The Displacement of Palestinians

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Israel, and those Westerners and Arabs who backed it, had hoped to resettle the Palestinians in the Arab states, converting them into Arab nationalities that would make them forget the past and help them abandon their national rights and give up claiming them. This hope perhaps explains why the mandate of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees was set at thirty years, on the assumption of the Western states that the Palestinians would have dissolved [into their host societies] within that period. Nor did the idea of land for resettlement escape the mind of the United States, which considered the Jazira region in the northeast of what was then a smaller Syria, and the Anbar region west of Iraq, as two candidate areas. Matters did not unfold as Israel and its backing states wished.

Israel concerned itself with displacing the Palestinians on two levels: the level of Palestine’s interior, so as to empty the whole of Mandatory Palestine of Palestinians, and the regional level, so that Palestinians would dissolve into Arab societies and content themselves with seeking their daily bread. It could do nothing about the Palestinians who remained inside Palestine in 1948, owing to the objective circumstances surrounding them, and it had to bear their rising natural population growth. As for the land occupied in [19]67, Israel resorted to indirect displacement through squeezing the population’s living conditions. Israel created difficult security, economic, and educational conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, pushing many citizens to leave in search of work or safety in Arab and foreign countries. There are no statistics available on the number of people who have emigrated from the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, but if we assume — and this is an assumption close to the truth — that the annual rate of emigration from the West Bank and Gaza is 20,000 people, then roughly 800,000 have left, and if we add to this figure the natural-increase rate compounded over forty declining years, the number becomes large enough that the number of Palestinians inside Palestine today could have been far greater than the number of Jews.

Displacement as a security tool

There are those who say that Palestinians fight because of their poor living conditions, and that they would largely calm down if better livelihood opportunities were made available to them, and would stop joining and supporting Palestinian organizations. This view is not necessarily correct, but Israel and America constantly repeat the importance of improving living conditions as a means of facilitating the reaching of peaceful solutions. Past and subsequent American presidents and officials have repeated this phrase, and have pledged to provide financial and economic assistance to help reach solutions.

If improving living conditions leads Palestinians to become convinced of the peaceful solutions on offer, then why should the improvement not take place outside Palestine rather than inside it? If the West is providing money to the Palestinians, why not ease their path to emigrate to countries where job opportunities are available, so that they can work and provide their own daily bread without charity? This is logical, it is an inexpensive option, and it benefits the economy in which they work, since they become part of its labor force.

On the other hand, Israel has been unable to achieve security and safety through military victories, and it had to think of activities other than military action, including reducing the numbers of Palestinians in the region. Israel now views the growing numbers of Palestinians inside Palestine as an escalating danger, given what this entails in terms of the rising likelihood of youth becoming involved in acts of resistance. The larger the population and the scarcer the economic and financial resources, the more security problems appear — not only in the face of an enemy, but also against the existing system of rule. The Palestinian population now inside Palestine (occupied in [19]48 and [19]67) exceeds five million, and if the current standards of population growth continue, the proportion of Palestinians within Palestine’s total population will keep rising. This is why, from a strategic standpoint, Israel sees the necessity of working to facilitate the emigration of young Palestinians.

In 1983 I wrote an article titled “The National Procreation Project,” published in the Jerusalem newspaper al-Fajr, in which I laid out a plan for increasing the number of Palestinians in Palestine so that they would achieve a demographic majority within twelve years. The military governor of the Tulkarem district at the time summoned me and warned me against writing on this subject again. As for the Liberation Organization, which I asked to pay attention to the matter, it did not bother to even discuss it.

The security of the Arab regimes

After the displacement of the Palestinians, Israeli and Western thinking focused on resettlement in the Arab countries, particularly the neighboring states, whose cultural and social environment was considered similar to that of Palestine. But Lebanon and Syria rejected the idea entirely, and refused to grant Palestinians citizenship along with the passports that would come with it. Jordan repeatedly declared that it was against resettlement, but it granted Palestinians Jordanian citizenship pursuant to the decision on unity between the East and West Banks, and Palestinians became part of Jordan’s political institutions, and over the years Jordan tried to be the spokesman for the Palestinian people.

Problems appeared in Jordan following the concentration of the Palestinian resistance there after the 1967 war, and an internal war broke out; problems appeared in Lebanon as well, where the Palestinian resistance was a principal party to the civil war. Many Palestinians in various Arab countries became absorbed in party and organizational work, and some of them carried out security activities against Israel, or assisted toward that goal, which created certain problems for the Arab regimes. In Egypt, matters reached the point that security forces under President Abdel Nasser deported many Palestinian students, in their nightclothes, to Iraq and Syria, following Abdel Nasser’s acceptance of the Rogers peace initiative.

[What happened] in Kuwait provided renewed proof to many regimes that the Palestinians constitute a factor of instability or unease, because of their having sided with President Saddam Hussein. The point here is not that all Palestinians held a single position, or that all of them were active, but it was enough for some of them to be active in order to give the Arab governments and their security services a pretext to search for a way to rid themselves of the Palestinians.

Palestinians paid a heavy price in Iraq, at the popular level, after the American occupation. Many Iraqis turned against the Palestinians, attacked them, killed many of them, and destroyed their property, because of their belief that some Palestinians had sided with and backed Saddam. Whoever hated Saddam hated the Palestinians — a pattern we see similarly repeated in other Arab countries.

Lebanon constitutes the strongest example of rejecting the Palestinians’ continued presence, because of the fragile demographic balance there. The Lebanese government places heavy restrictions on Palestinians and denies them much of the work and employment that would help them earn their daily bread, and Palestinians in Lebanon live as though standing on the edge of a sword, taking great care that none among them makes a mistake that would cause trouble for everyone. The degree of tolerance in Lebanon toward Palestinians — outside the circles of Hezbollah and the Amal Movement — is very weak, a degree that brings pain, sorrow, and humiliation. A number of Lebanese leaders demand that Palestinian refugees must return to their lands, while others practice hostility against them.

Because of the pressure bearing down on Lebanese and Palestinians alike, it has been said that Israel would allow Palestinians to return to the West Bank within the framework of a peaceful solution — meaning by this the Palestinians residing in Lebanon.

Getting rid of the Palestinians

If the Palestinians are a burden on Israel and on the Arab regimes, and if the Arab regimes do not want to prepare to confront Israel and wrest back Palestinian rights, and do not want to support the Palestinian resistance, and if most of them want normalization with Israel and to sign treaties with it, then the optimal solution for the various parties is to get rid of the Palestinians. Mass killing is no longer possible under international conditions, nor is forced deportation to distant places any longer possible. So what is to be done?

The work rests on two points:

First: pressuring the Palestinians in every form and color — economically, morally, psychologically, politically, and in security terms — so that the Palestinian, especially the youth, comes to curse his life and to lose faith in the homeland, the citizens, the holy sites, Arabism, and Islam. They pressure the Palestinian wherever he may be found, in order to entrench the darkness and gloom of life, and they close doors in his face so that he loses confidence in the future and in the possibility of liberation, return, and building a family. What is wanted is for the Palestinian to reach the conclusion that the lands of the Arabs are not lands of livelihood and security, that there is nothing in them but worry, distress, intelligence services, and persecution, and that the only option is to leave for wherever an open door can be found.

The result that has been so laboriously worked toward is felt by people everywhere Palestinians are present, and specifically in Lebanon and Palestine. Many young people cry out that they want to emigrate, wishing that the doors before them would open so they could pick up their belongings and flee without looking back. The desire to emigrate is a clear and tangible phenomenon on the Palestinian street.

Although we possess no documents about active encouragement to open the door to emigration to distant countries, it is noticeable that the willingness of a number of countries, such as Canada, Australia, and America, to receive Palestinians is increasing, and that numbers of Palestinians are emigrating, particularly from Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. There are considerable facilitations in the procedures and conditions for immigration, to the point that the requirement to pass a language exam is sometimes waived, as is the case regarding financial sponsorship and age. In the past it was difficult for young people to obtain entry visas, but matters now appear much easier.

The criterion of academic qualifications used to play an important role in accepting immigration applications in the past, but its value is now declining, and it is no longer a strict condition scrutinized by foreign consulates. They approve many applicants who possess no academic, technical, or vocational qualifications that the host country could benefit from. It is evident that some countries work to provide simple manual jobs for new, unskilled, non-professional immigrants so that they can make their way with a minimum of hardship, and in order to encourage others who are waiting to see the outcome of their friends’ experience.

The security criterion

It is Palestine’s good fortune that the host countries remain wary of receiving Palestinians for security reasons. The host countries have not given up the security criterion; they conduct a security screening of every person applying for immigration, to be assured that he never joined the ranks of the resistance, and that his security record with Israel and with a number of Arab regimes is clean, or at least acceptable, and that there is nothing in it to suggest he will resume his activities, in one form or another, in the host country.

But just as with the Arab states, the host countries fear large Palestinian population concentrations because of the internal self-sustaining dynamic that can arise within them. Large population concentrations give rise to a great many activities, desirable and undesirable, wanted and unwanted, and this is what the host countries want to escape. They are certainly thinking of what is called terrorist activity, and of the infiltration of Palestinian organizations, particularly the Islamic ones. This remains a major obstacle to throwing the door wide open.

The role of the Palestinian leaderships

The conduct and performance of the Palestinian leaderships — whether the leadership of the Authority, the [Liberation] Organization, or the factions — constitute a factor both repelling and encouraging youth toward emigration. The Palestinian leaderships are not equal to the responsibility, and much of what they do contributes to instilling frustration and despair in the hearts of the young.

What is required is for the leaderships to set themselves straight, and to pay attention to the fact that their internal conflicts and their chasing after personal interests inflict great harm on the Palestinian cause. And if they do set themselves straight, a great deal of work, guidance, education, and construction still lies ahead of them in order to stop the draining away of the Palestinian population.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “تهجير الفلسطينيين” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.