Yaron Brook on the "Nakba"

Q: Could you explain the truth about the moral status of the 700,000 Palestinians who fled as part of the 1948 invasion? How complicit were they—or subsets of them—in the violence against the Jews? How should they have been treated? How were they treated? And are any reparations owed to any of them?

A: All right, so this is a great question, and it’s a fairly complex question. Here we’re talking about 700,000 people who were residents of what, at the end of the 1948 war, became Israel. The armistice lines of 1948, which became modern Israel, included 700,000 Palestinians. Seven hundred thousand Arabs who lived in the land that became Israel either left that land or were kicked out of that land during the war that occurred during 1948.

Just a quick history in terms of the sequence of events here, because I think the sequence of events is important to understanding both practically and morally what happened here. Before November 1947, the British, who had a mandate from the UN to basically run the territory that is considered today Israel and Palestine—was called Palestine by the British but, for much of that period, included Jordan as well—the British decided they wanted out. They wanted to leave. It was costly for them. They were winding down their empire anyway, post-World War II, and they’d had enough of the Jews and the Muslims in the Middle East, and they were basically divvying up the Middle East and handing over power to local authorities all over the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is a country created by the British. Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon were countries created by the British and the French. Jordan was created by the British. These are not countries that had existed. These are not countries that had any kind of reality. They were created by British and French post-World War I because they were all lands that they had occupied as part of defeating the Ottoman Empire.

Part of this was also what was called Palestine, the section between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and so they went to the UN and said, “Look, get us out of this. We’re leaving. You decide what happens here.” And the United Nations voted. Not overwhelmingly—it was close—but voted for the partition of the territory into two states: a Palestinian state for the Arabs and a Jewish state for the Jews, called Israel, and they drew up the borders. The borders were very restrictive. Population concentrations of Arabs would be part of the Palestinian state, the Arab state, and population centers of Jews, where Jews were dominant, would be Jewish.

Anyway, the Jews in Palestine celebrated. They danced. There are pictures of this. The next day, the Arabs started a military offensive against Israel. Not Arabs from outside, but what are called Palestinians. The Arabs inside that geographic area started violent activity against Israel, against the Jews, with the idea that before the British left, they wanted to create a reality on the ground where there were basically no Jews there or the Jews had been so marginalized that it made no sense to give them any kind of land. So the idea that the Arabs had, that the Palestinians had, was to occupy as much of this land as possible, to kill as many Jews as possible, to drive as many Jews into the sea as possible, and basically to be able to occupy this territory as a “Palestinian territory.”

The idea that the Palestinians had was to occupy as much of this land as possible, to kill as many Jews as possible, to drive as many Jews into the sea as possible, and basically to be able to occupy this territory as a “Palestinian territory.”

In May of 1948, the British basically said, “We’re leaving,” and they packed up and left. On that day, Israel basically declared independence, and on that day, also, as soon as the Israelis declared independence, the armies of seven Arab countries invaded Israel, and a war was begun. Interestingly enough—and it’s always important to note this—when those seven countries invaded, their goal was not to create a Palestinian state, not to create an Arab state. Their goal was to carve this territory up among themselves. Egypt wanted the south, Jordan wanted big chunks of what is to the east in Israel, Syria and Lebanon wanted northern parts of Israel. They all wanted pieces of it. Probably if they had won, they would have started fighting each other for who gets to rule Jerusalem, let’s say, and things like that.

As part of the Arab invasion, as part of the invasion by these seven countries, the Arab countries communicated to the Arab civilian population within this territory, they told them, “Look, guys, get out of the way. There’s going to be a war. It’s going to be brutal. Get out of the way. If you want to fight on our side, join the fighting. But if you’re just a civilian, if you’re not going to raise weapons against them, just get out of the way. What we suggest to you is go to Jordan, go to Lebanon.” Those are the primary places they went. “Go to Egypt.” But the primary places were Jordan and Lebanon, primarily Jordan. Jordan’s the closest. “Get out of the way so that when we start bombing these cities, when we start fighting these wars, you won’t get in the way.” Just like Israel has told the Palestinians, “Go south,” because we’re attacking in the north.

And what you saw in the days following were—and there are photos of this—long convoys of Arabs leaving their homes in Jaffa, which is very close to Tel Aviv, Haifa, which was always a mixed city and still is a mixed city, the Galilee, parts of the southern and mid-section of Israel, just getting in their cars and driving away and leaving and going to where they were promised. And the Arab countries said, “Look, we’re going to win this very quickly. This is not going to take long. I mean, how many Jews are there? A few hundred thousand Jews? There are tens of millions of us. We’re going to wipe them out, and when we wipe them out”—and, literally, it was about wiping them out—“you will be able to come back.”

So, a big chunk of the 700,000 were Arabs who left because Arab countries urged them to leave under the idea that they could could come back once victory was achieved.

Now, some of them left because the fighting started and, indeed, they discovered they were in the crossfire. And maybe they were part of the people fighting and they discovered they were losing, and rather than suffer the full defeat, they ran away. So some of them just ran away. Ran away because of the crossfire, ran away because they were losing, ran away because Israel was beating them. Indeed, Israel increased its territory from the UN partition to the ceasefire in 1949 of this war of independence. It had grown, because it had occupied a lot of the territory where fighting was going on.

And then a third category of people were actually kicked out of their homes by Israelis, and I would split this category into two: One, some segments of the Israeli military, some units, misbehaved. There were indeed, very few, but a couple of occasions in which Jewish forces massacred civilians on the Arab side. Very few, once or twice. There were many such occurrences, by the way, of Arabs massacring Jews. And there were also occasions where they kicked people out of their homes and pointed guns at them and forced them to run away. So that’s one category. And a second category is, there were certain villages, certain locations, where they had fought against Israel, where their location was strategic in terms of the security of the state of Israel, and they basically told people to leave because they were in the way and they were strategically inhibiting their ability to defend Israel.

So, how do you think about these people? Well, most of them—the ones who left because they were urged to leave, the ones who fled because they were in the crossfire or because they were losing—I’d say those first two categories fall under the category of: you started a war and you lost it. Their leadership, whether they supported it or not—and most of them supported it—their leadership started a war, and they listened to their leadership. They followed the suggestions of the leadership, and they were victims of war. Many of them are victims of the decision-making of these seven Arab countries that invaded Israel. And therefore, Israel has no responsibility towards them. They vacated their land. They abandoned their property. Their property is abandoned and can be used by anybody else for productive purposes. Again, when you lose a war—a war you start—you lose a war. The real victims of the wars that the Arab countries have started against Israel are not only the soldiers who have died in the war, Arab and Israeli, but the victims are these Palestinians who don’t have a home, were promised one, but don’t have one. The moral responsibility for taking care of them should be on those who urged them to leave.

Instead, what has happened is that the refugee camps that the Palestinians established—first in Jordan and then in Lebanon and in other places, some of them in the West Bank and Gaza—basically 70-something years later, are still in existence. Arabs have kept them as second-, third-class citizens in their own countries. They’re not citizens of Lebanon, even though they’ve lived there for decades. They’re not citizens of Jordan, even though they’ve lived there for decades. They’re treated horribly by Arab countries, and instead of resettling them, making them citizens, they’ve kept them as refugees as something to dangle over Israel and as something to use to elicit guilt from the Europeans and Americans for their support of Israel.

So there are two other categories. One category is people who Israel required to leave for a variety of reasons. Now, if these were people who were engaged in combat against the Israelis then, again, I think they have no claim. Once you initiate violence, you can’t say, “Oh, but property rights.” No, you lose your rights, and you lose your claim to the property that you used in order to engage in the violence. And if Israel needed to throw some people out because their security demanded that this particular land be free of hostiles, then so be it.

Once you initiate violence, you can’t say, “Oh, but property rights.” No, you lose your rights, and you lose your claim to the property that you used in order to engage in the violence.

There is one group that I think does have a claim here. If there are cases in which the Israeli military gratuitously forced people off their land, threw them out, murdered some of them, like they did in Deir Yassin—and maybe one other place, but Deir Yassin is the famous one—then those Palestinians have a legal claim against Israel. They have a legal claim against the government where it is clearly gratuitous, not as a part of a war action, not as an act of self-defense. Or if, after the war was over, the Israeli government confiscated land from Palestinians without giving them any compensation, once hostilities were done. And that has happened, it’s happened in the West Bank, it’s happened in other places. They should be able to sue and get their land back or at the very least, under the idea of eminent domain in the United States, get compensated for it.

But, just to be clear, the 700,000 Palestinians that are out there—and some of them, those ones who were gratuitously kicked out should have some claim to come back to their land and their property, but that’s a fraction; maybe it’s 10,000, probably less than that—the 700,000 have no right to return to their land. They initiated force, they’ve lost all rights to that. Their government, their representatives, their leaders, their community leaders, their political leaders, their religious leaders all initiated force on their behalf, in their name. They lost all rights, all claims.

Now, the Arabs who stayed in Israel won. They won the lottery. Because the Arabs who stayed in Israel—who didn’t run, who didn’t listen to their leadership, who stayed, and didn’t fight, and weren’t killed in the crossfire—they ended up living in the freest country in the Middle East. They ended up having their rights protected better than in any other country in the Middle East, better than any Arab country. They ended up hitting the jackpot in terms of wealth, in terms of freedom.