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What Happened to the German Right of Return?

(Jerusalem Post) - Shlomo Avineri During an international meeting dealing with Middle Eastern problems, sponsored by a German foundation, a Lebanese academic raised the issue of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel. A senior German minister responded: "This is an issue with which we in Germany are familiar; may I ask my German colleagues in the audience to raise their hand if they, or their families, were refugees from Eastern Europe?" More than half the Germans present (government officials, journalists, businessmen) raised a hand: they, or their families, had been Vertriebene, expelled from their ancestral homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia after World War II. It is estimated that up to 10 million were expelled; with their descendants today they make up almost double that number - almost one in four Germans. The German minister said he himself was born in Eastern Europe and his family was expelled in the wake of the anti-German atmosphere after 1945. "But," he added, "neither I nor any of my colleagues claim the right to go back." Anyone who now argues that the 1948 Palestinian refugees have a claim, in principle, to return to Israel, has to confront the question: Why not the millions of German post-1945 expellees from Eastern Europe? The German minister explained: Had a German government insisted in talks about reunification in 1990 that all German expellees from Poland and Czechoslovakia have, in principle, a right to return to these countries, it would have been clear that what West Germany had in mind was not reunification, but undoing the consequences of Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945. This is exactly the meaning of the Palestinian demand for the right of return. The Palestinians' insistence on it at Camp David and Taba in 2000 made clear to most Israelis that what they have in mind is not undoing the consequences of 1967 - but undoing the consequences of their defeat in 1948. At that time, Palestinian Arabs and four Arab members of the UN went to war - not only against Israel, but against international legitimacy and the UN plan for a two-state solution. There is no other example of member countries going to war against UN decisions; this is what the Arab countries - and the Palestinians - did. Obviously they prefer to forget it. Clearly there is a serious humanitarian issue involved. That the Palestinians' plight has been compounded by Arab use of the refugees as political pawns for half a century is a measure of the cynicism and immorality of Arab politics.
2003-07-18 00:00:00
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