A major issue in the peace conference between Israel and the Palestinians, to be held in Annapolis, Md., next month, is the so-called Right of Return. The conference is sponsored by the U.S. The Palestinians want negotiations to be based on the Arab League peace plan, the White House vision of two states, Israel and Palestine, side by side, and the internationally approved Road Map.
The Right of Return would permit Palestinians who fled their homes during wars with Israel, and their heirs, to return there, regardless of who is living in these places now. The largest number of Palestinian refugees, several hundred thousand, fled during Israel’s Independence War in 1948. The majority settled in what today is the kingdom of Jordan, while others fled across the Arab world. Many ended up in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, which came under the rule of Egypt, and in Syria and Lebanon.
The refugee camps, funded largely by the United Nations, exist till this day, more than 59 years after they were created. Generations of Palestinians have been living in them, knowing no other way of life.
Yet there is absolutely no way Israel can permit the return of Palestinians to their homes in the Jewish state because it will cease to exist. The number of Palestinians, who have a much higher birth rate than the Israelis, will overwhelm the Jewish population. The Gaza Strip alone is jammed with between 1.5 and two million Palestinians, mostly living in refugee camps.
Palestinians in other Arab countries such as Kuwait were never permitted to become citizens, a condition that kept them as permanent outsiders. Returning home would end that status.
However, the reality is that no such right exists anywhere in the world, where wars have been fought and lost. Israel won its Independence War, having been attacked by the armies of five Arab nations. Since when do winners owe losers the return of their properties?
An example from my own family history illustrates that no such rights exist. My parents were born in the city of Posen, then part of Germany, at the turn of the 19th century. When Germany lost World War I, Posen was returned to Poland, which had become independent. It is now called Poznan. My mother’s parents owned two hotels, a restaurant and a stationery store. My father and his mother, a widow, owned a shoe store.
As the war ended, my parents and their families, like other German citizens, fled Posen. They settled in Berlin. Through the years, the Polish government never offered them the right to return to their homes or reclaim their properties, which were taken over by Poles.
Flash forward to much later wars. The refugees who fled North Korea to the south have not been offered such a right. Nor have all those who fled their homes during the wars that characterized what once was Yugoslavia. Think Serbia, for example, in the 1990s. There currently are an estimated thirty wars going on. Does anyone think they will conclude with refugees entitled to return to their homes?
Look back in history. The Babylonians exiled the ten tribes of Israel to what today is Iraq. It took a Persian king, who conquered Babylon, to encourage the Jews to return to their homeland. By then they had become known as the ten lost tribes. Centuries later the Romans conquered Judea, as the Jewish state was then known, exiling its occupants not to return till modern times.
It is true that Germany, in the years after Hitler, opened its doors to those Jews who wished to return, and offered financial restitution to survivors of the Holocaust. Considering the mammoth crime of genocide, I suppose it was the least the Germans could do.
Interestingly, while the Arabs talk about the right of Palestinians to return to their homes in today’s Israel, they don’t offer a similar right to the many thousands of Jews who fled Arab countries in 1948 to make their homes in the new state of Israel. Those Jews had lived among the Arabs since the dawn of Islam.
The Right of Return, fraught with danger for Israel, appears to be a one-way street.
The Issue of the Right of Return scuttled the Camp David peace conference in 2000, when Yassir Arafat refused to compromise on the issue. Chances are the same will happen again.
