Unique Rules Apply for ‘Palestinian Refugees’

Then there is the question of Palestinian “refugees.” This matter of who can rightly be called a “Palestinian refugee” is bizarre. There is one rule for all other refugees in the world, and another for the Palestinian Arabs alone. Every other group of refugees consists of those who actually were “unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” But when it comes to the Palestinians, the “refugee” status is passed on down through the generations; it is an inheritable characteristic. And thus the number of “Palestinian refugees” constantly increases, as more generations – ever more distant from the original, true, refugees — are born. Henry Kissinger is a refugee from Nazi Germany, but his son, and his grandchildren, are not. Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian refugee from the Soviets. His son, born in Berlin, was not. But the Palestinian Arabs, no matter when or where they were born, or how many generations away from their ancestors who left Israel/Mandatory Palestine, are and always will be “refugees” in saecula seculorum.

When it comes to Palestinian Arabs, unique rules apply. A son of Palestinian refugees, born in Beirut, and his granddaughter, born in New York, and two great-grandsons born in Miami, according to what the world has been made to believe, are all “Palestinian refugees.” Israel should keep asking aloud “why are the Palestinians alone allowed to inherit the status of refugees”? Who decreed that this should be so? Why should anyone be expected to accept it? Why don’t we at long last put a stop to this sinister farce?

As for the Palestinians who left Mandatory Palestine or Israel – often at the instigation of Arab leaders who assured them they would soon be able to return following the certain Arab destruction of the Jews – they are the only ones who may properly be described as “Palestinian refugees.” And how many of them are still alive? Possibly as many as 30,000 – a far cry from the “five million refugees” that Saeb Erekat and Mahmoud Abbas like to talk about. In order to cast doubt on the propriety of treating all the descendants of Palestinian refugees as “Palestinian refugees” themselves, in writing, scare-quotes ought always to be added thus: “Palestinian ‘refugees.’” In speeches, pro-Israel speakers ought always to refer to “those Palestinian quasi-refugees” or “demisemihemi refugees” or soi-disant refugees, and if anyone questions these cast-doubting epithets, the Israelis and their allies should welcome the opportunity to point out that the treatment of the descendants of Palestinian Arabs as themselves being “refugees” is unique, that no other group of refugees in history has been similarly allowed to limitlessly expand in numbers.

Whenever the PA mentions the 600,000 (they usually inflate this figure to 700,000) Arabs who left Israel/Mandatory Palestine, shouldn’t Israeli spokesmen insist on raising the issue of the 900,000 Jews who fled violence in Arab lands – whose story, after decades of silence, is at long last starting to be told? Every time Palestinian spokesmen raise the “great injustice” of the “Palestinian refugees” Israeli spokesmen should be quick to raise the still “greater injustice” — and the far greater number — of Jews forced to flee from Arab lands. Far too many people know little or nothing of these Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Israel and its supporters must inform them, and then constantly remind them of “the other Middle Eastern refugees.”

Is Israel a “settler-colonialist state”? The word “colonists” is ordinarily used to describe those people who come from, and maintain ties to, a powerful mother country that has appropriated distant territory in which these “colonists” settle, and where they exploit the resources of the colony, including its indigenous labor force. The hundreds of thousands of French people who settled in Algeria, a French colony, offer one example. The tens of thousands of British people who went to live and farm in Kenya offer another. But the Israeli situation is very different. Jews who arrived in Israel were not colonists tied to another country. They did not come to exploit an indigenous population or resources; they did not keep up ties to, or pledge loyalty, a “colonial power.” They came to stay, to take part in rebuilding a Jewish commonwealth in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.

If they were colonists, as some Arab propagandists claim, what was the country on whose behalf they “colonized”?