The “Right of Return” The Wild Card of the Middle East Negotiation Process

The 1948 War Continues

Israel’s 1948 war has not been resolved. The Palestinian Authority and PLO, with the help of the UN, keep that war simmering. How? With the demand to implement the “Right Of Return”, so that Arab refugees and their descendents may claim Arab homes and villages abandoned during the 1948 war, even if they have been replaced by Israeli cities, collective farms and woodlands

While anywhere between 450,00 and 700,000 Arabs left or fled from the former British mandate of Palestine during Israel’s 1948-49 war of independence, the PLO now claims that eight million Arabs must be allowed to return to live within Israel’s 1949-1967 cease-fire at the end of any peace settlement.

The demand for ” The Right of Return” gets little media coverage in the mainstream media in the west and even in Israel.

Most people, even Israelis, know nothing about it.

Yet all foreign governments involved in middle east negotiations, including the US, give tacit support to the “right of return”, which is a simple formula to replace Israel’s population with an Arab population who claim more than 80% of Israeli homes as the property of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendents.

“Right of Return” in the UN-run Palestinian Arab refugee camps

Schools in the UN-run Palestinian Arab refugee camps inculcate a new generation that soon they will be living inside a Jew’s house inside Israel.

Take a look at the precision with which the “right of return” curriculum is taught at www.palestineremembered.com, where the descendents of Palestinian Arab refugees can peruse photos and maps of the homes and villages that they expect to return to… which are now “occupied” by Jews.

You can see how the “right of return” is woven into the official curriculum of the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education at www.edume.org, whose schools and school books are funded by the US AID, Canada and all major European nations.

“Right of Return”: Basis of the ‘Road Map’

The issue of the Palestinian Arab demand for “right of return” to the Arab villages that they left in 1948 is now on the table.

Indeed, the current “road map”, sponsored by the US, the EU, Russia and the UN is based on the “Saudi peace plan” proposed by Crown Prince Abdullah on March 28th 2002 at the Arab League in Beirut. Nabil Shaath, the Palestine Authority Foreign Minister and Arafat confidante, affirmed in Beirut on August 16th that the US-sponsored road map would mandate the right of Palestinian Arab refugees to return to their homes and villages from 1948.

Surprisingly, Shaath was correct. All you have to do is to read the official document of “road map” to know that The Saudi initiative, which supports the “right of return”, provides the basis for the Road Map, can be found in the document entitled ” A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” http://www.un.org/media/main/roadmap122002.html.

In other words, the “Saudi peace plan” demands that Israel must accept the recognition of the “right of return” for any Palestinian Arab refugee or any refugee descendant who would want to act upon his or her “right”.

All this is in keeping with the Palestinian State Constitution, authored by the same Nabil Shaath and ratified on March 26th by the US- funded PLC, the Palestine Legislative Council. That constitution legislates the “right of return” for all Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendents to return to the villages from 1948, even if they no longer exist

Thousands of maps recently issued and distributed by the Palestinian National Authority in Arabic and in English provide a clear guide for Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants to forcibly take back the 531 Arab villages lost in 1948 which have been replaced by Israeli cities, collective farms and woodlands.

None of the villages where Palestinian Arab refugees demand the “right of return” are located in Judea, Samaria (Also known as the west bank) or Gaza.

Only last week, Palestinian Arabs fired kassam rockets into Ashkelon from UN refugee camps in Gaza, followed by The Palestinian Authority’s PBC Voice of Palestine news anchor’s excited announcement, some 24 hours after the Arab rocket attack, that “Palestinian fighters,” he said, “had attacked the Israeli settlement in Majdal- Ashkelon.”

The emphasis in his voice was on Majdal, alluding to the fact (which his Arab Palestinian listeners would be expected to know) that Ashkelon has been built on the ruins of al-Majdal, a cluster of Arab villages.

The refugee residents of UNRWA camps in Gaza speak of the necessity of removing “illegal Israeli settlements” to achieve peace.

One might think that they are referring to the 21 Israeli Jewish farming communities that have been founded on the sand dunes south of Gaza in the context of their claim to all of Gaza

However, an example of a settlement that the UNRWA camp residents wish to remove is the “illegal Israeli settlement” of Ashkelon, which replaced Majdal and other Arab villages as a result of the 1948 war, or the constantly shelled Shderot, which replaced Arab villages in the Negev.

The “Right of Return”: Motto of the Palestinian Authority

The emergence of a Palestinian Arab entity in the form of the Palestinian Authority has done little to stem Palestinian Arab expectations for the “right of return”…

After the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations during summer 2000, both the Israeli and Palestinian Arab delegations to the talks confirmed that the talks broke down because Israel did not recognize the “right of return”

As Israeli negotiator Dan Meridor told me in an interview in September, 2000, the Israeli delegation was amazed that the Palestinian Arab delegation was so adamant on the full recognition of the “right of return”.

Yet Palestinian Legislative Council Chairman, Ahmad Qurei’, [a.k.a. “Abu ‘Alaa”], Arafat’s most recent candidate for prime minister of a future Palestinian Arab state, has declared time and again that the ideology of a Palestinian Arab state must be based on the “right of return”. As he stated in 1999:: “… Either [we achieve] a just peace that will guaranty the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people, including [the] Return, self determination, and the establishment of an independent [Palestinian] state with Jerusalem as its capital – or there will be no peace but [rather] a return to the struggle in all its forms.”

Al-Ayyam, September 24 1999
[Excerpt from MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 58 November 18, 1999]

We asked the head of the PLO refugee committee, Daoud Baraket, about the difficulties of that “right of return”, since Israelis live in cities which replaced the Arab villages from 1948. Baraket had a simple solution. “The Israelis should leave”, he said. And what if they do not leave, we asked. “Well, we would have to kill them, and international law would be on our side”, Baraket said.

“Right of Return”: The Basis of UNRWA

The “Right Of Return” also forms the basis for the UN operation of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, established back in 1950 to administer 59 “temporary” Palestinian Arab refugee camps for the past 55 years instead of repatriating them to Arab countries.

UNRWA continues to operate these camps as “temporary shelters” under that very mandate of the “right of return”

Often, UNRWA Arab refugee camps organize each neighborhood according to the precise neighborhoods and villages from where they left in 1948, so as to facilitate their repatriation to those same neighborhoods and

In June of this year, Hamas won 60% of the votes to take over the UNRWA workers union, the professional guild which represents the 23,000 employees of UNRWA, most of whom are college-educated Palestinian Arab residents of the UNRWA camps.

That indicates the ideology which dominates of the UNRWA employees people who run the camps.

It is no wonder that the 59 UNRWA refugee camps remain the safe haven of Arab terror groups.

The Lebanese Equation:

Lebanon is the one country where UN camps are most likely to prime Palestinian Arab refugees to “return to their homes from 1948” 320,000 Palestinian Arab refugees wallow in the UNRWA camps in Lebanon, which is the only host country for UNRWA which restricts Palestinian Arabs from working in most professions, so as to keep the Palestinian Arabs impoverished and dependent n the UNRWA camps.

UNRWA camps in Lebanon openly conduct daily military exercises to prepare thousands of refugees for the day that will come when they flood northern Israel to retake their homes and villages that were lost in the 1948 war, all under the spirit and slogan of the “right of return”.

Surprising US acquiescence to the “Right of Return”

People across the political spectrum in Israel expected that the Bush Administration to stand with Israel on the issue of the “right of return”, since the idea of Palestinian Arabs flooding Israel with refugees seemed incompatible with the Bush notion of a two-state solution where Arab refugees would be absorbed by a Palestinian Arab entity.

However, two days before the road map was affirmed with strong reservations by the Israeli cabinet, Shimon Schiffer, the senior diplomatic correspondent for the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, reported on May 23, 2003 that “the Americans rejected one of Israel’ central demands, which states that the Palestinian Arabs would agree to concede the right of return in return for Israel’s recognition of a Palestinian Arab state”.

The US also rejected Israel’s request to remove the Saudi proposal (a full withdrawal to the lines of June 4, 1967, recognition of the right of return, in return for the recognition of Israel by the Arab countries and natural relations) as the basis of the road map’s authority.

The US support for the “right of return” is no theoretical matter.

That support was translated into the $114 million that the US contributed over the past fiscal year to UNRWA – 30% of the UNRWA budget.

On August 4th, the US allocated another $26 million to UNRWA, with no strings attached to mandate that UNRWA should not promote the “right of return”

Will the US Congress Place Constraints on UNRWA?

Rep. Chris Smith (R;NJ), deputy chairman of the US House International Relations Committee, successfully offered an amendment on August 18th expressing the “Sense of the Congress” that “UNRWA was failing to vigorously oppose terrorism, and calling on the Department of State and UNRWA’s own leadership to “take more pro-active steps to disassociate UNRWA from the terrorist elements that operate within and among its staff and humanitarian operations”. Smith’s amendment demands that UNRWA comply with section 301(c) of the US Foreign Assistance Act which curtails US aid to any humanitarian agency which hosts military training.

It will soon be up to the US Congress to determine if they agree with the assessment of the Dr. Reuven Ehrlich, the head of Israel’s “Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center” who wrote a position paper in December, 2002 for Israeli intelligence which concluded that “Terrorist Organizations use UNRWA officials and Facilities to Carry out Terrorist Activities” {See text on Israel Resource Review of March 31, 2003)