My Amazon Review of Adi Schwartz's and Einat Wilf's "The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace"

 

The Palestinian Right of Return: Get Over It

 

Journalist Adi Schwartz and former MK Einat Wilf, both members of the Israeli Left, have written an important book making the case that the biggest obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace is the mistaken belief and Western indulgence of the belief that Palestinians have a right to return to Israel proper. In essence the right to return is a rejection of the Israeli state whose Jewish population would be demographically overwhelmed. This is a demand that no Israeli government can accept. The notion of a right of return is especially galling because how can there be refugees from a war that ended over 70 years ago?

 

Traditionally the role of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has been to rehabilitate and resettle refugees. That precisely was the process after World War II and the India/Pakistan split of 1947. Going back in history there was a mass separation of Turks and Greeks after the Turko-Greek War of 1919-20. The Turks in Greece moved to Turkey while the Greeks in Turkey moved to Greece. Further, if you can believe this, any descendant of someone living in 1948 Israel now living in the United States can be classified as a refugee by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). Something like this has never happened before.

 

Indeed UNRWA, despite its name is not really a UN organization. The UN funds a small management fee, but the bulk of its funds come directly from Western contributions. The organization is not really on the UN budget. The U.S. was the leading contributor until 2018 when President Trump ceased making contributions in 2018. In 2021 the Biden Administration restored U.S. contributions.

 

Meanwhile UNRWA has effectively become a Palestinian front organization where it is the second largest employer on the West Bank, and it actively promotes the culture of Palestinian victimhood. The Palestinian are being victimized by their own culture of victimhood. As the authors note the original sin of introducing the right of return was not a Palestinian, but rather the UN diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte. In part the right of return notion was put in place to placate the Arabs and thereby keep the Soviets out of the Middle East. Were it not for Cold War politics the whole notion would never have seen the light of day.

 

As a result, UNRWA’s operation of the Palestinian camps, which are really cities in their own right, became hothouses for Palestinian nationalism, something that really did not exist until the 1960s. It was in the camps that the return ideology got so cemented that no Palestinian politician can back away from.

 

Schartz and Wilf correctly argue that peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis broke down in 2000 and 2008 over the right of return issues. It was not about borders or the final status of Jerusalem. Thus, instead of being a side issue, the right of return is the central focus of the Palestinians. It means that the peace process faces a long winding road ahead of it. As Wilf and Schwartz argue the phasing out of UNRWA is a precondition for getting the Palestinians to accept reality.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Palestinian Right of Return: Get Over It (amazon.com)