Einat Wilf supported the Oslo Peace accords which envisioned a two state solution.. She was in favour of giving the Palestinians what she thought they wanted and “be done with it.” She supported the Clinton plan which Ehud Barak and Yassir Arafat negotiated which proposed a Palestinian state comprising 96% of the West Bank, along with the entire Gaza Strip, and a capital in East Jerusalem.
To compensate for the land Israel would annex for major settlement blocs, the plan included land swaps of 1% to 3% from Israeli territory. She thought the Palestinians really wanted a state and this plan would have given them one. ‘‘But Arafat “walked away” and “was perceived as a hero.” Wilf reached out to “moderate Palestinians” but learned they claimed all the land including Israel proper, and were not interested in diving it between two peoples. She “began a journey” to search for Palestinians whose vision of peace was of a Palestinian state living next to Israel.
Wilf was this year’s speaker for Adas-Yeshurun Herzlia synagogue’s 9th Annual Distinguished Lecture Series on May 24, and authored a bookwith Adi Shwartz, entitled The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace.
Wife referred to British Foreign Secretary Earnest Bevin who in an address in the House of Commons on February 18 1947, “ before any Palestinian Arabs were displaced”, declared “For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”
‘The Palestinian Arabs wanted the Jews not to have a state,” no matter how small, Wilf stressed,
The Palestinians had opportunities in 1937 (Peel Commission Plan), 1947 (UN Partition Plan) and before the 67 war . The Palestinians were told “you can have a state but the Jews also get a state”, but more than wanting their own state they wanted to ensure there would be no Jewish state.”
Wilf also made reference in her talk to Bobby Kennedy who traveled to Palestine in April 1948 as a correspondent for the Boston Post. His dispatches described how the Jewish people were fighting to establish an independent state, while Arab leadership vehemently opposed the creation of a separate Jewish state.. He wrote:
The Arabs are determined that a separate Jewish state will be attacked and attacked until it is finally cut out like an unhealthy abscess.
From a small village of a few thousand inhabitants, Tel Aviv has grown into a most impressive modern metropolis of over 200,000. They have truly done much with what all agree was very little.
The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500,000 Arabs, in the 12 years between 1932 and 1944, came into Palestine to take advantage of living conditions existing in no other Arab state. This is the only country in the Near and Middle East where an Arab middle class is in existence.
As Wilf concluded “Palestinians were committed to the non-existence of a Jewish state.” [Editor’s note re: Bobby Kennedy: He later became U.S. Attorney General, supported the existence of a Jewish state. He was later assassinated by an Arab Christian Sirhan Sirhan who chose the first anniversary of the Six Day War to kill the Democratic candidate, who had supported Israel in 1948 urging the U.S. to provide Israel F-4 Phantom jets].
Wilf noted that the Jewish state has the “highest state of legitimacy” since there is clearly a connection of a people to a land, the Jews are certainly an indigenous people with an historical connection in that they have had a continuous presence in this land for close to 4000 years (long before Islam was born) .The Jewish people also have their own language (Hebrew, a Semitic language ), and a connection to the backed up by archaeological evidence and religious ties. But Palestinian Arabs rejected this Jewish connection to the the land.
Wilf has written that after the 1947-1949 war, Arab states were demanding all Palestinian refugees be given the right to return. But they were demanding this notwithstanding they were not willing to enter into a peace treaty with the newly established state of Israel. Ben-Gurion feared returning refugees would be a fifth column for the day of revenge and would invite Arab states to invade. The IDF forces were physically exhausted, 1% of the Jewish population has died in the war, the forces were barely holding onto vital areas and returning villagers could fortify themselves behind front lines. Israel would not be able to achieve any domestic tranquility.
As Wilf and Schwartz outline in their book, in Oct. 1949 the Egyptian Foreign Minister stated that the demand for the return of the Palestinian refugees was meant to be a return as “masters of their homeland and not as slaves.” Palestinian Arab Historian Nasser Nashishibi made it clear that the Palestinian Arabs did not want to return under the flag of Israel, but wanted to return to make Israel become a Palestinian Arab state. A Lebanese weekly paper in Feb 1949 stated the returning refugees ought to be “a fifth column in the struggle yet before us.” Thus Wilf and Schwartz conclude that the Palestinian Arab refugees were not interested in returning peacefully to live in a sovereign Jewish State. They were interested in subverting “the very foundation of that state.” As Wolfe and Schwartz conclude through the massive right of return “ the Arab side wanted to restore the land to the Arabs not just restore the Arabs to the land.” The Arabs ignored that they were the instigators of the war and chose not to found their own state as per the partition plan. Wilf maintains Israel was therefore “fully justified” in refusing a massive right of return. After the war Palestinian refugees could have return to the West Bank and Gaza, which was in Arab hands after the war, and which had been designated to part of Arab Palestine under the 1947 Partition plan. They would have been “internally” displaced but living in historic Palestine. In other cases, a person who is internally displaced is not considered a refugee, but no one in the Aran states wanted this to happen as it would have meant ending the struggle with Israel and accepting its existence.
Wilf had noted that at the time, when refugees were allowed to return it was because they were members of the majority group of the accepting side. There is no example in an ethnic conflict of a refugee population from a minority group returning to an accepting state with a different majority group. After World War 11 Wilf pointed out that Allied powers and Eastern European nations forcibly displaced 14 million ethnic Germans, living in Poland, Czechoslovakia etc after a divided Germany was created.. These Germans did not want to leave but Germany accepted responsibility for the war, and they had to leave, “with some 2 million people dying on the way.” During the 1947 Partition of British India, communal violence forced an estimated 15 million people to migrate. Millions of Muslims fled to West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Many Pakistanis never returned because their original homes and properties were claimed by incoming Hindu and Sikh refugees, leaving them with nothing to go back to.
In her talk, Wilf explained that the term “Nakba” , which means “disaster” was originally coined by a Syrian intellectual in “real-time”, and it meant “ the shameful” failure of 7 Arab armies “in real time to defeat the inferior Jews”. Jews had always been considered to have inferior status to Muslims in Muslim Arab societies and the Nakba was the impotency of the Arabs “to subdue Zionism.” As Wilf has written, the plight of the refugees was “subservient” to the goal of snuffing out the existence of a Jewish state, no matter how small. The Nakba narrative also fails to account for the fact that the Arabs in Middle Eastern countries “turned on defenseless Jews”, who had never waged war on them and deliberate ethnically cleansed them from Arab lands, “because of the failure to stop Zionism.”
As indicated in “the War of Return “, the Arab states did not want Palestinian refugees to be dealt with by the United Nations body responsible for refugees, the UNHC (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), like all other refugees. The Arab states took the position that because the UN countries had supported partition, which the Arab states said had caused the Palestinian refugee problem, there needed to be a separate UN body set up for Palestinian Arabs only.
Thus, UNRWA came into existence. In the 1950’s , refugees in other areas of the world , including in Korea, had been resettled in countries that were culturally similar to them, but this did not occur with Palestinian refugees. As Wilf details in her book, after 10 years of UNRWA, the U.S and U.K. wanted to stop funding UNWRA and urged the Arab states to absorb the Palestinian refugees. However the US and UK were concerned about the strategic location of Arab states . It was the Cold War, and the West did not want Arab states and their oil moving into the Soviet orbit. Accordingly, the West continued to fund UNWRA as “a bribe” to Arab states in an attempt to keep them in the West’s orbit. Thus an agency that meant to be a temporary agency had continued to exist. It defines all descendent of the 1948 Palestinian refugees as refugees such that there are now over 6 million, even though there are only some 20,000 actual 1948 refugees in existence. It has been used to keep undermining the legitimacy of Israel by the Palestinians and their supporters who want to turn Israel into a Palestinian Arab state from the River to the Sea.
