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9 5 The main goal of many infiltrators was to rejoin their families . Thus, Israel’s efforts to prevent this became a central bone of contention between the state and its minority population, impinging on the daily and family lives of many Arabs. But the Arabs enjoyed no little success. According to government figures, 20,500 infiltrators who entered Israel between the end of the 1948 war and October 1953 were allowed to remain and were granted citizenship. Additionally, some 3,000 Arabs outside the country were granted entry permits for humanitarian reasons.1 While these returnees constituted onlyasmallproportion—fewerthan5percent—oftherefugeeswhoendedup outside Israel’s borders, their reentry was nevertheless no mean achievement. Nearly every village and community was able to implement a limited “right of return” for a few of its members, enlarging the country’s Arab population by 15 percent. By the nature of the phenomenon, many could claim credit—the nationalists, who helped conceal and support infiltrators; the people who aided them for personal and family reasons; and of course the so-called moderate leaders who used their contacts with state agencies to assist members of their communities, in the process enhancing their own influence. But two other factors also played a large role. The first was the attitude of the international community, which pressured Israel to take in refugees; the second was the Israeli regime’s willingness to yield, for humanitarian reasons, to the Arab population’s needs and requests, even during the period of the four The Land T h e L a n d 9 6 military government. The general guidelines the military governors received were to allow only infiltrators “likely to be useful” to them to remain in the country, and the government’s policy was that temporary residence permits were to be granted only when they contributed to “enhancing the state organs’ power and influence.”2 But these rules were not always observed. The return of more than twenty thousand refugees testifies to institutional ambivalence and to the fact that the official Israeli policy of “fewer Arabs on less land,” to use the phrase coined by the custodian of absentee property, was not always implemented.3 Yes, special efforts were made to prevent the return of refugees, including a policy of a quick finger on the trigger in border areas, searches for infiltrators in abandoned and inhabited villages, and brutal expulsions of those who crossed the border.4 On top of all this, the state used pressures and incentives to encourage Arab citizens to emigrate.* However, both because of international pressure and because of the humanist self-image of the state and humanitarian values of some of Israel’s leaders, the state on occasion refrained from deporting infiltrators who succeeded in reuniting with their families. The battle over Arab lands was a different matter. Here the state unquestionably had the upper hand, and the Arab population achieved little (except, perhaps, for illegal construction on state land, which the authorities were unable to prevent for a variety of reasons). Arab lands were transferred to state ownership in a variety of ways, which have been documented and analyzed in many studies.5 Most effort went into transferring land belonging to refugees—including both those outside the country and internal refugees —to state ownership. The internal refugees were those Arabs who had been uprooted from their homes and villages but remained within Israel and became its citizens.† Jewish settlements were built on their land. In addition, * The Central Council for Arab Affairs established a special subcommittee to explore “options for the exit of Arabs from the country.” Its members were GSS chief Isser Halperin (Harel); KKL official Yosef Weitz; the prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs, Yehoshua Palmon; and the head of the military government, Yitzhak Shani (protocol of the council meeting, 3 July 1952, ISA 56, 22/2214). The policy of encouraging Arab emigration continued in the following decade. In 1965, Shmuel Toledano, then adviser on Arab affairs, estimated that about three thousand Arabs had left Israel with the encouragement of the authorities. He recommended that the heads of the security forces “exhaust all possibilities for quiet emigration of Arabs from Israel.” PMO-AAA, Shmuel Toledano, to head of the GSS and others, “Blueprint for the Governmental Policy toward the Arab Minority in Israel,” 14 July 1965, ISA 79, 2637/5. † At least 25,000 of the 160,000 Arabs who were granted Israeli citizenship in 1949 were internal refugees, or IDPs (internally displaced...

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