Property to Jewish settlers and farmers, old and new. Furthermore the imposition of martial law and military administration in the period between 1948 and 1966 had an enormous impact on the internally displaced and the remaining Palestinian population in Israel. In 1948 the Israeli Provisional State Council (the forerunner of the Knesset), in search of international recognition for the newly proclaimed state, included in the "Independence Charter" a promise that the Jewish state would "uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, and sex". What, in fact, took place was exactly the opposite. After its establishment, Israel treated the Palestinians still remaining within its frontiers almost as foreigners. It swiftly imposed a military administration in the areas inhabited by the Palestinian community, expropriated over half of the lands of this "non-Jewish" population, and pursued various policies of demographic containment, political control and systematic discrimination in all spheres of life.

Officially the purpose of imposing martial law and the Military Administration on Israel's Palestinian community was security. However, their establishment was intended to serve a number of both stated and concealed objectives:

(a) The first objective was to prevent the return of the Palestinian refugees ("external refugees") to their homes, villages and towns in Israel. "In the process other Arabs who had not infiltrated the country were sometimes driven out as well."

(b) The second and third goals were specifically aimed at the internal refugees; the second goal was "to evacuate semi-abandoned [Arab] neighborhoods and villages as well as some which had not been abandoned — and to transfer their inhabitants to other parts of the country. Some were evacuated from a 'security cordon' along the borders, and others were removed in order to make room for Jews."

(c) The third purpose was to reduce the overall number of the internal refugees in the state of Israel;

(d) The fourth goal was to maintain control and supervision over the Israeli Palestinian citizens, who were separated and isolated from the Jewish population.

To reduce the overall number of internally displaced persons in the state of Israel in the post-1948 period the Military Administration carried out many incidents of expulsion, especially from the Galilee and the Triangle after the latter's annexation to Israel in May 1949, following the Rhodes agreement signed with Jordan on 3 April 1949. For instance, in late May or early June 1949, 4,000 internal refugees were expelled by the Military Administration from the Triangle across the border into the West Bank. The military governor of the central area, Lieutenant Colonel Emmanuel Markovsky, reported to the head of the Military Administration, General Elimelech Avner, on 30 June 1949:

Upon our entry into the area [the Triangle] and the proclamation of [Israel's] rule in it, we announced that we will not recognise the [internal] refugees as being entitled to reside in the area or any aid and benefit. We prohibited their employment in any work ... we banned organising permanent aid for them. When we received authorisation to transfer them across the border, the action was implemented in full within a week.

Markovsky added that after the Military Administration put pressure on "representatives" of the Triangle's villages (possibly certain mukhtari), the latter agreed to assist in the process. In conclusion, Markovsky wrote: "In retrospect, this action proved that a fair and forceful rule in the [Israeli Arab] villages gives the possibility of implementing tasks in full, and fortifies Israel's rule." In the same year, some 1,000 people from the village of Baqa al-Gharbiyya in the Triangle (presumably many of them internal refugees) were expelled by Israel across the border into the West Bank.

In early February 1951, the residents of thirteen small Arab villages in Wadi 'Ara were expelled over the border. On 17 November of the same year the inhabitants of the village of Khirbat al-Buwayshat in the Triangle were expelled and their houses were dynamited by the army. Earlier, in 1949, some 700 people from Kafr Yasif village in the Galilee were trucked to the Jordanian border and ordered to cross it. These internal refugees had never left the Galilee during the 1948 war, but simply had fled their homes in adjoining villages and moved to Kafr Yasif. In a Knesset debate on 8 March 1949, Arab Knesset member Tawfiq Tubi strongly protested against this large single expulsion of internally displaced persons. He stated:

The forced evacuation of Arab villages has also been carried out by the Israeli authorities. Only a few weeks ago 700 people who had taken refuge in the village of [Kafr] Yasif during the [1948] war were taken to the Iraqi front [on the northern West Bank border with Israel] in trucks and forced to cross the lines to 'Abdullah.

In mid-April 1949, the US consul in Jerusalem reported that "several hundred" Galilee Arabs (some of the internal refugees) had been expelled by the Israeli army across the border, together with some Palestinian refugees who had "infiltrated" back to their villages. Such expulsions often were carried out with brutality. One kibbutz woman wrote anonymously to the newspaper Al-Hamishmar of witnessing such "infiltrators", men, women and children blindfolded, being trucked out:

Those of us standing nearby had witnessed no bad behaviour on the part of the Arabs, who sat frightened, almost one on top of the other. But the soldiers were quick to teach us what they meant by "order". "The expert" jumped up and began to ... hit [the Arabs] across their blindfolded eyes and when he had finished, he stamped on all of them and then, in the end, laughed uproariously and with satisfaction at his heroism. We were shocked by this despicable act. I ask, does this not remind us exactly of the Nazi acts towards the Jews?

On 31 May 1950 the Israeli army transported about 120 internal refugees in two crowded trucks to a point near the edge of Wadi Araba, a hot desert wasteland astride the Israeli-Jordanian frontier between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. The refugees were ordered to cross to Jordan, with the soldiers "firing bursts over their heads to urge them forward". While most of the expellees made it, as many as thirty-six "may be assumed ... [to have] perished from thirst and starvation", the British minister to Amman, Kirkbride, wrote. The survivors, who were questioned in Jordan, were found to be:

Members of divided families who infiltrated across the line to find their relatives, or who fled from what is now Israeli territory when the Jews arrived there, abandoning money and valuables in their homes; ... Refugees caught en route from Gaza to Jordan; ... [and] Arabs living in their homes in Israel, with whom the Jews have become displeased for some reason or other.

The issue of both the "internally displaced" Palestinian and the "external refugees" remained a major preoccupation for the Military Administration. On 24 March 1949, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion appointed a committee that was directed to submit to him recommendations on whether the Military Administration should be abolished, or, alternatively, whether any changes in its policies towards the Palestinian community and the internal refugees ought to be carried out. By determining the composition of the committee, Ben-Gurion seemed to have ensured the outcome of its investigations. The committee was headed by General Elimelech Avner, who was the head of the Military Administration, and its two other members were Major Michael Hanegbi, the Military Governor of the Negev, and Yehoshu'a Palmon of the Foreign Ministry. In its report, submitted to the Prime Minister on 3 May 1949, the committee stressed that the continuation of a forceful military administration was essential for security, demographic, and land settlement reasons and for dealing with the question of refugees within Israel. The committee maintained, inter alia, that comprehensive and effective supervision over the Arab population was needed in order to:

(a) find "a solution to the problem of the Arab refugees who are present within the boundaries of the state [because the problem of internal refugees] requires the transfer [of Arab communities] from one place to another, the concentration of land for their resettlement, the transfer of [Arab] workers to employment centres, [and] directed [Jewish] settlement policies. ... The implementation of all these requires a regime with military character, which is not subject to the rules of normal procedures";

(b) "[facilitate] greatly the implementation of the desired demographic and land policies, and the process of populating [with Jews] the abandoned Arab villages and towns".

(c) prevent "infiltration" of Palestinian [external] refugees back to their homes and villages;

(d) prevent the Palestinian community from becoming a fifth column.

In October 1952, Ben-Gurion asked then minister-without-portfolio Pinhas Lavon (later defence minister) to look into the functioning of the Military Administration. Lavon's report, which was presented a few weeks later, criticised the Military Administration as inefficient and harbouring much corruption. Lavon also attempted to deal with claims he heard from army General Staff representatives, who had asserted that the reason for the difficulties and inefficiency of the Military Administration was the lack of a consistent policy towards the Palestinian community and the internally displaced. This inconsistency, according to the army, was the result of the activities of civilian ministries among the Arab population, in parallel with army activities. The army, Lavon wrote, wanted exclusive and total authority in dealing with the Arab community. However, he recommended that the army's demand should not be accepted, although he opposed abolition of the Military Administration and the Defence (Emergency) Regulations. Lavon's report was most telling:

The claim about the "lack of a consistent policy" [made by representatives of the General Staff] is based on the demand to [adopt] a policy which would lead to the emigration of the Arab residents from the territory of the State of Israel. ... Such emigration is undoubtedly desirable, but it is doubtful whether it would be possible to achieve that — the emigration of tens of thousands of Arabs — with the means available to a Military Government in time of peace, in a democratic state, which is open to criticism, supervision, and is in need of world's sympathy. The harm [resulting] from half measures is clear, and their benefit is doubtful. Absolutely effective means [which would bring about the total departure of the Arab minority] cannot be pursued by the state of Israel, without the shaking of its international position.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Catastrophe Remembered by Nur Masalha. Copyright © 2005 Nur Masalha. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Forward: Edward W. Said, Scholar-Activist - Naseer H. Aruri
Introduction - Nur Masalha
Part I: Evolving Israeli Policies and Indigenous Resistance
1. Present Absentees and Indigenous Resistance - Nur Masalha
2. The State of Israel Versus the Palestinian Internal Refugees - Hillel Cohen
3. Patterns of Internal Displacement, Social Adjustment and the Challenge of Return- Nihad Boqai'
4. Forced Sedentarisation, Land Rights and Indigenous Struggle: The Palestinian Bedouin in the Negev - Isma'el Abu Sa'ad

Part II: Palestinian Oral History and Memory
5. "A Muted Sort of Grief": Tales of Refuge in Nazareth (1948-2005) - Isabelle Humphries
6. Kafr Bir'im - William Dalrymple
7. The Nakba, Oral History and the Palestinian Peasantry: The Case of Lubya - Mahmoud 'Issa
8. Unrecognised Villages: Indigenous 'Ayn Hawd Versus Artists' Colony 'Ein Hod - Jonathan Cook
9. The Nakba in Hebrew: Israeli-Jewish Awareness of the Palestinian Catastrophe and Internal Refugees - Eitan Bronstein

Part III: Human Rights and International Protection
10. The Real Roadmap to Peace: International Dimensions of the Internal Refugee Question - Ilan Pappé
11. International Protection and Durable Solutions - Terry Rempel

Index

Editorial Reviews

This is a work of enormous significance by distinguished scholars of singular courage and integrity. The spirit and legacy of Edward Said are embodied in these papers that seek to rectify grave historical omissions and distortions pertaining to the plight and rights of the Palestinians, particularly in their displacement and exile.” —Hanan Ashrawi

“In this remarkable book, twelve writers brilliantly evoke the spirit of Edward Said to tell the unvarnished truth about Palestine and Israel.” —John Pilger

“Catastrophe Remembered makes a timely and useful contribution to an important and unfinished discussion.” —Neil Caplan, Midwest Jewish Studies Association

“An excellent reader on the subject, bringing together as it does a wide range of essays... Israel's arguments against its critics often include the claim that it is the Middle East's only democracy. This book illustrates why that claim is so shallow, based as it is on a situation which denies full rights to a significant portion of Israeli citizens, denying them everything from adequate water supplies to the validity of their memories and history.” —Peace News

“A valuable source to construct a clearer picture of what actually happened to the Palestinian people in the chaotic years of 1947-9.” —Political Studies Review

“A wide-ranging collection of invariably interesting essays... the lesson of Catastrophe Remembered is that no two-state solution will be enough to give Palestinians in Israel the dignity denied to them for so long.” —Tom Hill, Tribune

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