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Dr. Alex Grobman is the author of Zionism=Racism: The Ongoing War Against The Jews, which will be published in 2006.
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By Dr. Alex Grobman
February 28, 2006
A number of reports in the media claim that Hamas is softening its position toward recognizing Israel. A careful review of the interview in The Washington Post with Hamas's new Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh reveals that this is nothing more than a ruse. In response to a question about recognizing Israel's right to exist, Haniyeh said, "The answer is to let Israel say it will recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, release the prisoners and recognize the rights of the refugees to return to Israel. Hamas will have a position if this occurs."
The demand to release murderers and permit millions of Arabs to enter the country is not new. What self-respecting nation would allow individuals who have killed its citizens to go free? What message would Israel be sending to terrorists if they were to agree to this prerequisite to recognition?
Arabs have been insisting on their "right of return to Israel" for so many years that they have convinced numerous people that this is a legitimate claim. Since 1947, the UN General Assembly (GA) has adopted a number of resolutions regarding the Palestinian refugees. GA resolution 194 (III) of December 11,1948, established the principle in paragraph 11 "that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date."
The operative word is peace. That is a sine qua non.
Even before the resolution passed, David Ben-Gurion said on August 1, 1948, that as long as the Arab states refused to make peace with the Jews, Israel could not trust the assurances made by the Arab refugees that they would live in peace with their neighbors. He did not preclude the possibility repatriating a limited number of Arab refugees, but insisted that the fundamental solution was to resettle them in Arab States.
Abba Eban, Israel's representative to the UN, reminded the UN delegates that seven states including six Members of the UN had attacked Israel in an effort to reverse the GA's resolution by force, driving out hundreds of thousands seeking refuge outside the country. Furthermore, Israel was the only state involved in the conflict that had complied with the Security Council's resolution of November 16, 1948, calling upon the warring governments to negotiate an armistice as a first step to a lasting peace.
A.B. Yehoshua, one of Israel's most prominent writers and a leading figure in the Israeli left, contends that the Palestinian Arabs have no right of return. Either they or the Arab nations were responsible for their plight. Those who fled or were expelled are not refugees, he argues, but displaced persons (DP). The difference is significant. A refugee is an individual who fled or was forced out of his native country; a DP is a person who fled or was expelled from his residence, but stays within the border of his country of origin.
When the Arabs forced Jews to flee from the Old City of Jerusalem, Kfar Darom, Beit Ha'arava, Atarot, and the Etzion Bloc into Israeli territory, the Jews were not refugees, they were DPs who were immediately given new homes in Israel.
During the 19 years the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were under Jordanian, Palestinian and Egyptian rule, these refugees could have returned to their homeland, where they would be DPs instead of refugees. "This," he said "is the beginning of the tragedy of the Palestinians, for which they themselves and the Arab countries carry direct moral responsibility. Even if (from their point of view) they did have a legitimate hope that they would see the day when they would be able to eliminate the Jewish state and take back all of Palestine - or at least return to their homes just as the displaced persons from the Etzion Bloc and the Old City did - there was still nothing to prevent the Palestinian displaced persons from building real homes. They could have lived ordinary, respectable lives within their homeland, instead of humiliating provisional existences in miserable camps."
Yehoshua believes the Palestinian Arabs confuse "the concept of homeland with the concept of home?." When the Soviet Union launched an aggressive war against Finland at the beginning of World War II, they expelled Finnish citizens to other parts of the Finnish state where they were DPs, not refugees. They built homes and new lives in their homeland. In contrast, Arab refugees and DPs harbor the idea of literally returning to their former homes.
"When my Palestinian friends," he said, "demand the right of return I tell them that I would be prepared to bring all the Palestinian refugees back to their homes in Israel on the condition that they first bring back the 6,000 Israelis killed during the aggressive war of 1948, when Israel was pleading for its life after the UN partition plan and seeking peaceful coexistence."
In determining a response to Hamas demands, Israel would be wise to consider what Edmund Burke said in 1775: "The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear." Appeasement has a place in resolving disputes, he believed, but not in dealing with aggression. Israel has yet to learn this lesson.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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