Since I wanted to respond quickly, I grabbed a US Army handbook, published in 1994. I highlighted a couple of passages not exactly flattering to Israel, to demonstrate that it is not particularly biased. This is not, of course, proof, but it shows what our government considered to be the state of the case on the flight/expulsion issue in recent years:
Source :U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
Source key :AR
Program :ARMY AREA HANDBOOKS
Program key :AR ARMAN
Update sched. :Occasionally
ID number :AR ARMAN ISRAELCH1.06
Title :Chapter 1.06: PROBLEMS OF THE NEW STATE, 1948-67
Data type :TEXT
End year :1994
Date of record:02/22/1994
Country :
| Israel
Text :
PROBLEMS OF THE NEW STATE, 1948-67
Etatism
The War of Independence was the most costly war Israel has
fought; more than 6,000 Jewish fighters and civilians died. At
the war's end in 1949, the fledgling state was burdened with a
number of difficult problems. These included reacting to the
absorption of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants and to a
festering refugee problem on its borders, maintaining a defense
against a hostile and numerically superior Arab world, keeping a
war-torn economy afloat, and managing foreign policy alignments.
Faced with such intractable problems, Ben-Gurion sought to ensure
a fluid transition from existing prestate institutions to the new
state apparatus. He announced the formation of a Provisional
Council of State, actually a transformed executive committee of
the Jewish Agency with himself as prime minister. Weizmann became
president of the council, although Ben-Gurion was careful to make
the presidency a distinctly ceremonial position. The provisional
government would hold elections no later than October 1948 for
the Constituent Assembly to draw up a formal constitution. The
proposed constitution was never ratified, however, and on
February 16, 1949 the Constituent Assembly became Israel's first
parliament or Knesset (see Glossary).
A key element of Ben-Gurion's etatism was the integration of
Israel's independent military forces into a unified military
structure. On May 28, 1948, Ben-Gurion 's provisional government
created the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the Hebrew name of
which, Zvah Haganah Le Yisrael, is commonly abbreviated to Zahal,
and prohibited maintenance of any other armed force. This
proclamation was challenged by the Irgun, which sailed the
Altalena, a ship carrying arms, into Tel Aviv harbor. Ben-Gurion
ordered Haganah troops to fire on the ship, which was set aflame
on the beach in Tel Aviv. With the two camps on the verge of
civil war, Begin, the leader of the Irgun, ordered his troops not
to fire on the Haganah. Although the Altalena affair unified the
IDF, it remained a bitter memory for Begin and the Irgun. Begin
subsequently converted his armed movement into a political party,
the Herut (or Freedom Movement). By January 1949, Ben-Gurion had
also dissolved the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah.
Ingathering of the Exiles
The first legislative act of the Provisional Council of State
was the Law and Administrative Ordinance of 1948 that declared
null and void the restrictions on Jewish immigration imposed by
British authorities. In July 1950, the Knesset passed the Law of
Return (see Glossary), which stated that "Every Jew has the right
to come to this country as an olah (new immigrant)."
In 1939 the British Mandate Authority had estimated that about
445,000 out of 1.5 million residents of the Mandate were Jews.
Israeli officials estimated that as of May 15, 1948, about
650,000 Jews lived in the area scheduled to become Israel under
the November 1947 UN partition proposal. Between May 1948 and
December 31, 1951, approximately 684,000 Jewish immigrants
entered the new state, thus providing a Jewish majority in the
region for the first time in the modern era. The largest single
group of immigrants consisted of Jews from Eastern Europe; more
than 300,000 people came from refugee and displaced persons
camps.
The highly organized state structure created by Ben-Gurion and
the old guard Mapai leadership served the Yishuv well in the
prestate era, but was ill prepared for the massive influx of
non-European refugees that flooded into the new state in its
first years of existence. Between 1948 and 1952 about 300,000
Sephardic immigrants came to Israel. Aside from 120,000 highly
educated Iraqi Jews and 10,000 Egyptian Jews, the majority of new
immigrants (55,000 Turkish Jews, 40,000 Iranian Jews, 55,000
Yemeni Jews, and thousands more from Jewish enclaves in
Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and Cochin in southwest India) were
poorly educated, impoverished, and culturally very different from
the country's dominant European culture. They were religious Jews
who had worked primarily in petty trade, while the ruling
Ashkenazim of the Labor Party were secular socialists. As a
result, the Ashkenazim-dominated kibbutz movement spurned them,
and Mapai leadership as a whole viewed the new immigrants as "raw
material" for their socialist program (see Jewish Ethnic Groups,
ch. 2).
In the late 1950s, a new flood of 400,000 mainly undereducated
Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Egyptian Jews immigrated to
Israel following Israel's Sinai Campaign (see 1956 War, ch. 5).
The total addition to Israel's population during the first twelve
years of statehood was about 1.2 million, and at least two-thirds
of the newcomers were of Sephardic extraction. By 1961 the
Sephardic portion of the Jewish population was about 45 percent,
or approximately 800,000 people. By the end of the first decade,
about four-fifths of the Sephardic population lived in the large
towns, mostly development towns, and cities where they became
workers in an economy dominated by Ashkenazim.
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 two-thirds of the Arab population. The second critical area
was the so-called Little Triangle, located between the villages
of Et Tira and Et Taiyiba near the border with Jordan (then
Transjordan). The third area included much of the Negev Desert,
the region traversed by the previously apolitical nomadic beduins
(see fig. 4).
The most salient feature of military government was restriction
of movement. Article 125 of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations
empowered military governors to declare any specified area
"off-limits" 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
non-Jew. 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 non-Jewish, mostly Arab,
population access to about 95 percent of the land.
The Emergence of the IDF
In February 1950, the Israeli government had discreetly
negotiated a draft treaty with King Abdullah of Transjordan,
including a five-year nonaggression pact, open borders, and free
access to the port of Haifa. In April Abdullah annexed the West
Bank and East Jerusalem, thus creating the united Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan. Ben-Gurion acquiesced because he thought this
would mean an end to independent claims on Israeli territory and
material claims on confiscated Arab territory. Abdullah, however,
was assassinated in July 1951. Moreover, Israel was boycotted by
all its Arab neighbors, and from the end of 1951 the Suez Canal
and the Strait of Tiran (at the southern end of the Gulf of
Aqaba, where it opens into the Red Sea) were closed to Israeli
shipping.
Surrounded by enemies and having to integrate thousands of
immigrants into the new state, Ben-Gurion attempted to make the
IDF the new unifying symbol of the fledgling state. He realized
that the socialism of the Histadrut was ill suited to solving the
problems facing the new state. Above all, Israel needed a unity
of purpose, which in Ben-Gurion's thinking could only be provided
by a strong army that would defend the country against its
enemies and help assimilate its culturally diverse immigrants.
Thus, Ben-Gurion added to the socialist ethos of the Histadrut
and kibbutz movements an aggressive Israeli nationalism
spearheaded by the IDF. To carry out this new orientation, he
cultivated a "new guard" Mapai leadership headed by dynamic young
General Moshe Dayan and technocrat Shimon Peres. Throughout the
1950s and early 1960s the Dayan-Peres supporters in Mapai and the
"old guard" Labor establishment would compete for power (see
Multiparty System, ch. 4).
In November 1953, Ben-Gurion tendered his resignation, and the
less militaristic Moshe Sharett took over as prime minister.
Under Sharett's weaker leadership, the conflict between the
old-guard Mapai leadership and Ben-Gurion's new technocratic
elite festered openly. This led to a major scandal in the Labor
Party called the Lavon affair. Defense Minister Pinchas Lavon, an
important figure in the old guard, had authorized intelligence
chief Benjamin Gibly to launch Israeli spy rings in Cairo and
Alexandria in an attempt to embarrass Egyptian president Gamal
Abdul Nasser. The Egyptians, however, caught and later executed
the spies, and the affair proved to be a major embarrassment to
the Israeli government. The commission authorized to investigate
the affair became embroiled in a test of strength between the
young military establishment--including Dayan and Peres--and the
Mapai old guard, whose support Lavon solicited.
In February 1955, Ben-Gurion returned to the Ministry of
Defense, and with the malleable Sharett still as prime minister
was able to promote his hard-line defense policy. This position
resulted in a number of raids against the Egyptians in response
to attacks on Israeli settlements originating from Egyptian-held
territory. Subsequently, Ben-Gurion was restored to leadership of
the Mapai government. At this time, his biggest concern was the
rising power of Nasser. By October 1955, Nasser had signed an
agreement to buy arms from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia,
while President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to supply Israel
with weapons.
Ben-Gurion sought to inflict a mortal blow on the Egyptian
regime. Because Nasser threatened Western interests in the Suez
Canal, Ben-Gurion entered into secret talks with Britain and
France about the possibility of Israel striking at the Sinai
Peninsula, while Britain and France moved in on the Suez Canal,
ostensibly to help protect Western shipping from combat. In late
October, the IDF routed the Egyptian army at Gaza and after a
week pushed to the Gidi and Mitla passes. On November 5, 1956,
the French and British took over the Suez Canal area. After
intense pressure from the Eisenhower administration, which was
worried about the threat of Soviet military involvement, the
European powers acceded to a cease-fire.
In March 1957, Israeli troops were forced to withdraw. The war
served to spur Ben-Gurion's drive toward greater militarization.
Although Israel was forced to withdraw from Sinai, Ben-Gurion
deemed the war a success: the raids from Gaza ceased, UN
peacekeeping forces separated Egypt and Israel, greater
cooperation with France led to more arms sales to Israel and the
building of a nuclear reactor, and, most important, the army's
near-perfect performance vindicated his view on the centrality of
the IDF.
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This file extracted from Dept. of Commerce, Economics & Statistic's Division's
Mar. 1994 NATIONAL TRADE DATA BANK (NDTB) CD-ROM, SuDoc C1.88:994/3/V.2
Processed 4/20/1994 by RCM (UM-St. Louis Libraries / / AAH60011
.
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