The Strategic Implications of the “Right of Return”

Those who stay abreast of middle east news may have been surprised to learn that Palestinian Arabs fired kassam rockets into Ashkelon from Gaza.

Since Ashkelon is not located anywhere beyond Israel’s 1967 line in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, why were the Arabs firing into Ashkelon?

Was this merely a random attack on a Jewish city that was within range of the rocket?

The Palestinian Authority’s PBC Voice of Palestine news announcer led off this morning, some 24 hours after the Arab rocket attack, with an announcement that provides an answer: “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.

Indeed, information is available from a variety of Arab Palestinian sources: Ashkelon appears on the official atlas of the Palestinian Authority school system as an Israeli settlement that has replaced Arab villages. The Palestine Return Center lists Al-Majdal on its website:

www.prc.org.uk/prc/prcmap/MapMain.asp?ID=3&MapLang=English&PlcID=47

The PalestineRemembered Website lists a couple of the villages (al-Khisas and Ni’ilya) within the complex that Ashkelon replaced, respectively, at: netfinity2.palestineremembered.com/Gaza/al-Khisas/index.html

and at:
netfinity2.palestineremembered.com/IsraeliSettlementsGaza.html

Yet it is one thing to remember the past, and another to “liberate” an area via attack. That requires a particular mindset. International sanction precisely for this sort of mindset comes from what might seem an unlikely source: The United Nations.

For years, our news agency ran press seminars in the UNRWA Arab refugee camp of Jabalya in Gaza. There, UNRWA camp spokespeople are always pleased to show their guests around the Jabalya neighborhood known as Majdal.

[As a matter of policy, 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 precise neighborhoods and villages.]

The refugee residents of this UNRWA camp 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; one might expect that they are claiming right to all of Gaza, without Jewish settlement. However, the settlement that the UNRWA camp residents refer to is the “illegal Israeli settlement” in Ashkelon, which replaced Majdal and other Arab villages as a result of the 1948 war.

UNRWA — the UN agency that runs the Arab refugee camps under the mandate of UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) — promotes the “inalienable right of return.” This means that the Arab refugee population in the camps is not being assisted in rehabilitation. Instead, they endure lives wrought with impermanence and frustration as they wait to get back what was theirs (or their grandparents’) more than 50 years ago.

From this it is no more than a short jump to the idea that they have the “right” to “liberate” Ashkelon. It seems hardly a coincidence that rockets were fired from UN refugee camps at this city.