Summary
The Israeli label, as Manna presents it in Chapter 4, for Palestinian refugees who crossed back from neighbouring countries to their homes and lands after 1948, whom Israel fought as a security threat through arrest, military courts, fines and renewed expulsion (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.153, 155).
Details
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Israel criminalised returnees as ‘infiltrators’ and fired indiscriminately on refugees seen trying to return (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.26).
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Despite massive army and police effort, Israel’s success in halting return was only partial: thousands returned to their homes and remain there; remainers were criminalised for not informing authorities of returnees’ presence and faced jail and exorbitant penalties for helping relatives (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.153).
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Manna’s three-part division of Israeli security policy after the armistices places returnees between external and internal policy; most returned for economic and social reasons, not revenge, and the early 1949 returnees from Lebanon were mostly unarmed Operation Hiram expellees (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.155).
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In November 1951, 195 ‘infiltrators’ were in detention and 148 others indicted, together about 80 percent of detainees; at the end of May 1953, 341 infiltrators in jail constituted about 30 percent of Arabs in prison (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.156).
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The line between census-registered residents and ‘infiltrators’ was unclear; surprise searches expelled many residents who had never left, and General Elimelech Avnir’s January 1949 report records 1,038 people expelled from eleven villages (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.156).
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Chapter 4’s conclusion (part 5) quantifies the outcome: official Israeli sources estimated about 20,500 “infiltrators” had succeeded in gaining citizenship five years after the Galilee’s occupation, while Israel agreed to family reunification for about 3,000; returning “infiltrators” constituted about a quarter of the Galilee’s post-Nakba population (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.184).
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In the same conclusion Manna puts expulsion of remainers from the war’s end to the mid-1950s at at least 10,000 individuals, doubling if the Naqab expulsions are added — a similar number to those who succeeded in returning and settling for good (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.184).
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Manna’s Chapter 5 (part 6) shows the category’s routine lethality inside the The Triangle: villagers accustomed for generations to crossing the area freely were shot as “infiltrators,” some villages created special cemeteries for them, and Manna quotes Benny Morris’s Israel’s Border Wars figure of “between 2,700 and 5,000 Arab infiltrators were killed,” the vast majority unarmed (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.211-212, 217). The June 1952 ‘Ara case is his type example of citizens shot under the label without having crossed the border at all (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.211-212).
Related pages
Nakba and Survival, Remainers, Present Absentees, Right of Return, Elimelech Avnir