Tangled Roots (2019–2020): Season 1, Episode 6 - Tangled Roots - full transcript
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Northern Ireland, Vietnam,
Korea, Falkland Islands, Bangladesh.
the Iran-Iraq War,
the Greco-Turkish War,
the First and Second World Wars...
These are just some of the conflicts
that broke out and ended
while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
goes on and on.
What is it about our conflict
that won't enable it to end?
Is what happened between us
so unforgivable and unsolvable?
We deserve full rights!
Let's go back to this story again,
but we'll try to tell it
not like it's told in an argument,
but like it's told in... a lesson.
Let's call it a refresher lesson.
Let's call it a Homeland Lesson.
Israelis still shy away
from this word, Nakba.
It also took the Palestinian several years
to adopt and distribute it.
But Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq
chose it back in the summer of 1948.
Even before the fighting was over,
he wrote:
The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine
is not a small downfall - Naksa.
"It is a catastrophe - Nakba -
in every sense of the word."
Constantin Zureiq, 1948
Nakba in Arabic means disaster,
catastrophe.
In the summer of 1948 the Arabs and
Palestinians already realized there's a Nakba,
there's a catastrophe,
there are refugees,
Israel refuses to take them back,
there is no Palestinian state,
there's a Jewish state.
Seven Arab states declare war
on Zionism in Palestine
and then turn on their heels.
"A land robbed from its residents.
"The uprooting and the expulsion,
which characterized the Jewish fate
"have now become
the fate of the Arabs."
Constantin Zureiq, 1948
He wasn't the only one
who realized at this stage
that this tremendous defeat
couldn't only be
the Zionists' fault.
Not just the Palestinians
but all the Arabs
need to do some soul-searching
and think about it.
It was as if several countries
fought against the Jews,
but each country had its own interest
and acted in its own way.
Zureiq realizes
that it is a Nakba,
but UN peace envoy,
Count Bernadotte,
tries to turn the wheel back,
go back to the Partition borders
and return the refugees to their homes.
In response,
Lehi operatives assassinate him.
Israel starts regarding Bernadotte
a hater of Israel,
although he was the opposite of that,
and that he's trying to force conditions
on Israel that it doesn't want -
the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees
as a condition for peace between the two sides.
The fact that he was
assassinated indicates
the fear that the UN would compel
a solution for peace
and stop the war.
The Palestinians aren't happy
with Bernadotte's plan either.
They're mainly concerned about his suggestion
to hand over the Arab part of Palestine
to Abdullah, King of Jordan.
In response, the Palestinians
finally establish themselves a state
that will demand sovereignty
over the land.
In late September, the All-Palestine Government
declares its establishment
and appoints Haj Amin al-Husseini
its president.
All-Palestine issues passports
and declares Jerusalem as its capital
although its parliament
is located in Gaza.
The Palestinian national movement
manages to recruit
78 members to parliament.
This government gets to work.
It has a budget,
it has the support of the Arab League
and several Arab states,
but then the war resumes.
The government itself, its ministers,
flee from Gaza to Cairo.
Indeed, the war resumes in October
when Israel sets out
to expand its borders
to those determined
in the Partition Plan.
There is a three-month truce,
there is no existential threat
on the State of Israel.
The Arab armies can't do anything
to the State of Israel,
the Palestinian forces
are completely crushed,
the, State of Israel is interested
in breaking the truce.
The idea is to expand its borders
as much as possible.
The considerations are security-related
in the first stage,
in the second stage they're more
related to the demographic balance.
There are two approaches.
One approach says:
We have no problem capturing
all the western part of the Land of Israel
and reach the Jordan River.
And another approach that says:
There's no need to go too far
in expanding,
we do need to leave territory
west of the Jordan
for Palestinian population,
because if we capture that territory,
all the refugees that left
will be under our control again.
So it's that argument
of demography against geography.
At the end of the war
Ben-Gurion will explain the decision
not to fight over
the areas of Judea and Samaria.
"When we were faced with the question
of the whole country without a Jewish state
"or a Jewish state
without the whole country
"we chose the Jewish state
without the whole country."
David Ben-Gurion, 1949
So Israel lets the West Bank alone
and sets out to capture
the Western Negev in Operation Yoav.
Today's Ashdod
used to be Isdud,
today's Ashkelon
used to be Majdal
or Majdal Asqalan.
According to the Partition Plan
they were supposed to be in the Arab state
and they were still
under Arab control.
Beer Sheva
Dozens of villages,
more than 100,000 residents,
are expelled, and those who are not
expelled during the operation
are expelled later on.
Most of what was done in the Negev
was ethnic cleansing
and not expulsion during wartime.
It was after the defeat
of the Egyptian army
and you want territory
that you will use
for Jewish settlement.
More than two-thirds of the Gaza Strip's
population are refugees
who lived here in this area
beforehand, in the south,
and they had to see
the Jews taking over their villages,
their land,
they built cities
like Ashdod and Ashkelon
while they live in refugee camps.
After capturing the Negev
the IDF turns north, to the Galilee
where for the first time in the war
it has a hard-time making the Arabs flee.
The precedent was set
a few months earlier
when the Galilee's Arab capital, Nazareth,
was captured without any population movement.
Nazareth is a very, very important
Christian city in the world
and the Israeli leadership was convinced
that the world was watching,
specifically the Christian world.
So the operation order, which is issued
the day before, is very, very clear..
Don't do things in Nazareth
that were, done in other places,
like, for example, Lod-Ramle.
Therefore Nazareth remains
the only Arab city
that was not destroyed
and whose residents were not expelled.
This is already three months after
the Haifa expulsion
and some of Haifa's refugees
end up in Nazareth.
So the people of Nazareth saw with
their own eyes what refugeehood looks like,
what happens to you
when you leave your home.
Some of the city's residents,
Communists and others,
stood at the entrances to the city
and told people
who wanted to leave:
Go back, there's no reason to leave.
The residents of the Galilee understand
what the residents of Nazareth understood
and when Operation Hiram reaches their villages,
they're in no hurry to flee.
The Palestinians realized that
Israel won't let back whoever leaves.
No one believes anymore
that the Arab armies will come
and defeat the Israeli army
and the refugees will return,
that's why people stay put.
There is "Sumud," steadfastness,
to stay put on one's land, in one's home.
And then you have a situation,
much more than before,
where the IDF reaches the villages
and they're inhabited.
What do you do?
You don't want them to be there.
Operation Hiram - in one week
the IDF commits 12!
12 massacres
in peaceful Palestinian villages.
Most were committed
after the villages had been captured.
That's almost half of all the massacres
throughout the entire war.
There were many villages
that remained,
that's why we have a large
Arab minority in the Galilee to this day.
It's as if Ben-Gurion let the ground
do what it wanted.
When there were expulsions,
he didn't punish anyone.
When Arabs weren't expelled,
no one was punished either.
Meanwhile the UN continues
its efforts to end the fighting
and in December
it passes Resolution 194
which calls out to both sides to enter
negotiations on the same core issues
that are with us to this day:
The borders, the refugees, Jerusalem.
The IDF embarks on another campaign
in the south, Operation Horev,
which convinces the Egyptians
to accede to the UN's call.
The war that broke out in December 1947
ends in December 1948.
Poet Haim Gouri writes:
"Already a year, and we almost didn't notice
how the time has passed in our fields.
"Already a year, and few of us remain.
"So many are no longer among us."
Haim Gouri, 1948
During the war, Israel buried
almost 6,000 of its sons and daughters,
one percent
of the fledgling state's population.
On the other side
of the armistice lines
Palestinian poet
Taha Muhammad Ali writes:
"We did not weep when we were leaving,
for we had neither time nor tears.
"We did not know at the moment of parting
that it was a parting.
"So where would our weeping
have come from?"
Taha Muhammad Ali
In 1948
Palestinian society collapses
and the main manifestation
of that collapse
is the creation
of a huge refugee problem.
The most acceptable number
is 750,000 refugees.
Many of them end up in Gaza
and in the West Bank,
in refugee camps and villages
and about a third flees
to neighboring countries.
In Lebanon there are 90,000 refugees
at the end of the war,
in Syria 60,000,
in Transjordan more than 100,000.
Radio Ramallah reports:
"They are lying on old sacks and rags,
destitute.
"What can the girls do
with small brooms of twigs
"in classrooms
now holding 300 people?
"There won't be a drop of flour
left in Ramallah in three days."
Radio Ramallah, 1948
The Palestinian refugees hope
to return to their homes soon
but Israel has other plans.
At a very early stage of the war
they start destroying the houses
so that the refugees won't be able
to return to them.
There are places where deserted villages
are destroyed by local initiative,
there are places that a commission
recommends or takes action to destroy them,
there are places whose stones were taken
to build other towns.
They hand over land, fields,
orchards, etc., to Jewish hands,
to kibbutzim and moshavim
in different areas
so there was a local Jewish interest
not to allow the refugees to return.
Once the war is over,
Israel gives legal approval
to what's already happening
on the ground.
They conduct a population census
which lists 700,000 Jews
and 70,000 Arabs.
In the second enumeration
the number of Arabs will reach 150,000.
The population census which gives rights
to the Palestinians who remained
within the boundaries of the State of Israel
and turns them into its citizens,
determines who is not an Israeli citizen.
And when 80 percent of the Arabs
who lived within the territory that became
the State of Israel became refugees,
we know that they were here
and they're no longer here.
It's, that "they are not' returning,"
they're no longer here.
And then we have the question
regarding their property.
The property and land of those
Who weren't listed in the population census
Is handed to the state's guardian of
Absentee Property.
The Absentee Property Law says:
Anyone who left
their home, village, town,
their property and land will be
expropriated by the State of Israel.
Houses in the neighborhoods
of Haifa,
Ramle, Lod,
Jerusalem - Baqa and Talbieh,
Jaffa.
The whole country.
In cities and villages.
Then Jewish towns,
kibbutzim and moshavim are established,
they bring immigrants into these places
and build, they build a state.
We're taking about something
along the lines of
four million dunams of agricultural land
and 150,000 dunams of urban land.
Most are sold to
the Jewish National Fund (JNF)
and the JNF gives the land
only to Jewish towns, of course,
so that a tremendous amount
of private land
that once belonged to the Arabs
gradually becomes
the land of kibbutzim, moshavim
and peripheral towns.
So there's a golden opportunity here
that's very essential.
There are hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews
in Europe who need to be settled,
you have hundreds of thousand'
of Jews in Arab countries
whose situation is getting worse.
So here, this is the land.
Today the Arabs in Israel,
who make up 20 percent of the population,
own less than three percent
of the state's land.
97 percent was taken away
from the Arabs.
"We have to get rid of the Arab names
for political reasons
"because we do not recognize
the Arab possession of this country
"neither their spiritual possession
nor their names."
David Ben-Gurion, 1949
Bror Hayil
Nablus
Ramle
Tzova
In January 1949,
only one month after the end of the war,
Israel is already heading towards elections
in which the Arab citizens are also
allowed to vote and be elected,
but they are denied
most of the rest of their civil rights
by the martial law that rules them.
The State of Israel remains with
150,000-160,000 Arabs.'
The question is
what to do with them.
First thing -
We don't want them to act against us.
Second thing -
We don't want them to have
Palestinian national identity.
Third thing -
We can't deny the fact that they're Arabs.
So they try to create
what's called "an Israeli Arab."
And the people running things
are from the defense establishment.
The Shabak, military intelligence,
the police
and the martial law officials.
The Israeli army controls
all aspects of life.
Every time you leave
your home, your town,
if you go out to work
or to the hospital,
you need a permit
from the military governor.
The military governor could decide
to impose a curfew, administrative detention,
to deport people.
Under martial law,
a certain consciousness is created,
a consciousness of fear.
They monitor what people say,
what people write.
For example, if a teacher says,
"Look at these Jews,
"how they expelled hundreds
of thousands of our people,"
he'll be called in for questioning:
"Don't talk like that,
"you need to make a living.
"You don't have to talk about it,
it's not in the curriculum."
They make people understand
what can and cannot be said,
they make people realize
that if they want a building permit,
they have to behave.
A carrot-and-stick policy.
Whoever voted for Mapai
received benefits from the government.
And what "benefits"
are we talking about?
About a permit to leave the village,
about a work permit.
"Military Governor
Baqa al-Gharbiyye"
Despite the increasing public criticism
of the martial law,
it will only we lifted in 1966.
One year later the same martial law
will be re-imposed,
this time on the Arabs in the territories
that were occupied in the Six Day War.
They live under it
to this day.
Back to January 1949.
Right after the elections in Israel
talks begin in Rhodes under
the auspices of the UN regarding the borders
between Israel and its neighbors.
The talks will be held
with each Arab state separately.
The stateless Palestinians
will not participate.
In the midst of the talks
Israel sets out to capture Eilat
in Operation Uvda,
and then the border is drawn
with Egypt,
which gains control
over the Gaza Strip.
The talks with Syria
end with an agreement
that will leave the eastern shore
of Lake Kinneret as disputed territory.
Jordan gains sovereignty over
the territory in which it rules,
Judea and Samaria
and East Jerusalem,
but the Jordanians agree
to Israel's demands
to receive control
in the Little Triangle and Wadi Ara.
From Kafr Qasim,
Jaljulia, Tira, Tayibe
to Umm al-Fahm and its surroundings,
Wadi Ara,
that entire area hadn't been captured.
Israel had two main considerations.
They wanted to push the border
as far east as possible.
Because the southern villages
controlled the railroad
between Tel Aviv and Haifa
and the northern villages
were right on the Wadi Ara Road.
So if these areas were not
within the State of Israel,
strategic areas would be
cut off from one another.
The Armistice Line, which was agreed upon
at the talks in Rhodes,
was marked on the maps
with a green line.
T-H-E Green Line.
The Green Line implements
the partition idea
which is closer to the idea of the
Peel Commission from 1937
considering that a Palestinian state
wasn't established there,
but rather it was annexed to
the eastern side of the Jordan River
of one Arab state from both sides of
the Jordan River and a Jewish state.
That's 78 percent
of the territory
of Mandatory Palestine
as opposed to 55 percent that was
allocated to us in the Partition Plan.
The new State of Israel
is the optimization point
between these three goals
with the emphasis on the fact that this state
will be, first and foremost, a democratic state
and a state with a Jewish majority
while conceding
part of Mandatory Palestine,
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Zionist vision
has no Green Line.
The Jews in the Diaspora,
whether they were
in Fez or in Warsaw...
The landscape of the Land of Israel
isn't the landscape of the Coastal Plain.
It's the landscape of
the area known as Gav HaHar.
It's the route that goes through
Nablus, Beit El, Hebron
and of course Jerusalem
in the center.
And the same thing
on the Palestinian side.
Of course Acre is part of Palestine,
of course Jaffa is part of Palestine,
of course Beer Sheva
is part of Palestine,
it's all Palestine.
Not a single Palestinian
draws the map of Palestine
as a lump that's made up of the state of Gaza
and the state of the West Bank
and not a single Israeli
draws the map of Israel
without the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip.
On the other hand,
there's the realpolitik.
Is this our vision?
Is this our aspiration?
Of course not.
The Green Line provides
a partial solution to the refugee issue,
when King Abdullah
gives Jordanian citizenship
to the Palestinians
that are now under his rule.
The right of return
for all the refugees
is discussed at the conference
that the UN convenes in April
in Lausanne, Switzerland.
This time Israel- is sitting with
all the Arab representatives
including a Palestinian representative,
but from Jordan.
All the parties supposedly agree
on what Resolution 194
already determined.
"Refugees wishing to return to their homes
and live at peace with their neighbors
"should be permitted to do so
at the earliest practicable date.
"Compensation should be paid
for the property
"of those choosing not to return
under principles of international law."
From Resolution 194, 1949
The idea is to allow refugees
who want to live at peace
with their Jewish neighbors,
to return
at the earliest practicable date.
While the Palestinian side looks at
"the earliest date"
the Israeli side is talking about
"the earliest practicable date."
Secondly, it sets a prerequisite,
"refugees who wish to live at peace,"
so everything here is open
if you want to live at peace.
So we say,
the State of Israel,
"to live at peace" means when we have
peace agreements with all the Arab states.
When that happens, we can talk.
194 is a resolution of the General Assembly,
not the Security Council,
therefore it has no teeth,
and the fact is, this resolution
has repeated itself
almost every year since 1948
and nothing has happened with it.
It's not a resolution for action,
therefore you could say
that this resolution
refers to the principle
of the return of the refugees
in a positive manner,
but it doesn't lay down the law,
it doesn't decide on a date
and it doesn't compel
the State of Israel.
It's considered one of Israeli diplomacy's
most brilliant moves,
after the success of the Partition Plan.
Israel does not allow the return
of the Palestinian refugees,
but at the same time
takes in refugees of its own
and builds refugee camps
of its own.
They call the refugees "Olim"
and the camps "Maabarot."
During the war
Israel already took in
about 100,000 Holocaust survivors
and by 1951
the number of Olim to Israel
will reach the number of refugees that left,
about 700,000.
Just as Ben-Gurion envisioned
in the One Million Plan,
many of these Olim
come from Arab countries.
The Jewish communities
in Arab states,
their status is completely undermined
due to the war
and the Arab governments
around Israel
see the Jews in their countries
as a potential fifth column.
What happened to the Jews of Iraq
and later on
to the Jews of Morocco
is that there are two national movements
who want them to leave.
It's not only that
the Iraqis expelled them,
the Zionists pulled them
and the Iraqis pushed them.
About 800,000 Jews
abandon their homes in Arab states
and then Israel says:
This was actually a population transfer.
Jews left Arab states
and Arabs left the Land of Israel
to Arab states.
Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett says:
"The question of Arab return can be decided only as
part of a peace settlement with Arab states
"when the question of confiscation of Jewish property
in neighboring countries and their future will also be raised.
Moshe Sharett, 1948
Part of this claim
is the denial of the Palestinians' entity
as a political entity,
because in order to say
it is a population transfer,
you have to say that on one hand
the Jews are part of the nation
that has the right to a state
in Mandatory Palestine
and on the other hand
the Palestinians are just Arabs
and they can be anywhere.
A refugee, by definition, is a person
who wants to return to his homeland.
The Jews who live here in Israel
who came from the Arab world,
don't want to go back
to their homeland.
Once the Jews of Iraq...
and the Jews of Morocco and Yemen,
each in their own way,
accept the Zionist idea,
it means they're coming
to their homeland.
So it creates
a very strange case here
where you have refugees
coming to their homeland
and we know that the second
and third generations won't be refugees.
But not the Palestinians.
Not the Palestinians.
The aim,
and this is what Ben-Gurion says,
is that the second and third generations
will forget they're Palestinians.
He says something like that.
The children, the grandchildren
will forget Palestine.
But they don't forget.
Because they're not homeland refugees,
they're outside their homeland.
Even if some of the Palestinian refugees
are willing to adopt a new homeland,
most of the countries that accept them
don't give them that possibility.
Syria doesn't give them citizenship,
but they have the right to work.
Lebanon doesn't give them citizenship
or enable them to work legally.
In Lebanon the refugees' situation
is the worst of all Arab states.
The Maronite Christian government
doesn't want the Palestinian refugees
because most of them
are Sunni Muslims.
You can't refer to Arab countries
as countries that embraced
the Palestinian state
and promoted the Palestinian interest.
Arab countries have a political interest
in keeping the refugees
refugees
and they use it
as a political wrangling
without any interest
in the refugees themselves,
but practically speaking
these countries didn't have the resources
to deal with 700,000 refugees
even if they wanted to,
and I don't think they did.
That's how we should understand
the refugee camps,
their goal is to keep
the Palestinian issue alive.
Israel really doesn't like it
because Israel wants
the Palestinian issue to die out.
Since no one assumes
responsibility for the refugees
the UN takes them under their care
through UNRWA.
What was supposed to be a temporary solution
is now dealing with fourth-generation refugees.
Anyone who was forced
to leave Palestine in 1948
and the following generations
are refugees,
because they still haven't agreed
to give up their right to return.
Israel objects to this definition,
that's part of Israel's claims
against UNRWA,
that by registering
the later generations
they are perpetuating the problem,
but for the Palestinians
it's a very clear-cut issue.
As long as these generations
want to return, they are refugees.
Today, there are about five million,
six million Palestinian refugees
registered by the UN.
The children, the grandchildren,
the great-grandchildren
of the refugees from 1948.
Like the number of refugees,
the rest of the questions
that were left open in 1948
have only multiplied.
The border issue claimed and
is still claiming countless victims,
the holy places continue
to fuel the conflict
and the refugees... are still refugees.
The wars that are yet to come,
first and foremost the Six Day War,
won't solve any of these problems.
They may even make them worse.
70 years after the Armistice Agreement
in Rhodes
and no one has laid down their arms
for a moment.
Israel still feels as if it is
in the midst of a war of independence
and the Palestinians are still trying
to right the wrongs of the Nakba.
Is it possible to settle things
between these two narratives?
Is it possible to reach a situation
where Israel acknowledges the fact
that Ashdod was once Isdud
and the Palestinians will accept
the fact that Isdud is now Ashdod?
---
Northern Ireland, Vietnam,
Korea, Falkland Islands, Bangladesh.
the Iran-Iraq War,
the Greco-Turkish War,
the First and Second World Wars...
These are just some of the conflicts
that broke out and ended
while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
goes on and on.
What is it about our conflict
that won't enable it to end?
Is what happened between us
so unforgivable and unsolvable?
We deserve full rights!
Let's go back to this story again,
but we'll try to tell it
not like it's told in an argument,
but like it's told in... a lesson.
Let's call it a refresher lesson.
Let's call it a Homeland Lesson.
Israelis still shy away
from this word, Nakba.
It also took the Palestinian several years
to adopt and distribute it.
But Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq
chose it back in the summer of 1948.
Even before the fighting was over,
he wrote:
The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine
is not a small downfall - Naksa.
"It is a catastrophe - Nakba -
in every sense of the word."
Constantin Zureiq, 1948
Nakba in Arabic means disaster,
catastrophe.
In the summer of 1948 the Arabs and
Palestinians already realized there's a Nakba,
there's a catastrophe,
there are refugees,
Israel refuses to take them back,
there is no Palestinian state,
there's a Jewish state.
Seven Arab states declare war
on Zionism in Palestine
and then turn on their heels.
"A land robbed from its residents.
"The uprooting and the expulsion,
which characterized the Jewish fate
"have now become
the fate of the Arabs."
Constantin Zureiq, 1948
He wasn't the only one
who realized at this stage
that this tremendous defeat
couldn't only be
the Zionists' fault.
Not just the Palestinians
but all the Arabs
need to do some soul-searching
and think about it.
It was as if several countries
fought against the Jews,
but each country had its own interest
and acted in its own way.
Zureiq realizes
that it is a Nakba,
but UN peace envoy,
Count Bernadotte,
tries to turn the wheel back,
go back to the Partition borders
and return the refugees to their homes.
In response,
Lehi operatives assassinate him.
Israel starts regarding Bernadotte
a hater of Israel,
although he was the opposite of that,
and that he's trying to force conditions
on Israel that it doesn't want -
the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees
as a condition for peace between the two sides.
The fact that he was
assassinated indicates
the fear that the UN would compel
a solution for peace
and stop the war.
The Palestinians aren't happy
with Bernadotte's plan either.
They're mainly concerned about his suggestion
to hand over the Arab part of Palestine
to Abdullah, King of Jordan.
In response, the Palestinians
finally establish themselves a state
that will demand sovereignty
over the land.
In late September, the All-Palestine Government
declares its establishment
and appoints Haj Amin al-Husseini
its president.
All-Palestine issues passports
and declares Jerusalem as its capital
although its parliament
is located in Gaza.
The Palestinian national movement
manages to recruit
78 members to parliament.
This government gets to work.
It has a budget,
it has the support of the Arab League
and several Arab states,
but then the war resumes.
The government itself, its ministers,
flee from Gaza to Cairo.
Indeed, the war resumes in October
when Israel sets out
to expand its borders
to those determined
in the Partition Plan.
There is a three-month truce,
there is no existential threat
on the State of Israel.
The Arab armies can't do anything
to the State of Israel,
the Palestinian forces
are completely crushed,
the, State of Israel is interested
in breaking the truce.
The idea is to expand its borders
as much as possible.
The considerations are security-related
in the first stage,
in the second stage they're more
related to the demographic balance.
There are two approaches.
One approach says:
We have no problem capturing
all the western part of the Land of Israel
and reach the Jordan River.
And another approach that says:
There's no need to go too far
in expanding,
we do need to leave territory
west of the Jordan
for Palestinian population,
because if we capture that territory,
all the refugees that left
will be under our control again.
So it's that argument
of demography against geography.
At the end of the war
Ben-Gurion will explain the decision
not to fight over
the areas of Judea and Samaria.
"When we were faced with the question
of the whole country without a Jewish state
"or a Jewish state
without the whole country
"we chose the Jewish state
without the whole country."
David Ben-Gurion, 1949
So Israel lets the West Bank alone
and sets out to capture
the Western Negev in Operation Yoav.
Today's Ashdod
used to be Isdud,
today's Ashkelon
used to be Majdal
or Majdal Asqalan.
According to the Partition Plan
they were supposed to be in the Arab state
and they were still
under Arab control.
Beer Sheva
Dozens of villages,
more than 100,000 residents,
are expelled, and those who are not
expelled during the operation
are expelled later on.
Most of what was done in the Negev
was ethnic cleansing
and not expulsion during wartime.
It was after the defeat
of the Egyptian army
and you want territory
that you will use
for Jewish settlement.
More than two-thirds of the Gaza Strip's
population are refugees
who lived here in this area
beforehand, in the south,
and they had to see
the Jews taking over their villages,
their land,
they built cities
like Ashdod and Ashkelon
while they live in refugee camps.
After capturing the Negev
the IDF turns north, to the Galilee
where for the first time in the war
it has a hard-time making the Arabs flee.
The precedent was set
a few months earlier
when the Galilee's Arab capital, Nazareth,
was captured without any population movement.
Nazareth is a very, very important
Christian city in the world
and the Israeli leadership was convinced
that the world was watching,
specifically the Christian world.
So the operation order, which is issued
the day before, is very, very clear..
Don't do things in Nazareth
that were, done in other places,
like, for example, Lod-Ramle.
Therefore Nazareth remains
the only Arab city
that was not destroyed
and whose residents were not expelled.
This is already three months after
the Haifa expulsion
and some of Haifa's refugees
end up in Nazareth.
So the people of Nazareth saw with
their own eyes what refugeehood looks like,
what happens to you
when you leave your home.
Some of the city's residents,
Communists and others,
stood at the entrances to the city
and told people
who wanted to leave:
Go back, there's no reason to leave.
The residents of the Galilee understand
what the residents of Nazareth understood
and when Operation Hiram reaches their villages,
they're in no hurry to flee.
The Palestinians realized that
Israel won't let back whoever leaves.
No one believes anymore
that the Arab armies will come
and defeat the Israeli army
and the refugees will return,
that's why people stay put.
There is "Sumud," steadfastness,
to stay put on one's land, in one's home.
And then you have a situation,
much more than before,
where the IDF reaches the villages
and they're inhabited.
What do you do?
You don't want them to be there.
Operation Hiram - in one week
the IDF commits 12!
12 massacres
in peaceful Palestinian villages.
Most were committed
after the villages had been captured.
That's almost half of all the massacres
throughout the entire war.
There were many villages
that remained,
that's why we have a large
Arab minority in the Galilee to this day.
It's as if Ben-Gurion let the ground
do what it wanted.
When there were expulsions,
he didn't punish anyone.
When Arabs weren't expelled,
no one was punished either.
Meanwhile the UN continues
its efforts to end the fighting
and in December
it passes Resolution 194
which calls out to both sides to enter
negotiations on the same core issues
that are with us to this day:
The borders, the refugees, Jerusalem.
The IDF embarks on another campaign
in the south, Operation Horev,
which convinces the Egyptians
to accede to the UN's call.
The war that broke out in December 1947
ends in December 1948.
Poet Haim Gouri writes:
"Already a year, and we almost didn't notice
how the time has passed in our fields.
"Already a year, and few of us remain.
"So many are no longer among us."
Haim Gouri, 1948
During the war, Israel buried
almost 6,000 of its sons and daughters,
one percent
of the fledgling state's population.
On the other side
of the armistice lines
Palestinian poet
Taha Muhammad Ali writes:
"We did not weep when we were leaving,
for we had neither time nor tears.
"We did not know at the moment of parting
that it was a parting.
"So where would our weeping
have come from?"
Taha Muhammad Ali
In 1948
Palestinian society collapses
and the main manifestation
of that collapse
is the creation
of a huge refugee problem.
The most acceptable number
is 750,000 refugees.
Many of them end up in Gaza
and in the West Bank,
in refugee camps and villages
and about a third flees
to neighboring countries.
In Lebanon there are 90,000 refugees
at the end of the war,
in Syria 60,000,
in Transjordan more than 100,000.
Radio Ramallah reports:
"They are lying on old sacks and rags,
destitute.
"What can the girls do
with small brooms of twigs
"in classrooms
now holding 300 people?
"There won't be a drop of flour
left in Ramallah in three days."
Radio Ramallah, 1948
The Palestinian refugees hope
to return to their homes soon
but Israel has other plans.
At a very early stage of the war
they start destroying the houses
so that the refugees won't be able
to return to them.
There are places where deserted villages
are destroyed by local initiative,
there are places that a commission
recommends or takes action to destroy them,
there are places whose stones were taken
to build other towns.
They hand over land, fields,
orchards, etc., to Jewish hands,
to kibbutzim and moshavim
in different areas
so there was a local Jewish interest
not to allow the refugees to return.
Once the war is over,
Israel gives legal approval
to what's already happening
on the ground.
They conduct a population census
which lists 700,000 Jews
and 70,000 Arabs.
In the second enumeration
the number of Arabs will reach 150,000.
The population census which gives rights
to the Palestinians who remained
within the boundaries of the State of Israel
and turns them into its citizens,
determines who is not an Israeli citizen.
And when 80 percent of the Arabs
who lived within the territory that became
the State of Israel became refugees,
we know that they were here
and they're no longer here.
It's, that "they are not' returning,"
they're no longer here.
And then we have the question
regarding their property.
The property and land of those
Who weren't listed in the population census
Is handed to the state's guardian of
Absentee Property.
The Absentee Property Law says:
Anyone who left
their home, village, town,
their property and land will be
expropriated by the State of Israel.
Houses in the neighborhoods
of Haifa,
Ramle, Lod,
Jerusalem - Baqa and Talbieh,
Jaffa.
The whole country.
In cities and villages.
Then Jewish towns,
kibbutzim and moshavim are established,
they bring immigrants into these places
and build, they build a state.
We're taking about something
along the lines of
four million dunams of agricultural land
and 150,000 dunams of urban land.
Most are sold to
the Jewish National Fund (JNF)
and the JNF gives the land
only to Jewish towns, of course,
so that a tremendous amount
of private land
that once belonged to the Arabs
gradually becomes
the land of kibbutzim, moshavim
and peripheral towns.
So there's a golden opportunity here
that's very essential.
There are hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews
in Europe who need to be settled,
you have hundreds of thousand'
of Jews in Arab countries
whose situation is getting worse.
So here, this is the land.
Today the Arabs in Israel,
who make up 20 percent of the population,
own less than three percent
of the state's land.
97 percent was taken away
from the Arabs.
"We have to get rid of the Arab names
for political reasons
"because we do not recognize
the Arab possession of this country
"neither their spiritual possession
nor their names."
David Ben-Gurion, 1949
Bror Hayil
Nablus
Ramle
Tzova
In January 1949,
only one month after the end of the war,
Israel is already heading towards elections
in which the Arab citizens are also
allowed to vote and be elected,
but they are denied
most of the rest of their civil rights
by the martial law that rules them.
The State of Israel remains with
150,000-160,000 Arabs.'
The question is
what to do with them.
First thing -
We don't want them to act against us.
Second thing -
We don't want them to have
Palestinian national identity.
Third thing -
We can't deny the fact that they're Arabs.
So they try to create
what's called "an Israeli Arab."
And the people running things
are from the defense establishment.
The Shabak, military intelligence,
the police
and the martial law officials.
The Israeli army controls
all aspects of life.
Every time you leave
your home, your town,
if you go out to work
or to the hospital,
you need a permit
from the military governor.
The military governor could decide
to impose a curfew, administrative detention,
to deport people.
Under martial law,
a certain consciousness is created,
a consciousness of fear.
They monitor what people say,
what people write.
For example, if a teacher says,
"Look at these Jews,
"how they expelled hundreds
of thousands of our people,"
he'll be called in for questioning:
"Don't talk like that,
"you need to make a living.
"You don't have to talk about it,
it's not in the curriculum."
They make people understand
what can and cannot be said,
they make people realize
that if they want a building permit,
they have to behave.
A carrot-and-stick policy.
Whoever voted for Mapai
received benefits from the government.
And what "benefits"
are we talking about?
About a permit to leave the village,
about a work permit.
"Military Governor
Baqa al-Gharbiyye"
Despite the increasing public criticism
of the martial law,
it will only we lifted in 1966.
One year later the same martial law
will be re-imposed,
this time on the Arabs in the territories
that were occupied in the Six Day War.
They live under it
to this day.
Back to January 1949.
Right after the elections in Israel
talks begin in Rhodes under
the auspices of the UN regarding the borders
between Israel and its neighbors.
The talks will be held
with each Arab state separately.
The stateless Palestinians
will not participate.
In the midst of the talks
Israel sets out to capture Eilat
in Operation Uvda,
and then the border is drawn
with Egypt,
which gains control
over the Gaza Strip.
The talks with Syria
end with an agreement
that will leave the eastern shore
of Lake Kinneret as disputed territory.
Jordan gains sovereignty over
the territory in which it rules,
Judea and Samaria
and East Jerusalem,
but the Jordanians agree
to Israel's demands
to receive control
in the Little Triangle and Wadi Ara.
From Kafr Qasim,
Jaljulia, Tira, Tayibe
to Umm al-Fahm and its surroundings,
Wadi Ara,
that entire area hadn't been captured.
Israel had two main considerations.
They wanted to push the border
as far east as possible.
Because the southern villages
controlled the railroad
between Tel Aviv and Haifa
and the northern villages
were right on the Wadi Ara Road.
So if these areas were not
within the State of Israel,
strategic areas would be
cut off from one another.
The Armistice Line, which was agreed upon
at the talks in Rhodes,
was marked on the maps
with a green line.
T-H-E Green Line.
The Green Line implements
the partition idea
which is closer to the idea of the
Peel Commission from 1937
considering that a Palestinian state
wasn't established there,
but rather it was annexed to
the eastern side of the Jordan River
of one Arab state from both sides of
the Jordan River and a Jewish state.
That's 78 percent
of the territory
of Mandatory Palestine
as opposed to 55 percent that was
allocated to us in the Partition Plan.
The new State of Israel
is the optimization point
between these three goals
with the emphasis on the fact that this state
will be, first and foremost, a democratic state
and a state with a Jewish majority
while conceding
part of Mandatory Palestine,
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Zionist vision
has no Green Line.
The Jews in the Diaspora,
whether they were
in Fez or in Warsaw...
The landscape of the Land of Israel
isn't the landscape of the Coastal Plain.
It's the landscape of
the area known as Gav HaHar.
It's the route that goes through
Nablus, Beit El, Hebron
and of course Jerusalem
in the center.
And the same thing
on the Palestinian side.
Of course Acre is part of Palestine,
of course Jaffa is part of Palestine,
of course Beer Sheva
is part of Palestine,
it's all Palestine.
Not a single Palestinian
draws the map of Palestine
as a lump that's made up of the state of Gaza
and the state of the West Bank
and not a single Israeli
draws the map of Israel
without the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip.
On the other hand,
there's the realpolitik.
Is this our vision?
Is this our aspiration?
Of course not.
The Green Line provides
a partial solution to the refugee issue,
when King Abdullah
gives Jordanian citizenship
to the Palestinians
that are now under his rule.
The right of return
for all the refugees
is discussed at the conference
that the UN convenes in April
in Lausanne, Switzerland.
This time Israel- is sitting with
all the Arab representatives
including a Palestinian representative,
but from Jordan.
All the parties supposedly agree
on what Resolution 194
already determined.
"Refugees wishing to return to their homes
and live at peace with their neighbors
"should be permitted to do so
at the earliest practicable date.
"Compensation should be paid
for the property
"of those choosing not to return
under principles of international law."
From Resolution 194, 1949
The idea is to allow refugees
who want to live at peace
with their Jewish neighbors,
to return
at the earliest practicable date.
While the Palestinian side looks at
"the earliest date"
the Israeli side is talking about
"the earliest practicable date."
Secondly, it sets a prerequisite,
"refugees who wish to live at peace,"
so everything here is open
if you want to live at peace.
So we say,
the State of Israel,
"to live at peace" means when we have
peace agreements with all the Arab states.
When that happens, we can talk.
194 is a resolution of the General Assembly,
not the Security Council,
therefore it has no teeth,
and the fact is, this resolution
has repeated itself
almost every year since 1948
and nothing has happened with it.
It's not a resolution for action,
therefore you could say
that this resolution
refers to the principle
of the return of the refugees
in a positive manner,
but it doesn't lay down the law,
it doesn't decide on a date
and it doesn't compel
the State of Israel.
It's considered one of Israeli diplomacy's
most brilliant moves,
after the success of the Partition Plan.
Israel does not allow the return
of the Palestinian refugees,
but at the same time
takes in refugees of its own
and builds refugee camps
of its own.
They call the refugees "Olim"
and the camps "Maabarot."
During the war
Israel already took in
about 100,000 Holocaust survivors
and by 1951
the number of Olim to Israel
will reach the number of refugees that left,
about 700,000.
Just as Ben-Gurion envisioned
in the One Million Plan,
many of these Olim
come from Arab countries.
The Jewish communities
in Arab states,
their status is completely undermined
due to the war
and the Arab governments
around Israel
see the Jews in their countries
as a potential fifth column.
What happened to the Jews of Iraq
and later on
to the Jews of Morocco
is that there are two national movements
who want them to leave.
It's not only that
the Iraqis expelled them,
the Zionists pulled them
and the Iraqis pushed them.
About 800,000 Jews
abandon their homes in Arab states
and then Israel says:
This was actually a population transfer.
Jews left Arab states
and Arabs left the Land of Israel
to Arab states.
Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett says:
"The question of Arab return can be decided only as
part of a peace settlement with Arab states
"when the question of confiscation of Jewish property
in neighboring countries and their future will also be raised.
Moshe Sharett, 1948
Part of this claim
is the denial of the Palestinians' entity
as a political entity,
because in order to say
it is a population transfer,
you have to say that on one hand
the Jews are part of the nation
that has the right to a state
in Mandatory Palestine
and on the other hand
the Palestinians are just Arabs
and they can be anywhere.
A refugee, by definition, is a person
who wants to return to his homeland.
The Jews who live here in Israel
who came from the Arab world,
don't want to go back
to their homeland.
Once the Jews of Iraq...
and the Jews of Morocco and Yemen,
each in their own way,
accept the Zionist idea,
it means they're coming
to their homeland.
So it creates
a very strange case here
where you have refugees
coming to their homeland
and we know that the second
and third generations won't be refugees.
But not the Palestinians.
Not the Palestinians.
The aim,
and this is what Ben-Gurion says,
is that the second and third generations
will forget they're Palestinians.
He says something like that.
The children, the grandchildren
will forget Palestine.
But they don't forget.
Because they're not homeland refugees,
they're outside their homeland.
Even if some of the Palestinian refugees
are willing to adopt a new homeland,
most of the countries that accept them
don't give them that possibility.
Syria doesn't give them citizenship,
but they have the right to work.
Lebanon doesn't give them citizenship
or enable them to work legally.
In Lebanon the refugees' situation
is the worst of all Arab states.
The Maronite Christian government
doesn't want the Palestinian refugees
because most of them
are Sunni Muslims.
You can't refer to Arab countries
as countries that embraced
the Palestinian state
and promoted the Palestinian interest.
Arab countries have a political interest
in keeping the refugees
refugees
and they use it
as a political wrangling
without any interest
in the refugees themselves,
but practically speaking
these countries didn't have the resources
to deal with 700,000 refugees
even if they wanted to,
and I don't think they did.
That's how we should understand
the refugee camps,
their goal is to keep
the Palestinian issue alive.
Israel really doesn't like it
because Israel wants
the Palestinian issue to die out.
Since no one assumes
responsibility for the refugees
the UN takes them under their care
through UNRWA.
What was supposed to be a temporary solution
is now dealing with fourth-generation refugees.
Anyone who was forced
to leave Palestine in 1948
and the following generations
are refugees,
because they still haven't agreed
to give up their right to return.
Israel objects to this definition,
that's part of Israel's claims
against UNRWA,
that by registering
the later generations
they are perpetuating the problem,
but for the Palestinians
it's a very clear-cut issue.
As long as these generations
want to return, they are refugees.
Today, there are about five million,
six million Palestinian refugees
registered by the UN.
The children, the grandchildren,
the great-grandchildren
of the refugees from 1948.
Like the number of refugees,
the rest of the questions
that were left open in 1948
have only multiplied.
The border issue claimed and
is still claiming countless victims,
the holy places continue
to fuel the conflict
and the refugees... are still refugees.
The wars that are yet to come,
first and foremost the Six Day War,
won't solve any of these problems.
They may even make them worse.
70 years after the Armistice Agreement
in Rhodes
and no one has laid down their arms
for a moment.
Israel still feels as if it is
in the midst of a war of independence
and the Palestinians are still trying
to right the wrongs of the Nakba.
Is it possible to settle things
between these two narratives?
Is it possible to reach a situation
where Israel acknowledges the fact
that Ashdod was once Isdud
and the Palestinians will accept
the fact that Isdud is now Ashdod?