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Israel
Israeli Arabs, Arab Land, and Arab Refugees
Events immediately before and during the War of Independence
and during the first years of independence remain, so far as those
events involved the Arab residents of Palestine, matters of bitter
and emotional dispute. Palestinian Arab refugees insist that they
were driven out of their homeland by Jewish terrorists and regular
Jewish military forces; the government of Israel asserts that
the invading Arab forces urged the Palestinian Arabs to leave
their houses temporarily to avoid the perils of the war that would
end the Jewish intrusion into Arab lands. Forty years after the
event, advocates of Arabs or Jews continue to present and believe
diametrically opposed descriptions of those events.
According to British Mandate Authority population figures in
1947, there were about 1.3 million Arabs in all of Palestine.
Between 700,000 and 900,000 of the Arabs lived in the region eventually
bounded by the 1949 Armistice line, the so-called Green Line.
By the time the fighting stopped, there were only about 170,000
Arabs left in the new State of Israel. By the summer of 1949,
about 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were living in squalid refugee
camps, set up virtually overnight in territories adjacent to Israel's
borders. About 300,000 lived in the Gaza Strip, which was occupied
by the Egyptian army. Another 450,000 became unwelcome residents
of the West Bank of the Jordan, recently occupied by the Arab
Legion of Transjordan.
The Arabs who remained inside post-1948 Israel became citizens
of the Jewish state. They had voting rights equal to the state's
Jewish community, and according to Israel's Declaration of Independence
were guaranteed social and political equality. Because Israel's
parliament has never passed a constitution, however, Arab rights
in the Jewish state have remained precarious (see Minority Groups
, ch. 2; Arab Parties , ch. 4). Israel's Arab residents were seen
both by Jewish Israelis and by themselves as aliens in a foreign
country. They had been waging war since the 1920s against Zionism
and could not be expected to accept enthusiastically residence
in the Jewish state. The institutions of the new state were designed
to facilitate the growth of the Jewish nation, which in many instances
entailed a perceived infringement upon Arab rights. Thus, Arab
land was confiscated to make way for Jewish immigrants, the Hebrew
language and Judaism predominated over Arabic and Islam, foreign
economic aid poured into the Jewish economy while Arab agriculture
and business received only meager assistance, and Israeli security
concerns severely restricted the Arabs' freedom of movement.
After independence the areas in which 90 percent of the Arabs
lived were placed under military government. This system and the
assignment of almost unfettered powers to military governors were
based on the Defense (Emergency) Regulations promulgated by the
British Mandate Authority in 1945. Using the 1945 regulations
as a legal base, the government created three areas or zones to
be ruled by the Ministry of Defense. The most important was the
Northern Area, also known as the Galilee Area, the locale of about
twothirds of the Arab population. The second critical area was
the socalled Little Triangle, located between the villages of
Et Tira and Et Taiyiba near the border with Jordan (then Transjordan).
The third area included much of the Negev Desert, the region traversed
by the previously apolitical nomadic beduins .
The most salient feature of military government was restriction
of movement. Article 125 of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations
empowered military governors to declare any specified area "offlimits
" to those having no written authorization. The area was then
declared a security zone and thus closed to Israeli Arabs who
lacked written permission either from the army chief of staff
or the minister of defense. Under these provisions, 93 out of
104 Arab villages in Israel were constituted as closed areas out
of which no one could move without a military permit. In these
areas, official acts of military governors were, with rare exceptions,
not subject to review by the civil courts. Individuals could be
arrested and imprisoned on unspecified charges, and private property
was subject to search and seizure without warrant. Furthermore,
the physical expulsion of individuals or groups from the state
was not subject to review by the civil courts.
Another land expropriation measure evolved from the Defense (Emergency)
Regulations, which were passed in 1949 and renewed annually until
1972 when the legislation was allowed to lapse. Under this law,
the Ministry of Defense could, subject to approval by an appropriate
committee of the Knesset, create security zones in all or part
of what was designated as the "protected zone," an area that included
lands adjacent to Israel's borders and other specified areas.
According to Sabri Jiryis, an Arab political economist who based
his work exclusively on Israeli government sources, the defense
minister used this law to categorize "almost half of Galilee,
all of the Triangle, an area near the Gaza Strip, and another
along the Jerusalem-Jaffa railway line near Batir as security
zones." A clause of the law provided that permanent as well as
temporary residents could be required to leave the zone and that
the individual expelled had four days within which to appeal the
eviction notice to an appeals committee. The decisions of these
committees were not subject to review or appeal by a civil court.
Yet another measure enacted by the Knesset in 1949 was the Emergency
Regulations (Cultivation of Waste Lands) Ordinance. One use of
this law was to transfer to kibbutzim or other Jewish settlements
land in the security zones that was lying fallow because the owner
of the land or other property was not allowed to enter the zone
as a result of national security legislation. The 1949 law provided
that such land transfers were valid only for a period of two years
and eleven months, but subsequent amending legislation extended
the validity of the transfers for the duration of the state of
emergency.
Another common procedure was for the military government to seize
up to 40 percent of the land in a given region--the maximum allowed
for national security reasons--and to transfer the land to a new
kibbutz or moshav (see Glossary). Between 1948 and 1953, about
370 new Jewish settlements were built, and an estimated 350 of
the settlements were established on what was termed abandoned
Arab property.
The property of the Arabs who were refugees outside the state
and the property expropriated from the Arabs who remained in Israel
became a major asset to the new state. According to Don Peretz,
an American scholar, by 1954 "more than one-third of Israel's
Jewish population lived on absentee property, and nearly a third
of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in the urban areas
abandoned by Arabs." The fleeing Arabs emptied thriving cities
such as Jaffa, Acre (Akko), Lydda (Lod), and Ramla, plus "338
towns and villages and large parts of 94 other cities and towns,
containing nearly a quarter of all the buildings in Israel."
To the Israeli Arabs, one of the more devastating aspects of
the loss of their property was their knowledge that the loss was
legally irreversible. The early Zionist settlers--particularly
those of the Second Aliyah--adopted a rigid policy that land purchased
or in any way acquired by a Jewish organization or individual
could never again be sold, leased, or rented to a nonJew . The
policy went so far as to preclude the use of non-Jewish labor
on the land. This policy was carried over into the new state.
At independence the State of Israel succeeded to the "state lands"
of the British Mandate Authority, which had "inherited" the lands
held by the government of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish National
Fund was the operating and controlling agency of the Land Development
Authority and ensured that land once held by Jews-- either individually
or by the "sovereign state of the Jewish people"--did not revert
to non-Jews. This denied Israel's nonJewish , mostly Arab, population
access to about 95 percent of the land.
Data as of December 1988
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