Why shouldn't Arab refugees get the 'Right to Return'?

It is being reported in Israel news (Arutz Sheva, July 6, 2011) that, on Friday, July 8, between 500-600 pro-Palestinian activists plan to fly into Israel’s Ben Gurion airport. Their goal is to reach Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Negev and Palestinian-controlled cities, to join Palestinian protest marches. During the marches and accompanying protests, they will claim the Arab ‘Right of Return’.

In addition, in a  recent online Commentary magazine essay that had appeared just a few days earlier, (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/07/01/palestinian-authority-indoctrinates-its-youth-against-peace/),  writer Evelyn Gordon relates how Taysir Nasrallah, who is both a senior member of Palestine Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, and the current director-general of the Nablus governor’s office for the PA, spoke recently about a youth community center in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus. Nasrallah had just given a tour of the community center to a Haaretz (Israel newspaper) reporter, and his words to that reporter give meaning to the goals of the ‘fly-in’ protesters: all of modern Israel is the ‘Palestine’ that the PA promises will be returned to the Arab refugee. To quote Nasrallah:  “We give the kids courses [at the community center] on the right of return, and teach them that the Israelis stole their lands.”

These two realities-- that Arabs today still live in refugee camps 63 years after a war they started, and still teach an Arab ‘Right of Return’ in this manner-- both remind me of a woman I once discovered. You might be interested in her story:  

In the mid-1970s, a journalist named Joan Peters began doing research for a book about Arabs who had become refugees after the 1948 Arab-Israel War. These Arab refugees were stuck, seemingly trapped in horrid ‘camps’.  Her intent was to write about their suffering and deprivation.

Although she began with the idea that she would explore the human rights of Arab refugees, she ended up with something very different—and what she created has left footprints down through the years, footprints we can still see today, footprints we would do well to remember as we face ongoing calls to surrender land and to negotiate the Arab demand to ‘return’ to Israel. Indeed, if you read her book today, you can learn not only something about the birth of modern Israel, but about the historians of the academic Left—and the world’s humanitarians-- as well.

What you learn will not be pretty or complementary. Nevertheless, this is a story you must not forget.

Her book is called, From Time Immemorial (JKAP Publications, USA, 1984). When it was first published in 1984, the Left hated it and savaged it in order to discredit her. Today, however, tells a different story about her work.

But we’ll come back to this later. Right now, we’re still at the beginning.

 As she did her research, she began to ask questions about how these refugees became refugees, and she learned that Arabs weren’t the only unfortunates who had left their homes during and following that 1948 conflict.  From everyone she had talked to, she had assumed that the Arab refugees from Israel  “were the ‘Middle East refugees (emphasis hers),’ but that was not true.  “I was startled,” she writes, that “whole Jewish populations from numerous Arab countries had been forced to flee as refugees.”

Did you know that Jews also became refugees at that same time?

Does the academic Left—or the world’s humanitarians-- tell us about that?

 Joan Peters does. This woman,  the journalist who is not an historian—and who may also, by the way, never  win a Pulitzer Prize for her writing skills—tells a story that I would  call stylistically flawed but riveting. She discovers, for example, that, as those Jews were displaced,  “the total  (emphasis hers) number of Arabs who reportedly left Israel is almost exactly equalled by the number of Jews” who left Arab countries.

Yes, she claims that the number of Jewish refugees almost equals the number of Arab refugees.

How often have you heard the academic Left or the world’s humanitarians tell us about the sorrows of the displaced Jews?

The issue of refugees was not simply an ‘Arab’ problem. It was a mutually disagreeable issue that affected both peoples.

 While her research techniques may not meet the standards of academic historians, and even though she has been viciously criticized, her cited references for her statements have never been refuted, and her descriptions stand:  after the 1948 War, while Israel ignored the propaganda value of asserting the experience of the Jewish War-of-Independence refugee, the Arabs waited, apparently anxious about the Jewish refugee story. They were concerned about the consequences to them, were Jews to start making ‘refugee’ announcements:  if the Jews began talking about how they were solving their own ‘refugee problem’, the Arab’s total refusal to reintegrate their own refugees could back-fire on them. The Arabs wrote about this, discussed it and, apparently, worried about it.

The Jews never raised the issue. All the Jewish refugees were absorbed into Israel; for the Jews, it was a non-issue.

Can you see why Hard-Left historians would savage her work in 1984 -86, when the book reviews were written?  Her story, left unchallenged, could shatter the Arab narrative.
  
Think about what the existence of an equal number of Jewish refugees could do to the Arab cause. Each group could equally claim ‘deprivation’, not just the Arab. Each group could point at their dislocated brethren and call out, ‘look at what you did to me.’  Ms Peters refers to Arab essays as early as 1966 focusing on this problem, warning that the existence of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled Arab lands and who were now absorbed into Israel, could trump the Arab refugee propaganda card. How could the Arab cry out for ‘special treatment’ when the Jews had been just as displaced—and yet only the Jewish displaced had reintegrated?  By comparison, the Arabs (i.e., the Arab League) could look like ruthless  abusers of their own people.

Still, we must remember that Ms Peters has her critics. Specifically, her work been called, ludicrous, preposterous, ignorant, polemical, filled with wild exaggerations,  rubbish—and those are the nicer things her critics have said; and yet, when we look at her words from the point of view of  the 21^st century—some 27 years later—we can  see exactly  how ludicrous she sounds:

 …”the objective of the Arab world’s propaganda strategy has been one-sided Arab ‘repatriation’, a ‘return’ in the name of self-determination of those Arab refugees who have been perceived as the Palestinian people…In the foundation for those claims, one cornerstone is the popular perception  that the Arabs are the only hapless refugees who were uprooted in 1948.”

Yes, the Arab was horribly dislocated by the 1948 war; and yes, they now demand one-way justice.

Gosh. That sounds fair, doesn’t it?

The Left says it is. So do the world’s humanitarians.

So what’s the issue here? Why would the Arabs refuse to repatriate their own people?  Ms. Peters quotes a  University of Chicago population expert , who had been a former US Census Director and who had represented the US on the UN Population Commission from 1947 to 1951, whom she had  interviewed in 1978, saying that, “the exchange of population between out-migrant Arab and out-migrant Jews is real—precedents have been established. As far as the unprecedented refusal by the Arabs to accept Arab refugees—some quarters call this a deliberate means of destroying Israel.”

Destroy Israel?  Really?

The scholarly, academic and professional historian of the Left has never seriously considered that the Arab refugee problem could be part of a deliberate plan to destroy Israel. A University of Chicago population expert saw it, but the professional historians of the Left simply bought into the Arab narrative hook, line and sinker; so did the world’s humanitarians.

That’s objective and scholarly and humane, isn’t it?

But the truth is, the 1948 War created large numbers of refugees—just as happens in every war. Those refugees represented an extensive “exchange of minorities between the Arabs and the Jews.”  This was not a one-way street.

To put this issue into perspective, according to Peters, during the years 1933-1950, perhaps 79-100  million people were displaced by war and its consequences. By 1984, however—her date of publication-- most were no longer refugees, “because the resettlement and integration of those refugee transfers by the host country has been considered by the world community to be the normal and humanitarian course of action.”

So why wouldn’t  the Arab nations behave like everybody else, and behave in a way that is both normal and humanitarian?

Because, she suggests, they had a long-term plan to use humans (suffering Arabs) to destroy the ‘Zionist entity’.

How ludicrous and absurd do those words sound today?

She makes two more statement which, so far as I can tell, have never been substantively refuted—and which we might want to remember:

First, “there has been no successful mass repatriation by any refugee group except after a military victory.”

Second, “in instances of refugee exchanges there is no historical, moral, or other basis for one-way repatriation.”

These two statements suggest some questions: who’s the oppressor of the Arab refugee, the Jew or the Arab? Why does the Left deny that the Arabs are possibly the only ‘family’ to refuse repatriation, when something like 79 – 100 million other displaced people reintegrated? For the Left—and the humanitarian-- what compelling justification is there for a historically unique one-way repatriation, for a people who ended up displaced explicitly because of a war their own people started and lost?

If there is a moral lesson here, it is not that the world owes the Arab a one-way  repatriation. Rather, the lesson is this: don’t start a war of aggression because if you do and you lose, you have no moral ground to stand on; and throughout history, there have no exceptions to this.

This shocks a person who calls himself  ‘professional historian’?

In the end, history is about telling the truth; and it seems to me that the work and words of Joan Peters do a far better job of revealing truth than the work of the professional historians of the Left.

And the world’s humanitarians? It seems they walked away from truth a long time ago.

So if those ‘fly-in’ protesters show up and tell the world they come to fight for the Arab ‘right of return’, allow me to suggest one way to respond: the Jews didn’t steal anything;  there is simply no historical or moral case for a one-way repatriation, especially when you start a war of aggression and lose; indeed, if the Arab is so concerned about where he lives in 2011, his elders should not have been so quick to declare war in 1948.