OPINION
So far in this series we’ve debunked the following ‘pro-Palestinian’ propaganda: that the rapist butchers of Hamas are ‘resistance fighters’, the obvious stupidity of the Marxist claim that Jews are ‘settler colonialists’ in their own homeland, the obnoxiously false claims that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ that is committing ‘genocide’ and the self-evidently ridiculous claim that Palestine, with a 36 per cent obesity rate, is a starving ‘prison’.
In this final instalment, we’ll look at probably the most enduring claim of the pro-Pally lobby: that Palestinian ‘refugees’ have the “right of return”. That is, that they can march into the state of Israel and take over land and houses that their ancestors fled nearly a century ago. That, unlike nearly every war in modern history, Palestinian ‘refugees’ have a ‘right’ to seize what they voluntarily abandoned and consequently lost in a war.
The first thing to consider is just how the so-called Nakba unfolded.
When the UN Resolution 181 established the modern state of Israel in the ancient Jewish homelands, it offered the Arabs a two-state solution that included a more generous slice of the then-British territory than any since. The Arabs violently rejected the idea and embarked on a brutal war of extermination against Jews who had been perfectly legally purchasing land and homes for decades (what’s the lefty chant about “No pride in genocide,” again?).
Arabs… dismantled or destroyed the Jewish towns and villages they conquered in the war, among them, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Beit Ha’arava and Kalya north of the Dead Sea; four kibbutzim of the Etzion Bloc, west of Bethlehem; the Jewish Quarter in Hebron; Atarot and Neve Ya’akov, north of Jerusalem; the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem; Tel Or/Naharayim – the hydro-electric power station built by Pinhas Rutenberg by the Jordan River south of Lake Kinneret; and Kfar Darom in the Gaza Strip.”
The destruction was routinely accompanied with the sort of brutal massacres that Arabs have perpetrated on Jews ever since, most notoriously on October 7.
Israel’s Arab neighbours fully expected to win the war and they encouraged Arabs in Palestine to leave “temporarily”, to leave the field of battle clear for the Arab armies.
Among those overconfident Arab leaders was Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said who promised to “smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in.”Syria’s Prime Minister, Hayed al Azm, wrote in his 1973 memoir that “we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave.”
The Arab National Committee in Jerusalem ordered women, children, and the elderly to leave in March 1948.
In August 1948, the commander of Jordan’s Arab Legion said that “Villages were frequently abandoned even before they were threatened by the progress of war.”
The Arabs were also terrified that the Israeli armies would treat them with the same brutality they had meted out to their Jewish neighbours. In an extraordinary and undeserved show of generosity, the victorious Israelis forewent vengeance and extended the olive branch instead.
After the capture of Haifa, a British police officer wrote that “every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe.”
On the other hand, Arab nations cynically exploited their Palestinian ‘brothers’, hoping to use them as bargaining chips and keep the war rolling.
But, to the Arabs’ surprise, the Yahud kicked their arses – and Arab nations were stuck with 700,000 ‘refugees’ they didn’t want but were unexpectedly stuck with.
The Arabs who were encouraged to leave their homes and join one of the invading armies were not allowed to become citizens of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, or Lebanon. Instead they were forced to live in “camps” – cities really – where they could be used as perpetual bargaining tools against the Jewish state […]
Salman Abu Sitta, a member of the Palestine National Council, in 1998 drafted a public letter to Arafat, forcing him to pledge that no peace deal could be made without a “right of return.”
In other words, a permanent, generational claim to be ‘refugees’ was to be used to keep the war against Israel going in perpetuity. And, for the first time in history, the losers of a war were demanding to dictate terms with the winners. Palestinian leadership have used the fiction of a ‘right of return’ to reject every offer of a two-state solution since (yet, we’re suddenly supposed to believe that Hamas have suddenly changed their minds).
Just as the Arab nations did in 1948, the UN today uses the so-called right of return to keep the fires of Arab resentment burning and threaten the very Israeli state it created.
In order to cater to these freshly-minted 700,000 “refugees,” the United Nations created the Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in 1949. UNRWA has since become indistinguishable from the Palestinian effort to eradicate Israel. Its schools in Gaza have long served as Hamas and PIJ missile launch pads and weapons depots and as cover for Hamas’s tunnel entrances, but now we know that the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City was used to disguise a command center for Underground Gaza, even providing it with electricity.
UNRWA teachers, many of whom cheered on the October 7 massacre, keep alive the hatred fueling the conflict by “encouraging jihad, violence, and martyrdom, as well as promoting antisemitism, conflict discourse, hate, and intolerance,” according to the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se). Some 30-plus UNRWA employees even participated in the October 7 assault. There is video evidence of them kidnapping hostages.
But what would a “right of return” look like, in practice? In practice, it would mean the obliteration of the Jewish state (which is, in fact, its entire point).
The “right of return” demand means that any relative of one of the Arabs who fled in 1948 has a right to claim parts of Israel. It would amount to some 5–7 million people, now calling themselves “Palestinian,” transforming Israel into something other than Israel. Jews would be a minority in their own country. The Jewish state would cease to be the Jewish state.
When Palestinian propagandists demand their right of return, they are demanding the right to erase Israel. The symbol of that alleged right is a key, representing the keys Arabs retained to the houses they left behind in 1948. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas regularly wears a key-shaped lapel pin, signifying his dedication to the foundational fantasy of the “Palestinian resistance.”
Not content with cooking up a fictitious “right of return”, Palestinian propagandists have embarked on a Maoist-level re-writing of history, to try and deny that Jews are, in fact, the indigenes of Israel.
Palestinian propagandists will go to any length to make the case that they were the original residents of Israel long before any Jews lived there, including denying the authenticity of archeological artifacts confirming Jewish history in Israel. But the most preposterous claim (thus far) came in a speech aired May 26, 2023, on Palestine TV, by the president of the Palestinian National Council, Rawhi Fattouh. In an attempt to best Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that Jews have lived in Israel for 3,000 years, Fattouh boasted that Palestinians had in fact established Jerusalem in 5,000 BC and that “it belongs exclusively to the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the Muslims.” Piling it higher and deeper, he added that, “The first human civilization appeared in the ancient caves on Mount Carmel, in Palestine” and, hilariously, “Humans appeared in Palestine 1.5 million years ago.”
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Which is as hilariously ludicrous as the claim by an Aboriginal “intellectual” that Aborigines have been in Australia for “millions of years”.
Given that the human species only appeared around 300,000 years ago, that’s an obviously outrageous lie.
But then, obviously outrageous lies are the stock-in-trade of the “pro-Palestine” lobby.