Francine Klagsbrun, excerpt from Lioness
Sounding calculating, almost brutal, she meant to shake up her listeners, jar the party and its heads into grappling with a situation most would do anything to avoid. “It seems to me that we entered this war unprepared for many things,” she said, “but also unprepared for victories.” She called on the central committee to hold a full-scale open and serious discussion about the Arab refugees and, in so doing, steer the party’s course on this troubling subject. This, too, required courage. She was confronting colleagues who spent hours debating every possible subject relating to the state that would be formed but who bypassed the most disturbing topic: how to relate to the Arabs in that state. Golda Meyerson broke the silence in the party on the subject of the Arab refugees, says the historian Benny Morris, an authority on the birth of the refugee problem, but nobody picked up on her questions. It wasn’t until June, after the Pan-Arab invasion of the Jewish state, that Ben-Gurion and Sharett made it known that while the war was on, Israel would not allow refugees to return to their homes, where they could serve as a fifth column. The policy, which gradually evolved, extended later to after the war as well.
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