Palestinians and the 'right of return'

Among the major barriers to peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis is the so-called right of return. In its broadest formulation, this "right" belongs to some 4 million alleged descendants of the 700,000 or so Palestinian Arabs who left what is now Israel as the result of the war that began when Israel declared statehood in 1948.

Palestinians say the Israeli government used the war as an excuse to chase a significant percentage of its Arab population out of the newly formed Jewish state. Palestinians call this war and its aftermath "al Nakba" – "the catastrophe."

Israelis insist this catastrophe was self-inflicted. By attacking Israel in a genocidal attempt to push the Jews into the sea, the combined Arab armies created the refugee problem. Israel acknowledges that it forced out some local Palestinians who lived in areas critical to the defense of the new state. But Israel insists that many other Palestinians left of their own volition or at the behest of Arab leaders who promised that the Palestinians would return triumphantly after Israel was defeated.

What is beyond dispute is that many of the refugees – regardless of how they became refugees – were placed in miserable camps and kept there for half a century by the Arab nations in which they sought refuge.

The millions of other refugees who were forced to leave their homes in the decades following World War II – the Sudeten-Germans, the Greeks and Turks, Pakistanis and Indians, and the 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries – have all been integrated and normalized. Only the Palestinian refugees have been kept in camps by their Arab hosts. The reason was and is entirely political: to maintain resentment and to hold open the empty promise of a triumphant return that would achieve demographically what the Arab nations have been unable to achieve militarily – destruction of the Jewish state.

Israel sees the right not as an individual, humanitarian claim, but rather as a collective, political assertion designed to turn Israel into another Arab state. In 1949, Egypt's foreign minister candidly acknowledged: "It is well known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of their homeland, and not as slaves. More explicitly: they intend to annihilate the state of Israel."

That is why Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert may have been correct in principle when he announced recently that he would never accept a right of return by Palestinian refugees and their descendants. His argument was simple: The Palestinians, aided by the surrounding Arab countries, started a war against the new state of Israel in an effort to destroy it; had they instead accepted the partition – the two-state solution – Israel would have accepted the presence of significant numbers of Palestinians in the new Jewish state. But once the Palestinians started a genocidal war, the inevitable consequence was the creation of refugees. Even if some were in fact forced to leave by Israeli military commanders, such actions were in response to the attack by the Arabs.

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