MICHAL GOVRIN
293
The manipulation of the status of victim climaxed in the Arab states'
immortalization of the fate of the uprooted in the war of
1947-1949 .
The war in which
1
percent of the inhabitants of the State of Israel were
killed resulted in a victory that saved the young state from destruction.
As a result of the battles, six hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians
were uprooted from their homes; about
60
percent of these left volun–
tarily with the encouragement of the Arab states, and about
40
percent
were expelled. Arab villages were destroyed in battles; Jewish settle–
ments were occupied and destroyed and their inhabitants uprooted.
Hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from transit and Displaced
Persons camps, and from Arab states, were settled in an effort at
absorption, their humiliation and death are still present in Israeli soci–
ety. The uprooted Palestinians were left in internment camps, sometimes
only dozens of kilometers from their original homes, for three genera–
tions now. In the twentieth century, of the hundreds of millions of
uprooted immigrants and refugees, the Palestinians are the only group
still penned up, "refugees" for fifty years . In Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and
Jordan (which has a Palestinian majority), they are not granted citizen–
ship or any other identity, not allowed to leave the barbed wire of the
camps for another life and future. In the words of the Palestinian leader
Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), "Arab armies entered Palestine to
defend the Palestinians from Zionist tyranny, but instead, they aban–
doned them, forced them
to
emigrate and leave their homeland, forced
on them a political and ideological siege, and put them between prison
walls." What was a trauma as a result of war turned into eternal forced
suffering, and the "right of return" became the basic credo and the
focus of the national identity of the Palestinian people. Realization of
the "right of return" for the uprooted and their children, a mass of four
million people today, to the State of Israel, which has six million citi–
zens, including more than a million Arabs, means its dismantling as a
Jewish state and its becoming a Jewish minority within a Muslim major–
ity of two hundred million Muslims stretching as far as Indonesia . The
refusal to settle the problem of the refugees by means of reparations or
exchange and the turning of the refugee camps into a harsh scene of
martyrdom became the most loaded subjects in the Israeli-Arab conflict.
The conquest of Egyptian and Jordanian territories in
1967
exposed the
million refugees living in camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to
direct contact with the Israeli army, and turned them, especially since
the first intifada of
1987,
into the central targets of violent clashes.
In the decade of the Palestinian Authority's existence, despite the
understandings in the Oslo Accords and the amounts of money it
