I first became aware of how the Palestinian right of return was an insurmountable obstacle to peace when in 2008 I went to a peace conference in Beit Jalla just outside of Bethlehem. There I interviewed many Palestinians each of whom maintained that they expected to return to the lands their ancestors had in 1948 inside Israel. At another conference in Tel-Aviv, two Palestinian women who lived in Beit Jalla began arguing in Arabic after I asked one of them if she would accept compensation instead. She would have said yes, but her friend pressured her not to, and she refused to answer me.
One of the subjects that Einat Wilf, a former Labour Party Knesset member and founder of Israel’s Oz Party, will be speaking about in the near future is the Palestinian claim to a Right of Return , among other subjects. Wilf is this year’s speaker for Adas-Yeshurun Herzlia synagogue’s 9th Annual Distinguished Lecture Series on May 24 at. 7 p.m. (Dessert Reception to Follow). She authored a book with Adi Shwartz, entitled The War of Retuen: How Western Indugence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace.
Wilf has emphasized that the international community has been very focused on settlements, especially those deep in the West Bank, sayingthey are the obstacle to peace. However no one really talks about the notion of a Palestinian right of return being a definite obstacle to peace. Palestinians who return would not be doing so because they want to reside in the State of Israel, but rather because they want to make Israel be a Palestinian Arab State.
As Wilf has written in 2020 in Fathom Journal, “If Israel with its 6 million Jews and more than 1.5 million Arabs has to absorb between 5 and 8 million Palestinians then the Jews will be relegated again to living as a minority among those who do not view them as equals; the only country in which the Jews are a majority and can exercise their right to self-determination would be no more.” The right of return which Palestinians have asserted for 78 years is thus a way of saying in essence “the war isn’t over.” Palestinians were unsuccessful in stopping Jews from immigrating to the land, and in preventing the 1947 vote of partition in the UN, and in the military battle against Israel’s birth. Now the war continues by by another mechanism-the right of return.
UNRWA, the organisation created specifically to deal with Arab refugees from Palestine from the 1947-1949 Arab-Israel war is a big part of the problem having “collaborated” with the Arab refusal to resettle the refugees in the areas where they reside, or to relocate them to third countries. Worse, UNRWA has ensured that the refugee issue is magnified by automatically registering descendants of the original 1948 refugees (who number approximately 20,000 ) as refugees in perpetuity.
Wilf has pointed out over 80 per cent of Palestinian refugees are either citizens of a third country, such as Jordan, or they live in the places where they were born/raised in the West Bank or Gaza. The Palestinians born in the West Bank and Gaza are considered citizens of Palestine by the Palestinian Authority itself, just like all other Palestinians born in these territories. “‘No other people in the world are registered as refugees while being citizens of another country or territory,” Wilf has written.in Fathom Journal
In the documentary film UNraveling Unwra, Wilf explains that there were 3.1 million Korean refugees and UNKRA took 18 months to resettle them and then that agency came to an end. But a similar situation had not occurred with UNWRA , which should have been a temporary agency. Palestinian children in UNWRA refugee camps are being indoctrinated into advancing a jihadist right of return by force of arms to their 1948 villages which no longer exist.
Wilf has concluded in Fathom Journal, “if millions of Arabs who are citizens of Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, or inhabitants of Syria and Lebanon, claim to be refugees from what is today Israel, even though they were never born there and never lived there, and demand that as a result of this refugee status they be given the right to relocate to Israel (‘the right of return’), then the whole basis for peace by means of two states for two people crumbles.”
Western countries, including Canada have been financing UNWRA .But dismantling Israel through return of refugees into a Muslim Arab state is not compatible with any two state vision backed by the West.
As Wilf has stated, “If the policy of Western countries towards the Jewish settlements in the West Bank were to take its cue from their policy towards the Palestinian refugees as shaped by UNRWA, it would go as follows: ‘Go ahead Israel, build as many settlements as you want and keep expanding them in perpetuity. We will accept the settlements as a natural expansion of Israel. We will even support the expansion effort financially.” This is the opposite of what occurs.
Referring to the Oslo years Wilf says that when the Palestinians said they recognized Israel, Israelis such as herself assumed that the Palestinians were recognizing Israel’s raison d’être—to be a sovereign state of the Jewish people . But as Wilf told Unpacked Media , this was “crazy wishful thinking.” She notes that when Palestinian Arabs said they supported a two state solution, they meant “an Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza and another Arab state to replace Israel” through the mechanism of the right of return.
Wilf ‘s platform for the Oz Party rests on three main points: peace based on Arab and Palestinian acceptance of Zionism, state services for those who serve the state, and a shift from a diasporic mindset to sovereign governance.
