In some circumstances, a family may have lost part or all of its land from which its living was secured, but it may still have a house to live in. Others may have lived on one side of the boundary but worked in what is now Israel most of the year. Others, such as Bedouins, normally moved from one area of the country to another, and some escaped with part or all of their goods but could not return to the area where they formerly resided the greater part of the time. [18]

To be sure, the 200,000 escapees to the Gaza Strip and the 280,000 who fled to the territory that became the West Bank after its April 1950 annexation to Jordan were in no position to return to their prewar dwellings. This was because their leaders and the Egyptian and Jordanian governments that conquered these areas during the war would not allow this, and because Israel would not allow their repatriation before a comprehensive peace was concluded in case this might be "exploited in order to encourage subversive or hostile activities" as feared by the IRO.[19]

American Friends Service Committee members hand out blankets to Palestinian refugees, Gaza, 1948. A British diplomat was told by refugees that "they have no quarrel with the Jews… and are perfectly ready to go back and live with them again." They clearly had no "well-founded fear of being persecuted."

Yet these displaced persons remained in their country of nationality and could have readily rebuilt their lives there as ordinary citizens rather than refugees, either by being allowed to proclaim their own independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, as stipulated by the partition resolution of November 1947, or as citizens of the respective occupying states.

Indeed, the 280,000 escapees in the West Bank, alongside the 88,000 who had fled to Transjordan (east of the Jordan River)—i.e., a total of 368,000, more than 60 percent of those who had fled their homes during the war[20]—became Jordanian citizens even before the area's official annexation to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

This, on its own, should have disqualified them for refugee status as both the IRO constitution and the 1951 convention unequivocally deny this status and its attendant benefits to any refugee who "has acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality."[21] In line with this ruling, in 1952-53, the High Commissioner for Refugees declined Ankara's request to grant refugee status to the 154,000 persons of Turkish origin who had been expelled from Bulgaria on the grounds that they ceased to be refugees upon receiving Turkish citizenship.[22] Yet this principle has never been applied to the Palestinians who have been granted Jordanian citizenship or their descendants—amounting to some 3 million "refugees" in today's terms.

Even less deserving of refugee status are the Palestinians who moved from the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to its eastern bank during the June 1967 war. Not only did they remain in the country of their nationality under the rule of their own government, but as members of the aggressing party, they did not meet the basic requirement for refugee status: victimhood.On June 5, at the outbreak of hostilities on the Egyptian front, Israel passed several secret messages to Jordan's King Hussein, pleading with him to stay out of the fighting and pledging that in such an eventuality, no harm would be visited upon his kingdom.[23] Had the king heeded these pleas and refrained from attacking Israel, there would have been no war, and the West Bank would have remained under his control.

Justified flight? Last but not least, the 1951 convention linked people's flight from their national homeland, which qualified them for refugee status, to "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion."[24] Yet no such fear should have existed in the Palestinian case—not in 1967, when it became evident within days that West Bankers faced no imminent threat to their lives or properties, and not in 1948-49, when the Zionist leadership went out of its way to articulate its desire for peaceful coexistence with the country's Arab population. Indeed, no sooner had the guns fallen silent than a senior British diplomat on a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949 was told by the refugees that "they have no quarrel with the Jews, that they have lived with the Jews all their lives and are perfectly ready to go back and live with them again."[25]

These were no idle words. In accepting the partition resolution, the Zionist movement acquiesced in the principle of a two-state solution and all subsequent deliberations were based on the assumption that Palestine's Arabs would remain as equal citizens in the Jewish state that would arise with the termination of the British mandate. In the words of David Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel's first prime minister: "In our state, there will be non-Jews as well—and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: The state will be their state as well."[26]

In line with this conception, committees laying the groundwork for the nascent Jewish state discussed in detail the establishment of an Arabic-language press, the improvement of health in the Arab sector, the incorporation of Arab officials in the government, the integration of Arabs within the police and the ministry of education, and Arab-Jewish cultural and intellectual interaction.[27] No less importantly, the military plan of the Hagana (the foremost Jewish underground organization in mandatory Palestine) for rebuffing an anticipated pan-Arab invasion (or Plan D) was itself predicated, in the explicit instructions of Israel Galilee, the Hagana's commander-in-chief, on the "acknowledgement of the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without any discrimination, and a desire for coexistence on the basis of mutual freedom and dignity."[28]

The same principle was enshrined in Israel's Declaration of Independence of May 14, 1948, which undertook to "uphold absolute social and political equality of rights for all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or sex" and urged the Arab citizens "to take part in the building of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and on the basis of appropriate representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent." In its first meeting two days later, the provisional Israeli government discussed a basic law regulating the nascent state's ruling institutions and practices, which ensured, among other things, the right of Arab citizens to be elected to parliament and to serve as cabinet ministers as well as the continued functioning of the autonomous Muslim (and Christian) religious courts that had existed during the mandate. Four months later, the government decided that Arabic, alongside Hebrew, would serve as the official language in all public documents and certificates.[29]

Had the Palestinian leadership and the neighboring Arab regimes similarly accepted the partition resolution rather than attempt to destroy the state of Israel at birth, there would have been no war and no refugee problem in the first place. Most of mandatory Palestine's Arab population would have resided in the prospective Arab state and a substantial Arab minority would have lived peacefully in Israel. Hence, the Palestinian exodus was not a result of "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion" but a corollary of a failed war of annihilation against a peaceful neighbor.

Likewise, the Palestinian flight during the 1967 war was not the consequence of a "well-founded fear of being persecuted." The Israeli defeat of the second pan-Arab attempt to destroy it in a generation posed no threat to the West Bank's civilian population. Quite the contrary, had it been up to Israel, war would not have come to this front in the first place as evidenced by the secret pleas to King Hussein noted above. Besides, with West Bank fighting over within a mere four days, it was clear to all that there was no Israeli plan to harm, let alone expel the Palestinian population in this territory.

Inflating Refugee Numbers

Apart from recognizing the Palestinians as refugees despite their failure to meet the basic criteria for this status and assigning a distinct agency to tend to their affairs, the U.N. blindly registered countless false claimants as refugees despite its keen awareness of the pervasiveness of this fraud, then let their falsely obtained status be passed on to future generations.

Palestinians who moved from the West Bank of Jordan to its eastern bank during and after the Six-Day War, as these seen here crossing the Jordan River, June 22, 1967, are not refugees as they remained in the country of their nationality under the rule of their own government.

At the beginning of August 1948, after eight months of Arab-Jewish fighting, the director of the U.N. Disaster Relief Project (DRP) in Palestine, Sir Raphael Cilento, set the number of refugees at 300,000-350,000,[30] and the September 16 General Assembly report by the U.N. mediator for Palestine Folke Bernadotte settled on the slightly higher figure of 360,000.[31] A supplementary report submitted a month later by Bernadotte's successor, Ralph Bunche, raised the figure to 472,000, estimating the number of people who would require U.N. aid in the 9-month period from December 1, 1948 to August 1, 1949, at 500,000.[32]

By now, however, the Arabs had dramatically upped the ante. In October 1948, the Arab League set the number of refugees at 631,967, and by the end of the month, official Arab estimates ranged between 740,000 and 780,000. When the U.N.'s Relief for Palestine Refugees began operation in November 1948, it found some 940,000 refugees on its relief rolls.[33]

U.N. officials deemed these figures to be grossly exaggerated, not least since there had been no major influx of refugees since Bernadotte and Bunche submitted their far lower estimates. By way of illustrating the inflated Arab figures, Cilento pointed to allegations of growing refugee presence in certain locations at a time when their real numbers in these sites had actually decreased.[34] Similarly, in his October report, Bunche noted the false allegation by the Syrian authorities of the existence of 30,000 refugees in the northern cities of Aleppo, Latakia, Hama, and Homs whereas the actual figure was hardly half that size.[35] Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo, got a firsthand impression of the pervasive inflation of refugee numbers during a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949. He reported to London:

The Quakers have nearly 250,000 refugees on their books. … They admit, however, that the figures are unreliable, as it is impossible to stop all fraud in the making of returns. Deaths for example are never registered nor are the names struck off the books of those who leave the district clandestinely. Some names, too, are probably registered more than once for the extra rations.[36]