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How the Myth of a "Palestinian Right of Return" Makes Peace Impossible

(Quillette) Benjamin Kerstein - Former Israeli Knesset Member Einat Wilf and journalist Adi Schwartz argue in their new book, The War of Return, that what actually lies at the heart of the Israeli-Arab conflict is the Palestinian assertion of a "right of return." The persistent demand that the Arabs who fled what became the State of Israel after its War of Independence and their descendants be allowed to return constitutes a refusal to accept a Jewish state on any part of the former British mandate. For decades, the Palestinian national movement has insisted on the return of the Arab refugees, and for just as long, Israel has seen this demand as an existential threat that would immediately turn Israel into an Arab state by sheer weight of demographics. And it is this, Wilf and Schwartz say, that has rendered all peace initiatives futile. It is now fashionable for historians sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative to downplay the threat that the Jewish community faced in the 1948 conflict, but that is simply untrue. The secretary-general of the Arab League openly stated: "This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades." The Palestinian Arabs' most influential leader, the Nazi collaborator Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, said the Arabs would "continue to fight until the Zionists are eliminated, and the whole of Palestine is a purely Arab state." Wilf and Schwartz advocate a long overdue paradigm shift, in which the international community tells the Palestinians publicly and firmly that a mass "return" of the refugees to Israel will never happen and that the Jewish state is here to stay. "The resolution of the conflict therefore lies not simply in finding technical solutions to matters of borders, settlements, security, and even Jerusalem - but primarily in getting the Arab world, and specifically the Palestinians, to accept the rightful exercise of sovereignty by Jews in their midst, recognizing that there will be no Palestinian return to the State of Israel." The Palestinian demand for return, they say, must be delegitimized and replaced with "full legitimacy, support, and fuel for a moderate Palestinian vision that does not entail the erasing of Israel under any guise."
2020-05-01 00:00:00
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