The establishment of the state of Israel involved the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their land
75 years ago, on 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel. 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land in the course of its establishment.
In 1947, Britain handed over responsibility for the future of mandate Palestine to the UN and a UN commission recommended a partition plan involving the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states. This was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in resolution 181, which was passed on 29 November 1947 by 33 votes to 10, despite the opposition of the Palestinians and all Arab states.
At that time, about 2 million people, 1.4 million Arabs and 600,000 Jews, lived in mandate Palestine. The partition plan was extraordinarily generous to Jews, who made up less than a third of the population and owned less than 6% of the land. Despite this, the partition plan allocated almost 56% of the land to a Jewish state, containing the vast majority of the 600,000 Jews in Palestine but also with a large Arab minority.
The Zionist leadership accepted the partition plan publicly, but with the clear intention of expanding the territory allocated to Jews by the UN and of expelling the bulk of the Arabs living there. The Israeli state was established in this expanded territory, which amounted to around 78% of mandate Palestine.
Around 750,000 of the 900,000 Arabs living in that territory were either expelled or fled beyond the borders of mandate Palestine – to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, or Transjordan – or to the West Bank and Gaza. Much of this ethnic cleansing – of around 300,000 people – had already taken place by the time of Ben-Gurion’s declaration on 14 May 1948.
At the end of the war, an Arab minority of only 156,000 people remained within the state of Israel. Of this number, 46,000 were internal refugees who were either expelled or fled from their homes and land and had to continue living in other places inside Israel.
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With limited exceptions, Palestinian refugees were never allowed to return to their homes and land. To this end, during the war and in the years immediately following it, Israel destroyed approximately 400 abandoned Palestinian villages and Palestinian neighbourhoods in cities, or settled Jewish immigrants there. Over time, the villages’ names were erased from the map, marked as “ruins,” or renamed in Hebrew.
Most of the land in those villages was appropriated immediately after the 1948 War and became state land through the Absentees Property Law, which defined Palestinian internal refugees as “present absentees”. Further land expropriations followed in the coming decades. Palestinian internal refugees were also barred from returning to their villages, due to restrictions on movement imposed by the military administration that ruled over Palestinians in Israel until the end of 1966.
In all, 85% of the land holdings that were owned by Palestinians within the area that became the state of Israel prior to 1948 were expropriated and became state-owned land. As a result, agricultural lands which constituted the main sources of income for the Palestinian minority that remained within Israel were also seized by the state.
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On 27 April 2023, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, sent a video message [1] to the Israeli President on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the foundation of his state. The text of it is as follows:
Dear President Hertzog, dear friends.
Seventy-five years ago, a dream was realised, with Israel’s Independence Day. After the greatest tragedy in human history, the Jewish People could finally build a home in the Promised Land.
Today, we celebrate 75 years of vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East. Seventy-five years of dynamism, ingenuity and ground-breaking innovations. You have literally made the desert bloom, as I could see from my visit to the Negev last year.
Today we also celebrate 75 years of friendship between Israel and Europe. We have more in common than geography would suggest: our shared culture, our values, and hundreds of thousands of dual European-Israeli citizens have created a deep connection between us.”
Europe and Israel are bound to be friends and allies. Your freedom is our freedom. Happy birthday to all the people of Israel.
No mention there that “realising the dream” of a Jewish state involved the ethnic cleansing of over 80% of the indigenous Arab population from the 78% of Palestine that became Israeli territory. In fact, no mention of Palestinians at all. It’s as if they don’t exist, and never existed.
No mention either of the fact that for the past 56 years the Israeli state has occupied the other 22% of Palestine and established Jewish settlements there, which continue to grow in size and number. The EU has been known to apply economic sanctions to states that engage in this sort of behaviour (for example, to Russia, with respect to Crimea) but different rules seem to apply to Israel.
As for the “75 years of vibrant democracy”, von der Leyen doesn’t seem to realise that by no stretch of the imagination can Israel be described a democracy. The most basic principle of such a system of government is that everybody subject to the rule of the government emerging from the electoral process should have a vote. But millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories haven’t got a vote and are excluded from the election of the government which rules over them.
As for the “75 years of friendship between Israel and Europe”, a few days after she spoke there was a hiccup in the friendship when the EU delegation in Israel refused to meet a senior member of the Israeli government. The minister in question was the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Apparently, although according to von der Leyen the EU shares “values” with Israel, it doesn’t share “values” with this Israeli minister: his “views contradict the values the EU stands for”, the EU says [2]. As a result of this conflict of “values”, the EU delegation had to cancel its Europe Day (9 May) diplomatic reception, because Itamar Ben-Gvir was scheduled to represent Israel at it.
(Clare Daly MEP has produced four short video responses to von der Leyen [3]. They are excellent, as usual.)
David Morrison
23 May 2023
References:
[1] twitter.com/EUinIsrael/status/1651088583644594177
[3] twitter.com/ClareDalyMEP/status/1658131096440127490
Labour Affairs 