The Point of No  - Right of - Return
The Point of No - Right of - Return

The generally unjust and injurious tack of prejudice and hate the Muslim world has always adopted against Jews and Judaism has only gotten worse over the years.

The antagonism goes far beyond the issue of “settlements” or “occupation”. A culture of Islamic Jew hatred has arisen which has become an end in itself.

This was also true in Israel’s war of independence. Historians have tended to dismiss the jihadi rhetoric and flourishes that accompanied the two stage Arab assault on the Yishuv.  But the fact is the 1948 War, from the Arabs’ perspective, was a war of religion as much as - if not more than - a nationalist war over territory.

The Arab defeat in the War of Independence and Israel’s survival as a Jewish country caused the Arabs to retaliate against the Jews living in Arab countries.

The Source of the "Right of Return" Concept

In 1945, there were more than 870,000 Jews living in the various Arab states. Throughout 1947 and 1948 on account of the establishment of Israel, these Jews were viciously persecuted. Their property and belongings were confiscated. There were anti-Jewish riots in Egypt, Lybia, Syria, and Iraq. In Iraq, Zionism was made a capital crime.

Following the war of independence, approximately 600,000 Jews from Arab lands sought refuge in the State of Israel. They arrived destitute, but they were absorbed into the society and became an integral part of the state. In effect, then, a veritable exchange of populations took place between Arab and Jewish refugees.

Approximately 700,000 Palestinians became refugees during the War of Independence. There are two main reasons this happened. 1. They fled the advancing Israeli army to escape the heat of battle in areas Israel occupied for strategic reasons. 2. Arab leaders called on the Palestinians to flee before the advancing Arab armies and return to their homes after the Arabs quickly defeated the Jews.

In fact, there are large numbers of homeless refugees after every war. Reasonable and often extreme humanitarian efforts are always exerted to resettle war refugees in some logical framework. But the opposite was done with the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war.

From a base count of some 700,000 in 1948, the descendants of the Palestinian refugees in the various refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza and in surrounding Arab countries number 4 or 5 million today. For 63 years the Arab countries have adamantly refused to integrate the refugees into normal life in their own societies.

Instead the UNRWA organization was created to be a sort of social and humanitarian Palestinian refugee enabler and this has only served to perpetuate the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees – not end it.

Non-binding UN General Assembly 1948 resolution 194 calls for permitting the Palestinian refugees who so desire to return to the homes they abandoned in Israel.

The resolution states that refugees who wish to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.

Non-binding UN General Assembly resolution 3236 from 1974 states that the Palestinian refugee right of return is an “inalienable” right.

There was no UN resolution on return or compensation for confiscated property for the Jews forced to leave Arab lands.

The "right of return" was defined as the "foremost of Palestinian rights" at the 12th Palestine National Council meeting in 1974 when it became the first component of the Palestine Liberation Organization's trinity of inalienable rights, the others being the right of self determination and the right to an independent state.

In 1975 the UN established the Committee for the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. This UN committee places a big stress on implementing the refugee right of return, needless to say.

In spite of all the fuss surrounding the Palestinian right of return over the years, this aim and the relevant UN resolutions in particular aren’t mentioned in the historic 1993 Oslo Accords.

However, the Palestinian political unrest in the First Intifada led to the Palestinians observing their so-called “Nakba Day” in 1988. Nakba in Arabic means catastrophe. The Palestinians observe Nakba Day on Israel’s Independence Day May 15 as a day of mourning for the refugees of 1948, and to call for the return of their millions of descendants to Israeli territory.

Arafat and the "Right of Return"

In May 2001, Arafat proclaimed that the Palestinian people would not surrender one grain of the soil of its homeland.

In his speech on Nakba Day on 15 May 2004, Arafat called the right of return  a "divine" command that even supersedes UN resolution. "There is no one and nothing in the world who can surrender the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. The State of Israel can never free itself of the moral, political, and international responsibility...for this tragedy visited upon the Palestinian refugees. Every single Palestinian refugee has the holy right to return to his homeland Palestine, in keeping with the legitimate international resolutions and, first of all, the resolution that relates to return of the refugees, 194."

Unfortunately, Arafat’s vision of the Arab "right of return" is a trifle one sided. Which is to say that while he goes on at great length and great passion about the millions of Palestinian "refugees" returning to Israel, he does not drop the other shoe.

He never said anything about what this immense flood of Palestinian Arabs into the state of Israel would do to Israel. This eventuality is completely unfathomable. Implementation of the Palestinian "refugee right of return" envisions an explosion of incoming population into Israel in a very short time – 5 million people entering Israel, and to homes and lands of their refugee forefathers that no longer exist.

Where will they all go?

This is a rhetorical question. If Israel permits the influx of millions of Palestinian Arab refugee descendants into its territory it is nothing but a formula for national suicide. Of course, this is the underlying motivation of the Palestinian "refugee right of return". The Arabs want nothing more than to eliminate Israel.

Their hallucinatory idea that 5 million refugees will swiftly return to the territory that once was called Palestine - but as a Jewish homeland -  is harnessed to their equally hallucinatory idea that Israel can and should be destroyed.

The so-called Palestinian "refugee right of return" is nothing less than a sublimated Palestinian desire to wipe Israel off the map. And that obviously cannot be permitted to happen.

This is precisely why there is no point in even discussing the Palestinian "refugee right of return". The idea is worse than a non-starter. It is a dead letter, a poison pill.

Every human being is entitled to have hallucinations and delusions about all kinds of things on the face of the earth. There is a joke about a mentally ill man who talks to his dog. He is considered mentally ill, however, because he believes the dog talks back to him. This is the essential flaw and the lethal flaw in the PA "refugee right of return" construct. They talk as if their so-called "right of return" is an inalienable right, but it is essentially comparable to their believing the dog talks back to them.

Quite recently, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, also identified the Palestinian "right of refugee return" as a deal killer for peace with Israel:

"Today the Palestinian leadership is calling for an independent Palestinian state, but insists that its people return to the Jewish state," Prosor said, explaining that such a proposition is one "that no one who believes in the right of Israel to exist could accept because the only equation in political science with mathematical certainty is that the so-called right of return equals the destruction of the State of Israel."

"The idea that Israel will be flooded with millions of Palestinians is a non-starter. The international community knows it. The Palestinian leadership knows it. But the Palestinian people aren’t hearing it. This gap between perception and reality is the major obstacle to peace. The so-called right of return is the major hurdle to achieving peace," he added.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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