The Biggest Prison on Earth by Ilan Pappe

Author:Ilan Pappe
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2017-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

I would like to bring the following item to the government’s attention. The international press brings horror stories on the extent of the flight from the West Bank and the terrible suffering it causes. As these descriptions are to be found in our press, I assume this is an accurate picture. The worst seems to happen within the territories we hold. Israel is being portrayed in the international community and among world Jewry as pursuing an immoral and inhuman policy. The problem is not in the way we represent this policy, but in the wisdom behind the policy itself.29

Under pressure from Eban, Dayan said, ‘I can confirm that 50,000 refugees left Jericho’; and they will be allowed to return, added Eshkol.30

Old habits die hard and it seems that, since many of the senior army commanders were veterans of the 1948 ethnic cleansing, they were falling back on the same methods they had used before when occupying villages. Dayan had to issue a special order to the army to stop dynamiting evicted villages – common practice in 1948 that was meant to prevent the return of the villagers to their homes. The Zionist left ministers of Mapam, a movement that was very active in the 1948 ethnic cleansing, reappeared in 1967 with moral sensitivities and a conscience that had been absent in 1948. They felt, as they told the Prime Minister, that they represented in the government the members of various kibbutzim that were located next to West Bank villages. One of them told Dayan that the ‘astonished’ members of ‘our Kibbutzim’, such as Kibbutz Nachshon in the Latrun Valley, were bewildered to find out that villages with which they enjoyed cordial relations were depopulated by force. Dayan’s insistence that he agreed with the consensual position of the government against massive eviction and that these represented unauthorized exceptions was more or less accepted. However, the Minister of Tourism, the liberal Moshe Kol, noted that regardless of the government’s stance, the foreign press gave the impression that Israel had created a new refugee problem.31

These reservations voiced in the meetings at the end of June were to be the last of their kind. For many ministers the main worry was the large number of 1948 refugees within the Occupied Territories. Yaacov Shimshon Shapira, the Minister of Justice, said, ‘We should establish a ministry for refugees with the purpose of encouraging their emigration . . . especially the young elements because they are very dangerous and they are the worst.’32 He argued that Israel should demand the ‘exclusive right to solve the question’. However, he concurred with Bentov that, as for the 100,000 who ‘left’, in his words: ‘We cannot repeat 1948 [the anti-repatriation] policy . . . we should give them a month to return and if 5000 would return [this is] not a big problem and we would have a different image in the world.’33

Not everyone agreed. Israel Yeshayahu, the Minister of Postal Services, objected to repatriation. Haim Moshe Shapira, the Interior

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