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Hillel Cohen is a research fellow in the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, and teaches in the Middle East Department of Jerusalem's Hebrew University. He is the author of The Present Absentee: The Palestinian Internal Refugees in Israel since 1948.
The internal refugees in the state of Israel are 1948 Palestinian refugees who were uprooted from their villages in the course of the war, but remained within the borders of Israel and became its citizens. They have continuously demanded to be allowed to return to their villages, only to be met by the refusal of successive Israeli governments. For the most part, their lands have been given over to Jewish settlements. While constituting a part of the general refugee problem, this moral, political and practical issue is one of the most concrete expressions of the structural conflict between the state of Israel and its Arab citizens.
The Roots of the Problem and the Denial of Return
The roots of this phenomenon are to be found in the way in which Arab residents were uprooted from areas conquered by Jewish forces in the 1948 war. During the fighting, these people generally fled in fear to neighboring villages, which had not yet been conquered, or to large towns where they hoped to find refuge. Some fled more than once. The town of Nazareth, which received special status from the IDF because of its Christian holy places, served as a place of refuge for thousands of people from neighboring and distant villages, who remained there after their villages were occupied by the IDF 1.
The reaction of the IDF was to drive the refugees who remained within the area of the State of Israel across the border to prevent them returning to their villages. Thousands of refugees were thus expelled from the region of Ramah and Beqi'in in Galilee and from the town of Majdal (Ashkelon) in the south. Similarly in the Arab triangle, in villages transferred to Israel under the Rhodes agreement, various forms of pressure were exerted to prevent refugees remaining in the State of Israel 2.
Yet in spite of these forced expulsions, according to official estimates some 25,000 internal refugees remained, mainly in Galilee, constituting about one sixth of the total Arab...