by Richard Baehr
A
Chinese news agency is reporting that Secretary of State John Kerry has
offered one of his many "bridging proposals" on the right of return of
Palestinian refugees, in his effort to move the Israeli-Palestinian
peace talks along. These talks appear to be going nowhere on their own
when Palestinians and Israelis are left to deal with each other
directly, but also nowhere with Kerry in the middle, as he seems to be
regularly, now that his most recent diplomatic "breakthrough," the
Iranian nuclear deal, remains in limbo, near two months on from the much
ballyhooed November signing in Geneva.
The six-month interim
period established in the Geneva agreement, during which Iran agrees to
freeze some of its nuclear activity, and Western nations relax some of
their sanctions, has not yet commenced, and no one is quite sure at this
point what has been agreed to. In any case, Iran continues to proclaim
the things they intend to do during the interim phase, such as advanced centrifuge development
insuring that the new centrifuges can be quickly installed and begin
spinning if the interim agreement is not extended and talks break down
at some point short of a final agreement, as they seem likely to do.
The report on the
refugee proposal is significant since this is not a minor issue for the
Palestinians. Their narrative of the Palestinian Nakba argues that
European imperialists established Israel due to guilt over the Holocaust
and made the Palestinians pay the price with their expulsion in large
numbers during the 1948 war, thereby creating the refugee situation. Of
course, the Zionist movement preceded the Holocaust by decades, and
first won European support after World War I. The Palestinian narrative
places the Palestinians in their now established role of victims,
ignoring the many opportunities they had and rejected over the last 75
years to create a state of their own.
It also gives no agency
to how Palestinians have dealt with refugee matters themselves, or how
neighboring Arab countries have handled the issue since 1948. In both
cases, the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors have chosen to make the
refugees and their far more numerous descendants, now three generations
on, cling to a fantasy of return to a land where almost none of them
ever lived. It is why so many Palestinians live a life of squalor in U.N. Relief and Works Agency camps
in various countries, infused with political indoctrination about
destroying Israel and returning to their homes. Alone among the refugee
populations of the world (well over 50 million since World War II), the
Palestinian refugees are permanent, and avoid (if not fight)
resettlement. Resettlement would mean accepting that they are not going
back (or for the first time) to Israel and need to get on with their
lives. This would mean a sort of tacit acceptance of Israel's existence.
Three and in some cases four generations of Palestinians have
sacrificed their futures or had them sacrificed absent their own
choosing, so this dream of the elimination of Israel can remain alive.
Most estimates place
the number of Arab refugees from the 1948 war at between 600,000 and
700,000, a number that is dwarfed by the greater number of Jews who were
uprooted and driven out after centuries of living in various Arab
countries. Over two-thirds of the Jews who were forced out arrived in
Israel, and within a fairly short time, were no longer in camps or
temporary housing, but on their way to new lives in a new country. The
Jews who arrived in Israel after the 1948 war, including displaced
persons from Europe and those expelled by the Arab countries, doubled
the size of the Jewish population in Israel in a few years. The Arab
refugees, on the other hand, were a blip on the populations of the Arab
countries, other than Jordan.
The Arabs who left
their homes during the war, arrived in other Arab lands nearby, whether
the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, or Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where
the same language was spoken and the same religion was practiced. While
some of the refugees were encouraged to leave by the Zionists during the
fighting, others left on their own so as to be out of the war zone,
some left before the war even started, and others left their homes with
the active encouragement of Arab armies (to get out of the way so the
Arabs could finish off the Jews in the fighting) and even some political
leaders among the Palestinian population.
In fact, there was no
distinct nationality in Palestine itself, as the Arab refugees were
indistinguishable from their neighbors, except for how they became pawns
in the endless battle to delegitimize and undermine Israel. As revealed
in Joan Peters' exhaustive work, "From Time Immemorial," many of the
Arabs who resided in Palestine at the time of the 1948 war had been
recent arrivals, lured to Palestine from other Arab lands by the
improving standard of living that arrived with the Zionists.
The demand for a right
of return for all refugees, meaning every original refugee and all
descendants of refugees, is another unique feature in the way
Palestinian refugees are treated by international organizations, in that
other refugee populations around the world have only included those who
became refugees themselves, and future generations were never
considered refugees as well. This is why the number of Palestinian
refugees, which at one time was in the 600,000 to 700,000 range, now
includes over 5 million registered refugees, regardless of whether they
live in refugee camps. And of course, Palestinian have their own refugee
agency, while all the rest of the world's refugees are handled by a
separate agency.
Into this twisted
narrative of an ever-soaring refugee population, Kerry seems to have
pulled a number out of the air for refugees who should be allowed back
into Israel -- 80,000. This number almost certainly exceeds the number
of living refugees from the 1948 war. The Chinese report suggested that
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, now serving in the 10th
year of his four-year term in office (more evidence of Palestinian
number inflation), has supposedly countered Kerry's offer with one of
his own, demanding that 200,000 Palestinians be allowed back into
Israel. Of course this demand is for Palestinians to enter Israel after a
supposed peace deal is struck, and many Palestinians are counting on
such a deal only deferring the next stage in their war against Israel.
If a peace deal weakens Israel strategically (how could it not?), many
Palestinians, including leaders of the various political and terror
groups, are counting on a future defeat or collapse of Israel, leading
at some future date to a universal right of return for Palestinians, all
of whom at that point would have no residential linkage whatsoever to
the land of Israel itself.
Israeli leaders were
quick to argue that there would be no recognition of a right of return
for Palestinian refugees to Israel itself in any peace agreement, but
only to a new Palestinian state. But with Kerry and Abbas negotiating a
range for the number of refugees allowed back in, it appears that Israel
was not consulted, or was merely ignored by the secretary of state, and
will appear to be "intransigent," to use a favored New York Times
descriptor, if it does not enter the bidding.
The Israelis for their
part have demanded that Palestinians accept that Israel is the Jewish
state (with non-Jews of course representing a substantial minority
population within the country). With current high and growing Jewish
birth rates, and declining Israeli Arab birth rates, the fact of a heavy
Jewish majority will not disappear in future generations, as once
forewarned by some analysts. But it is not empirical evidence that is at
issue with the total Palestinian rejection of the concept. It is much
more that the concept is in conflict with their own narrative, which
claims that except for the (supposed) expulsion of the refugees, Arabs
would now be dominant within the country, and so they cannot concede
Israel's permanence and the Jewish majority's permanence in Israel
without ignoring their own narrative. This would be an abandonment of
the refugees. Of course, the Palestinians also demand that no Jewish
Israelis at all may live in the new Palestinian state.
Kerry has walked onto one of the
many land mines in this conflict with his offer, if the story is even
real. Refugees are not a split-the-difference issue and such leaks of
bridging proposals serve no purpose if progress on difficult issues is
what one or both sides really want. Sixty-five years after a war they
started and lost, the few remaining Palestinians who are among the
original refugee population need to move on. The fake refugees who are
their descendants need to give up their delusions of victimhood. Israel
is not their land.
Richard Baehr
Source:
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