Today, I published an article for We Are For Israel in which I talked about today’s article from Haaretz in which the PA leaders repeated their statement that they will “Never” recognize Israel as a Jewish state. You might want to view the entire article which includes several quotes here, but if you want the gist of it, it boils down to this.
President Abbas believes that the nation of Israel as recognized by the UN as a state exists, but he does not accept its Jewish nature now or in the future. He believes that it can exist solely within its recognized borders pre-1967. This is a position that has no chance to achieve peace because it has no chance to meet any of the most basic concerns of Israel including of note that the 1967 border was no where near secure and did not include most of Jerusalem on the Israeli side. The entire Old City would be on the Palestinian side.
In looking at no few recent articles including the one from Haaretz mentioned above, we find the concept, the ridiculous notion to be more accurate, that among the Palestinian concessions is the Right of Return of refugees and their descendants from 1948, much less 1967, to their homes within what would be Israel after a peace agreement. This makes no sense and cannot be understood as a concession. The only realistic option in addressing these refugees concerns is restitution, compensation for lost property.
The Right of Return as a peace concession amounts to “If you let us kill you this way, we won’t kill you the other way.” It is absurd as a notion, much less as a demand. More insane than this is the fact that the Palestinians and the Arab world act as if it is a demand that they cannot concede!!! It is an invalid and impossible demand to begin with!!! It simply cannot be done unless the goal is to eliminate the Jewish state and replace it with a Palestinian one. Thus, Israel cannot possibly agree to it. If that is true, it is not a valid negotiating position. It would amount to going to a car dealer to negotiate about the purchase of a car and the dealer only offering options that involve the car remaining in their possession after the sale.
The peace process is about the creation of two states for two peoples. One must be a state for the Jewish people. If that is not being discussed, there is no peace process.
The idea of a “right of return” that the Palestinians are at the minimum entitled to use as a bargaining chip, something that they should only give up at the price of major concessions, should be challenged now, often, and vigorously. It does not exist; it is a fanciful creation that applies to no one else.
Millions upon millions of people in the last century were displaced, from Ionian Greeks after World War I on…Karelian Finns, Sudeten Germans, eastern Poles, Bessarabians, Pakistani Hindus…and on and on and on, not forgetting the Jews forced from Arab lands in a number that coincidentally happens to be about the same as the number of Arabs who for various reasons left what became Israel.
None of them, not one, is in a refugee camp today. No one suggests that the Karelian Finns, victims of outright and unprovoked aggression, have any right of return, much less compensation for the property they were forced to leave behind. Salonikan Turks do not languis in camps eighty years later, yearning to return to their ancestors’ homelands. And if they claimed such a right they’d be greeted with shrill laughter by everyone else in the world.
But the Palestinians, who are to a large extent the authors of their own plight, are allowed to maintain dreams of returning and the Palestinian leadership claims it cannot even consider abandoning this alleged right. And in any case, “refugee”is usually defined as someone who was displaced, not his grandchildren.
Pro-Israel people should start challenging this imaginary right at every chance. We might also occasionally mention that the Arabs, with billions of dollars in resources, won’t let Palestinians settle in Egypt, deny them the right to engage in over seventy different occupations in Lebanon, forbid them from owning land in Syria, and so forth.