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The Palestinian Refugee Problem Resolved

(Middle East Quarterly) Shaul Bartal - During the 1948 war, some 600,000 Palestinian Arabs fled their homes to the neighboring Arab states or to parts of mandatory Palestine occupied by Arab states (the West Bank and Gaza). Likewise, within a few years after the establishment of the State of Israel, nearly all of the 850,000-strong Jewish population living in Arab states was either expelled or escaped with just their lives, about 550,000 of whom were resettled in Israel. The resettlement of most of the Palestinian refugees in the host Arab countries created a de facto population exchange. According to UNRWA data, only a quarter of the descendants of the Palestinian refugees still live in camps, the majority of these in Lebanon. The descendants of the refugees who arrived in Gaza have been resettled in the quasi-independent area governed by Hamas, while the descendants of the refugees in the West Bank are settled, for the most part, in the area of the autonomous Palestinian Authority. This means that Israel has no responsibility whatsoever toward the descendants of the 1948 Palestinian refugees and no obligation to aid them other than out of purely humanitarian concerns, together with the rest of the enlightened world. Any attempt to argue otherwise stems from misplaced political considerations and the rewriting of history. The writer is a lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
2013-11-01 00:00:00
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