Most Palestine refugees in Jordan, but not all, have full citizenship. The percentage of Palestinian refugees living in refugee camps to those who settled outside the camps is the lowest of all UNRWA fields of operations. Palestine refugees are allowed access to public services and health care, as a result, refugee camps are becoming more like poor city suburbs than refugee camps.
Most Palestine refugees moved out of the camps to other parts of the country. Following the capture of the West Bank by Israel in , Jordan revoked the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians to thwart any attempt to permanently resettle from the West Bank to Jordan. West Bank Palestinians with family in Jordan or Jordanian citizenship were issued yellow cards guaranteeing them all the rights of Jordanian citizenship if requested.
As of January , there are , registered refugees in Lebanon. Until , Palestinians were forbidden to work in over 70 jobs because they do not have Lebanese citizenship, but this was later reduced to around 20 as of after liberalization laws. In , Palestinians were granted the same rights to work as other foreigners in the country. Lebanon gave citizenship to about 50, Christian Palestinian refugees during the s and s. In the mids, about 60, Shiite Muslim refugees were granted citizenship.
This caused protest from Maronite authorities, leading to citizenship being given to all Christian refugees who were not already citizens. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. In , several Zionist armed groups declared war on Britain for trying to put limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine at a time when Jews were fleeing the Holocaust. The Zionist paramilitary organisations launched a number of attacks against the British — the most notable of which was the King David Hotel bombing in where the British administrative headquarters were housed; 91 people were killed in the attack.
In early , the British government announced it would be handing over the disaster it had created in Palestine to the United Nations and ending its colonial project there. At the time, the Jews in Palestine constituted one third of the population and owned less than six percent of the total land area. Under the UN partition plan, they were allocated 55 percent of the land, encompassing many of the main cities with Palestinian Arab majorities and the important coastline from Haifa to Jaffa.
The Arab state would be deprived of key agricultural lands and seaports, which led the Palestinians to reject the proposal. Shortly following the UN Resolution , war broke out between the Palestinian Arabs and Zionist armed groups, who, unlike the Palestinians, had gained extensive training and arms from fighting alongside Britain in World War II.
Zionist paramilitary groups launched a vicious process of ethnic cleansing in the form of large-scale attacks aimed at the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their towns and villages to build the Jewish state, which culminated in the Nakba. While some Zionist thinkers claim there is no proof of a systematic master plan for the expulsion of Palestinians for the creation of the Jewish state, and that their dispossession was an unintended result of war, the presence of a Palestinian Arab majority in what Zionist leaders envisioned as a future state meant the Nakba was inevitable.
The British occupation authorities had announced that they would be ending their mandate in Palestine on the eve of May 15, Palestinians commemorated their national tragedy of losing a homeland in an unofficial way for decades, but in , the former President of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat , declared May 15 a national day of remembrance, on the 50th year since the Nakba.
Though displacement of Palestinians from their lands by the Zionist project was already taking place during the British Mandate, mass displacement started when the UN partition plan was passed. In less than six months, from December to mid-May , Zionist armed groups expelled about , Palestinians from villages. By the first half of , at least , Palestinians in total were forcibly expelled or fled outside of their homeland.
Zionist forces had committed about atrocities by , including massacres, attacks such as bombings of homes, looting, the destruction of property and entire villages. Some , Palestinians remained in the areas of Palestine that became part of the Israeli state. Of the ,, some 30, to 40, were internally displaced. Like the , who were displaced beyond the borders of the new state, Israel prohibited internally displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes.
In the years that followed the establishment of Israel, the state extended its systematic ethnic cleansing. Though armistice agreements had been signed with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon in , the newly founded Israeli army committed a number of additional massacres and campaigns of forced displacement. For example, in , the remaining 2, Palestinian residents of the city of Majdal were forced into the Gaza Strip, about 2, inhabitants of Beer el-Sabe were expelled to the West Bank, and some 2, residents of two northern villages were driven into Syria.
By the mids, the Palestinian population inside Israel had become about , Between and the mids, some 30,, or 15 percent of the population, were expelled outside the borders of the new state, according to the BADIL refugee rights group.
While under the UN partition plan Israel was allocated 55 percent, today it controls more than 85 percent of historic Palestine. The Naksa led to the displacement of some , Palestinians, half of which originated from the areas occupied in and were thus twice refugees. As in the Nakba, Israeli forces used military tactics that violated basic international rights law such as attacks on civilians and expulsion.
As for the broadcasts by Arab radio stations allegedly calling on people to flee, a detailed listening to recordings of their programmes of that period shows that the claims were invented for pure propaganda. This document sets at , the number of Palestinians who had already left the territory that was by then in the hands of Israel, and evaluates the various factors that had prompted their decisions to leave. One example of this second phase was the expulsion of Arabs living in Lydda present-day Lod and Ramleh.
On 12 July , within the framework of Operation Dani, a skirmish with Jordanian armoured forces served as a pretext for a violent backlash, with killed, some of whom were unarmed prisoners. Similar scenarios were enacted, as Morris shows, in central Galilee, Upper Galilee and the northern Negev, as well as in the post-war expulsion of the Palestinians of Al Majdal Ashkelon. I felt that things that were going on were hurting my soul, the soul of my family and all of us here Now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being has been shaken Their villages were either destroyed or occupied by Jewish immigrants, and their lands were shared out between the surrounding kibbutzim.
Almost Arab villages were thus either wiped off the map or Judaised, as were most of the Arab quarters in mixed towns. According to a report drawn up in , Israel had thus succeeded in expropriating 73, rooms in abandoned houses, 7, shops, workshops and warehouses, 5 million Palestinian pounds in bank accounts, and - most important of all - , hectares of land There is no room here for compromise.
There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries Not one village must be left, not one bedouin tribe. Seven years later, Weitz found himself in a position to put this radical programme into effect. Already, in January , he was orchestrating the expulsion of Palestinians from various parts of the country.
Its role was extended, in July, to take in the creation of Jewish settlements in the border areas. Contrary to the widely held view, the Arab leaders were prepared for compromise.
Despite international pressure - with the United States to the fore - this enterprise was to founder on the intransigence of the Israeli authorities, particularly once the Jewish state had been admitted to the United Nations. This shift of position does not, however, prevent him from continuing to resist any notion of a Jewish expulsion plan, and to exonerate David Ben Gurion, president of the Jewish Agency and subsequently prime minister and defence minister of the newly-created Israeli state.
As Norman G. Finkelstein has highlighted, in a textual study that is as brilliant as it is polemical 14 , this twin denial by Benny Morris seems at first sight to contradict what Morris says himself. The same is true as regards the responsibility or otherwise of David Ben Gurion.
Morris makes clear that the prime minister was the originator of the Dalet Plan. This order, Morris tells us, had not been debated within the Israeli government. In fact, some days previously the Mapam, partner of the ruling Mapai, had obtained from the prime minister an instruction explicitly forbidding the military to carry out expulsion measures In Nazareth, General Chaim Laskov decided to take the official instruction literally.
All issues, whether military or civilian, were decided with him, often without the slightest consultation with the government, let alone with the parties that comprised it.
0コメント