Karsh, E.thepalestiniansandtheRightofReturn

8/13/2019 Karsh, E.thepalestiniansandtheRightofReturn

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May 2001

The Palestinians and the Rightof Returnfraim Karsh

Y THE early 1990's, most Israelis, on both sidesof the political spectrum, had come to embracea two-state solution to their decades-long conflictwith the Palestinian Arabs, a solution based on theidea of trading land for peace. For these Israelis,and especially for the doves among them, the twi-light hours of Ehud Barak's short-lived governmentcame as a terrible shock.During a span of six months, from the CampDavid summit ofJuly 2000 to the Taba talks a fewdays before his crushing electoral defeat in Febru-ary 2001, Barak crossed every single territorial redline upheld by previous Israeli governments in hisfrenzied quest for an agreement with the Palestini-ans based on the formula of land for peace. Un-questioningly accepting the Arab side's interpreta-tion of UN Security Council Resolution 242,passed in the aftermath of the Six-Day war of 1967,Barak's government offered to cede virtually theentire West Bank and Gaza Strip to the nascentPalestinian state, and made breathtaking conces-sions over Israel's capital city of Jerusalem. But toits amazement, rather than reciprocating thissweepingly comprehensive offer of land with a sim-EFRAIM KARSH, head ofMediterranean tudies at King'sCollege, University of London, is the author (with InariKarsh)ofEmpires of the Sand: The Struggle for Masteryin the Middle East, 1789-1923 andFabricating IsraeliHistory: The New Historians. Among his contributions toCOMMENTARY is Intifada II: The Long Trail ofArabAnti-Semitism (December 2000).

ilarly generous offer of peace, the Palestinians re-sponded with wholesale violence.At Taba, the Palestinians also insisted, with re-newed adamancy, on another non-negotiable con-dition that had been lying somewhat dormantin the background of the Oslo process begun in1993. No peace would be possible, they declared,unless Israel guaranteed the right of the Arabrefugees of the 1948-49 war, and their descendants,to return to territory that is now part of the state ofIsrael, and to be compensated financially for lostproperty and for decades of privation and suffering.The reintroduction of this issue, at a momentwhen Israel had effectively agreed to withdraw toits pre-1967 lines, shook the Israeli peace camp tothe core. All of a sudden, it seemed that the Arabstates and the Palestinians really meant what theyhad been saying for so long-namely, that peacewas not a matter of adjusting borders and territorybut was rather a euphemism for eliminating theJewish state altogether, in this case through demo-graphic subversion. Implementing the 'right of re-turn' means eradicating Israel, lamented AmosOz, the renowned author and peace advocate. Itwill make the Jewish people a minor ethnic groupat the mercy of Muslims, a 'protected minority,'just as fundamentalist Islam would have it.Oz's plaintive cry struck no responsive chord withhis Palestinian counterparts, however. We as Pales-tinians do not view our job to safeguard Zionism. Itis our job to safeguard our rights, stated the promi-

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nent politician Hanan Ashrawi, vowing to upholdthe right of return even at the cost of undermin-ing Israel's demographic balance. The refugeeproblem, she continued, has to be solved in totalas a central issue of solving the Palestinian questionbased on the implementation of international law ;for not only has this right of return never been re-linquished or in any way modified, it has been af-firmed annually by the UN member states.As it happens, Hanan Ashrawi is very much mis-taken; and so, in his own way, is Amos Oz. Thereis no such collective right of return to be imple-mented. But to grasp what is at issue here requiresa deeper look into history, demography, interna-tional law, and po litics.

IIWTH TEVER THE strengths and weaknesses of'VV the Palestinians' legal case, their foremostargument for a right of return has always restedon a claim of unprovoked victimhood. In the Pales-tinians' account, they were and remain the haplesstargets of a Zionist grand design to dispossess themfrom their land, a historical wrong for which theyare entitled to redress. In the words of MahmoudAbbas (a/k/a Abu Mazen), Yasir Arafat's second-in-command and a chief architect of the 1993 Osloaccords: When we talk about the right of return,we talk about the return of refugees to Israel, be-cause Israel was the one who deported them. Thepolitical activist Salman Abu Sitta has put it in evenmore implacable terms:

There is nothing like it in modern history. Aforeign minority attacking the national major-ity in its own homeland, expelling virtually allof its population, obliterating its physical andcultural landmarks, planning and supportingthis unholy enterprise from abroad, and claim-ing that this hideous crime is a divine interven-tion and victory for civilization. This is thelargest ethnic-cleansing operation in modernhistory.One may be forgiven for pausing a moment atthe last sentence. To identify the Palestinian exo-dus-some 600,000 persons at most-as the larg-est ethnic-cleansing operation in modern historyrequires at the very least a drastic downgrading ofother rather well-documented incidents: the 15million ethnic Germans forced out of their homesin Eastern Europe after World War II; the millionsof Muslims and Hindus fleeing the newly estab-lished states of India and Pakistan during the par-

tition of the Indian subcontinent in 1948; the mil-lions of Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Finns, Bulgari-ans, and Kurds, among others, driven from theirlands and resettled elsewhere during the 20th cen-tury; and so forth and so on .But put aside the hyperbole. The claim of pre-meditated dispossession is itself not only baseless,but the inverse of the truth. Far from being thehapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, thePalestinians were themselves the aggressors in the1948-49 war, and it was they who attempted, albeitunsuccessfully, to cleanse a neighboring ethnic

community. Had the Palestinians and the Arabworld accepted the United Nations resolution ofNovember 29, 1947, calling for the establishmentof two states in Palestine, and not sought to subvertit by force of arms, there would have been norefugee problem in the first place.It is no coincidence that neither Arab propagan-dists nor Israeli new historians have ever producedany evidence of a Zionist master plan to expel thePalestinians during the 1948 war. For such a plannever existed. In accepting the UN partition resolu-tion, the Jewish leadership in Palestine acquiesced inthe principle of a two-state solution, and all subse-quent deliberations were based on the assumptionthat Palestine's Arabs would remain as equal citizensin the Jewish state that would arise with the termi-nation of the British mandate. As David Ben-Gurion,soon to become Israel's first prime minister, told theleadership ofhis Labor (Mapai) party on December 3,1947: In our state there will be non-Jews as well-and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in every-thing without any exception; that is: the state will betheir state as well.In line with this conception, committees layingthe groundwork for the nascent Jewish state dis-cussed in detail the establishment of an Arabic-lan-guage press, the improvement of health in the Arabsector, the incorporation of Arab officials in thegovernment, the integration of Arabs within thepolice and the ministry of education, and Arab-Jewish cultural and intellectual interaction. No lessimportantly, the military plan of the Hagana (theforemost Jewish underground organization in man-datory Palestine) for rebuffing an anticipated pan-Arab invasion was itself predicated, in the explicitinstructions of Israel Galilee, the Hagana's com-mander-in-chief, on the acknowledgement of thefull rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in theHebrew state without any discrimination, and a de-sire for coexistence on the basis of mutual freedomand dignity.The Arabs, however, remained unimpressed by

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THE PALESTINIANS AND THE RIGHT OF RETURN

Jewish protestations of peace and comity. A few daysbefore the passing of the UN partition resolution,Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the former mufti of Jeru-salem and then head of the Arab Higher Commit-tee (AHC), told an Egyptian newspaper that wewould rather die than accept minority rights in aprospective Jewish state. The secretary-general ofthe Arab League, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, promisedto defend Palestine no matter how strong the op-position. You will achieve nothing with talk ofcompromise or peace, he told a secret delegation ofpeace-seeking Zionists in September 1947:

For us there is only one test, the test ofstrength.... We will try to rout you. I am notsure we will succeed, but we will try. We suc-ceeded in expelling the Crusaders, but lostSpain and Persia, and may lose Palestine. Butit is too late for a peaceable solution.N THE event, the threats to abort the birth of Is-rael by violence heralded the Palestinians' col-lective undoing. Even before the outbreak of hos-tilities, many of them had already fled their homes.Still larger numbers left before war reached theirdoorstep. By April 1948, a month before Israel'sdeclaration of independence, and at a time whenthe Arabs appeared to be winning the war, some100,000 Palestinians, mostly from the main urbancenters ofJaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and from vil-lages in the coastal plain, had gone. Within anoth-er month those numbers had nearly doubled; andby early June, according to an internal Hagana re-port, some 390,000 Palestinians had left. By thetime the war was over in 1949, the number ofrefugees had risen to between 550,000 and 600,000.Why did such vast numbers of Palestinians taketo the road? There were the obvious reasons com-monly associated with war: fear, disorientation, eco-nomic privation. But to these must be added thelocal Palestinians' disillusionment with their ownleadership, the role taken by that leadership inforc-ing widespread evacuations, and, perhaps above all,

a lack of communal cohesion or of a willingness,especially at the highest levels, to subordinate per-sonal interest to the general good.On this last point, a number of Palestinians havethemselves spoken eloquently. There was a Bel-gian ship, recalls Ibrahim Abu Lughod, an academ-ic who fled Jaffa in 1948,and one of the sailors, a young man, looked atus-and the ship was full of people from Jaffa,some of us were young adults-and he said: why don't you stay and fight? I have never

forgotten his face, and I have never had onegood answer for him.Another former resident of Jaffa was the re-nowned Palestinian intellectual Hisham Sharabi,who in December 1947 left for the United States.

Three decades later he asked himself how we couldleave our country when a war was raging and theJews were gearing themselves to devour Palestine.His answer:There were others to fight on our behalf;those who had fought in the 1936 revolt andwho would do the fighting in the future. Theywere peasants . . . [whose] natural place wa shere, on this land. As for us-the educatedones-we were on a different plane. We werestruggling on the intellectual front.In fact, the Palestinian peasants proved no moreattached to the land than the educated classes.Rather than stay behind and fight, they followed inthe footsteps of their urban brothers and took to theroad from the first moments of the hostilities. Still,the lion's share of culpability for the Palestinian col-lapse and dispersion does undoubtedly lie with the educated ones, whose lack of national sentiments,so starkly portrayed by Sharabi and Abu Lughod, setin train the entire Palestinian exodus.In 1948, both the Jewish and the Arab commu-nities in Palestine were thrown into a whirlpool ofhardship, dislocation, and all-out war-conditions

that no society can survive without the absolutecommitment of its most vital elites. Yet while theJewish community (or Yishuv), a cohesive nationalmovement, managed to weather the storm by ex-treme effort, the atomized Palestinian community,lacking an equivalent sense of corporate identity,fragmented into small pieces. The moment itsleading members chose to place their own safetyahead of all other considerations, the exodus be-came a foregone conclusion.The British High Commissioner for Palestine,General Sir Alan Cunningham, summarized whatwas happening with quintessential British under-statement:The collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is insome measure due to the increasing tendencyof those who should be leading them to leavethe country.... In all parts of the country theeffendi class has been evacuating in large num-bers over a considerable period and the tempois increasing.Hussein Khalidi, Secretary of the Arab HigherCommittee, was more forthright. In 1936 there

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were 60,000 [British] troops and [the Arabs] didnot fear, he complained to the mufti on January 2,1948. Now we deal with 30,000 Jews and [theArabs] are trembling in fear. Ten days later, he waseven more scathing. Forty days after the declara-tion ofajihad and I am shattered, he complainedto a fellow Palestinian. Everyone has left me. Six[AHC members] are in Cairo, two are in Damas-cus-I won't be able to hold on much longer....Everyone is leaving. Everyone who has a check orsome money-off he goes to Egypt, to Lebanon, toDamascus.The desertion of the elites had a stampede effecton the middle classes and the peasantry. But hugenumbers of Palestinians were also driven out oftheir homes by their own leaders and/or by Arabmilitary forces, whether out of military considera-tions or, more actively, to prevent them from be-coming citizens of the Jewish state. In the largestand best-known example of such a forced exodus,tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bulliedinto leaving the city of Haifa against their wishesand almost certainly on the instructions of the ArabHigher Committee, despite sustained Jewish ef-forts to convince them to stay.* Only days earlier,thousands of Arabs in Tiberias had been similarlyforced out by their own leaders. InJaffa, the largestArab community of mandatory Palestine, the mu-nicipality organized the transfer of thousands ofresidents by land and sea, while in the town of Bei-san, in the Jordan valley, the women and childrenwere ordered out as the Arab Legion dug in. Andthen there were the tens of thousands of rural vil-lagers who were likewise forced out of their homesby order of the AHC, local Arab militias, or thearmies of the Arab states.

None of this is to deny that Israeli forces did onoccasion expel Palestinians. But this occurred notwithin the framework of a premeditated plan but inthe heat of battle, and was dictated predominantlyby ad-hoc military considerations (notably the needto deny strategic sites to the enemy if there were noavailable Jewish forces to hold them). Even thelargest of these expulsions-during the battle overthe town of Lydda in July 1948-emanated from astring of unexpected developments on the groundand was in no way foreseen in m ilitary plans for thecapture of the town. Finally, whatever the extent ofthe Israeli expulsions, they accounted for only asmall fraction of the total exodus.It is true that neither the Arab Higher Commit-tee nor the Arab states envisaged a Palestinian dis-persion of this extent, and that both sought to con-tain it once it began snowballing. But it is no less

true that they acted in a way that condemned hun-dreds of thousands of Palestinians to exile. In earlyMarch 1948, the AHC issued a circular castigatingthe flight out of the country as a blemish on both thejihad movement and the reputation of thePalestinians, and stating that in places of greatdanger, women, children, and the elderly should bemoved to safer areas within Palestine. But only aweek later, the AHC was evidently allowing thosesame categories of persons to leave Jerusalem forLebanon, and also ordering the removal of womenand children from Haifa. By late April, nothing re-mained of the AHC's stillborn instruction as Trans-jordan threw its doors open to the mass arrival ofPalestinian women and children and the Arab Le-gion was given a free hand to carry out populationtransfers at its discretion.

MUHAMMAD NIMR al-Khatib, a prominent Pal- lV estinian leader during the 1948 war, summedup his nation's dispersion in these words: ThePalestinians had neighboring Arab states whichopened their borders and doors to the refugees,while the Jews had no alternative but to triumph orto die.That is true as far as it goes-yet it severely un-derplays the extent of mutual recrimination be-tween the Palestinians and their supposed saviors.From the moment of their arrival in the neigh-boring Arab states which opened their borders anddoors, tension between the refugees and the hostsocieties ran high. The former considered thestates derelict for having issued wild promises ofmilitary support on which they never made good.The latter regarded the Palestinians as a cowardlylot who had shamefully deserted their homelandwhile expecting others to fight for them.This mutual animosity was also manifest withinPalestine itself, where the pan-Arab volunteer forcethat entered the country in early 1948 found itselfat loggerheads with the community it was supposedto defend. Denunciations and violent clashes werecommon, with the local population often refusingto provide the Arab Liberation Army with the basicnecessities for daily upkeep and military operations,and army personnel abusing their Palestinian hosts,of whom they were openly contemptuous. Whenan Iraqi officer in Jerusalem was asked to explainhis persistent refusal to greet the local populace, heangrily retorted that one doesn't greet these dodg-ing dogs, whose cowardice causes poor Iraqis todie.* have recounted the Haifa story at some length in Were thePalestinians Expelled?, COMMENTARY, July-August 2000.

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The Palestinians did not hesitate to reply inkind. In an interview with the London Telegraph inAugust 1948, the Palestinian leader Emile Ghouryblamed not Israel but the Arab states for the cre-ation of the refugee problem; so did the organizersof protest demonstrations that took place in manyWest Bank towns on the first anniversary of Israel'sestablishment. During a fact-finding mission toGaza in June 1949, SirJohn Troutbeck, head of theBritish Middle East office in Cairo and no friendto Israel or the Jews, was surprised to discover thatwhile the refugees

express no bitterness against the Jews (or forthat matter against the Americans or ourselves)they speak with the utmost bitterness of theEgyptians and other Arab states. We knowwho our enemies are, they will say, and theyare referring to their Arab brothers who, theydeclare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leavetheir home.... I even heard it said that manyof the refugees would give a welcome to the Is-raelis if they were to come in and take the dis-trict over.The prevailing conviction among Palestiniansthat they had been, and remained, the victims oftheir fellow Arabs rather than of Israeli aggressionwas grounded not only in experience but in thelarger facts of inter-Arab politics. Indeed, had theJewish state lost the war, its territory would not

have been handed over to the Palestinians butrather divided among the invading forces, for thesimple reason that none of the Arab regimesviewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation. Per-haps the clearest sign of this was that neither Egyptnor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-determinationin the parts of Palestine they conquered during the1948 war: respectively, Gaza and the West Bank. Asthe American academic, Philip Hitti, put the Arabview to a joint British and American committee ofinquiry in 1946: There is no such thing as Pales-tine in history, absolutely not.So much for the largest ethnic-cleansing opera-tion in modern history.

IIIUT THE appeal to history-to what did or didnot happen in 1948-49-is only one arrow inthe Palestinian quiver. Another is the appeal to in-ternational law, and in particular to the United Na-tions resolution that, as Hanan Ashrawi sternly re-minds us, has been affirmed annually by the UNmember states.

The resolution in question, number 194, waspassed by the UN General Assembly on December11, 1948, in the midst of the Arab-Israeli war. Thefirst thing to be noted about it is that, like all Gen-eral Assembly resolutions (and unlike SecurityCouncil resolutions), it is an expression of senti-ment and carries no binding force whatsoever. Thesecond thing to be noted is that its primary purposewas not to address the refugee problem but ratherto create a conciliation commission aimed at fa-cilitating a comprehensive peace between Israeland its Arab neighbors. Only one of its fifteenparagraphs alludes to refugees in general-not Arab refugees -in language that could as readilyapply to the hundreds of thousands of Jews whowere then being driven from the Arab states in re-venge for the situation in Palestine.This interpretation is not merely fanciful. Theresolution expressly stipulates that compensationfor the property of those refugees choosing not toreturn should be made good by the governmentsor the authorities responsible. Had the provisionapplied only to Palestinians, Israel would surelyhave been singled out as the compensating party;instead, the wording clearly indicates that Arabstates were likewise seen as potential compensatorsof refugees created by them.Most importantly, far from recommending thereturn of the Palestinian refugees as the only viablesolution, Resolution 194 put this particular optionon a par with resettlement elsewhere. It advocated,in its own words, that the refugees wishing to re-turn to their homes and live at peace with theirneighbors should be permitted to do so at the ear-liest practicable date, but also that efforts shouldbe made to facilitate the resettlement and eco-nomic and social rehabilitation of the refugees.It was, indeed, just these clauses in Resolution194 that, at the time, made it anathema to theArabs, who opposed it vehemently and voted unan-imously against it. Linking resolution of therefugee issue to the achievement of a comprehen-sive Arab-Israeli peace; placing on the Arab statessome of the burden for resolving it; equating re-turn and resettlement as possible solutions, and di-luting any preference for the former by means ofthe vague phrase, at the earliest practicable date ;and above all establishing no absolute right of re-turn, the measure was seen, correctly, as ratherless than useful to Arab purposes.Only in the late 1960's, and with the connivanceof their Soviet and third-world supporters, did theArabs begin to transform Resolution 194 into thecornerstone of an utterly spurious legal claim to a

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right of return, buttressing it with thinly arguedand easily refutable appeals to other internationalcovenants on the treatment of refugees and dis-placed persons. Today, after decades of ferventPalestinian rejection of the very idea of living atpeace with their neighbors, the most that can besaid of those who invoke the language of Resolu-tion 194 is that they are being disingenuous-though stronger and more accurate words alsocome to mind.

IV ND THE refugees themselves? As is well-known,they were kept in squalid camps for decadesas a means of derogating Israel in the eyes of theWest and arousing pan-Arab sentiments. And therelarge numbers of them have remained, with theconspicuous exception of those allowed to settleand take citizenship in Jordan.At the end of the 1948-49 war, the Israeli gov-ernment set the number of Palestinian refugees at550,000-600,000; the research department of theBritish Foreign Office leaned toward the higherend of this estimate. But within a year, as largemasses of people sought to benefit from the un-precedented influx of international funds to thearea, some 914,000 alleged refugees had been reg-istered with the UN Relief and Works Agency(UNRWA).

More than a half-century later, these exaggerat-ed initial numbers have swollen still further: as ofJune 2000, according to UNRWA, the total hadclimbed close to three and three-quarters million.Of course, UNRWA itself admits that the statisticsare inflated, since they are based on informationvoluntarily supplied by refugees primarily for thepurpose of obtaining access to Agency services.(The numbers also include close to a million-and-a-half Jordanian citizens.) But the PLO, for itspart, has set a still higher figure of 5 millionrefugees, claiming that many have never registeredwith UNRWA.

Aside from demanding an unconditional right ofreturn for these individuals, Palestinian spokesmenhave calculated that justice will also require mone-tary reparations in the amount of roughly $500billion-half for alleged material losses, and therest for lost income, psychological trauma, andnon-material losses. To this figure would also beadded the hundreds of billions to be claimed by therefugees' host countries (notably Lebanon, Syria,and Jordan) for services rendered, bringing thetotal to about $1 trillion.

Needless to say, Israel has challenged UNRWA'sfigures, not to speak of the PLO's; it has unoffi-cially estimated the current number of refugeesand their families at closer to 2 million. But evenif the more restrictive Israeli figures were to be ac-cepted, it is certainly true, just as Amos Oz darklypredicts, that the influx of these refugees into theJewish state would irrevocably transform its demo-graphic composition. At the moment, Jews consti-tute about 79 percent of Israel's 6-million-pluspopulation, a figure that would rapidly dwindle tounder 60 percent. Given the Palestinians' far high-er birth rate, the implementation of a right of re-turn, even by the most conservative estimates,would be tantamount to Israel's destruction.Not that this stark scenario should surprise any-one. As early as October 1949, the Egyptian politi-cian Muhammad Salah al-Din, soon to become hiscountry's foreign minister, wrote in the influentialEgyptian daily al-Misri that in demanding therestoration of the refugees to Palestine, the Arabsintend that they shall return as the masters of thehomeland and not as slaves. More specifically, theyintend to annihilate the state of Israel.

In subsequent years, this frank understanding ofwhat the right of return was all about would bereiterated by most Arab leaders, from GamalAbdel Nasser, to Hafez al-Assad, to Yasir Arafat.Only during the 1990's did the PLO temporarilyelide the issue as it concentrated on gaining con-trol of the territories vacated by Israel as part ofthe Oslo peace process. Its Israeli interlocutors, fortheir part, chose to think of the right of returnas a PLO bargaining chip, to be reserved for talkson a final-status settlement and then somehowdisposed of symbolically or through a token ges-ture of good will (such as by conceding some degreeof Israeli practical -but not moral -responsi-bility for the 1948-49 exodus).Throughout the 1990's, successive academicstudy groups, made up of the most earnestly forth-coming Israelis and the most grudgingly tractablePalestinians, devoted themselves to formulating acompromise proposal on this issue. They all failed-a fact that should have raised a large warning flag,but did not, even though the reason for the failurewas plain enough. For the right of return is, forthe Palestinians, not a bargaining chip; it is theheart of the matter.That is why, over the decades, other perfectlycommendable Israeli gestures toward dealing withthe plight of the refugees have consistently metwith indifference or rebuff. In 1949, Israel offeredto take back 100,000 Palestinian refugees; the Arab

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states refused. Nevertheless, some 50,000 refugeeshave returned over the decades under the terms ofIsrael's family-reunification program, and another75,000 who were displaced from the West Bankand Gaza in the 1967 war have also returned tothose territories. As Alexander Safian of CAMERAhas documented, 90,000 Palestinians have alsobeen allowed to gain residence in territory con-trolled by the Palestinian Authority since the be-ginning of the Oslo process. Safian similarly pointsout that millions have been paid by Israel in settle-ment of individual claims of lost property- de-spite the fact that not a single penny of compensa-tion has ever been paid to any of the more than500,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries.Indeed, if one were to insist on the applicabilityof international law, here is one instance where itspeaks unequivocally. In 1948-49, the Palestiniansand Arab states launched a war of aggressionagainst the Jewish community and the newly-pro-claimed state of Israel, in the process driving outfrom their territories hundreds of thousands of in-nocent Jews and seizing their worldly goods. Eversince, these same aggressors have been suing to bemade whole for the consequences of their ow nfailed aggression. Imagine a defeated Nazi Ger-many demanding reparations from Britain andthe United States, or Iraq demanding compensa-tion for losses it suffered during the 1991 Gulf

war. Both legally and morally, the idea is grotesque.But in the end none of this matters. What is atissue in the dispute over the right of return isnot practicality, not demography, not legality, andcertainly not history. What is at issue is not eventhe refugees themselves, shamefully left in home-lessness and destitution, and nourished on hatredand false dreams, while all over the world tens ofmillions of individuals in similar or much worsestraits have been resettled and have rebuilt theirlives. What is at issue is quite simply the existenceof Israel-or rather, to put it in the more honestterms of Muhammed Salah al-Din, the still vibranthope among many Arabs and Palestinians of anni-hilating that existence, if not by one means then byanother.Tactically, we may win or lose, declared Faysalal-Husseini, the moderate minister for Jerusalemaffairs in Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority, in lateMarch of this year; but our eyes will continue to as-pire to the strategic goal, namely, to Palestine fromthe [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea -thatis, to a Palestine in place of an Israel. Whatever weget now, he continued, cannot make us forget thissupreme truth. Until this supreme truth is buriedonce and for all, no amount of Israeli good will, par-tial compensation, or symbolic acceptance of re-sponsibility can hope to create anything but an ap-petite for more.

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Karsh, E.thepalestiniansandtheRightofReturn