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| Arabs and Jews left their lands. Only the Arabs continue to claim refugee-hood |
“Why won't Israel accept the right of return for Palestinians?”
Because there is no “right of return” for Palestinians. The phrase in UNGAR 194 about the return of refugees states in part:
“11. Resolves that the 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,…”
The operative phrase that remains unfulfilled by the Palestinians is: “and live at peace with their neighbours”. To date there has been little evidence that any self-styled Palestinian is willing to “live at peace with their neighbours”. No country can be expected to accept a massive intake of a hostile population that has only one objective: destroying the country they claim they want to “return” to.
Article 11 goes on to say 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 in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;”
The entire Arab League, along with the Higher Arab Committee for Palestine, which was the representative of the Arabs of Palestine at that time, rejected UNGAR 194 in its entirety when it was published in December 1948. You cannot come back 45 years later (1993) and say, “Hey, you remember that offer you made back in 1948? I’d like to take you up on that!”
As for compensation, there are very few Arabs from Palestine who can actually demand compensation for the simple fact that only about 8% (including land owned in the West Bank and Gaza, which would only be eligible for compensation if Israel annexed the same parcels of land) of the Mandate land was actually owned by local Arabs, and several thousand claims have already been adjudicated since 1948. How many can possibly be left?
Then there’s the issue of compensation, which “should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;”, which includes the Arab League governments and the Higher Arab Committee for Palestine, who “advised” and in many cases threatened Arabs to leave their homes:
“The Arab exodus, initially, at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem exiled by the British for siding with the Germans in WWII, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine. They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea.” Kenneth Bilby, an American correspondent covering Palestine during the war. (1940- “New Star in the Near East”, New York, 1950, pp. 30-31)
And:
“I do not want to impugn anybody but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the Arab States in opposing partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously, and they must share in the solution of the problem.” Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, the official leader of the Palestinian Arabs, in a Beirut newspaper, also reported in the Daily Telegraph on September 6, 1948.
And:
“The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war.” General Glubb Pasha (the British officer who helped build the Transjordanian Army) wrote this in the London Daily Mail (August 12, 1948).
And:
“The Arab Exodus …was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by the Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews. …For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy.” – The Jordanian daily newspaper Al Urdun, April 9, 1953.
And:
“The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.” A refugee quoted in Al Difaa (Jordan) September 6, 1954.
And:
“The wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab states, and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and re-take possession of the country.” – Edward Atiyah (Secretary of the Arab League, London, The Arabs, 1955, p. 183)
Even Mahmoud Abbas blames the Arab League states for their part in today’s status of the self-styled “Palestinians”:
“The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe.“The Arab states succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the states of the world did so, and this is regrettable.” – The Current President of the Palestinian authority- Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), from the official journal of the PLO, Falastin el-Thawra (“What We Have Learned and What We Should Do”), Beirut, March 1976, reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, June 5,2003.
As for compensation, there’s also the “minor detail” of compensating the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands, with all their possessions confiscated, since they were also a result of the same war. The Arab League states, so humiliated over losing the 1948 war, expelled all their Jewish populations and stole their possessions.
If the “Palestinians” deserve compensation, then so do the Jews, whose families lived in those lands for a thousand years or more before Mohammed invented Islam, deserve the same consideration… and it’s several times larger than any accumulated Palestinian claims could ever be.
From Michael Davison.
