Between 1948 and 1966, over 150,000 Arabs living within Israel's post-independence borders were governed by military rule, faced curfews, travel restrictions, and the threat of arbitrary arrest and expulsion.
The draconian circumstances faced by Arab-Israelis during the period of military rule were not instituted on the basis of security considerations or any real fear of an Arab uprising, but were part of a concerted plan to drive the minority from the land and to clear the way for Jewish settlement, a declassified secret supplementary to a government report has revealed.
The document, excerpts of which have been published by Haaretz, was part of a report by the Ratner Committee, a government committee established in late 1955 to examine the possibility of abolishing martial law in the Arab-majority territories of israel.
Entitled “Security Settlement and the Land Question,” the codicil discusses the provisions governing the estimated 156,000 Arabs who stayed behind in the territories which became part of israel after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (another 800,000 Arabs fled Israel during this period).
The secret supplementary, which characterised martial law as a tool in the struggle against Arab “trespassers”, argued that in the long term, only Jewish settlement, dubbed “security settlement” in the document, could ensure the security of the nation's borders. Therefore, the document said,…
