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Jewish World Review July 12, 1999 /28 Tamuz, 5759

Jeff Jacoby

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Econophone

Clinton's Palestinian shocker

http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
AT A JOINT PRESS CONFERENCE with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak earlier this month, Bill Clinton was asked whether, having insisted on the right of Kosovo refugees to return home, he would now insist on the right of Palestinian refugees to go back to their homes in Israel. This was his answer:

"No one can accuse me of dodging Middle East questions. I've been up to my ears and eyeballs in this peace process since the day I took office.... Whether refugees go home depends in part on how long they've been away and whether they wish to go home.... I would like it if the Palestinian people felt free, and were free, to live wherever they like, wherever they want to live."

Clinton's words sent shock waves through Israel. They are bound to come up when Ehud Barak, the new Israeli prime minister, visits Washington this week. For in asserting that the Palestinians should be free to settle "wherever they want to live," Clinton would seem to have embraced the most radical Palestinian claim of all: that there is a "right of return" entitling any Arab who once lived, or whose ancestor once lived, in the territory that became Israel to move back and reclaim the land from the Jews.

White House aides insisted that Clinton's remarks did not represent a change in US policy. Even if that is true, it is now clear where his personal sympathies lie. The president and his spokesmen repeatedly condemn the building of Jewish settlements; but he wants Palestinian Arabs -- and there are now 3 million of them -- "to live wherever they like." The double standard is staggering.

If there is a single point on which all Israelis agree, it is that a Palestinian "right of return" would mark the end of the Jewish state. They are right; that is why it was a central plank of the Palestine National Covenant, the PLO charter for the liquidation of Israel.

The Palestinians put on a show of repealing that covenant, or at least its most noxious provisions, last December. But dismembering Israel remains high on their agenda. Abu Mazen, second-in-command to Yasser Arafat, demanded last month that Israel withdraw from the Galilee, the country's northern region. If that came to pass, Israel would lose Nazareth, Tiberias, and Safed. Meanwhile, senior Palestinian officials have been calling for the imposition of UN General Assembly Resolution 181, a 52-year-old plan to partition what was then called Palestine into two unequal states, a larger Arab one and a smaller Jewish one.

The Jews accepted 181, though it would have left them with a tiny, defenseless state. The Arabs rejected it, intending instead -- once the British pulled out Palestine -- to kill the Jews and take all the land for themselves. In May 1948, the British left and Israel proclaimed its independence -- and five Arab armies invaded. Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, announced their purpose: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre," he exulted, "which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

In the course of the war that followed, about 650,000 Arabs left the country. In a few cases, they were expelled by Jewish fighters, but the great majority left on their own, or at the encouragement of Arab leaders. Many intended to sit out the fighting and return once the Jews were destroyed. "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter," vowed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said. "The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting dies down."

Later that year, The Economist would report that "of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained.... There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors [in their flight] were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit." All the while, many Zionist leaders pleaded with the Arabs to stay; orders were issued for the protection of Arab property and forbidding troops from burning or demolishing Arab villages.

And so was born the Palestinian refugee problem, a problem caused entirely by the Arabs themselves. Had they accepted Resolution 181 in 1947, there would have been no refugees and an independent Arab state in Palestine would be marking more than half a century of independence. But they chose war.

By rights the Palestinian refugees should have faded from the scene decades ago. The world was awash with refugees in the 1940s (including 750,000 Jewish refugees from the Arab world). The only ones still living in camps in the 1990s are the Palestinians. All the other displaced persons eventually settled somewhere and got on with their lives. The Palestinians didn't -- because their Arab brethren wouldn't let them. Except for Jordan, no Arab country welcomed the Palestinians or offered them citizenship. They wanted the refugee problem left unsolved, a festering sore that could be exploited as a weapon against Israel. The Arab world kept the Palestinians in squalor -- and told them the Jews were the cause of their misery.

What Clinton should have said at his press conference is that the Kosovo refugees cannot be compared with the Palestinians. The Kosovars were the victims of "ethnic cleansing;" the Serbs set out to drive them off their land. But in Israel 50 years ago, it was the Jews who were threatened with ethnic cleansing; the massed armies of the Arab world were bent on their extermination. If the Kosovo refugees hadn't fled, they would have become corpses. If the Palestinians hadn't fled -- and 160,000 of them didn't -- they would have become citizens of Israel, the freest state in the Middle East.


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©1999, Jeff Jacoby