That refusal to accept Israel’s existence is why there is no peace

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK/ MARK REINSTEIN

AS disastrous as Israel’s hasbarah efforts have been since the beginning of the Gaza War, of even greater long-range concern is the failure to persuade young Jews around the world of the justness of Israel’s cause. The more that young Jews feel alienated from Israel, the more attenuated their Jewish identity will become.

For that reason, I wish every Jew in the world would read Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf’s The War of Return; How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (2020). Written prior to the Gaza War, it seeks to answer why there is still no peace between Jews and Palestinians nearly 80 years after the creation of Israel.

Dr. Wilf and Schwartz are members of the Israeli “peace camp.” She was a left-wing MK and he a long-term writer for Ha’aretz, Israel’s progressive daily. Both were committed to a “two-state solution” based on territorial compromise. And both were puzzled when the Palestinians walked away from proposals in 2000 and 2008 that would have given them a state in the West Bank and Gaza, free of Jewish settlements, with a capital in East Jerusalem.

Their solution to the quandary: The Palestinians, and indeed much of the Arab world, never have reconciled themselves to Jewish sovereignty in any part of the Land. And the demand for a return of refugees to their pre-1948 homes is the concrete expression of that refusal.

Prior to 1948, Azzam Pasha, then secretary-general of the Arab League, told Abba Eban that there could be no agreement to a Jewish state: “It is a question of historic pride.... What would be shameful would be to accept [an unjust and unwanted situation] without attempting to prevent it.” The decision, he said, “will have to be by force.”

Even after the Jews had secured their state and armistice agreements were signed, the Arabs refused to accept the result as anything more than temporary. On the very day of the signing of an armistice agreement, the Syrian ambassador to the UN declared, “The [next] war with Zionism is approaching.” Again, Azzam Pasha explained to Abba Eban the Arab opposition to any peace with Israel as a matter of pride: “As long as we don’t make peace with the Zionists, the war is not over, and as long as the war is not over, there is neither victor nor vanquished.”

The Grand Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, head of the Arab Higher Command, continued to oppose any negotiations with Israel over return of refugees, as that would constitute de facto recognition of Israel. Emil Ghury, another Higher Command official, rejected such negotiations as turning “a matter of jihad [religious war] into a problem of refugees.”

The departure of approximately 750,000 or so Palestinians from their homes after the UN vote on partition, beginning with the elites of Palestinian society, was completely unanticipated by the leaders of the Yishuv. Yet those who fled convinced themselves that they had suffered a tragedy unique in human history. They had not.

In mixed Hindu-Muslim areas of the Indian subcontinent, 3.5 million people lost their lives in ethnic fighting around the same time, and 14 million fled their homes; 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Poland and other countries after World War II, as were 300,000 Italians from Yugoslavia.

The position of the victorious Allies after World War II was that refugees from ethnic conflict should be absorbed into countries where they would be part of the dominant ethnic group. And that became the model for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as well. Over three million Koreans fled Northern Korea for the South during the Korean War. Aided by the UN Korean Reconstruction Agency, those refugees helped turn South Korea into one of the most dynamic economies in the world. And in the late ’40s and early ’50s, Israel absorbed more Jewish refugees from Arab lands, where they had lived for over a millennium, than the existing population of the state. And it did so without any help from the international community.

BUT THE PALESTINIANS and the Arab states hosting them rejected all plans for their long-range integration into their new host societies. With the exception of Jordan, whose King Abdullah was assassinated in East Jerusalem in 1953, no Arab country granted citizenship to Palestinian refugees. And they were discriminated against in access to higher education, the learned professions, and land ownership. Ahmad Sukeiri, the first chairman of the PLO, explained that the Arab states would never “integrate the Palestine refugees because the integration would be a slow process of liquidation of the Palestinian problem.”

But the Palestinians, too, rejected all efforts at their rehabilitation in their host countries as implicitly giving up on their “right of return” to their former homes. Under the auspices of the UN, an Economic Survey Mission was created in 1949 to make concrete proposals for the permanent resettlement of the refugees. In particular, the Mission was not to content itself with temporary relief programs or emergency works.

To direct the Economic Survey, the US chose Gordon Clapp, who had formerly headed the Tennessee Valley Authority, a massive government development project. No sooner had Clapp and his team of experts arrived in Beirut in September 1949 than they found themselves accosted by a delegation of thousands of Palestinian women who came to protest his mission and to proclaim their intention “that they must go back to Palestine even if they face death.”

Musa Alami, the son of a former mayor of Jerusalem and at one time a member of the Arab Higher Committee, began digging for wells near Jericho in 1949, with a dream of creating employment for his fellow Palestinians. He succeeded in finding water, and created an experimental farm that eventually employed thousands at its peak.

But in 1955, thousands of refugees from camps around Jericho attacked and leveled the farm. Alami’s anti-Israel bona fides did not spare him. The rioters chose remaining in the camps for the foreseeable future over recognizing the State of Israel and abandoning their claimed right of return.

UNRWA, too, began life with the mandate for massive projects to rehabilitate the refugees, including one to settle 50,000 refugees in the Sinai, and another to redirect the waters of the Yarmouk River to the Jordan Valley to resettle 200,000 refugees. Between 1951 and 1955, however, only $7 million of the $200 million earmarked by the international community was spent, due to lack of Arab cooperation.

THOSE ATTEMPTS turned out to be about the last useful thing UNRWA did. By 1959, the US and UK, eager to keep the Soviets out of the Middle East, decided that placating the Arabs by effectively turning over UNRWA to their control would be a cheap gesture. It was not.

Unlike all other UN refugee projects, which had durations of only a few years at most to ease the absorption of refugees into their new host communities, UNRWA’s mandate was extended indefinitely. All other projects under the UN High Commissioner on Refugees were limited to the actual refugees. In 1965, refugee status for Palestinians was extended not only to children of the original refugees but to their descendants in perpetuity.

As a consequence, while there are no refugees remaining from the more than ten million created by other ethnic conflicts in the ’40s and ’50s, UNRWA’s rolls today exceed five million. That figure is grossly inflated because it does not account for the 40 percent of the original refugees who became citizens of Jordan, or those who went to the Gulf States in the ’70s, or who became citizens over the years of the United States and other countries. Or for those living today within the original territory of the Palestine Mandate, who thus are not refugees.

It was in the camps created by UNRWA that the most intense and violent Palestinian identity based on the right of return was forged. In UNRWA schools, children endlessly recited songs such as: “Palestine is our country/ Our aim is to return/ Death does not frighten us/ Palestine is ours/ We will never forget her/ Another homeland we will never accept.”

All maps of Palestine in the UNRWA schools showed Israel painted black. A 1969 UN report on the textbooks used in the UNRWA schools found that 79 out of 127 should be banned or substantially modified, as they contained more or less open calls for violence against Israel. The purpose of the textbooks, the UN’s own experts found, was to strengthen the idea of revenge in schoolchildren. David Bedein’s Center for Near East Policy Research has demonstrated that nothing has changed in UNRWA textbooks over the past six decades.

Not surprisingly, a large percentage of the terrorists who hijacked airplanes in the ’70s or killed Israel Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972 were raised and educated in UNRWA camps in Lebanon or Gaza. By 1974, 50,000 camp residents had received military training.

After its expulsion from Lebanon in 1982, the PLO switched strategy and gave voice to recognition of Israel and to a readiness to accept a Palestinian state. But a host of PLO leaders and spokesman took pains to make clear in Arabic that this was only as part of a phased strategy, culminating in the destruction of Israel.

Meanwhile, Israeli peace negotiators convinced themselves that the Palestinians’ continued insistence on the right of return was but a minor issue that would be resolved with some sort of symbolic acknowledgment at the end of negotiations over territory. At most, they believed, it was being used as a bargaining chip by Palestinian negotiators.

They were wrong, however. As long as the Palestinians claim that the “right of return” is a personal right belonging to every 1948 refugee and their descendants, there is no room for piecemeal or symbolic implementation. As Mahmoud Abbas explained to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he had no choice but to reject Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of everything Israeli and US negotiators believed the Palestinians wanted: “I can’t tell four million Palestinians that only five thousand of them can go home.”

Like Arafat before him, he had done nothing to prepare his people for peace. And they continued to look at Israel’s eight million Jews, located in the midst of hundreds of millions of Arabs and one billion Muslims, as a temporary stain sure to be removed one day.

Schwartz and Wilk sum up their findings on how the refugee problem was deliberately allowed to balloon over decades in order to continue the 1948 war: “It was not by chance that that after the war ended in 1949, the only option the Arab states would countenance was full return of the refugees. It was not by chance that in the 1950s the Arab states and refugees themselves  rejected any possibility of rehabilitation.

“Nor was it by chance that before the 1967 war and Israel’s military occupation, the refugee camps developed a culture of violent struggle against Israel for the complete liberation of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And it was not chance that during what Western negotiators thought were serious peace talks, the Palestinians walked away from the chance for a negotiated two-state solution because it did not contain the principle of return.”

And that refusal to accept Israel’s existence is why there is no peace.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1097. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)