The Right Of Return

The right of return

I was privately asked about a post implying that Israel is refusing to allow the right to return to Palestinians that have been displaced even though Jews have had the right of return for a while now. I thought I’d answer in a post.

Let me address this by first of all pointing out that Palestinians currently do have the right to return… to the Palestinian-controlled territories. If an American Palestinian wants to move to Ramallah, Israel has no say in the matter, meaning in effect the Palestinians have the right of return to those parts of the historical Land of Israel.

Which means that when Palestinians keep talking about the right of return, they’re not talking about the right to return to their own self-governed territories, they’re talking about the right to return to the territories which make up the State of Israel. The Jewish Virtual Library has a good summary on how in international law, the right of return only applies to individual nationals, it’s not an obligatory right that has to be granted to entire groups of people. That means that every country which does grant a right of return to an entire group of people does so because it chooses to, not because it is compelled by international law. In other words, it does grant this right when it believes it’s in the best interest of the country or of the population the country is meant to serve. When Palestinians demand the right of return not to the parts of the land that they govern, but to the parts which make up the State of Israel, it’s equivalent to country X demanding that country Y will grant automatic citizenship to descendants of country X instead of country X giving those people a right of return to its own borders. That’s something that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world. And, in fact, if country X did try to make such a demand, country Y would likely see this as a threat, because of the way that a big concentration of nationals loyal to another country had been used along history. This is how Hitler used the people of German descent who were living in Czechoslovakia to take over Sudetenland (and later using this initial split of the country to take over all of Czechoslovakia), or how Russia has used the substantial population of Russian descent living in the eastern parts of Ukraine to demand those territories.

To make the current situation clearer, I’ll add that many Jews were originally from territories that are now under Palestinian control (meaning they were displaced from those places, not from the parts of the Land of Israel which today make up the Jewish state). Those Jews don’t have a right of return to those parts of the Land of Israel either, they can’t return to Gaza, they can’t return to areas A and B of Judea and Samaria, they can’t return to Jewish communities that existed on the eastern side of the Jordan river and which were ethnically cleansed by the Jordanians as a part of Jordan’s actions against Israel during the latter’s War of Independence (despite reaching a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan, signed in 1994). To be accurate, even within the State of Israel, Jews don’t have a free right of return to every place they used to inhabit. In antiquity, all of Israel used to be Jewish. Even in later times, there still were Jewish communities in places like ShefarAm, Nazareth, Pekiin and Huseifa, all places that were originally Jewish towns. They are today all under Israeli rule, but the Jews don’t get to return there. The demographics of these places had been irreversibly changed.

Certainly when we look at borders between countries, two states for two people where each gets to self-govern means the right of return is and will remain limited geographically for both groups.

If the right of return won’t be limited, it’s clear which of the two groups will become the minority, losing in practice the right to self-determination. Because it has to be emphasized that the right to self-determination is not considered a right that is fulfilled when a group of people is a minority. As long as a group is a minority, its power to determine its own fate is dependent, either (in a democracy) on the good will of the majority (for example, in the 1920′s and early 1930′s in Germany, Jews who made up 0.8% of the German population didn’t get to decide who will lead their country, they were dependent on the majority of Germans voting against the Nazis… and we all know how that turned out) or it’s dependent on the minority’s use of force to override the majority (which is the case in Syria, for example, where the Alawi minority reigns over the Sunni majority through the use of force. We all saw how bloody that got during Syria’s civil war, and nobody wants that for Israel). If the Palestinian right of return were to be applied without limitation to the entire Land of Israel, it would be the Jews who would become a minority and lose the right to self-determination.

This is why the push for the right of return of Palestinians to all of Israel is considered such a red flag by a majority of Jews. Because it’s understood to be a tool in destroying the State of Israel serving as the one place where Jews get to have self-determination, and to deny Jews this universal right is discriminatory in nature, and therefore considered by many to be antisemitic. This is one of the reasons why so many, including actual governments, have declared the BDS movement (which calls for the boycott of Israelis and Jews) antisemitic, because one of its three stated goals is a return of Palestinian refugees to all of Israel. Note here that the one of the founders of BDS is Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian man living in Israel thanks to his marriage to an Israeli Arab. He states he wants a right of return of Palestinian refugees, while ignoring the right of Jews to return to Israel. He knows exactly what this means for Jews.

More than that, most conflicts around the world aren’t resolved through a mutual and unlimited right of return. When two countries were in a conflict and many people were displaced on both sides, conflicts were usually resolved through eventually agreeing that there was a population exchange, and whatever harm befell one country and its population, it was more or less balanced off by whatever harm befell the other country and its population. A population exchange is a bad thing, since it points to many people being displaced, but once it has occurred, recognizing it can allow both sides to move on. The Israeli-Arab conflict could have been resolved like that long ago. About 800,000 Arabs were displaced in Israel during its War of Independence (most of them because they fled the war that their own side started), about 850,000 Jews from Arab countries were expelled from those countries following Israel’s victory in that war, and most of the Jews displaced from Arab countries ended up in Israel. Agreeing that this was an exchange of populations, that Israel would take care of the displaced Jews, and the Arab countries would take care of the displaced Arabs (presumably by creating a new Arab state on the parts of the Land of Israel that Egypt and Jordan had occupied during Israel’s War of Independence) could have been a resolution for this conflict over 70 years ago. In fact, Israel agreed to this when it told the UNWRA in 1952 it assumes all responsibility for the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries. Here’s a mention of Israel taking that responsibility in an excerpt from an essay looking into how UNWRA today discriminates in favor of the Palestinian refugees in comparison with how all other refugees worldwide are treated by UNHCR (for example, mentioning that refugees treated by UNHCR have no right of return):

If this conflict wasn’t resolved through accepting the mutual population exchange, if the Arab countries didn’t create a Palestinian state on the lands occupied by Jordan and Egypt, if the Palestinians today continue to insist on the right of return even as they gain citizenship in other countries, and they insist on a right of return specifically to the territories that now make up the State of Israel, it’s because they’re not interested in a resolution. They know that applying the Palestinian right of return to all of the land will effectively wipe out Israel as the one Jewish state, and that’s what those who are advocating for it are really interested in.

Here’s a statement by a UN official from 1952, convinced that the Arab states are purposely using the Arab refugees as a political weapon against Israel:

Here’s what a leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization said in a 1977 interview he had with a Dutch newspaper:

“There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are part of one people, the Arab nation. Look, I have family members with Palestinian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Syrian citizenship. We are one people.

Only for political reasons we do carefully maintain our Palestinian identity. Indeed, it is of national importance for the Arabs to insist on the existence of a Palestinian people to oppose Zionism.

Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is only there for tactical reasons.” - Zuheir Mohsen, PLO, March 31, 1977