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Revisiting the Right of Return

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  • Revisiting the Right of Return

    Front Page Magazine
    June 18 2004

    Revisiting the Right of Return
    By Steven Plaut
    FrontPageMagazine.com | June 18, 2004

    Try to imagine what the world would be like if Israel had granted the
    "Palestinian refugees," who fled from Israel in 1948-49, the right
    to return to Israel. Not to the West Bank. Not to the Gaza Strip --
    but to Israel within its pre-1967 borders.

    Imagine a situation in which Israel agreed to allow tens of thousands
    of Arabs who fled from the battle zones of the Israeli War of
    Independence the possibility of returning to Israel, in many cases to
    the very homes they had abandoned during the fighting. Imagine how the
    same world, currently obsessed with achieving a "right of return" for
    "Palestinian refugees," would be forced to acknowledge that Israel had
    already granted the possibility for tens of thousands of these refugees
    to return to Israel, in many cases decades ago. How then could the
    world continue to bash Israel? What ammunition would anti-Semites
    have left? And what about the crowd claiming to be "anti-Zionists
    but not anti-Semites" or the self-hating leftist Jewish anti-Semites?

    Well, hold on to your hat, because I have a whopper of a revelation
    to make to you. Israel DID grant the "Palestinian refugees" the
    right to return to Israel!

    Let us back up a bit. In 1947-48, the UN proposed partitioning
    "Palestine" into a Jewish and an Arab state of approximately equal
    sizes. The Jews accepted the plan, and the Arabs rejected it. When the
    UN ended the British Mandate over "Palestine," the Arab states attacked
    the newborn state of Israel, tried to annihilate it and its population,
    and at the same time gobbled up most of the territory that the UN
    had allotted to become a Palestinian Arab state. The territory that
    became Israel had NEVER been a Palestinian Arab state.
    Most of the Arabs in "Palestine" had migrated there from neighboring
    Arab countries after the 19th Century start of the Zionist Jewish
    immigration, taking advantage of the influx of capital and the
    availability of jobs and services, like hospitals. In other words,
    the Arabs of "Palestine" in 1948, just like the Jews, were by and
    large people from families who had been in the country for three
    generations or less.

    During the fighting in the 1948-49 war, thousands of Arabs living in
    the territory that became Israel fled. The main reason they fled was
    that they understandably wanted to put some distance between their
    families and the battle zones. At the same time, they were ordered
    by the Arab political leadership to leave the territory of Israel.
    Why take my word on this? Listen to Arab sources:

    "The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes
    temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies."
    - Falastin (Jordanian newspaper), February 19, 1949.

    "The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we
    got out, but they did not get in." - from the Jordan daily Ad Difaa,
    September 6, 1954.

    ""The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from
    the Zionist tyranny but, instead, THEY ABANDONED THEM, FORCED THEM
    TO EMIGRATE AND TO LEAVE THEIR HOMELAND" (emphasis added), Abu Mazen,
    erstwhile "Prime Minister" of the Palestinian Authority, in "What We
    Have Learned and What We Should Do,” published in Falastin el Thawra,
    the official journal of the PLO, of Beirut, in March 1976.

    There are scores of other Arab sources confirming this.

    So how many Arabs fled? The number has become enormously distorted
    over time by the Bash-Israel lobby and by Arab propagandists and
    their apologists, who usually claim between 500,000 and a million.
    A more realistic estimate is between 300,000 and 450,000, based in
    part on Arab and UNRWA sources themselves. Most of these refugees
    ended up in some of the twenty-two sovereign Arab states, including
    those Arab countries from which they had migrated in the late 19th
    and early 20th Centuries in the first place. In other words, the
    "refugees" went back to their earlier homelands in Lebanon, Syria,
    and Jordan. It was a semi- "right of return." At the same time,
    the Arab states carried out a near-total ethnic cleansing of around
    a million Jews, who had been living there since Biblical days and in
    many cases before these states had Arab populations. The Jews from
    Arab countries left behind far more property than did the Palestinian
    Arab refugees. Most of these Jewish refugees were resettled in Israel

    In the years immediately following World War II, there were more than
    50 million refugees: Poles, Germans, Indians, Pakistanis, Hungarians,
    Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc. etc. They were all long ago resettled
    and forgotten, all except for the "Palestinian refugees". How come?

    Because for decades, the Arab aggressor states found it convenient
    to utilize the "refugees" as a political and military weapon
    against Israel, not only of propaganda and spin, but of terrorism.
    "Palestinians" inside Arab states were trained as terrorists and
    sent out to murder. At the same time, there was enormous incentive
    for the Arab locals in the countries into which the refugees had
    entered to pretend also to be "Palestinian refugees.” After all,
    the UN and other agencies were handing out free food and perks to
    anyone pretending to be a refugee from "Palestine".

    Unlike all those many millions of other people considered refugees
    in the late 1940s, the "Palestinians" were the only ones for whom
    the "right of return" to their previous homes was considered an
    entitlement. The reason was not a selective affection for Palestinians,
    but a selective hostility towards Israel and Jews. Those demanding the
    wholesale "return" to Israel of Palestinian "refugees", including the
    countless thousands of non-Palestinians pretending to be Palestinian
    refugees, had one goal in mind, the eradication of Israel.

    Israel would have been insane to allow itself to be inundated with
    real and make-pretend Palestinian "refugees", this in a tiny sliver of
    land the size of Maryland, at the same time that the 22 Arab states
    have territory-galore stretching from the Atlantic Ocean all the way
    to Central Asia! The Palestinian Arabs and their sponsors had tried
    to annihilate Israel and failed. Just like the infant United States,
    which refused to allow any of the tens of thousands of Tory Loyalists
    expelled by the patriots to "return" to the United States after the
    War of Independence, Israel was entirely in its rights to refuse to
    allow the "return" of masses of "Palestinians", whose migration was
    being demanded by those seeking to liquidate Israel via a demographic
    flooding.

    There is just one little caveat though.

    Israel DID let the Palestinian refugees return! Tens of thousands of
    them were quietly allowed to return to Israel, in many cases to their
    original homes, once the fighting in 1949 subsided. Many continue
    to be admitted today within the framework of "family reunification"
    agreements.

    >>From 1948 until 2001, Israel allowed about 184,000 "Palestinian
    refugees" or their families to "return" to Israel proper (Jerusalem
    Post, January 2, 2001; see also Ha'aretz 28 December 2000). These are
    in addition to about 57,000 Palestinians from Jordan illegally in
    Israel, towards whom the authorities are turning a blind eye (Ha'aretz,
    4 April 2001). Not the West Bank, not Gaza, but Israel inside its
    pre-1967 "Green Line" borders! In the Camp David II meetings in 2000,
    Israeli leftist Prime Minister Ehud Barak rather insanely offered to
    allow another 150,000 "refugees" to enter Israel as part of a peace
    accord. The PLO's response was to launch pogroms and four years of
    atrocities, because the number was finite.

    The demand for a "right of return" by Palestinians to Israel is no
    doubt the most absurd political demand floating anywhere around the
    planet. There is already an Arab state in two thirds of Mandatory
    Palestine, named Jordan, and most Palestinan Arabs make up most of its
    population. The Oslo Accords and Israel's Camp David II offer would
    have created a second Arab state in Palestine, in the West Bank and
    Gaza, as part of a comprehensive peace settlement. Any "Palestinian"
    from anywhere could have moved to "Palestine" or to Jordan, within
    the framework of such a peace, the same way any Jew who wishes to may
    immigrate to Israel, or any Armenian may immigrate to Armenia, and
    Greeks from the Greek Diaspora are automatically welcomed in Greece.

    The PLO and the Islamo-Fascist states backing it demand that in
    ADDITION to establishing a second Arab state in Palestine within
    the framework of any peace settlement, Israel itself must ALSO be
    converted into a third Arab Palestinian state, via unlimited massive
    immigration of people claiming to be Palestinians. Benjamin Franklin,
    who opposed granting even a dime in compensation to the Tory refugees
    expelled from the United States during the War of Independence,
    would be splitting his sides laughing.

    But the most Orwellian absurdity of all is that Israel DID grant the
    "right to return" to tens of thousands of "Palestinian refugees"
    long ago. Did this earn Israel the world's gratitude for its uniquely
    generous gesture? Did the world denounce the Arab Fascist states that
    ignored this generosity and continued to seek Israel's destruction
    and the genocide of its population? Do today's bleeding hearts and
    recreational compassion poseurs, pretending to feel uncontrollable
    pain and caring for Palestinian refugees, even know about the limited
    "right of return" granted by Israel over the past decades?

    Hindus have never been returned to Pakistan, Muslems from Pakistan
    have not been returned to India, ethnic Germans were not returned to
    their pre-war homes in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia or Romania,
    Japanese have not been returned to Manchuria, Greeks have not been
    returned to Anatolia, Jews have not been compensated for the billions
    they left behind when ethnic cleansing of Jews in Muslem countries
    took place, and Tory Loyalists were never returned to New England.
    But tens of thousands of "Palestinian refugees" had their chance.

    It is time to say enough is enough. The only remaining reasonable
    plan regarding those still claiming to be "Palestinian refugees"
    is simply: Forget about it.

    http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13819
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