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Palestinians and the "Right of Return"

[Christian Science Monitor] Alan Dershowitz - Among the major barriers to peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis is the so-called right of return. In its broadest formulation, this "right" belongs to some 4 million alleged descendants of the 700,000 or so Palestinian Arabs who left what is now Israel as the result of the war that began when Israel declared statehood in 1948. Israelis insist that the Palestinian "Nakba" - catastrophe - was self-inflicted. By attacking Israel in a genocidal attempt to push the Jews into the sea, the combined Arab armies created the refugee problem. Israel insists that many Palestinians left of their own volition or at the behest of Arab leaders who promised that the Palestinians would return triumphantly after Israel was defeated. The millions of other refugees who were forced to leave their homes in the decades following World War II - the Sudeten-Germans, the Greeks and Turks, Pakistanis and Indians, and the 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries - have all been integrated and normalized. Only the Palestinian refugees have been kept in camps by their Arab hosts. In 1949, Egypt's foreign minister candidly acknowledged: "It is well known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters....They intend to annihilate the State of Israel."
2007-04-17 01:00:00
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