Infiltrator

Most of the people displaced in 1948 did not go far. Nur Masalha, working from the Israeli record, cites Zalman Lifschitz’s report to Ben-Gurion of 13 September 1948 giving the numbers who had reached neighbouring states — some 75,000 to Transjordan, 5,000 to Iraq, 12,000 to 15,000 to Lebanon, 20,000 to Syria — and noting that the fellahin, the village population, “were encamping along the front lines and hoping to return.” Some had begun moving back to their villages while the war was still going on. It was this movement, Masalha writes, that “the Israeli government had begun to term ‘infiltration’.”

The vocabulary did work that policy then completed. Lifschitz recommended that the peasants encamped along the lines be harassed and intimidated into leaving the country; Yosef Weitz told Ben-Gurion two weeks later that the roughly 60,000 Arabs concentrated in the central Galilee should be “intimidated without end,” and asked for orders to drive them into Syria and Lebanon; on 26 October 1948 the Transfer Committee formally recommended that the government confirm its policy of blocking return. The physical measure followed. Major General Avraham Tamir, in an interview later sealed by Israel’s Defence Ministry and published by Haaretz in July 2019, described the response to “reports about marches of refugees from Jordan toward the abandoned villages”: “Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won’t have anywhere to return to… 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.”

Law then made the condition permanent. The Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 defined an “absentee” broadly enough to include people displaced a few kilometres inside the country, and vested their land, homes, businesses and bank accounts in a state Custodian; Adalah describes it as the principal legal instrument by which Israel took possession of refugee property. Set beside the Law of Return of the same year, which grants any Jew anywhere in the world the right to immigrate and acquire citizenship, the asymmetry of the two statutes is the architecture of the refugee question: one population may enter at will, another may not go home, and the second is described in the statute book by the language of trespass.

Naming it matters because the terminology, not the fact, is what is usually in dispute. Nobody denies that Palestinians tried to return and were prevented; the argument is over whether “infiltrator” describes a security threat or a refugee walking back to a village that was still standing. The Israeli documents cited here answer that question in their own words.

Sources

• Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) — on Lifschitz, Weitz and the origin of the term “infiltration”
• Hagar Shezaf, “Burying the Nakba” — Haaretz, 5 July 2019, containing the sealed Avraham Tamir interview (PDF via the Akevot Institute)
• Absentees’ Property Law (1950) — Adalah, Discriminatory Laws Database
• Law of Return (1950) — Adalah, Discriminatory Laws Database