Palestinian return to Israel
From 1967 to 1993, a period of mass employment in Israel of Palestinian workers from the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip prevailed, although immigration and naturalization remain largely inaccessible.
[2] In December of that year, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 194, which resolved "that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.
"[2][3] Despite much of the international community, including the US President Harry Truman, insisting that the repatriation of Palestinian refugees was essential, Israel refused to accept the principle.
[3] In the intervening years Israel has consistently refused to change its position and has introduced further legislation to hinder Palestinians refugees from returning and reclaiming their land and confiscated property.
In the bureau of Maj. Gen. Zvi Ayalon, and in the presence of intelligence officer Binyamin Jibli, I was ordered to liquidate every infiltrator encountered by our forces, and as deterrence to leave the body in the field, to make an example of it.
Most of the people in question were refugees attempting to return to their homes, take back possessions that had been left behind during the war and to gather crops from their former fields and orchards inside the new Israeli state.
[9] Meron Benvenisti states that the fact that the infiltrators were for the most part former inhabitants of the land returning for personal, economic and sentimental reasons was suppressed in Israel as it was feared that this may lead to an understanding of their motives and to the justification of their actions.
[10] Israeli leadership came to the conclusion that only retaliatory strikes would be able to create the necessary factor of deterrence, that would convince the Arab armies to prevent infiltration.
The tactical success of the raids led to the establishment of a very unstable balance of threat, which essentially left Israel in a state of border warfare.
The resulting strategic dilemma was one of the reasons for Israel's participation in the 1956 Suez Crisis, after which U.N. peacekeepers were positioned in Gaza, and Jordan tightened security over its border.
The Egyptian formal adoption of the Fedayeen in 1954 seems to support this claim; moreover, Israel points out that after its retaliatory operations, the Arab countries managed to significantly decrease the number of infiltrations by deploying on the borders and by other measures.
He proceeds by saying that the Israeli claims were unfounded, basing on an interview with an individual named Aryeh Eilan, who is described as an official in the Israeli Ministry of Exterior: Glubb Pasha, the British officer who commanded the Jordan Arab Legion at the time, wrote that A number of documents captured by Israel during the Six-Day War were publicized, such as a letter from the minister of defence wrote to the prime minister demanding drastic steps to prevent infiltration, dated 27 February 1952.
Morris (Righteous Victims p. 270) concludes that: The armistice line separating Israel from the Israeli-occupied West Bank remained open and relatively unpatrolled after capture in the 1967 war until the 1990s.
