The Right of Return

The Right of Return

About 2,000 years ago the ancient kingdom of Israel ceased to exist when wars and conquering emperors scattered the Jews across the globe. Now many people, especially Zionists and Christian Zionists, celebrate the creation of Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and the return of an exiled people to their homeland. Any Jew may immigrate to Israel and obtain citizenship in Israel, claiming that it is their birthright as Jew. At the same time

hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, imprisoned and exiled from the land of their birth, which has been renamed Israel. Why should the descendants of the ancient Israelites be allowed to return to Palestine after 2,000 years when those who still remember being driven from their childhood homes and still possess the deed to the land and the key to the front door are banned from entering the country? 

Supporters of Israel give two common answers to this question. Many say it is God’s will that the Jews return to their homeland, and that the creation of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.  I am a Christian and I believe in the prophecies in the scriptures, but I think all religious people recognize that there are many cases in history where prophecy has been misinterpreted and the Bible used as an excuse to put one group of people higher than another and persecute the innocent. None of us can pretend to know the will of God. But we do know how Jesus lived. He said “love your enemy.” He was gentle, a friend to all, he healed and forgave the people who arrested and killed him.  No matter who is in the right politically, the war and violence cannot be justified in the name of biblical prophecy. While I believe in biblical prophecy, I do not believe Israel is a fulfillment of it. Does it even matter? Doesn’t God love all his children? The second answer I often hear as for why Israel had the right to be founded the way it was and kill the way it does is that because of anti-Semitism and especially the holocaust, there was nowhere else for the Jews to go. Why should Palestinians be responsible for the tragic and horrific actions of anti-Semitic European nations? Why shouldn’t it have been Germany and Russia who gave up parts of their land to provide a safe place for the Jews to establish a country? Many anti-Semitic nations supported the creation of Israel as a solution to the “Jewish problem,” a way to get them out of their country. Russia supported the creation of Israel largely due to the fact that Israel was built on socialist principles. It is Israel’s bellicose treatment of its neighbors that sews the seeds of hate among Palestinians and other Arabs.

According to history, logic and international law, Palestinians naturally have the ancestral and legal right to live in Palestine/Israel/Jerusalem.  It is because of Israeli law and the United States’ refusal to support international law that Palestinians’ rights remain unrecognized. The Israeli Law of Return, signed July 5th 1950, allows any Jew living anywhere in the world to immigrate and obtain Israeli citizenship.[i] I once met a young British Israeli man living in Sderot, Israel on the border of the Gaza strip. He took me on a tour of his city. The first thing I heard upon arriving in Sderot was “If you hear a siren go off you have 15 seconds to make it to a bomb shelter before a rocket hits.” We walked through the streets which were dotted with bomb shelters, and where I could actually feel the fear in the air.  Saw the playgrounds where long tunnels in the form of brightly painted caterpillars acted as bomb shelters. The community center screened a documentary with footage of Palestinian rockets hitting the city, and of children running from the schoolyard into a bomb shelter inside the school. He led me to the top of a hill on the outskirts of the city where the majority of the rockets hit and where there are no bomb shelters within a 15 second sprint. There we were, overlooking the Gaza strip, less than a mile away. A place which I don’t think I would ever dare to enter. As rough as the situation was there in Sderot I knew that just beyond that barbed wire fence the conditions are 100 times worse. In Gaza it isn’t small homemade rockets whose casualties are tragic but rare, but rather it is precision missiles, tanks, ground troops and chemical weapons like white phosphorous that kill hundreds of people.

white phosphorous fired over civilian population in Gaza

There everything from building materials to potato chips are carefully regulated. Fishermen’s families suffer because people are shot if they are caught fishing more than three miles off shore and gas for the boats is a luxury. People in Sderot live there because housing is cheaper than other cities in Israel. People in Gaza are lucky to have a home. The majority of those living in the Gaza Strip are there because the violence that ensued during the founding of Israel forced them to flee to refugee camps there or they were forcefully and systematically driven from their homes in 

White phosphorous fired on Palestinian school in Gaza

the surrounding area (including towns like Sderot) and forced into Gaza. Many people there live within sight of their old villages (where they and their great grandparents were born), prevented from returning by soldiers who shoot anyone who dares get too close to the fence.  While not the majority, many of those soldiers’ or their parents’ original homes are in the United States, Britain, France, etc. There they had normal happy lives where they were financially stable and accepted as part of society. That was the case of my British Israeli tour guide in Sderot. So it was with great shock that I heard him explain how the Palestinians should be grateful for the help and aid that Israel provides them and complain about how hard it was “to live where people are constantly trying to steal your land.” Perhaps he should check the ground underneath his feet for remains of those same peoples’ homes. So who has the right to live where hundreds of villages like Sderot now stand?

The Right of Return is the Palestinian and Arab political belief that Palestinian refugees and their immediate descendants have the right to return to their land. [ii] The logic and legality of this claim is difficult to dispute. In 1948 the UN passed resolution 194 declaring that “the [Palestinian] refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible”.[iii] Instead, those homes and villages were occupied by Israeli residents or destroyed to make room for Israeli villages or forestry projects. U.N. resolution 3236, passed in 1974, affirms that "the inalienable right of Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return."[iv] Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Commission describes in detail the demand of international law for the Right of Return. These laws include The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the principle of self determination.

From the very beginning of peace negotiations the Right of Return has been one of the major obstacles in getting all sides to agree. Israelis will not allow Palestinians to return because there would no longer be a Jewish majority in the state. Israel sees itself as a Democratic Jewish state. Jews do not believe that the state can be both Jewish and Democratic unless they are the overwhelming majority. To solve that problem they drove out hundreds of thousands of Palestine’s inhabitants until now only 20% of Israel’s population is Palestinian.

Why should Palestinians and Arabs be blamed for this conflict? While Jews were being persecuted in Europe and America they were welcomed in the Middle East. Why should Palestinians be punished for the actions of anti-Semitic nations? And why should the United States continue to support Israel in preventing the rightful return of Palestine’s people? 

Israel’s Law of Return must be amended so that Jews facing persecution may have Israel as an option for refuge, and so that those Palestinians living in exile may return to their homeland. But then Israel as we know it would cease to exist, becoming either democratic and pluralist (and non-Jewish), or Jewish and apartheid (where the laws, rights and living conditions are different for each race). But why did Palestine, where Christians Jews and Muslims lived side by side in harmony, have to be wiped off the map? Would it not be better to return to that state, be it called Israel, Palestine or any other name? That is why Palestinian refugees and exiles must be permitted to return to their homeland. The state that emerges then will become a true ally and the real example of democracy and human rights that Israel claims to be.

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[i]Israel’s Basic Laws: The Law of Return”https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Politics/Other_Law_Law_of_Return.html

[ii] Al-Awda: The Palestine right to return commission. http://www.al-awda.org/

[iii] United Nations. Palestine- Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator. 194. December 1948. http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/c758572b78d1cd0085256bcf0077e51a?OpenDocument

[iv] United Nations. The Question of Palestine. 3236.  November 1974. http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/025974039acfb171852560de00548bbe?OpenDocument