Refugees Within Israel: The Case of the Villagers of Kafr Bir‘im and Iqrit

Abstract

On April 1, 1973, near Hadera in Israel, almost 7,000 Arabs and Jews took part in an open air meeting of solidarity with the inhabitants of Kafr Bir'im and Iqrit. I The meeting was a reminder that the cause of these two small, empty ruined villages in northern Israel along the Lebanese border, so prominent in 1972, has still not died. The inhabitants of these two villages the Uprooted, as they have been termed in the Israeli press who were dispossessed by the Israeli army in 1948, have been struggling from within Israel for a quarter of a century for the right to return to their homes. In 1972, their case finally burst into the open and provoked controversy inside Israel and among both Jews and non-Jews outside. Some indication of the impact upon American Jewish opinion of the demand of these villagers to return to their homes in 1972, and its cold reception by the Israeli government, is suggested by an article in the American Jewish Congress periodical, the Congress Bi-weekly, by Chaim I. Waxman. Acknowledging that the affair of the villages had received some coverage in the United States, Waxman expressed the fear that the Israeli government's refusal to allow the villagers to return could become a major weapon in the arsenals of critics of Zionism and Israel. Presenting a point of view favourable to the dispossessed villagers and critical of the government's handling of the situation, Waxman affirmed: Before too much time elapses, it behooves us to reexamine the issues involved in this most difficult question which presents Israel with one of its most serious moral challenges. 2 In Israel