14 THE QUESTION' OF PALESTINE indicated, I chink, in these remarks by Moshe D ayan in April 1969: We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country [the total area was about f> percent] we bought the lands from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal [Dayan's own village] arose in the place of Mahalul, Oevat— in the placc of Jibta, [Kibbutz] Sarid— in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua— in the place of Tell Shaman. There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population. [Ha-Aretz, April 4, 1969] Even D ayan ’s term inology, frank as it is, is euphemistic. For what he means by “ the A rab villages are not there eith er" is that they were destroyed systematically. O ne outraged Israeli, Professor Israel Shahak, who reckons almost four hundred villages were thus elim inated, has said that these villages were “ destroyed completely, with their houses, garden-walls, and even cem eteries and tom bstones, so that literally a stone does not remain standing, and visitors are passing and being told that ‘it was all desert.’ " " There is some unpleasant congruity to the fact that after the Israeli occupation o f the West Bank and G aza in 1967 the same policy o f destruction was carried out there; by the end o f 1969, 7,554 A rab houses were razed, and by August 1971, 16,212 houses had been demolished, according to the London Sunday Times o f June 19, 1977. Nor was this all. A ccording to the most precise calculation yet made, approxim ately 780,000 A rab Palestinians were dispossessed and displaced in 1948 in order to facilitate the “ reconstruction and rebuilding” o f Palestine.11 These are the Palestinian refugees, who now number well over two million. And finally we should add that the quantity o f A rabs held since 1967 inside the O ccupied Territories (which Menachem Begin