“The refugees could have gone home after the war; nobody stopped them”

Many of the displaced did not go far. Nur Masalha, working from the Israeli record, notes that by September 1948 only a minority had crossed into neighbouring states — Zalman Lifschitz reported to Ben-Gurion on 13 September 1948 figures of 75,000 to Transjordan, 5,000 to Iraq, 12,000–15,000 to Lebanon and 20,000 to Syria — while the fellahin, the village population, “were encamping along the front lines and hoping to return.” Movement back toward their villages was what the new government began to call “infiltration.” Lifschitz recommended that these peasants be harassed and intimidated into leaving the country. Two weeks later Yosef Weitz told Ben-Gurion that the some 60,000 Arabs concentrated in the central Galilee should be “intimidated without end,” and asked for orders to be issued to drive them into Syria and Lebanon. On 26 October 1948 the Transfer Committee submitted recommendations to Ben-Gurion reaffirming the policy of blocking the return of the refugees and calling for their resettlement in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Transjordan.

Then the villages were removed. Major General Avraham Tamir, in an interview with the historian Dr Lev Tov conducted in the early 2000s and later placed under seal by the Defence Ministry, described his own part in it: “One development was when reports arrived about marches of refugees from Jordan toward the abandoned villages [in Israel]. And then Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won’t have anywhere to return to. That is, all the Arab villages, most of which were in [the area covered by] Central Command, most of them.” Asked whether he meant villages that were still standing, Tamir answered: “Standing. It was necessary for there to be no place for them to return to, so I mobilized all the engineering battalions of Central Command, and within 48 hours I knocked all those villages to the ground. Period. There’s no place to return to.” Asked whether he had hesitated: “Without hesitation. That was the policy. I mobilized, I carried it out and I did it.” That testimony reached the public only because Hagar Shezaf reported it in Haaretz on 5 July 2019, after the Akevot Institute documented the sealing programme.

The law completed what the engineering battalions began. The Absentees’ Property Law, enacted in March 1950, defined an “absentee” so broadly that it captured anyone who had been outside the area of Israel or in territory held by Arab forces during the relevant period — including people displaced a few kilometres from their own homes — and vested their land, houses, businesses and bank accounts in a state Custodian. Adalah, the legal centre for the Arab minority in Israel, describes it as the principal legal instrument by which Israel took possession of refugee property. Nothing was returned; no compensation was paid. Tens of thousands who had never left the country at all were classified as “present absentees”: physically present, legally absent, barred from their own villages.

The international position was settled at the time and has been restated ever since. On 11 December 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 194 (III), paragraph 11 of which “resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.” The UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine read that paragraph as giving each refugee a free choice between repatriation with compensation and resettlement with compensation. The General Assembly has reaffirmed the resolution at virtually every session since. It has never been carried out.

The claim that no one stopped the refugees therefore inverts a documented sequence: a cabinet-level decision not to permit return, an intimidation campaign against those who tried, the demolition of the villages so that there would be nothing to return to, and a statute transferring what was left to the state. Each element is recorded in Israeli sources, and one of them was recorded by the officer who carried it out.

Sources

• Hagar Shezaf, “Burying the Nakba” — Haaretz, 5 July 2019, containing the sealed Avraham Tamir interview (PDF via the Akevot Institute)
• Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) — on the Transfer Committee’s October 1948 recommendations and the “infiltration” policy
• Absentees’ Property Law (1950) — Adalah, Discriminatory Laws Database
• The Right of Return of the Palestinian People — United Nations study, quoting Resolution 194 (III) and the Conciliation Commission’s interpretation