Refugees of apartheid: Why Israelis need to talk about Palestinian return

Supporters of the Israeli activist group Zochrot carry banners and signs to remember the Nakba and Palestinian refugees as thousands march in the annual human rights march in Tel Aviv, December 9, 2011. (Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org)

The debate in Israel around Amnesty’s recent “apartheid report,” such as there was one, consisted of three familiar appraisals of its contents: some dismissed it as an antisemitic blood libel; some shrugged it off as a statement of the obvious; and others pondered whether this was a development with concrete legal ramifications. What was and continues to be missing in the meantime is a frank discussion of our responsibility as Jewish Israelis not only for the past, but for the future of this country.

Published in early February, Amnesty International’s report is systematic and comprehensive, but does not offer significant new information, and its recommendations are limited. The evidence for Israel’s violations of international law listed in the report will come as little surprise to any Israeli who has ever listened to the news — let alone left-wing activists. Its importance and practical significance lie rather in its two meta-arguments. The first is that the Israeli variant of apartheid is not limited to the occupied territories or to any particular part of the Palestinian population, but is inherent to the very partition of the territory and population into units with different legal statuses.

The second meta-argument is that denying the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to the land and homes from which they were displaced in 1948 is the central mechanism of that policy principle.

The decision to refer to the Palestinian refugees in a report on Israel’s present responsibility and steps required for a future of justice, equality, and reconciliation is a unique one, which breaks through the narrow bounds of Jewish-Israeli political discourse. Within that discourse, the right of return is usually addressed in terms originating from the Israel propaganda machine: from “there was a war and they lost it,” to the claim that the return of Palestinian refugees is synonymous with the end of Jewish existence in Israel. Reading the “apartheid report” offers an opportunity to realize that the opposite is true: it is preventing refugee return that constitutes an ongoing existential threat.

1948: Opening move

The report states that Israel’s apartheid policy has been implemented explicitly and consistently from its very first day. One of its main arguments is that before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, conditions were ripe for establishing Jewish demographic superiority and for maximizing Jewish control of lands and natural resources. The numbers behind the 1948 war clarify this point well: until that year, the Palestinians represented some 70 percent of the country’s inhabitants, holding approximately 90 percent of its land, whereas the Jews were less than 30 percent of the population and owned less than seven percent of the land. Two steps taken by the fledgling state enabled it to completely reverse the situation: the decision made in 1948 to prevent refugee return and the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law.[1]

In May 1948, as the war was raging, a special committee was established in order to examine how to turn the Palestinian’s flight “into an accomplished fact.”[2] The committee recommended to the Israeli leadership to destroy Palestinian locales, prevent land cultivation, settle Jews in the depopulated villages, pass laws to freeze the current situation, and invest in propaganda.[3] The recommendations were implemented religiously: already at a cabinet meeting of June 16, it was announced that Israel would not let any refugees return; military units were sent to blow up villages or set them on fire (601 villages were destroyed, most of them by the first half of 1949); new Jewish immigrants were housed in depopulated Palestinian homes (350 of the 370 new Jewish settlements established in 1948-1953 were located on refugee lands); and Palestinians who tried to return to salvage some of their property, to forage for food or to reunite with families left behind were summarily shot.[4]

Palestinian citizens of Israel in the destroyed village of Iqrit walk by a historic photograph showing the displacement of the village by the Israeli military during the Nakba, April 21, 2014. (Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org)

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