The 1949–1956 Palestinian expulsions were a continuation of the 1948 expulsion and flight of Palestinian Arabs from Israeli-controlled territory that occurred after the signing of the ceasefire agreements. This period of the exodus was characterised predominantly by forced expulsion during the consolidation of the state of Israel and ever increasing tension along the ceasefire lines ultimately leading to the 1956 Suez Crisis.
Between 1949 and 1950, according to historian Benny Morris, Israel had displaced and expelled between 30,000 and 40,000 Palestinians and Bedouin. Many villages along the ceasefire lines and the Lebanon border area were also leveled, many emptied villages were resettled by new Jewish immigrants and demobilized Israeli military forces.
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 her image abroad.
Background
Immediately after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Israel started on a process of nation building with the first general elections held on 25 January 1949. Chaim Weizmann was installed as Israel's first President and Ben-Gurion as head of the Mapai party attained the position he had held in the Provisional government of Israel that of Prime minister of Israel. Ben-Gurion emphatically rejected the return of refugees in the Israeli Cabinet decision of June 1948 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 3 indisputable rights:
1. That the ceasefire was binding on regular armies, irregular forces and civilians. 2. That the ceasefire line should be treated as an international border, pending full de jure recognition in a final peace agreement. 3. 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 3 rights: 1. That the agreements were a truce and therefore did not end the state of war. 2. That the ceasefire lines were temporary and were not an international border. 3. The Armistice Agreements did not cancel out the refugees right of return.
Security
Israeli security was thought of on two levels general security and daily security. The general security covered the threat of invasion while daily security was 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, mainly by mizrahim (oriental Jews) in moshavim along the ceasefire lines; 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 5th 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 those 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 just 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.