FAQ 9

Doesn’t the Palestinian right of return mean the death of Israel?

 

The Allegation

Israel’s acceptance of a Palestinian “right of return” would amount to national suicide. The return of every refugee would make Arabs the majority, so the world’s only Jewish state would cease to exist.

Brief rebuttal

Accepting the right of return would require and result in a fundamental change in the political structures governing the land that until 1948 was called Palestine. The existing dominant control by Israeli Jews would be completely inconsistent with the new reality in which Palestinians might well be in a majority, depending on how many Palestinians choose to exercise their right to return. The necessary new political settlement would require that equal rights for all, including those of Israeli Jews, should prevail. Indeed, in whatever new political arrangements were implemented in the whole area of mandate Palestine, these equal rights would need to apply to all national, linguistic and ethnic groups “between the river and the sea”.

The allegation is an emotive appeal to a tribal fear of extinction. That fear results in part from the Holocaust, but also from a determination to avoid facing up to the realities of what happened in the Nakba. Accepting the right of the expelled Palestinians and their descendants to return would require Israel to face up to its responsibility for the trauma inflicted on the Palestinians. The “Jewish state” has had no hesitation in implementing the “right to return” for all Jews everywhere in the world, for most of whom their connexion to the land of Israel is tenuous at best. Agreeing and implementing the right of return for Palestinians would be part of the change necessary if Palestine and the region are to find a road to peace.

More detail

The right of return would mean the end of an exclusivist, ethnocratic, discriminatory state in which only Jews are full citizens. Any democratic state – or states – in the area of mandate Palestine would need to be “a state for all its citizens” (or possibly two states, each of which establishes the normal equality of rights of all its citizens. However, the realities of Israel’s de facto unitary state between the river and the sea today presents formidable practical obstacles to such an outcome.) There is no reason why the “Jewish character” of the state – the Hebrew language, the rhythms of the Jewish calendar and more – would not form the basis of life for those who wanted it, whatever the agreed constitutional structures that emerge in a general settlement (one state, two states, a federation or whatever).

Historians have now clearly established that around 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, often by direct violence or threat of violence, during the war of 1947-48. And a further 280,000-325,00 in 1967. They and their descendants have a right of return recognised in Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”.

More specifically, Resolution 194 of the United Nations General Assembly in Dec 1948 resolved that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” Israel refused to implement this resolution and in the 1950s systematically confiscated the land and possessions of those who had left their homes, perpetuating the refugee problem to this day.

Israel demands that the Palestinians “forget” the very real and recent history and experience of their dispossession and accept the new dispensation achieved by force. Yet Israeli claims to the land are based on “remembering” a 2,500 year-old past, based on bible stories which clearly have a large mythical element to them. “Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for Palestinians?” asks Peter Beinart.

Further resources

1. Wikipedia, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, 11 Dec 1948

2. Human Rights Watch Policy on the Right of Return

“Human Rights Watch has long defended the right of refugees and exiles to return to their homes. We have upheld this right both when international borders were settled – Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Malawi, Burma, Mauritania – and when they were in dispute – Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, East Timor, Ethiopia/Eritrea. Human Rights Watch similarly urges that this right be recognized for all displaced people in the Middle East, regardless of religion or nationality.”

3. Peter Beinart, A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return, The Guardian, 18 May 2021

“As fraught and imperfect as efforts at historical justice can be, consider what happens when they do not occur. The crimes of the past, when left unaddressed, do not remain in the past.”

4. Dahlia Sheindlin, Neither Intractable nor Unique: A Practical Solution for Palestinian Right of Return, The Century Foundation, 28 Apr 2020

This provides a detailed discussion of the point of view of both sides, shows that this is not a unique case and suggests that the situation is not intractable.