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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
THE NUMBER OF PALESTINIAN REFUGEES
Over the years, a minor point of dispute between Israel and the Arab states has been the number of Palestinian Arabs who became refugees during and as a result of the 1948 war. From 1949 onwards, Arab officials spoke of a total of 900,000 or one million. Israeli spokesmen, in public, usually referred to ‘about 520,000’. The United Nations Economic Survey Mission and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) put the figure at 726,000.
Other estimates ranged between the Israeli and Arab figures. For example, the British, in February 1949, thought that there were 810,000, of whom 210,000 were in the Gaza Strip, 320,000 in the West Bank and 280,000 in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan (East Bank). The director general of the Israel Foreign Ministry, Walter Eytan, in a private letter in late 1950 referred to the UNRWA registration in 1949 of 726,000 as ‘meticulous’ but thought that ‘the real number was close to 800,000’. However, officially, Israel stuck to the low figure of 520,000–530,000. The reason was simple:
If people … became accustomed to the large figure and we are eventually obliged to accept the return of the refugees, we may find it difficult, when faced with hordes of claimants, to convince the world that not all of these formerly lived in Israeli territory … It would, in any event, seem desirable to minimise the numbers … than otherwise.
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