The Obama Test

Emmanuel Navon

www.navon.com

When President Obama met with Prime Minister Netanyahu a couple of weeks ago, he clearly stated that he expected Israel to stop all building activities beyond the 1949 armistice lines. Yet when PA Chairman Abbas was hosted at the White House last week, he was not asked to make any move in order to improve the chances of advancing the cause of peace. To be accurate, Obama did mention something about the anti-Semitic incitement in PA schools and mosques. But, instead of demanding the end of such incitement, Obama "praised" Abbas for his "efforts" to end it –and since Abbas is not making any "efforts" to end incitement, the message was clear: the PA is not expected to make any change or effort. Only Israel is.

Obama's "demand" that Israel ends all building activities, including for "natural growth," goes to show how valuable was the letter issued by President Bush to Prime Minster Sharon on 14 April 2004. The letter stated, inter alia: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities." Sharon claimed at the time that this letter meant the United States recognized Israel's right to keep the large settlement blocs. To put it mildly, it seems that Obama does not feel committed by this letter.

By putting the onus exclusively on Israel, the Obama Administration is making a mistake. If Obama wants the "two-state solution" to work, then both sides have to give up on something. The major obstacle to the "two-state solution" is not Israel's building activities. Israel removed all its settlements from Gaza in 2005, and look what a successful state the Palestinians built there. Nor was there any Israel settlement in the disputed territories before 1967. What were the Palestinians waiting for to build a state then? The major obstacle to the two-state solution it that the Palestinians reject it implicitly by continuing to insist on the so-called "right of return." The fact that Obama is letting the Palestinians get away with this perfidy puts to test his fairness or, worse, his understanding of the problem.

So here is a short tip for him on the Palestinian "refugee problem." For a start, there would not have been a single refugee had the Arabs not rejected the 1947 partition plan, and had they not launched a war of aggression against Israel. Many of the Arabs of British Palestine had immigrated there during the first decades of the twentieth century because of the economic opportunities created by the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community of British Palestine), and their "historical" rights had hardly been ignored by the partition plan. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinians' leader at the time, called upon his "Muslim brothers" to "murder the Jews," and Azzam Pasha, who was Secretary of the Arab League in 1948, declared that the war against the emerging Jewish state was to be "a war of extermination."

The Arab aggression created a double refugee problem. About 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries, while about 600,000 Arabs fled the British Mandate. Mahmoud Abbas declared in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on June 5, 2003, that the Arab armies "forced [the Palestinian Arabs] to emigrate and to leave their homeland." Benny Morris admits in his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem that the Arab commanders encouraged the Arabs of Palestine to temporary leave in order to be out of harm's way. During Israel's War of Independence, the Israeli army allowed Arab civilians to flee to Arab-controlled areas, while the Arab armies killed Jewish civilians who tried to escape (the Arab Legion murdered in cold blood the 127 Jews it captured in Gush Etzion).

There is a scandalous double standard in international law on the issue of refugees. There are two types of refugees in the world today: refugees and Palestinian refugees. All refugees in the world, except for Palestinian refugees, are under the responsibility of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Only for the Palestinian refugees is there a special UN agency that was created for them only: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East (UNRWA). This discrimination, however, is not only institutional. Besides the fact that no UN agency was created in 1949 to tackle the fate of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, Palestinian refugees enjoy a special definition of the word "refugee." For UNHCR, a refugee is a person outside the country of his or her nationality as a result of expulsion. UNRWA, however, extends this definition to the refugees' descendants. Which is why the number of refugees worldwide has decreased from about 60 million in 1948 to about 17 million today, while the number of Palestinian "refugees" has increased from about 600,000 in 1948 to over five million today. Moreover, according to UNRWA's definition, any Arab who had lived for at least two years in the British Mandate prior to 1948 can be considered a Palestinian refugee (together with his descendants). Which means that the grandchild of an Egyptian worker who came to British Palestine in 1945 to find work and who left as a result of the war, is today counted as a "Palestinian refugee."

If the UN were to abandon this double-standard, the "Palestinian refugee problem" would be easily solved. Of the 600,000 refugees from 1948, maybe a third are still alive, and most of them are old. Israel would have no problem integrating them. Alternatively, if UNRWA's definition of a refugee was to be applied to the 25 million refugees from the partition of India in 1947, to the 15 million German refugees who fled Eastern Europe in 1945, or to the 1.5 million refugees of the 1922 conflict between Turkey and Greece, then dozens of millions of German "refugees" would have to "return" to Poland, and hundreds of millions of "refugees" would have to re-cross the border between India and Pakistan. Only in the case of the Palestinian refugees are such fanciful ideas even discussed.

While the purpose of UNHCR is to integrate refugees, the purpose of UNRWA is to keep Palestinian refugees in camps. This is not surprising. As former UNRWA Director Ralph Garroway candidly admitted in 1957: “The Arab States do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the UN and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die.” Gamal Abdel Nasser admitted no less candidly in an interview to Zürcher Woche on September 1st, 1961, that "if the Arabs return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist." PA official Nabil Shaath was quoted in Ha'aretz on 15 July 2003 saying that "the right of return is part of the Road Map. This right includes the return to Palestinian cities inside the Jewish state, such as Haifa." The website mideastweb.org reported on 13 October 2003 that "Hisham Abd-el Razek, who is one of the signatories [of the Geneva Accords], denies that the document conceded the right of return."

The Palestinians also mislead international public opinion when they claim that Palestinian refugees are entitled to "return" to Israel according to UN resolutions. This is untrue. The often-quoted UN General Assembly resolution 194 (from November 1948), like all General Assembly resolutions, is not binding in international law. General Assembly resolutions are mere recommendations. Besides, Resolution 194 states that "the refugees wishing to return to their houses and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so." How would such "refugees" possibly live at peace with their neighbors today, more than sixty years after their parents and grandparents left? As Abba Eban said, "hundreds of thousands of people would be introduced into a state whose existence they oppose and whose destruction they are resolved to seek."

The relevant UN resolution on the refugees is UN Security Council resolution 242 (from November 1967). As opposed to General Assembly resolutions, Security Council resolutions are binding. Resolution 242 calls for "a just settlement of the refugee problem." The word "just" can obviously be interpreted in different ways. But it cannot possibly mean the demographic disappearance of Israel (in fact, it does, as long as the Palestinians are concerned). As for the word "settlement," it certainly does not mean "return." The Palestinian refugees could and should have been integrated a long time ago in their host countries, like the rest of the refugees around the world. Moreover, the word "refugee" in Resolution 242 refers not only to the Arab refugees of the 1948 war, but also to the Jewish refugees. As explained by Arthur Goldberg, who was the US Delegate to the UN in 1967, Resolution 242 "refers both to Arab and Jewish refugees, for about an equal number of each abandoned their homes."

There is also a double-standard regarding the rights of the refugees' descendants. If an Arab can be allowed to return to Jaffa because his grandfather fled in 1948, why can't a Jew be allowed to return to Hebron because his grandfather was murdered there in 1929 during the Mufti's pogrom? Jews have been living in Hebron for three-thousand years, many centuries before the birth of Islam, before the appearance of the Arab nation, and certainly way before the Arabs invaded Hebron.

The Palestinians want to invade Israel with the descendants (or alleged descendants) of the 1948 Arab refugees, but they won't accept a single Jewish refugee into the Palestinian state that they want to establish. Jews have lived peacefully and uninterruptedly in Hebron for generations. The Arab pogrom of 1929 emptied Hebron of its Jews for the first time in History. But the Arabs deny the rights of the Jews whose parents were murdered in 1929 to return to their homes, while they demand that the descendants of the Arab refugees who fled because of the Arab war of aggression in 1948 return to what is Israel today. This is as absurd as it is immoral.

Which also raises the question of minorities in the framework of the "two state solution." Why should there be an Arab minority in the Jewish state and no Jewish minority in the Arab state? There are Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India. About 20% of Israel's citizens are Arabs, but the Arabs want the Palestinian state to be Judenrein. How about if a Jew whose family has been living in Hebron for dozens of generations would rather stay there as a Palestinian citizen? Such as Jew, however, would not have that option. His life would not be safe, and if he would be lucky enough to stay alive, he would be treated as a dhimmi, a second-class citizen, because he is not a Muslim.

Either Obama is not aware of this –which is bad- or he is, but has decided that the Palestinians should continue to get away with their hypocrisy –which is worse. President Obama has yet to deliver his long-awaited speech in Cairo, so he might still enjoy the benefit of the doubt for another couple of days. But his treatment of Israel and the PA in the past two weeks betrays signs of a double-standard that puts to test his reputation for fairness and probity.