Why at the end of hostilities did these people lose the right to return home. I don't know why, but in any case they were stripped of that right.
One reason, right off the bat, was that hostilities did not end. The Green Line is the truce line of 1949, no more. The Arab states did not recognize Israel nor did they end the state of war. Israel remains in a state of war today with Syria and Lebanon. Egypt and Jordan washed their hands of Gaza and the West Bank when they signed peace treaties, so they should be the Jews' headache.
I am not saying that there were no forcible removals; I am saying that the exodus was a mixed bag, a large voluntary evacuation on the mistaken expectation of a quick Arab victory, a general panic when that victory didn't materialize, plus forced removals and whispering campaigns in certain strategic areas. That there was no uniform policy for forcibly removing the Arabs is shown by the fact that 160,000 of them remained in Israel in 1949. The Israelis could have cleared them all out if that was their policy.
What I am saying above all, what the Palestinians want you to forget, is that the exodus happened in the context of a war that the Jews did not want but that the Arabs forced on them. Compromise is not a virtue in the Arab outlook on things (doubly so since the Mufti had killed any Arab who proposed compromise). If the Jews had lost that war, there wouldn't be one of them left in Arab Palestine. That circumstance should be remembered when you judge the outcome of events.
To be sure, the Palestinians have suffered, at the hands of the Jews and more still at the hands of their Arab brothers. I read a good quote recently, when a Palestinian said of the Arab countries, "With friends like these, who needs Israelis?". Every Jewish family has ancestors who were driven out and can sympathize. But my family is not getting its houses in Latvia back; Israelis are not getting their ancestors' houses in Poland and Baghdad back. To give unknown millions of Palestinians (no census has ever been done) a 'right of return' to Israel is to demand a two state solution, where both states are Arab Palestine. Israel will never agree to that, and why should it? |
