thousands were summarily evicted from the town of Kalkilia and several villages in the Latrun area of the West Bank when someone decided, without government approval, to destroy these townships for strategical purposes. The inhabitants of Kalkilia were later allowed to return and rebuild their homes.
When the plight of the new refugees started to make headlines around the world, alienating many of those who had been sympathetic to Israel during the war itself, the Israeli Government declared that it was prepared to let the new refugees come back. However, this was a tactical move, designed to blunt criticism; there never seems to have been any intention to let the bulk of the refugees return. In the end, less than ten per cent were allowed to come back, and many of these failed to return because the permits often did not include whole families, but only the older people.
Thus the 1967 war has, in a way, aggravated the situation, both by creating a huge number of new refugees and by deepening the conviction in the Arab mind that Israel, whenever possible, will grab new territory and evict its owners. I am deeply convinced that the behavior of the Israeli Government in this situation is altogether shortsighted. As one officer of the Israeli Army put it, "If we already have a million and a quarter Arabs in the areas now controlled by Israel, what difference does it make if we have a hundred thousand more or less? It only alienates the Arabs who stayed behind." This is exactly the point. If the government had been capable of adopting a strategy of peace, it would have behaved differently. For indeed, the new situation created by the war offered Israel chances it never had before.
There are hundreds of thousands of refugees in Israeliheld territory. Some of them, in the Gaza Strip, had been living for twenty years under Egyptian occupation, deprived of all civil rights, living in squalid camps within the Strip, which had become one big concentration camp it¬