Peter Finger

OK, this is exhausting to do every time, given the repeated Palestinian strategy of de-contextualized and a-historical claims, but here goes (and the full context is of-course in “The War of Return”): 1. To begin with, the nature of the events that led to the creation of the original (and only) Palestinian refugees has no connection to the existence of Palestinians who claim to be “refugees” today. Tens of millions of people became refugees throughout the 20th century when empires receded and new states were created and borders drawn and contested. None of them are refugees today. But if we do want to discuss why there were Arab refugees at all in 1948, the reason is simple - the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine and Arab armies waged an entirely unnecessary war against the partition of the land into a Jewish and an Arab state. Then as now they chose to wage an “all or nothing” war, to forfeit having their own state if it means that the Jews would have one too. Had there been no war, Palestinians would have had their state and no-one would have been displaced. As to the immediate causes, most refugees fled their homes for fear of war, and as the war progressed some were also expelled. But again, none of this is relevant to the present situation. Far more brutal wars were waged in the 20th century, tens of millions of refugees fled homes and were expelled, and none have insisted on perpetuating their status. They resettled and moved on. The Palestinians have worked to maintain their inter-generational refugee status for one reason only: to keep the war of 1948 alive and avoid accepting its outcome in the form of the existence of a Jewish state in any part of the land. 2. Palestinians are indeed the only people whose refugee status automatically and unreservedly is given to their descendants. In other real refugee cases, it is a very limited derivative status, which is individual, given case by case, after a process of verification and approval of dependence and when applying to other countries is considered a recommendation and not a binding rule. (P. 188 in “The War of Return”)   3. UNRWA is not actually a real refugee organization as it fails to do what the actual UNHCR refugee organization does, which is find individual solutions for resettling refugees without endlessly insisting on repatriation as an only solution. UNHCR offers protection for refugees while working to resettle them. It’s not an indefinite protection. UNRWA is better understood as the social and educational system of the Palestinian people, keeping them in endless limbo until such time as they will exercise “return”. Except for a thin donor facing international management UNRWA is managed by Palestinians for the Palestinian cause of negating Israel. This is why UNRWA inflates the number of Palestinian “refugees” more than 20 times, employs tens of thousands of “refugees” and does not work to resettle “refugees”, and serves as an advocate in international fora for their vision of unlimited return to Israel.  4. Palestinians indeed do not have a “Right of Return” into the sovereign state of Israel under any kind of international law. There is no precedent of a country being forced to accept a group of people against its will, and Palestinians, despite impressive efforts, cannot make up laws that gives them something that does not exist.  (Pp 181-186 in “The War of Return”). 5. The original “Nakba-Catastrophe” was defined and understood at the time by Arabs and Palestinians as the humiliating Arab failure (described as “impotence” by Zuraiq who coined the term “Nakba”) to defeat the Jews in a war intended to prevent the Jews from achieving self-determination in any borders. The recreation of the modern “Nakba” narrative seeks to erase any memory of Arabs waging an unnecessary war and to turn Palestinians into innocent bystanders rather than people who pursued a clear objective of denying another people a state, and failed.