Refugees: History in the Writing: choose your interpretation…or accept ALL the facts?

FRENCH MANDATE > SYRIA

In English, the name Syria was formerly synonymous with the Levant, known in Arabic as Sham. The modern state encompasses the sites of several ancient kingdoms and empires. In the Islamic era, its capital city, Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate, and a provincial capital of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt.

The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt was the last time this area was independent until the Muhammad Ali Dynasty was set up in 1805. It lasted from the overthrow of the Ayyubid Dynasty until the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517. At its height the sultanate represented the zenith of Egyptian and Levantine political, economic, and cultural glory in the Islamic era.

The Syrian economy did not flourish under the Ottomans. At times attempts were made to rebuild the country shattered by the Mongols, but on the whole Syria remained poor. The population decreased by nearly 30%, and hundreds of villages disappeared into the desert. By the end of the C18th only one-eighth of the villages were still inhabited. It was an ignored area.

Things changed once geologists anticipated oil reserves in the region. In the midst of WWI, two Allied diplomats (Frenchman François Georges-Picot and Briton Mark Sykes) secretly agreed on the post war division of the Ottoman Empire into respective zones of influence. The Sykes–Picot Agreement divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire [outside the Arabian peninsula] into areas of future British and French control or influence. The Russian Tsarist government was a minor party to the Sykes-Picot agreement and when, following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolsheviks exposed the agreement, 'the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted.'

The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 set the fate of Southwest Asia for the coming century; providing France with the northern zone (Syria, including what would become the state of Lebanon), and the United Kingdom with the southern one (Iraq and later, after renegotiations in 1917, Palestine, including what would become the state of Jordan, 'to secure daily transportation of troops from Haifa to Baghdad'. The two territories were separated by only a straight border line from Jordan to Iran. Early discoveries of oil in the Mosul led to negotiation with France in 1918 to cede this region the British zone of influence. In 1920, the two sides were recognized by the League of Nations. The Syrian state was established as a French mandate, and was the largest Arab state to emerge from the Ottoman Empire.

BRITISH PALESTINIAN MANDATE > ISRAEL & PALESTINE

The Sykes-Picot agreement was not the only document signed by a British official of that era. The Balfour Declaration was a 1917 letter from the UK's Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland: ‘His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

Apparently, Balfour was allowed to go ahead with his support of the Zionist cause in order to ensure that the Jews resident in that section of the Ottoman Empire continued to work for the British war effort. Note that in both world wars, Jews [populations and leaders] living in the Ottoman Levant and later the British Mandate consistently backed the British position, while Arabic and Turkish leaders [not necessarily populations] consistently backed the German position, and nearing the end of both wars switched sides in order to be able to participate in the post-war treaties and international bodies [League of Nations, United Nations]. British interests lined up with the Arabic leaders once oil was discovered in those regions, as the technology for extricating undersea oil was decades away, and upcoming Arabic families were glad to comply.

The Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the Sèvres peace treaty with Turkey and the Mandate for Palestine, both in 1920, in order to appease the Jewish population in the Levant. Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, the principal Zionist l eaders based in London, had asked for the reconstitution of Palestine as "the" Jewish national home. As such, the declaration fell short of Zionist expectations. There was no benefit to the British Empire to set up a Jewish homeland at once in the Levant, as it would alienate the agitated and agitating Arab leaders.

Immediately following the publication Germany entered negotiations with Turkey to put forward counter proposals. A German-Jewish Society was formed: Vereinigung jüdischer Organisationen Deutschlands zur Wahrung der Rechte der Juden des Ostens (V.J.O.D.) and in January 1918 the Turkish Grand Vizier, Talaat, issued a statement which promised legislation by which "all justifiable wishes of the Jews in Palestine would be able to find their fulfilment". German Jewry by and large had no interest in a separate homeland – this was being propelled by the Russian and French Jewish leaders who had experienced anti-Semitism strongly at ‘home’.

The Arabs expressed disapproval in November 1918 at the parade marking the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The Muslim-Christian Association protested the carrying of new "white and blue banners with two inverted triangles in the middle". They drew the attention of the authorities to the serious consequences of any political implications in raising the banners. It is necessary to note here that the Christian population in the Arabic countries has mostly been a forgotten group, by Muslims and Jews and Christians worldwide.

Later that month, on the first anniversary of the occupation of Jaffa by the British, the Muslim-Christian Association sent a lengthy petition to the military governor protesting once more any formation of a Jewish state. The large group of Palestinian Arab dignitaries and representatives of political associations addressed a petition to the British authorities in which they denounced the declaration. The document stated:’...we always sympathized profoundly with the persecuted Jews and their misfortunes in other countries... but there is wide difference between such sympathy and the acceptance of such a nation...ruling over us and disposing of our affairs.’

British public and government opinion became increasingly less favourable to the commitment that had been made to Zionist policy. In February 1922, Winston Churchill telegraphed Herbert Samuel asking for cuts in expenditure and noting: ‘In both Houses of Parliament there is growing movement of hostility, against Zionist policy in Palestine, which will be stimulated by recent Northcliffe articles. I do not attach undue importance to this movement, but it is increasingly difficult to meet the argument that it is unfair to ask the British taxpayer, already overwhelmed with taxation, to bear the cost of imposing on Palestine an unpopular policy.’

This is the background to the conflict which erupted after the second world war between two peoples who aspired to control each its own destiny in the same area of land which had seen two empires dispose of those aspirations. Independence for a people, for a nation, means being able to decide for oneself the path to take and how to take that path in the midst of other peoples.

Empires tend to cover and often to obliterate ethnic, cultural and religious differences under an umbrella set up into and by a distant capital, which has empirical concerns for the whole and not the parts, or even the sum of the parts. When those ancient parts lose the umbrella and are in the sun and rain for themselves – what happens?

What if the peoples have never had statehood before, or when they did it was so far in the past that the habit of self-governing has long been lost?

((Manaf Hassan takes final hour for Syria 2000>}}

The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, known to Israelis as the War of Independence, was fought between the State of Israel and a military coalition of Arab states and Palestinian Arab forces.

The war was preceded by a period of civil war in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine between Jewish Yishuv forces and Palestinian Arab forces in response to the UN Partition Plan. Upon the termination of the Mandate at midnight on 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, on behalf of the Yishuv, declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel. An alliance of Arab States intervened on the Palestinian side, turning the civil war into a war between sovereign states. The fighting took place mostly on the former territory of the British Mandate and for a short time also in the Sinai Peninsula and southern Lebanon. The war concluded with the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which established Armistice Demarcation Lines between Israeli and Arab military forces, commonly known as the Green Line.

**

Following World War II, on 14 May 1948, the British Mandate of Palestine came to an end. The surrounding Arab nations were also emerging from mandatory rule. Transjordan, under the Hashemite ruler Abdullah I, gained independence from Britain in 1946 and was called Jordan, but it remained under heavy British influence. Egypt, while nominally independent, signed the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 that included provisions by which Britain would maintain a garrison of troops on the Suez Canal. From 1945 on, Egypt attempted to renegotiate the terms of this treaty, which was viewed as a humiliating vestige of colonialism.^] Lebanon became an independent state in 1943, but French troops would not withdraw until 1946, the same year that Syria won its independence from France.

In 1945, at British prompting, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Transjordan, and Yemen formed the Arab League to coordinate policy between the Arab states. Iraq and Transjordan coordinated policies closely, signing a mutual defence treaty, while Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia feared that Transjordan would annex part or all of Palestine, and use it as a basis to attack or undermine Syria, Lebanon, and the Hijaz.

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending the adoption and implementation of a plan to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict by partitioning Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, and the City of Jerusalem. Each state would comprise three major sections, linked by extraterritorial crossroads; the Arab state would also have an enclave at Jaffa. The Jews would get 56% of the land, of which most was in the Negev Desert; their area would contain 499,000 Jews and 438,000 Arabs. The Palestinian Arabs would get 42% of the land, which had a population of 818,000 Palestinian Arabs and 10,000 Jews. In consideration of its religious significance, the Jerusalem area, including Bethlehem, with 100,000 Jews and an equal number of Palestinian Arabs, was to become a Corpus separatum, to be administered by the UN. The Jewish leadership accepted the partition plan, without reservation, as "the indispensable minimum," glad to gain international recognition but sorry that they did not receive more.

Arguing that the partition plan was unfair to the Arabs with regard to the population balance at that time, the representatives of the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab League firmly opposed the UN action and rejected its authority to involve itself in the entire matter. They upheld "that the rule of Palestine should revert to its inhabitants, in accordance with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations."

The 1947–1948 civil war in mandatory Palestine lasted from 30 November 1947, the date of the United Nations vote in favour of the termination of the British Mandate of Palestine and the UN Partition Plan, to the termination of the British Mandate on 14 May 1948. During this period the Jewish and Arab communities of Palestine clashed, while the British, who had the obligation to maintain order, organised their withdrawal and intervened only on an occasional basis.

Arab Palestinians left the country in large numbers, especially after Jewish forces took the major seaport of Haifa in April 1948. On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel. At this point the conflict became an outright war between the new State of Israel and its Arab neighbours.

Benny Morris states that the Yishuv's aims evolved during the war.

Initially, the aim was "simple and modest": to survive the assaults of the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states. "The Zionist leaders deeply, genuinely, feared a Middle Eastern re-enactment of the Holocaust, which had just ended; the Arabs' public rhetoric reinforced these fears". As the war progressed, the aim of expanding the Jewish state beyond the UN partition borders appeared: first to incorporate clusters of isolated Jewish settlements and later to add more territories to the state and give it defensible borders. A third and further aim that emerged among the political and military leaders after four or five months was to "reduce the size of Israel's prospective large and hostile Arab minority, seen as a potential powerful fifth column, by belligerency and expulsion."

Plan Dalet, or Plan D, was a plan worked out by the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary group and the forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces, in autumn 1947 to spring 1948, which was sent to Haganah units in early March 1948. According to the academic Ilan Pappe, its purpose was to conquer as much of Palestine and to expel as many Palestinians as possible, though according to Benny Morris there was no such intent. In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Ilan Pappé asserts that Plan Dalet was a "blueprint for ethnic cleansing":....this... blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go... The aim of the plan was in fact the destruction of both rural and urban areas of Palestine. The intent of Plan Dalet is subject to much controversy, with historians on the one extreme asserting that it was entirely defensive, and historians on the other extreme asserting that the plan aimed at maximum conquest and expulsion of the Palestinians.”

King Abdullah I of Jordan

King Abdullah was the commander of the Arab Legion, the strongest Arab army involved in the war.^] The Arab Legion had about 10,000 soldiers, trained and commanded by British officers.

In 1946–47, Abdullah said that he had no intention to "resist or impede the partition of Palestine and creation of a Jewish state." Hostile towards Palestinian nationalism, Abdullah wished to annex as much of Palestine as possible. Ideally, Abdullah would have liked to annex all of Palestine, but he was prepared to compromise. He supported the partition, intending that the West Bank area of the British Mandate allocated for Palestine be annexed to Jordan. Abdullah had secret meetings with the Jewish Agency (at which the future Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was among the delegates) that reached an agreement of Jewish non-interference with Jordanian annexation of the West Bank (although Abdullah failed in his goal of acquiring an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea through the Negev desert) and of Jordanian agreement not to attack the area of the Jewish state contained in the United Nations partition resolution (in which Jerusalem was given neither to the Arab nor the Jewish state, but was to be an internationally administered area). In one stunning diplomatic coup, the strongest Arab army agreed not to attack the Jewish state. However, by 1948, the neighbouring Arab states pressured Abdullah into joining them in an "all-Arab military intervention" against the newly created State of Israel, that he used to restore his prestige in the Arab world, which had grown suspicious of his relatively good relationship with Western and Jewish leaders.

Abdullah's role in this war became substantial. He saw himself as the "supreme commander of the Arab forces" and "persuaded the Arab League to appoint him" to this position. Through his leadership, the Arabs fought the 1948 war to meet Abdullah's political goals.

The other Arab aspirations

King Farouk of Egypt was anxious to prevent Abdullah from being seen as the main champion of the Arab world in Palestine, which he feared might damage his own leadership aspirations of the Arab world. In addition, Farouk wished to annex all of southern Palestine to Egypt. Nuri as-Said, the strongman of Iraq, had ambitions for bringing the entire Fertile Crescent under Iraqi leadership. Both Syria and Lebanon wished to take certain areas of northern Palestine. One result of the ambitions of the various Arab leaders was a distrust of all the Palestinian leaders who wished to set up a Palestinian state, and a mutual distrust of each other. Co-operation was to be very poor during the war between the various Palestinian factions and the Arab armies.

Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Chairman of the Arab Higher Committee, had collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. In 1940, he asked the Axis Powers to acknowledge the Arab right "to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy."

Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha, according to an interview in an 11 October 1947 article of Akhbar al-Yom, said: "I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades".

At the beginning of 1948, al-Husayni was in exile in Egypt. He was involved in some of the high level negotiations between Arab leaders at a meeting held in Damascus in February 1948 to organize Palestinian Field Commands; however, the commanders of his Holy War Army, Hasan Salama and Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, were allocated only the Lydda district and Jerusalem. This decision paved the way for an undermining of the Mufti's position among the Arab States. On 9 February, only four days after the Damascus meeting, a severe blow was suffered by the Mufti at the Arab League session in Cairo [where his demands for] the appointment of a Palestinian to the General Staff of the League, the formation of a Palestinian Provisional Government, the transfer of authority to local National Committees in areas evacuated by the British, a loan for administration in Palestine and appropriation of large sums to the Arab Higher Executive for Palestinians entitled to war damages [were all rejected]. The Arab League blocked recruitment to al-Husayni's forces, which collapsed at the death of his charismatic commander on 8 April.

Following rumours that King Abdullah was re-opening the bilateral negotiations with Israel that he had previously conducted in secret with the Jewish Agency, the Arab League, led by Egypt, decided to set up the All-Palestine Government in Gaza on 8 September under the nominal leadership of the Mufti. Historian Avi Shlaim wrote: ‘The decision to form the Government of All-Palestine in Gaza, and the feeble attempt to create armed forces under its control, furnished the members of the Arab League with the means of divesting themselves of direct responsibility for the prosecution of the war and of withdrawing their armies from Palestine with some protection against popular outcry. Whatever the long-term future of the Arab government of Palestine, its immediate purpose, as conceived by its Egyptian sponsors, was to provide a focal point of opposition to Abdullah and serve as an instrument for frustrating his ambition to federate the Arab regions with Jordan. ‘

Abdullah regarded the attempt to revive al-Husayni's Holy War Army as a challenge to his authority and on 3 October his Minister of Defence ordered all armed bodies operating in the areas controlled by the Arab Legion to be disbanded. Glubb Pasha carried out the order ruthlessly and efficiently. The Palestinian troops became part of the refugee exodus. Benny Morris has argued that although, by 1948, the Palestinians "had a healthy and demoralising respect for the Yishuv's military power", they believed that in decades or centuries "the Jews, like the medieval crusader kingdoms, would ultimately be overcome by the Arab world". This is hindsight on the Palestinian part – at the time it was simple fear of Arab and Jewish leadership.

On 12 May, David Ben-Gurion was told by his chief military advisers, "who over-estimated the size of the Arab armies and the numbers and efficiency of the troops who would be committed", that Israel's chances of winning a war against the Arab states were only about even.

To take our example state: Syria had 12,000 soldiers at the beginning of the 1948 War, grouped into three infantry brigades and an armoured force of approximately battalion size. The Syrian Air Force had fifty planes, the 10 newest of which were World War II–generation models. On 14 May Syria invaded Palestine with the 1st Infantry Brigade supported by a battalion of armoured cars, a company of French R 35 and R 37 tanks, an artillery battalion and other units. On 15–16 May they attacked the Israeli village Tzemah, which they captured, following a renewed offensive, on 18 May. The village was abandoned following the Syrian forces' defeat days later. The Syrians scored a victory at Mishmar HaYarden on 10 June, after which they reverted to a defensive posture, conducting only a few minor attacks on small, exposed Israeli settlements.

Five of the seven countries of the Arab League – Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, backed by Saudi Arabian and Yemenite contingents – invaded territory in the former British Mandate of Palestine on the night of 14–15 May 1948. Syria and Egypt launched attacks outside of the proposed Arab section of the Partition Plan. Jordan invaded the proposed "Corpus Separatum", including the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. The official motives for their intervention were published 15 May 1948: the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State, in accordance with democratic principles, whereby its inhabitants will enjoy complete equality before the law, [and whereby] minorities will be assured of all the guarantees recognised in democratic constitutional countries...”

According to Yoav Gelber, the Arab countries were "drawn into the war by the collapse of the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab Liberation Army [and] the Arab governments' primary goal was preventing the Palestinian Arabs' total ruin and the flooding of their own countries by more refugees. According to their own perception, had the invasion not taken place, there was no Arab force in Palestine capable of checking the Haganah's offensive….[but the Yishuv] perceived the peril of an Arab invasion as threatening its very existence. Having no real knowledge of the Arabs' true military capabilities, the Jews took Arab propaganda literally, preparing for the worst and reacting accordingly."

The Israelis maintain that the Arab complaint was not illegitimate, since Jews were a majority in areas assigned to the Jewish state. Israel, the United States and the Soviet Union called the Arab states' entry into Israel illegal aggression. China broadly backed the Arab claims. The United Nations secretary-general Trygve Lie: "The invasion of Palestine by the Arab states was the first armed aggression the world had seen since the end of the [Second World] War. The United Nations could not permit that aggression to succeed and at the same time survive as an influential force for peaceful settlement, collective security and meaningful international law".

British diplomacy in support of the Arabs

Britain, which at the time was one of the major powers in the Middle East, supported the Arabs. The reasons for this was laid out in a British staff memo which stated "No solution of the Palestine problem should be proposed which would alienate the Arab states. If one of the two communities had to be antagonised, it was preferable, from the purely military angle, that a solution should be found which did not involve the continuing hostility of the Arabs; for in the that event our difficulties would not be confined to Palestine, but would extend throughout the whole of the Middle East". The diplomat Sir John Toutbeck wrote: "We [and the Arabs] are partners in adversity on this question. A Jewish state is no more in our interest than it is in the Arabs.... Our whole strategy in the ME is founded upon holding a secure base in Egypt, but the usefulness of the base must be gravely impaired if we cannot move out of it except through a hostile country".

It was an article of faith for most British policy-makers that most Jews were Communists, and that Israel was bound to become a Communist state, thus giving the Soviet Union a toe-hold in the Middle East. For these reasons, the British in the months before May 1948 did their best to encumber and block partition. Trygve Lie wrote in his memoirs with some anger: "Great Britain had placed the Palestine matter before the Assembly with the declared conviction that agreement between the Arabs and Jews was unattainable. This did not deter the British representative, [Colonial Secretary] Arthur Creech Jones, from informing the Assembly that Britain would give effect only to a plan accepted by the Arabs and the Jews.... The British approach proved to be not in accord, in my opinion with the either the letter or the spirit of the partition plan.”

In December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 194 which declared (amongst other things) that in the context of a general peace agreement "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so" and that "compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return." The resolution also mandated the creation of the United Nations Conciliation Commission. However, parts of the resolution were never implemented, resulting in the Palestinian refugee crisis.

Armistice Agreements > Borders

In 1949, Israel signed separate armistices with Egypt on 24 February, Lebanon on 23 March, Jordan on 3 April, and Syria on 20 July. The Armistice Demarcation Lines, as set by the agreements, saw the territory under Israeli control encompassing approximately three-quarters of Mandate Palestine. This was about one-third more than was allocated to the Jewish State under the UN partition proposal.^[150] The armistice lines were known afterwards as the "Green Line". The Gaza Strip and the West Bank were occupied by Egypt and Jordan respectively. The United Nations Truce Supervision Organization and Mixed Armistice Commissions were set up to monitor ceasefires, supervise the armistice agreements, to prevent isolated incidents from escalating, and assist other UN peacekeeping operations in the region.

These armistices were not borders, which are legally defines as internationally recognized boundaries to a state’s holdings. The borders have changed from time to time with developments in Israel's military and diplomatic situation. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan and the West Bank in the east, the Gaza Strip and Egypt on the southwest

The border with Egypt was demarcated in 1906 between Britain and the Ottoman Empire. The borders with Lebanon and Jordan are based on the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The borders with Egypt and Jordan were formally recognised in peace treaties, in 1979 and 1994 respectively, and with Lebanon as part of the 1949 Armistice Agreement. The borders with Syria and Palestinian territories are still in dispute. Israel's borders with the West Bank and Gaza Strip are currently the Green Line, except in East Jerusalem, and the ceasefire line with Syria runs along the UN-monitored boundary between the Golan Heights and Syrian controlled territory.

Refugees: History in the Writing: choose your interpretation…or accept ALL the facts?

During the 1947-1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War that followed, around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, out of approximately 1,200,000 Palestinians living in former Mandate Palestine. In 1951, the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine estimated that the number of Palestinian refugees displaced from Israel was 711,000. This number did not include displaced Palestinians inside Israeli-held territory. More than 400 Arab villages, and about ten Jewish villages and neighbourhoods, were depopulated. According to estimates based on earlier census, the total Muslim population in Palestine was 1,143,336 in 1947.

The causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus are a controversial topic among historians.

Displaced Palestinian Arabs were settled in refugee camps throughout the Arab world. The United Nations established UNRWA, a relief and human development agency tasked with providing humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees. Arab nations refuse to absorb the refugees, keeping them in refugee camps insisting that they be allowed to return. The Arab League instructed its members to deny Palestinians citizenship "to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right of return to their homeland." Refugee status is passed on to their descendants, who are also denied citizenship, though West Bank inhabitants may vote for the parliament in Jordan. This is called being a pawn. More than 1.4 million still live in 58 camps.

The Palestinian refugee problem and debate about the right of return are major issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Palestinian Arabs and supporters stage demonstrations on 15 May of each year, on "Nakba Day". The popularity and number of participants in these annual al Nakba demonstrations has varied over time. During the Second Intifada after the failure of the Camp David 2000 Summit, the attendance at the demonstrations against Israel increased.

However – there is another side. During the 1948 War, around 10,000 Jews were forced to evacuate their homes in Palestine or Israel, but in the three years following the war, 700,000 Jews settled in Israel, mainly along the borders and in former Arab lands.^[158] Around 136,000 came from the 250,000 displaced Jews of World War II.^[159] About another 270,000 came from Eastern Europe. Another 300,000 arrived from the Arab and Muslim world as part of the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries. Many of these immigrants were forcibly expelled by their governments, while others voluntarily left, fleeing either antisemitic violence and pogroms and government persecution brought on by the war or by political instability, or left to settle in Israel of Zionist convictions or find better a economic and secure home in the West. They constituted the first wave of a total of 800,000–1,000,000 Jews who over the course of the next thirty years would flee or be expelled from the Arab world. Approximately 680,000 of them immigrated to Israel; the rest mostly settled in Europe (mainly France) or the Americas.

Israel initially relied on Jewish Agency-run tent camps known as immigrant camps to accommodate displaced Jews from Europe and Muslim nations. In the 1950s, these were transformed into transition camps, where living conditions were improved and tents were replaced with tin dwellings. Unlike the situation in the immigrant camps, when the Jewish Agency provided for immigrants, residents of the transition camps were required to provide for themselves. These camps began to decline in 1952, with the last one closing in 1963. The camps were largely transformed permanent settlements known as development towns, while others were absorbed as neighborhoods of the towns they were attached to, and the residents were given permanent housing in these towns and neighborhoods. Most development towns eventually grew into cities. Some Jewish immigrants were also given the vacant homes of Palestinian refugees.

After the war, Israeli and Palestinian historiographies differed on the interpretation of the events of 1948: in the West the majority view was of a tiny group of vastly outnumbered and ill-equipped Jews fighting off the massed strength of the invading Arab armies; it was also widely believed that the Palestinian Arabs left their homes on the instruction of their leaders. From 1980, with the early opening of the Israeli and British archives, some Israeli historians have developed a different account of the period. In particular, the role played by Abdullah I of Jordan, the British government, the Arab aims during the war, the balance of force and the events related to the Palestinian exodus have been nuanced or given new interpretations. Some of them are still hotly debated among historians and commentators of the conflict today.

Nur-eldeen Masalha writes that over 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants left their towns and villages in 1948, while Rashid Khalidi puts the percentage at 50. Factors involved in the flight include the voluntary self-removal of the wealthier classes, the collapse in Palestinian leadership, an unwillingness to live under Jewish control, Jewish military advances, and fears of massacre after Deir Yassin, which caused many to leave out of panic. Later, a series of laws passed by the first Israeli government prevented them from returning to their homes, or claiming their property. They and many of their descendants remain refugees. Later in the war, Palestinians were expelled as part of Plan Dalet. The expulsion of the Palestinians has since been described by some historians as ethnic cleansing, while others dispute this charge.

During the 1949 Lausanne conference, Israel proposed allowing the return of 100,000 of the refugees as a goodwill gesture prior to negotiation for the whole refugee population, though not necessarily to their homes, and including 25,000 who had returned surreptitiously and 10,000 family-reunion cases. "Israel formally informed the PCC of its readiness to take back '100,000' refugees on 3 August, making it conditional on 'retaining all present territory' and on the freedom to resettle the returnees where it saw fit."^[ The proposal was conditional on a peace treaty that would allow Israel to retain the territory it had taken, and on the Arab states absorbing the remaining 550,000–650,000 refugees. "The Arab states rejected the proposal on both moral and political grounds."

In the first decades after the exodus, two diametrically opposed schools of analysis could be distinguished. In the words of Erskine Childers: "Israel claims that the Arabs left because they were ordered to, and deliberately incited into panic, by their own leaders who wanted the field cleared for the 1948 war", while "The Arabs charge that their people were evicted at bayonet-point and by panic deliberately incited by the Zionists". Alternative explanations had also been offered. For instance Peretz and Gabbay emphasize the psychological component: panic or hysteria swept the Palestinians and caused the exodus. The above Israeli narrative was presented in the publications of various Israeli state institutions such as the national Information Center, the Ministry of Education (history and civic textbooks) and the army (IDF), as well as in the studies of Jewish scholars, those living in Israel or abroad.

Israel opened up part of its archives in the 1980s for investigation by historians, ten years prior to international law requirements. This coincided with the emergence of various Israeli historians who favoured a more critical analysis of Israel's history. The most famous scholar of this group, Benny Morris, concludes that Jewish military attacks were the main direct cause of the exodus, followed by Arab fear due to the fall of a nearby town, Arab fear of impending attack, and expulsions. The traditional Israeli version was replaced by a new version stating that the exodus was caused by neither Israeli nor Arab policies, but rather was a by-product of the 1948 War.

The Arab version did get support from some of the New Historians. Pappé calls the exodus an ethnic cleansing and points at Zionist preparations in the preceding years and provides more details on the planning process by a group he calls the 'Consultancy'. Morris also says that ethnic cleansing took place during the Palestinian exodus, though Morris considers that to have been justified. In an interview with Ari Shavit, Morris says that "there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. … when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and the genocide—the annihilation of your own people—I prefer ethnic cleansing [of those who threaten]." Israeli documents from 1948 use the term "to cleanse" when referring to uprooting Arabs, but Pappé’s scholarship on the issue has been subject to severe criticism. Benny Morris says that Pappés’ research is flecked with inaccuracies and characterized by distortions. Ephraim Karsh refers to Pappé’s assertion of a master plan by Jews to expel Arabs, as contrived.

After 1948, Israel designed a system of law to legitimise both a continuation and a consolidation of the nationalisation of land and property, a process that had begun decades earlier under the Ottomans and British whenever a Jewish fun bought land from absentee Arab landowners. For the first few years, many of the new laws continued to be rooted in earlier Ottoman and British law. These laws were later amended or replaced altogether.

Among the more important laws was article 125 of the Defence (Emergency) Regulations. According to Kirshbaum, the Law has as effect that "no one is allowed in or out without permission from the Israeli Military". "This regulation has been used to exclude a land owner from his own land so that it could be judged as unoccupied, and then expropriated under the Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law (1953). Closures need not be published in the Official Gazette". This is not the justice promised by the 1948 Declaration.

The Absentees' Property Laws were first introduced as emergency ordinances issued by the Jewish leadership and after the war were incorporated into the laws of Israel. According to COHRE and BADIL (p. 41), unlike other laws that were designed to establish Israel's 'legal' control over lands, this body of law focused on formulating a 'legal' definition for the people (mostly Arabs) who had left or been forced to flee from these lands.

The absentee property played an enormous role in making Israel a viable state. In 1954, more than one third of Israel's Jewish population lived on absentee property and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in urban areas abandoned by Arabs. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property. The absentee property law is directly linked to the controversy of parallelism between the Jewish exodus from Arab lands and the Palestinian Exodus, as advocacy groups have suggested that there are strong ties between the two processes and some claim that decoupling the two issues is unjust. But al-Husseini, Palestinian governor of East Jerusalem, has said that the Israeli law "is racist and imperialistic, which aims at seizing thousands of acres and properties of lands."

Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel gained control over a substantial number of refugee camps in the territories it captured from Egypt and Jordan. The Israeli government attempted to resettle them permanently by initiating a subsidized "build-your-own home" program. Israel provided land for refugees who chose to participate; the Palestinians bought building materials on credit and built their own houses, usually with friends. Israel provided the new neighbourhoods with necessary services, such as schools and sewers.

Within a few years of 1967 there were only remnants of Jewish communities left in most Arab countries. Jews in Arab countries were reduced from more than 800,000 in 1948 to perhaps 16,000 in 1991. Most Jews in Arab countries eventually immigrated to the modern State of Israel, and by 2003 they and their offspring, (including those of mixed lineage) comprised 3,136,436 people, or about 61% of Israel's Jewish population.^] As of 2011 the Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their descendants (including those of mixed lineage) number between 3,500,000 and 4,000,000. France was also a major destination and about 50% (300,000 people) of French Jews now originate from North Africa.

Of the nearly 900,000 Jewish refugees, approximately 680,000 were absorbed by Israel; the remainder went to Europe (mainly to France) and the Americas.^[108][109] Hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees to Israel were temporarily settled in the numerous tent camps. Those were later transformed into ma'abarot (transit camps), where tin dwellings were provided to house up to 220,000 residents. The ma'abarot existed until 1963. The camp populations were absorbed and integrated into Israeli society, a substantial logistical achievement, without help from the UN' various refugee organizations.

In March 2008, "[f]or the first time ever,... a Jewish refugee from an Arab country" appeared before the UN Human Rights Council. Regina Bublil-Waldman, a Jewish Libyan refugee and founder of JIMENA, "appeared before the UN Human Rights Council wearing her grandmother's Libyan wedding dress". Justice for Jews from Arab Countries presented a report on oppression Jews faced in Arab countries that forced them to find amnesty elsewhere.

In response to the Palestinian Nakba narrative, the term " Jewish Nakba " is sometimes used to refer to the persecution and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries in the years and decades following the creation of the State of Israel. Israeli columnist Ben Dror Yemini, himself a Mizrahi Jew, wrote: ‘However, there is another Nakba: the Jewish Nakba. During those same years [the 1940s], there was a long line of slaughters, of pogroms, of property confiscation and of deportations against Jews in Islamic countries. This chapter of history has been left in the shadows. The Jewish Nakba was worse than the Palestinian Nakba. The only difference is that the Jews did not turn that Nakba into their founding ethos. To the contrary.’

Canadian MP and international human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler criticizes the Arab states' rejectionism of the Jewish state, their subsequent invasion to destroy the newly formed nation, and the punishment meted out against their local Jewish populations: “The result was, therefore, a double Nakba: not only of Palestinian-Arab suffering and the creation of a Palestinian refugee problem, but also, with the assault on Israel and on Jews in Arab countries, the creation of a second, much less known, group of refugees—Jewish refugees from Arab countries. At a 2008 joint session of the UK's House of Commons and House of Lords, Cotler said: “Arab countries and the League of Arab States must acknowledge their role in launching an aggressive war against Israel in 1948 and the perpetration of human rights violations against their respective Jewish nationals.” He cited evidence from the report Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries: The Case for Rights and Redress which documented a pattern of state-sanctioned repression and persecution in Arab countries—including Nuremberg-like laws—targeting Jewish populations.

Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath rejects the comparison, arguing the ideological and historical significance of the two population movements are entirely different. Porath points out that the immigration of Jews from Arab countries to Israel, expelled or not, was the "fulfilment of a national dream". He also argues that the achievement of this Zionist goal was only made possible through the endeavours of the Jewish Agency's agents, teachers, and instructors working in various Arab countries since the 1930s. Porath contrasts this with the Palestinian Arabs' flight of 1948 as completely different. He describes the outcome of the Palestinian's flight as an "unwanted national calamity" that was accompanied by "unending personal tragedies". The result was "the collapse of the Palestinian community, the fragmentation of a people, and the loss of a country that had in the past been mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic."

The assertion that Jewish emigrants from Arab countries should be considered refugees has received mixed reactions from various quarters. Iraqi-born Ran Cohen, a former member of the Knesset, said: "I have this to say: I am not a refugee. I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee". Yemeni-born Yisrael Yeshayahu, former Knesset speaker, Labor Party, stated: "We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations". And Iraqi-born Shlomo Hillel, also a former speaker of the Knesset, Labor Party, claimed: "I do not regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists." This confirms the assertion above that ‘refugee’ did not become a defining ethos, as it did for Palestinians forced by their own to remain as such.

Historian Tom Segev stated: "Deciding to emigrate to Israel was often a very personal decision. It was based on the particular circumstances of the individual's life. They were not all poor, or 'dwellers in dark caves and smoking pits'. Nor were they always subject to persecution, repression or discrimination in their native lands. They emigrated for a variety of reasons, depending on the country, the time, the community, and the person."

Yehuda Shenhav has criticized the analogy between Jewish emigration from Arab countries and the Palestinian exodus. He also says "The unfounded, immoral analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi immigrants needlessly embroils members of these two groups in a dispute, degrades the dignity of many Mizrahi Jews, and harms prospects for genuine Jewish-Arab reconciliation." He stated that "the campaign's proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a right of return", and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of "lost" assets". Holocaust restitution expert Sidney Zabludoff has calculated that the losses sustained by the Jews who fled Arab countries since 1947 amounts to $6 billion, in contrast to the losses of the Palestinian refugees which he estimates at $3.9 billion (both in 2007 dollars). The official position of the Israeli government is that Jews from Arab countries are considered refugees, and it considers their rights to property left in countries of origin as valid and existent.

In 2008, the Orthodox Sephardi party sought compensation for Jewish refugees from Arab states. In 2009, Israeli lawmakers required compensation for Jewish refugees as an integral part of any future peace negotiations on behalf of current Jewish Israeli citizens expelled from Arab countries after 1948 and leaving behind a significant amount of valuable property. In February 2010, the bill passed its first reading. The bill follows a resolution passed in the US House of Representatives in 2008, calling for refugee recognition to be extended to Jews and Christians similar to that extended to Palestinians in the course of Middle East peace talks.

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