Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, Founder and President of the Palestine Land Society, spoke at the Jerusalem Fund in Washington today about “Mapping Palestine: For its Survival and Destruction”:
In his speech, Dr. Abu Sitta — described here as a historical geographer and researcher who writes about Palestinian refugees and their right to return — introduced the results of his research on the Palestinian Nakba, or forced dispersion of Palestinians in the fighting that surrounded the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
“Israel expelled half the total number of refugees before any Arab regular army set foot in Palestine [in May 1948. The other half was expelled in the following months”, he said in this lecture.
Still, he said, “88% of the Palestinian people [including refugees and displaced persons] are in Palestine, and only 12% are outside”. He is including in this figure those Palestinians who are physically inside Israel itself, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza.
However, this is at variance with other figures, which suggest that over one-third of the Palestinian people are refugees outside Palestine.
Dr. Abu Sitta is famous for his work suggesting where and how Palestinian refugees can return without displacing other people. In the summer of 2000, he co-authored an article in the Israeli media [Haaretz] suggesting that all the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and many of those in Gaza — over one million people — could be resettled in Israel’s Galilee and southern Negev desert “without anybody even noticing”.
In his lecture in Washington on Thursday, Drl Abu Sitta said that 84% of the whole Israeli Jewish population live in only 17% of
the land inside Israel — “the rest is used for the Army, and by kibbutzes”, he said. “If we bring back the refugees who are from the Galilee — some 800,000 people — they will be met by 500.000 family members living there” [who would, presumably, put them up and take care of them?]. While in the south of Israel, he said, “all the Jews are less than a single refugee camp in Gaza” [here, he also seemed to be arguing that there was room to resettle Palestinians from crowded Gaza]…
Dr. Abu Sitta said his research showed that people were forced to leave during military operations — when there was a truce, nobody left, he said. “All expulsion was directily coordinated with Israeli military operations”. 31 military operations that took place in Palestine over several months were associated with 71 massacres — about two massacres per operation, he said. And 675 Palestinian villages were depopulated in this period . “Many [of these] massacres were related to the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, or the corridor between Tel Aviv and Haifa”.
Most of the destroyed villages were between Jerusalem and Jaffa, and Jerusalem and Haifa, he said. Other destruction took place along the River Jordan, and around Tiberias, and also around Gaza.
In the massacres, he said, the men and women were separated. The women were forced to turn over their jewelry, then sent to Arab forward lines. Twenty percent of the captive men were massacred, and the rest — 80% — were sent to do hard labor”, Abu Sitta said.
In Gaza, he said, “people from 247 villages were herded into this place, an area the size of 1% of the total land of Palestine”.
He shows how the UN-negotiated armistice lines were altered: the northern boundary of the Gaza Strip, fixed by an armistice line agreed on 24 February 1949, was chopped by 200 square kilometers [all around the Gaza perimeter, according to a graphic chart he showed during his presentation] — reducing Gaza’s size from 550 square kilometers to 362 square kilometers. This was achieved, he said, as a result of coercion on Egypt’s King Farouk to agree on a “temporary modus vivendi line” that would “keep the border quiet”. By 1956 — the Suez War — this temporary line had become permanent, he said.
The West Bank armistice line of 2 April 1949 was moved after coercion exercised on Jordan’s King Abdullah — “Israel threatened to take over all of the West Bank, otherwise”, Abu Sitta said. As a result, an area called the “muthallath” or “triangle” in the north-western West Bank suddenly became Israeli [including the town of Um al-Fahm].
In the Jerusalem area, Abu Sitta said, Glubb Pasha and Moshe Dayan had agreed on a line. Then, Israel said it was no good for them, because it excluded the railway line from Jerusalem to Jaffa. As a result, he said, [part of] Walajeh, Beit Safafa, and the Latrun area became Israeli.
“As a result [of these alterations], 111 villages have been dissected by this armistice line.
Dr. Abu Sitta, who has published an Atlas of Palestine, also described his research results from compilation of elaborate computer databases. One of the projects he is working on is an international competition to redesign the destroyed Palestinian villages, with modern infrastructure. “We want to defy the dispossession”, he said, “and you have to have a plan for reconstruction of these Palestinian destroyed villages”.
In the spirit of the “Arab Spring”, he said, there will be a “masiirat al-awda” [a demonstration about return ] to mark Nakba [“catastrophe”] Day on May 15. This is also the anniversary of the date that Israel was established, according to the Common Era calendar. [The demonstration will probably be held on 13 May, a Friday, he said.] “It will be a peaceful demonstration but highly symbolic”, Dr. Abu Sitta said. “People will carry banners and signs with the names of their villages…Some of these people can actually see their home villages” from their refugee camps and places of exile.
He said that this “masiirat al-awda” will be held on all borders [of Israel] — the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Jordan, Lebanon and Syria”.