The expulsions of Palestinian people from 1949 to 1956 were a continuation of the 1948 expulsion and flight from Israeli-controlled territory that occurred after the signing of the 1949 ceasefire agreements. This period of the exodus was characterised predominantly by forced expulsion during the consolidation of the state of Israel and the growing tension along ceasefire lines that ultimately led to the 1956 Suez Crisis.
Between 1948 and 1950, according to historian Benny Morris, Israel displaced and expelled between 30,000 and 40,000 Palestinians and Bedouin.: "Excluding the Negev Beduoin, it is probable that the number of Arabs kicked out of, or persuaded to leave, the country in the border-clearing operations and in the internal anti-infiltration sweeps during 1948-1950 was around 20,000. If one includes expelled northern Negev Bedouin, the total may have been as high as 30,000-40,000." Many villages along the ceasefire lines and the Lebanon border area were leveled, and many emptied villages were resettled by new Jewish immigrants and demobilized Israeli military forces.; key to map 3 giving 186 former Arab villages repopulated by Jews.: "The major activities towards the end of the 1948 ethnic cleansing operation now focused on implementing Israel's anti-repatriation policy on two levels. The first level was national, introduced in August 1948 by an Israeli governmental decision to destroy all the evicted villages and transform them into new Jewish settlements or 'natural' forests."
Israel argued this was motivated by security considerations linked with the situation at the borders. During the consolidation period, Israel was more intent on gaining control of the demilitarized zones on the Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian fronts than on its image abroad.: Zionist mainstream thought had always regarded the Jewish State from the Mediterranean sea to the Jordan River as its ultimate goal. The vision of 'Greater Israel' as Zionism's ultimate objective did not end with the 1948 war. The politicians of the 'Right' primarily of the Revisionist Herut party, led by Menachem Begin, continued throughout 1949 and the early and mid 1950s to clamour publicly for the conquest of the West Bank.: Ben-Gurion to aides "Before the founding of the State on the eve of its creation, our main interest was self defense. To a large extent, the creation of the state was an act of self defense...Many think that we're still at the same stage. But now the issue at hand is conquest, not self defense. As to setting the borders—it's an open ended matter. In the Bible as well as in our history there are all kinds of definitions of the country's borders, so there is no real limit. No border is absolute. If it's the desert-it could just as well be the other side. If it's the sea, it could also be across the sea. The world has always been this way. Only the terms have changed. If they should find a way of reaching other stars, well then, perhaps the whole earth will no longer suffice."
Background Immediately after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Israel began a process of nation-building; its first general elections were held on 25 January 1949. Chaim Weizmann was installed as Israel's first President, and David Ben-Gurion (head of the Mapai party ) attained the position of Prime minister of Israel that he had previously held in the provisional government. Ben-Gurion emphatically rejected the return of refugees in the Israeli Cabinet decision of June 1948. This position is reiterated in a letter to the UN of 2 August 1949 containing the text of a statement made by Moshe Sharett on 1 August 1948 where the basic attitude of the Israeli government was that a solution must be sought, not through the return of the refugees to Israel, but through the resettlement of the Palestinian Arab refugee population in other states.
The Israeli government was of the view that the armistice agreements gave them three indisputable rights:
The ceasefire was binding on regular armies, irregular forces and civilians. The ceasefire line should be treated as an international border, pending full de jure recognition in a final peace agreement. The right to settle Jews on all the land within their territory, with the right to develop the economy without having to take into account the rights of the previous owners.
The Arab nations conversely also saw the General Armistice Agreements as conferring three rights: The agreements were a truce and therefore did not end the state of war. The ceasefire lines were temporary and were not an international border. The Armistice Agreements did not cancel out the refugees' right of return.
Security Israeli security was conceptualized on two levels: general security and daily security. General security covered the threat of invasion while daily security aimed to secure Israeli territory from infiltration. This was achieved by three processes: the transfer of Israeli Arabs away from the ceasefire lines to urban areas of concentration such as Jaffa and Haifa; the resettlement of the areas cleared along the ceasefire lines, mainly by Mizrahi Jews in moshavim; and operating a free fire policy.
Once the fighting phase of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war had ceased with a truce, the Israeli bureaucracy was faced with the task of ruling over dozens of severely disrupted Israeli Arab villages and towns, where thousands of displaced Palestinians had taken refuge. Since the Israeli state did not trust its Israeli Arab citizens, seeing them as a potential fifth column, it placed this entire population under a tight military regime supervised by the Central Committee for Arab Affairs. Established in 1954, the committee had representatives from the police and the domestic intelligence agency, Shabak, as well as the prime minister's consultant for Arab affairs and the commander-in-chief of military rule. In concert, the committee presided over three regional sub-committees (south, center and north), which dealt with the daily business of governance.
The Registration of Residents ordinance of 1949 left unregistered Palestinian Arabs without legal status and vulnerable to deportation. The Abandoned Property law of 1950, where the moveable and immovable property belonging to the refugees was effectively appropriated by the state of Israel, applied not only to Palestinian refugees who had left Israeli territory but also to Palestinian Arabs who had remained in Israel but who had left their ordinary place of residence. One quarter of the Arab citizens of Israel are "internal refugees," who until 1948 resided in villages that were destroyed in the war.
Infiltration From 1949 to 1956, an estimated 90% of infiltration was motivated by social and economic concerns. It was naturally difficult to prevent refugees who were living on a bare subsistence level from crossing lines beyond which they hoped to find fodder for their hungry sheep, or for scarce fuel. Additionally, occasional nightly clandestine smuggling occurred between Gaza and Hebron. The smuggling was largely motivated by the great discrepancy in prices between the two areas. In 1950, most of these complaints concerned the shooting by Israelis of refugee civilians and livestock, said to have illegally crossed the demarcation lines. In the most serious case of this kind, Egypt complained that on the 7 and 14 October 1950, Israeli military forces shelled and machine-gunned the Arab villages of Abasan al-Kabira and Beit Hanoun in the Egyptian-controlled territory of the Gaza strip, killing seven civilians and the wounding twenty. Israel complained of infiltration incidents leading to the death of four Israeli settlers and the wounding of twenty others.
The pejorative term 'infiltrator' was also applied to refugee non-residents who had not left Israel, as was the case in Nazareth. On 21 November 1949, the Arab member of the Knesset Mr. Amin Jarjura (Mapai) asked the Knesset permission for the 6,000 refugees of Nazareth to return to their surrounding villages; at the same time the IDF were conducting a sweep through the city of Nazareth, rounding up non-residents who the Jerusalem Post then termed infiltrators.Jerusalem Post 22 November 1949 p. 3 col 2 and col 4
Arab countries anti-infiltration policies The Israeli government claimed that as an extension of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Arab countries were aiding and abetting infiltrators by using them as guerillas. Some historians consider this claim inaccurate.
The problem of establishing and guarding the demarcation line separating the Gaza Strip from the Israeli-held Negev area, proved a challenging one, largely due to the presence of more than 200,000 Palestinian Arab refugees in the Gaza area. The terms of the Armistice Agreement restricted Egypt's use and deployment of regular armed forces in the Gaza strip. The Egyptian government circumvented this restriction by forming a Palestinian para-military police force, the Palestinian Border police, in December 1952. The Border police were placed under the command of ‘Abd-al-Man’imi ‘Abd-al-Ra’uf, a former Egyptian air brigade commander, member of the Muslim Brotherhood and member of the Revolutionary Council. 250 Palestinian volunteers started training in March 1953 with further volunteers coming forward for training in May and December 1953. Part of the Border police personnel were attached to the Military Governor's office and placed under ‘Abd-al-‘Azim al-Saharti to guard public installations in the Gaza strip.
To prevent future incidents caused by infiltration on the Egyptian ceasefire line and DMZ, the Mixed Armistice Commission finally decided that a system of mixed border patrols comprising officers and enlisted men from each side would decrease tension and lessen infiltration. Initially, the mixed patrols along the Egyptian demarcation line worked satisfactorily. The Egyptian Authorities maintained a policy of "incarcerating" the inhabitants of the Gaza strip until 1955.
Free fire policy The IDF adopted a free fire policy which included patrols, ambushes, laying mines, setting booby traps and carrying out periodic search operations in Israeli Arab villages. The "free fire" policy in the period of 1949 to 1956 has been estimated to account for 2,700 to 5,000 Palestinian Arab deaths. During anti-infiltration operations, Israeli forces committed atrocities including gang rape, murder and the dumping of 120 suspected infiltrators in the Avara desert without water.: August 1950 Four Israeli policemen rape a Palestinian “infiltrator”, Khadija Bint Suliman Hussein of the West Bank village of Qatana at the Agu Gosh police station where she was being held. She was caught picking fruit in a grove that her family owned. The four policemen were tried by an internal disciplinary board and each sentenced to 18 months in prison.: 2 November 1950 Three Palestinian children shot, two fatally by IDF troops near Deir Ayyub in the Latrun salient. According to subsequent Arab legion reports, whose main points were confirmed by UN observers. Ali Muhammad Ali Alyyan (12) his sister Fakhriyeh Muhammad Ali Alyyan (10) and their cousin Khadijeh Abd al Fattah Muhammad Ali (8) all from Yalu village. Had gone to gather fire wood near the demarcation line, some inside the Jordanian territory. An Israeli patrol came upon them and Khadijeh began to run back to her village. The IDF patrol opened fire and wounded her superficially on the thigh. As the children’s father and uncle rushed to the scene they saw the patrol dragging the brother and sister away to a spot south of Deir Ayyub, in no mans land. The men looked on helplessly from a near by hill. “The two children were stood in a wadi bed and the soldiers opened fire at them. According to both [adult] witnesses only one man fired at them with a sten gun but none of the detachment attempted to interfere.