The Palestinian Right of Return

by Issam Nashashibi & Rodrigo Readi Nasser

-

28 April 2008

This summary addresses issues raised about the validity of the Palestinian right of return, why it should be implemented and arguments presented against its implementation.

The right of return to one's home was so BASIC that it was thought of as a universal right that was not deemed necessary to be formally prescribed or codified.  However, it was codified in 1215 in the Magna Carta, the Geneva Civilian Convention of 1949, The Universal Declaration Human Rights and The International Covenant on Civil Rights.

The Palestinians' right of return to their homes is like that of other human beings.  Despite this right, UN Resolution 194 that reiterates it and recommends ways for its implementation, Israel continues to deny Palestinians the right to return to their homes.  In addition, the Resolution gives the Palestinians, and no one else, the right to CHOOSE to return to their homes.  It also provides for compensation for the damage to their property or the right to demand compensation if they do not choose to return.

UN Resolution 194 has not been implemented.  Its call for the implementation of the Palestinians rights to return to their homeland is a corner stone of a just and peaceful solution in the Middle East.

Arguments against the implementation of the inalienable rights of the Palestinians to return to their homes had been presented to justify the position that if the Palestinians have a right of return, it should be to a to-be defined-Palestinian state and not all of Palestine.

In fact, if the resumption of Jewish life in Eastern Europe is a right and is feasible, then the return of Palestinians or their descendants to their home is equally a right and as feasible.

The arguments presented against the Palestinian right of return and their rebuttals are:

1.  Why should Israel agree to the Palestinian right of return?

Because it is just.  Because a permanent peace, MUST be built on Justice.  As long as there is injustice there will be no permanent peace.  Hopes that the Palestinians will forget their country, Palestine, or melt away in Jordan are racist and are not supported by historical evidence. This argument promotes Israeli intransigence instead of reconciliation and justice.  With intransigence, Zionism is hoping that the current generations of Palestinians will die and the new Palestinian generations would never demand their rights.

Palestine is the common patrimony of the Palestinian Nation.  Moreover, the World has reaffirmed Palestinian right of return through many UN resolutions, including UN resolution 194.   The Palestinian struggle for justice will be continued by the next generations if Israel does not agree to a just solution.

On the other hand, Zionism promotes the right of Jews to return to Israel as its standard policy.  This policy is accepted despite the lack of evidence to prove that today's members of the Jewish faith are descendants, or that they are the only descendants, of the Hebrews who inhabited Palestine about 2000 years ago.  Even if one agrees with Zionism's argument, the land really belongs to the Canaanites, who were conquered by the Hebrews at about 1000 BC.

Notwithstanding its hi storically unjustifiable argument, Zionism calls for the Jewish return after the passage of millennia and considers it morally justifiable.  If Zionism assumes that its claim is justifiable, then Zionism must find as moral the right of the Palestinians to return to their homes, after just 50 years of the Palestinian Diaspora.

The “Zionist double standard,” of accepting the right of return for Jews and rejecting it for non-Jewish Palestinians, is based on racism.  It also assumes that Palestinians will never have the power to implement their rights.  Such a stance does not leave the Palestinians a peaceful alternative for implementing their right to return to their homes in Palestine.  If Israel is serious about peace; she should accept and implement the Palestinian Right of Return as recognition of one of their basic human rights.

If that is not a practical enough reason, there are moral reasons. Reasons like humanity, compassion especially towards victims and other commandments that Judaism, as well as other religions espouses.

 

2.  How can the Israelis be convinced to accept the Palestinian right of return?

The Israeli position is that "Israeli democracy" will determine the right of Palestinians to all of Palestine.  This is a smoke screen to continue violating the Palestinians' human rights.  If an election on the subject were allowed to take place, a negative result will confirm Zionism's racist ideology's hold on the Israeli voter.  A racism that continues to dehumanize the Palestinians and deny them their basic human rights.  After all, electoral decisions are not infallible; the Nazi party won through a popular election.

The Israeli government's intransigence is founded on the assumption that Israel will retain the land when this generation of Palestinians perishes with the passage of time.  Isn't wishing someone's death tantamount to murdering that person?  Isn't wishing the Palestinians' demise in order to deprive them of their property equivalent to robbing the dead?

While murderers and robbers like Rabin and Shamir are alive, their sins are not absolved.  The next generation of Zionist occupiers will not be free of responsibility for their parents' crimes, as children are responsible for their parent’s debts.  For the next generation of Zionist occupiers, this responsibility is actually inescapable because the parent’s crimes were committed in the name of the survival of the Zionist State.

If the Israeli government wishes a just peace, it can persuade the electorate to vote for the return of non-Jewish Palestinians to all of Palestine.  It is no different from convincing a majority of Israeli voters of the fallacy of (previously immovable) arguments such as:

  1. "Sharm El-Sheikh without peace is better than peace without Sharm El-Sheikh";
  2. "We cannot talk to the PLO" and ,
  3. "There is no such thing as the Palestinians"

 

3.  Exercising the Palestinian right of return will lead to the destruction of the state of Israel because the returning Palestinians will violently oppose Jews like they did in the past.

This predictive statement is only true if the Palestinians violence was based on pure racism.  The historical fact is that “ it was European Jews who stole the Palestinian lands, terrorized them and forced their evacuation from their homes not the other way around.”  Palestinian resistance was a legitimate self-defense against a colonialist power  (Jewish Europeans) similar to the Warsaw Uprising.

The Warsaw Uprising was against a power that wanted to destroy the Jewish Poles.  Palestinian self-defense is against a colonial power, the Yishuv.  The Yishuv had its own army whose purpose was the destruction of Palestine (which it had accomplished to date) and the ethnic cleansing non-Jewish Palestinians.  (See Aba Eban's "My People" page 388 for a definition of the Yishuv, its objectives and power.)

The Yishuv's terrorist acts against the non-Jewish population are documented in many places including Manachem Begin's unsanitzed 1952 memoirs, "The Revolt."  In these memoirs he described the Zionist Irgun gang's terrorist attack on the Village of Deir Yassin as "advanc [ing] like a knife through butter." Begin also boasted of the "heroic" act of murdering the village's 254 men, women and children on May 9, 1984.  For more details on the Yishuv and its destructionist intents, See Simha Flapan's, "The Birth of Israel Myths and Realities."

In reality, the Zionist mantra that Palestine was "a land without a people for a people without a land" dehumanizes non-Jewish Palestinians.  It is also a CLEAR indication of Zionism's aim to inflict "genocide that intended to murder the national ethnic, racial, religious, political, social gender of a people, non-Jewish Palestinians.  In addition to this Zionist mantra, Herzl, the father of Zionism, viewed the taking of land and the expulsion of non-Jewish Palestinians as complementary aspects of Zionism.  Herzl wrote in his diaries "We shall spirit the penniless population [Non-Jewish Palestinians] across the border by procuring employment for it in transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."  Besides this call for the ethnic cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians, Golda Meir always maintained that "There is no such thing as the Palestinians."  These statements can only be interpreted as a declaration of Zionism's racist policy that denies a whole people's existence and aims to destroy the Palestinians and their culture as Nazism tried to do with Jewish culture in Europe.  It is the promotion of a racist policy of  "Nichtjudenrein in Palestine"

Jewish and non-Jewish Palestinians lived together peacefully before the advent of Zionist immigration to colonize Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century.  Both groups of Palestinians will do so after the injustice to non-Jewish Palestinians has been remedied.  (For historical details on how Jewish-Arabs lived in peace and prospered in Arab countries, "the Golden Age of the Jews," see Aba Eban's book My People starting page 124)

4.  The Return of the Palestinians will change Israel's character.

This is only true if the state of Israel's character, the way it defines itself, is a state for an exclusive group.  That is, a state that discriminates and strives for its citizens tribal exclusivity.  Such a state is a racist state, similar to Nazi Germany.  Israel's definition of ethnicity rests on a religious basis.  Such a policy is racist and is also alien to Christianity and Islam.  If however, Israel is a democratic state with equal rights for its citizens, then the argument that the return of the Palestinians will change Israel's character cannot be valid.

5.  There is no court that has jurisdiction to enforce the right of the Palestinians; therefore they should negotiate with the Israelis to limit their right to the to-be-defined state of Palestine.

This statement is pure extortion.  It is an attempt to force the Palestinians to accept less than their full rights.  It is also an admission of the Palestinians rights under international law, but arrogantly flouts its disrespect for international law.  The argument also exploits the world's inability to implement such law.  The enforcer of international laws should be the UN, as it was in the case of Iraq.  However, US policy, led by the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, will veto any such decisions to implement the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes.  So, it is left for the Israeli government to implement the right of return if it truly seeks a just Permanent peace.  The continuation of Israel's racist intransigence and arrogance can only sow the seeds of future violence.

6.       Nothing in the "common practice of nations" has allowed for the return of populations to their homes, e.g., the partition of British India, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, etc.

Slavery was the "common practice of nations," including our own (the USA), does that make slavery right?

The cited population exchanges, plus the expulsion of the non-Jewish Palestinians from Palestine, are cases of ethnic cleansing, pure and simple.  Mahatma Gandhi never called for the expulsion of Moslems from India.  Greeks whose homes and roots were in Turkey still carry their Tur kish sounding last names.  Moreover, needless to say, what both Greece and Turkey did is not right.

The Palestinians were the ones expelled from their homeland and the world community expects them to be allowed to return.  Denying the non-Jewish Palestinians their right leaves them no alternative but violence with which to confront the violence that caused their expulsion.

7.  Jewish-Arabs (Mizrachis) have immigrated to Israel.  Arab countries should absorb the Palestinians in return.

This is another statement that condones ethnic cleansing.  It is morally deplorable.  All Mizrachis are welcome back to their homes in Arab countries.  They have every right to do so.  Some Mizrachis were coerced to leave their homes, such as in Iraq, by Zionist bombs and a corrupt Arab regime.  The Mizrachis of Yemen and Morocco were induced to emigrate by economic incentives.

8. Mizrachis cannot return to the societies they, or their parents or grandparents left because the social relations and culture in which they once lived are long past.  Likewise, Jewish Europeans or their descendants do not have a possibility or reestablishing Jewish communities that were destroyed in Europe.

This is another paternalistic racist statement masquerading as fact.  The Mizrachis right to return to their homes in Arab countries has never been denied.  In fact, it is supported by many, if not a huge majority of Palestinians.  There is no evidence to support the presented argument, yet there is ample evidence to support the rebuttal.

  1. Jewish communities were revived in Germany and Eastern Europe.  This effort is still ongoing. The World Jewish Congress (WJC) is undertaking an effort in Eastern Europe to reclaim Jewish property through lobbying the relative governments to change their laws.  If this a valid goal for the WJC, why should not be a valid and implementable goal for the Palestinians?
  2. Jewish communities prosper in many Arab countries.  For example, the Moroccan Minister of Tourism is a Jewish Arab.
  3. Jewish Arabs, as in the case of Jewish Syrians, are returning, from Europe and the United States, to their homes in Arab countries, NOT to Israel.
  4. Mizrachis are not inherently against their fellow Arabs.  Mizrachis still venerate the King of Morocco and thank him in their prayers for offering them shelter after 1492 and the Spanish inquisition.

9.  There is no evidence that any significant number of Mizrachis want to leave Israel for Syria, Iraq or North Africa.

Racism and continued perpetuation of the Jewish exclusivity of Israel are the motivation for this statement.  There is equally no evidence that Mizrachis do NOT want to return to their homes in Arab countries.

It may be that there is no evidence because no one asked them the question.  In fact, much anecdotal evidence indicates that some wish to leave Israel and would welcome the opportunity to return to their homes in Arab countries

 

 

-

 

Original

 

 



about us
| links | contact us | home | register

© 2008 Australians for Palestine &
Women for Palestine