The Palestinian Diaspora

By Nicolas B. Tatro / The Associated Press

Send this clipping to somebody

Transcribed from the clipping

LOD, Israel — Audeh Rantisi remembers a Sunday morning in July 1948 when an Israeli soldier came to the door and told his mother the family would have to leave the house and go to the center of town. Audeh's father, George, a soap maker and landowner, locked the front door of the four-room stone house, put the keys in his pocket and started walking.

He thought he would be home in time for dinner. But their footsteps on the dusty road took them into the Palestinian Diaspora, and Audeh's parents did not return to live in Lod.

They were among the 600,000 to 760,000 Arabs who left towns and villages in what is now Israel during the first Arab-Israeli war, according to Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who has studied the Palestinian refugee problem. The 1948 war started when Israel declared its independence and Arab countries attacked the new nation.

There was no state that belonged to the Palestinians, and many Palestinians who lived in the area that is now Israel left on the advice of Arab leaders or to escape the war zone. Arabs who identify themselves as Palestinians now number roughly 4.7 million.

About half the Palestinians live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, in the Israeli-annexed section of Jerusalem or inside the borders of Israel. About 766,000 still live in refugee camps. The rest are scattered.

A 15-month Palestinian uprising that began in December 1987 in the Israeli-occupied territories and a decision by the United States to talk with Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization have made the Palestinians and their future a main element of the quest for peace.

Because Palestinians living abroad seek the right to return to their homes, most of which were long ago destroyed or belong to Israeli families, the Palestinian Diaspora poses one of the thorniest peacemaking problems.

Israeli politicians of the right and left are united in opposing the return of Palestinians to what is now Israel, and many Israelis are concerned about an influx of former guerrillas and improverished camp dwellers to a Palestinian state created from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“The Palestinian can be, and has been, a Kuwaiti, a Jordanian, a Syrian, an American, a European. But he never, under any circumstances, gave up that identification of being a Palestinian,” said Dr. Mahdi Abdul Hadi, director of the Palestinian Academy for the Study of International Affairs in Jerusalem.

For Audeh Rantisi, then 11, his three younger brothers and two sisters, leaving their home meant joining a stream of thousands of other Palestinians uprooted from Lod and Ramle on July 12-14, 1948. “We didn't realize what was happening until we were out of town. We hadn't taken anything with us, no money, no papers, no clothes.

Nobody thought we were being evicted for good,” said Audeh, who is now an Episcopal pastor and political activist in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Cite this clipping

"The Palestinian Diaspora," Standard Star, 16 April 1989. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1989-031. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1989-031