SPITE OF RETURN

Palestinians say they have a “right of return.” It’s not about going home. It’s about eradicating the Jewish state.

Did anyone lose a key? Palestinians have sacrificed five generations in the hope of ethnically cleansing the Middle East of Jews. 

In that Arab-initiated war of 1948-’49, an estimated 711,000 Arabs were displaced from their homes in what became Israel.

Some historians contend that Arab leaders urged Arabs to leave Israel, await victory and return to enjoy the plunder of the routed Jews. Others say the refugees were forced out. Both certainly happened. Some jumped, others were pushed.

Some more Palestinians were made refugees in the Arab-initiated war of 1967 — estimates range from 280,000 to 325,000. There are now, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, nearly seven million Palestinian refugees. Given that almost all of the 1948 refugees have passed on, as have a sizeable number of the 1967 refugees, how did around one million refugees balloon into more than seven million?

The redefinition of the term “refugee” in the solitary case of Palestinians is key to understanding the wider conspiracy at the heart of the Palestinian movement.

When the Arabs lost the wars that they started, they adopted the “right of return” as a strategy. They would try again and again to defeat Israel through war and terror, but the “right of return” is a fallback plan, a Trojan horse intended to do to Israel demographically what invasions and terror have not been able to do with violence: erase it as a Jewish state.

The idea is that Palestinians who left or were forced out of what is now Israel in the successive Arab-initiated wars — and five generations of their descendants — should be allowed to “return” to Israel. That is seven million people who have been conditioned to believe with the fervency of a religion that they will eventually take up residency in Israel, a country of nine million people. And these millions have not exactly been raised to become nice citizens of their new homeland. They have been encouraged through education, popular culture, religion and socialization to perpetrate acts like October 7. 

About two million Israelis are Arabs, which means a “right of return” would erase Israel as a Jewish state, if not immediately, then soon.

As is so often the case, the Arab leadership never made their scheme a secret. It’s as if they know that Western powers and activists will avert their eyes to Arab misdeeds if guilt can be projected onto Israel. In October 1949, the Egyptian foreign minister said, “It is well known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of the homeland and not as its slaves. With greater clarity, they mean the liquidation of the state of Israel.”

As an article in a Lebanese newspaper put it, the Palestinians’ return would “create a large Arab majority that would serve as the most effective means of reviving the Arab character to Palestine while forming a powerful fifth column for the day of revenge and reckoning.”

Arab League Secretary-General Azzam Pasha viewed the returned refugees as “an irregular army that would be in a position to cause a great deal of inconvenience to the Jews by acts of sabotage.”

In their book The War of Return, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf comprehensively analyze the poison pill at the heart of the Palestinian strategy.

Schwartz and Wilf contend that Western observers have been duped into thinking that the “right of return” is a bargaining chip that will be mostly negotiated away in final status talks, that perhaps Israel will admit x number of refugees and the rest will content themselves with some sort of compensation and their place in the new state of Palestine. This, the authors say, is exactly wrong. If we needed any proof, simply listen to the preeminent message of the current anti-Israel mobs: “From the river to the sea” is not a chant of coexistence. It is a promise to eradicate the Jewish state.

“The one article that Israel could absolutely not agree to, as it entailed its very suicide, was the one without which the conflict would never end,” write Schwartz and Wilf. And that’s the point.

In an almost unimaginable act perpetrated by Arab states and abetted by the United Nations (and much of the world, including Western leftists) the bargaining chips are human beings — the Palestinian “refugees” themselves. 

To appreciate the gross inhumanity and craven hatred at the heart of the conflict, we have to look at UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which is the tool through which the Arab states, aided by a majority at the UN General Assembly in vote after vote, have effectively imprisoned millions of Palestinians, ensured their individual and collective failures and made mockery of terms like justice.

When the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was created, in 1950, its purpose was to end the plight of refugees around the world and resettle them in other states. UNRWA, which was founded a year earlier, was intended by the UN for a similar purpose, but was quickly taken over by Arab ideologues and turned into a tool of the Palestinian movement. This body adopted a single-minded political agenda to advance the cause of a “right of return” — precisely the opposite of what a refugee-serving organization should be mandated to do.

The perverted politics of the UN General Assembly, as well as fears by the U.S. and other Western leaders of offending oil-rich and hyper-sensitive Arab states, allowed the world to turn a blind eye to the atrocities UNRWA was perpetrating as the world poured more and more money into an increasingly corrupt, sprawling bureaucracy responding, in its way, to an ever-growing population of Palestinian refugees.

Deliberately refusing to integrate into the places they found themselves, and with the complicity of UNRWA, Palestinians have sat, idle and agitated, for seven decades and counting. Any efforts to form permanent institutions or put down roots is viewed as an abrogation of their “right of return.”

Flexing its power in a United Nations increasingly dominated by Palestinian-friendly postcolonial states who made common cause with the Arab and Soviet blocs, UNRWA was soon a largely unchecked entity. In 1965, UNRWA extended the eligibility of refugee status to children of those born after May 14, 1948 — that is, the grandchildren of the original refugees. In 1982, the UN General Assembly extended this eligibility to all descendants of the original refugees, effectively turning generations not yet born into an entirely new class of refugees.

Constructive suggestions of resolving the refugee issue in any manner other than the “right of return” have been rejected for decades. When Canada offered to resettle Palestinian refugees here, our foreign minister was burned in effigy in Nablus. Because resolving this problem is not the goal. Perpetuating it — for many more generations if necessary — is the objective, so that, if the Palestinians and the Arab states fail to dislodge Israel militarily, they will do so demographically.

For this contemptible ideological objective, Arab leaders, the UN and activists worldwide are willing to hold seven million Palestinian people stateless and enraged in the faint hope that, somehow, someday, if not in this generation perhaps in the next or five more generations down this tragic line, they will succeed in supplanting the Jewish state and finally ethnically cleanse the Middle East of Jews.

I have said this before: There are terms for people like these, but “pro-Palestinian” doesn’t seem like the right one.