Three-Quarter Million

on March 13, 2011 by Walt Dilg

Three-Quarter Million

When you learn about the the Israeli War for Independence, that battle that occurred in 1947-1948 when the UN granted Israel its independence following the British Mandate and the five Arab nations bordering it attacked to make Israel stillborn, you enter into a sacred area of heroics, legends, and myth-making - about Israel and Palestine.  You learn about the number three-quarter million.  

That's the number of Palestinian refugees who fled in the face of the Israeli forces as those forces fought to secure their freedom.  Palestinians look back at this time as the great catastrophe, they lost more land than they would have given up had they agreed with the UN on Israeli's initial borders, they lost many lives, and they lost ancestral homes and villages.  New literature calls this the "cleansing" of Palestine, using a more modern word to describe an age-old practice of taking over the land from the defeated in battle and moving them out, elsewhere.  

So we're told three-quarter million Palestinians lost their homes and became refugees in neighboring Arab countries.  We saw two such refugee camps in Jordan that were now established cities half a century later.  The refugee population has grown as the generations have passed.  There are now a couple million people who define themselves as refugees from that war  These are the folk that are referred to when in peace negotiations you hear the term "right of return."  The phrase is talking about their right to return to their prior homes and villages.  Yet many of these villages simply no longer exist, or would no longer be recognized by these returning refugees.  

Israel was establishing a Jewish state, and it was then and remains important now for Israel to have on-the-ground demographics that support that identity.  The Jewish populations needs to exceed the non-Jewish population to insure this identity, especially if Israel also wants to identify itself as democratic.  It's no good to have a section of your country vote your country out of existence, or change your country's basic premise of identity.  This realization was not lost on the early freedom fighters as they sought to motivate Palestinians to flee those villages.  It gave them a more secure sense of their new territory, as it minimized the potential for "5th Column" problems.  (We had Japanese-Americans in internment camps out here in the West during WWII due to "5th Column" fears.)

We travelers were surprised to hear our Jordan guide say there were "no Jews" in Jordan.  You'd think there would be some at least, especially since we were being impressed with Jordan's religious tolerance.  Why no Jews in Jordan?  This is the area Moses and the tribes traveled coming up from Saudi Arabia to reach the promised land. You'd think there would have been some stragglers or some folk who settled in this historic area during one of the diasporas.  

Making our way to the airport in Tel Aviv once leaving Jordan, we ask our Israeli guide her opinion as to why there were no Jews in Jordan. She said there were no Jews in Jordan because there were "no Jews worth counting in any of the neighboring Arab states."  All Jews had been expelled from these neighboring countries during or soon after the War for Independence.  She referred to UN documents that bear witness to this fact - a "cleansing" of the Jews from these neighboring Arab states as a result of the war, with over three-quarter million Jews being expelled from their homes and villages.  These refugees found their way to Israel joining the European refugees from earlier in the decade and the zionists who had come decades earlier.  They set up house-keeping and vowed never again to be expelled from their "homeland."    

"Right of return," for whom, to where, because of when?  There are three-quarter million reasons, times two, that make the middle east peace process so difficult.