The Palestinian refugees who abandoned their homes in 1948 were casualties of a war started by the Arab world with the objective of preventing the creation of a Jewish state. Some of the refugees fled at their own initiative; others were, in modern parlance, ethnically cleansed. The nascent state of Israel was fighting a war of existential survival. It owes no apologies for its behavior in 1948.
This is very misleading. It ignores the decades previous to 1948 in which an invasive, well-equipped, well-organized, and virulently nationalistic Jewish minority had initiated a campaign of harassment and terror against Palestine's indigenous Arab majority, with the stated goal of taking Arab land for a Jewish state.
Alpher's assertion is based on the ahistorical idea that the main source of the I-P conflict can be located in Arab "rejectionism," the refusal of Arab states to accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst. While it is true that Arab states rejected the existence of a Jewish state (they quite reasonably saw it as a Western colony in their midst), this is neither the cause of nor even most significant factor in the conflict. It should also be mentioned that the UN "deal" which created Israel required Palestinian Arabs to give up half of their land.
"Say, you've got twenty bucks there. How about giving ten to that guy? Sound like a good deal? No? What are you, a rejectionist or something?"
Would anybody take such a deal, or consider it reasonable?
I understand political Zionism, in its abstract, to be about Jewish nationalism and the right of the Jewish people to exist within a clearly defined, self-governing state. While I support this right, the unfortunate fact is that in 1917 Jews did not exist anywhere as a majority, at least not anywhere that was acceptable to Zionism's founders, and thus the objective reality of Zionism in Palestine has always necessarily involved the expulsion of an indigenous population and the expropriation of their land. This is the inconvenient, unavoidable, and too-little recognized truth about the birth of Israel.
Alpher:
UN General Assembly Resolution 194 was adopted in 1949 with the aim of ending the new refugee problem quickly by means of return and compensation. When you go back and read it, it invokes a degree of moderation: If refugees agree to "live at peace with their (Israeli) neighbors," then they "should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date." There is plenty of qualifying language here that has enabled Israel, over the years, to insist that Resolution 194 is not feasible because it is still effectively at war.
The Palestinian national movement, for its part, has turned Resolution 194 into a blatant demand that Israel accept the refugees' "right of return" - a phrase neither mentioned nor implied in that resolution - as a condition for peace.
On the contrary, Res. 194 clearly implies such a right, if it doesn't state it outright. Here's what Article 11 of UN Resolution 194 says:
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, 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 in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;
That seems pretty clear to me.
There's no denying the existence of widespread European anti-Semitism which gave birth to modern political Zionism, but it doesn't follow that Palestinian Arabs should be made to pay for the sins of Europe, which is essentially what the UN partition plan (which was itself basically a way for Britain to wash its hands and split out of a rapidly deteriorating situation) did.
There is also no question that Palestinian Arabs have been very poorly served by their Arab brethren, however it's ridiculous to claim that this somehow cancels or ameliorates the crime that was committed, and is still being committed, against the Palestinians by Israel, or that Palestinians should be held hostage to negotiations between governments in which they have no representation.
So, on the one hand, you've got the Palestinians being made to suffer for European anti-Semitism, and on the other you've got the Palestinians being made to suffer for the unwillingness of other Arab governments to accomodate a Jewish state. I can recall no other parallel situation in history.
So what to do now? The answer cannot be re-interpreting UN Resolutions in ways that redefine the problem, which is what Alpher tries to do here. Any true reconciliation will, sooner or later, have to admit and account for the wrong that was committed against Palestinians at Israel's founding.
Many Palestinians understand that it is simply not realistic at this point to expect that every descendant of every refugee will have the right to return to land that was taken, and that most of them will have to accept monetary compensation and resettlement in a future Palestinian state. What is so disturbing to me about Alpher's piece is that he has taken this beyond an argument over what is "practical" and tried to argue that Res. 194 does not express a right of return; that it does not in fact say what it clearly does say.
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