Palestinian right of return

Based on Wikipedia: Palestinian right of return

The Question That Won't Go Away

Imagine being handed the keys to a house your grandmother once lived in. You've never set foot inside. You were born in a refugee camp in Lebanon, or perhaps in a crowded neighborhood in Amman. But your family has kept those keys for three generations now, passing them down like an heirloom, a symbol of something lost. This is not a metaphor. Across the Middle East, Palestinian families actually do this. They keep the literal keys to homes that no longer exist, or that now house Israeli families who have lived there for decades.

The Palestinian right of return is one of the most intractable issues in modern international relations. It asks a question that sounds simple but has no easy answer: Should people who were displaced from their homes during a war be allowed to go back?

What makes this question so explosive is the math. When the state of Israel was created in 1948, somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000 Arabs left, fled, or were expelled from the territory. Today, when you count their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, that number has swelled to more than five million people. Israel's total population is around ten million. Allowing all of them to return would fundamentally transform the country's demographic character—which is precisely why Israel has rejected the idea for over seventy years, and precisely why it remains so important to Palestinians.

How It All Began

The story starts in 1948, in the chaos of what Israelis call their War of Independence and what Palestinians call the Nakba—Arabic for "catastrophe."

The displacement happened in waves. First came the upper and middle classes from the cities. In the months between December 1947 and March 1948, about 100,000 Palestinians left voluntarily, expecting to return once things settled down. They were like families evacuating ahead of a hurricane, assuming they'd be back in a week or two. They never came back.

Then came the larger exodus. From April to July 1948, between 250,000 and 300,000 people fled as Jewish military forces—primarily the Haganah, the precursor to the Israeli Defense Forces—launched offensives across the country. The ancient cities of Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre lost more than ninety percent of their Arab inhabitants. Some left out of fear. Some were explicitly expelled.

The most infamous expulsion occurred in July 1948, during what the Israeli military called Operation Danny. About 50,000 inhabitants of the towns of Lydda and Ramle were forced to march toward Ramallah. It happened in the summer heat. People died along the way.

Not everyone was expelled. In Nazareth and South Galilee, the Arab population was allowed to stay. These communities would eventually form the core of what we now call Arab Israelis or Palestinian citizens of Israel—a population of about two million people today who hold Israeli citizenship but identify ethnically as Palestinian.

By the time the guns fell silent, the United Nations estimated that 711,000 people had become refugees. They settled in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Many assumed their exile was temporary.

It wasn't.

The First Attempt at a Solution

Within months of the exodus, the international community tried to address the problem. On December 11, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 194. Article 11 of that resolution contains language that has been quoted, debated, and fought over ever since:

Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

Read that language carefully. It says refugees "should be permitted" to return. It conditions this on their willingness to "live at peace with their neighbours." It mentions an "earliest practicable date." And it offers an alternative: compensation for those who choose not to return.

Every word in that passage has been weaponized by one side or the other.

Palestinians and their supporters read it as an unambiguous affirmation of their right to go home. The resolution says they "should be permitted" to return—that sounds like a right. The compensation option was for those who chose not to return, not a substitute for the right itself.

Israel reads it very differently. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, insisted that the resolution was merely a recommendation, not a binding legal obligation. He pointed to the phrase about living "at peace with their neighbours" and argued that as long as Arab states refused to make peace with Israel, there was no obligation to allow return. If the refugees' own governments were at war with Israel, how could individual refugees be trusted to live peacefully within it?

This dispute over Resolution 194 has never been resolved. It crystallizes a fundamental disagreement about whether the right of return is a human right that belongs to individuals—and therefore cannot be negotiated away by governments—or whether it's a political claim that can be traded in peace negotiations like any other issue.

The Second Displacement

Nineteen years after the first war, it happened again.

The Six-Day War of 1967 was a military triumph for Israel. In less than a week, Israeli forces captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan. The territories Israel had controlled since 1948 nearly tripled in size.

And once again, there was an exodus. Between 280,000 and 350,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the newly occupied territories. The cruelest irony: somewhere between 120,000 and 170,000 of these refugees were people who had already fled once in 1948. They were now refugees for the second time, fleeing from the camps where they had spent nearly two decades waiting to go home.

The 1967 war added a new layer of complexity to the return question. Now there were refugees from two different displacements, with claims to homes in two different legal zones. Some had been displaced from what was now internationally recognized as Israel. Others had been displaced from territories that most of the world considered to be under illegal military occupation.

Why the Numbers Keep Growing

Here's something that makes the Palestinian refugee situation unique in the world: it's the only refugee population where status is inherited.

When the United Nations created a special agency to handle Palestinian refugees—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA—it adopted a definition that was broader than usual. Palestinian refugees include not just people who personally fled in 1948 or 1967, but also their descendants. A child born today in a refugee camp in Lebanon, whose great-grandparents left Haifa in 1948, is still classified as a refugee.

This is different from how other refugee populations are handled. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which deals with all other refugees worldwide, generally aims to find permanent solutions—return, local integration, or resettlement in third countries—that end refugee status within a generation or two. But UNRWA's mandate is only to provide services, not to find solutions. The political question of return is left to be resolved in peace negotiations.

The result is that the refugee population has grown exponentially. Those original 700,000 to 800,000 refugees have become more than five million registered refugees today. Critics of the Palestinian position argue that this is absurd—that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of refugees cannot meaningfully claim to be refugees themselves. Supporters argue that the inherited status is a direct consequence of the international community's failure to resolve the original injustice. The refugees remain refugees because they were never allowed to stop being refugees.

The Arab Countries' Complicated Role

When the refugees first fled, they went primarily to neighboring Arab countries. Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt all received large populations. The expectation was that these countries would be temporary way stations—the refugees would stay for a few months, maybe a few years, until they could go home.

Seven decades later, most of those refugees and their descendants are still there.

Jordan is the exception. It granted citizenship to Palestinians (at least those who arrived in 1948; the situation for 1967 refugees is more complicated), and Palestinians are now a majority or near-majority of Jordan's population. The country's Queen Rania is herself of Palestinian descent.

But Lebanon, Syria, and most other Arab countries have never granted citizenship to Palestinian refugees born within their borders. In Lebanon, Palestinians face severe legal restrictions—they are barred from owning property, excluded from many professions, and confined to overcrowded camps that have become permanent slums. The Lebanese government argues that absorbing the refugees would upset the country's delicate sectarian balance. But there's another reason too.

Arab governments have long argued that granting citizenship would undermine the right of return. If Palestinian refugees became Lebanese or Syrian citizens, the argument goes, they might lose their claim to return to their original homes. Keeping them stateless—keeping them refugees—preserves the pressure on Israel and the international community to resolve the underlying injustice.

Critics call this cynical, arguing that Arab states have instrumentalized Palestinian suffering to score political points against Israel while doing little to actually help the refugees build decent lives. Defenders argue that allowing refugees to be absorbed elsewhere would be accepting Israel's ethnic cleansing as an accomplished fact.

The Legal Arguments

Is the right of return actually a right under international law? Or is it merely a political claim dressed up in legal language?

Supporters point to several sources. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948—the same year as Resolution 194—states in Article 13 that "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." The Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1949, contain provisions about the rights of civilians in occupied territory. And in 1974, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3236, which explicitly described the Palestinian right of return as "inalienable."

The word "inalienable" is significant. An inalienable right is one that cannot be given away or taken away. It belongs to individuals, not governments, and no treaty or agreement can legitimately extinguish it. If the right of return is truly inalienable, then no Palestinian leader—not Yasser Arafat, not Mahmoud Abbas, not anyone—has the authority to negotiate it away.

In 2000, a group of one hundred prominent Palestinians from around the world signed a declaration making exactly this argument. The right of return, they said, is individual and cannot be reduced or forfeited by any representative acting on behalf of Palestinians. They compared it to the successful claims by European Jews for restitution of property stolen during the Holocaust. If Jews could claim their property back decades later, why couldn't Palestinians?

Israel and its supporters reject this framing entirely. They point out that UN General Assembly resolutions are recommendations, not binding law. They note that Resolution 194 was actually rejected by Arab states when it was first passed (because those states objected to its implicit recognition of Israel). They argue that whatever rights refugees might have had were forfeited when Arab states chose war over the UN partition plan, or were superseded by the demands of Israel's security.

Some Israeli legal scholars make a more subtle argument. They acknowledge that refugees might have a right under international law to return to their country—but argue that "their country" is now Palestine, not Israel. If and when a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank and Gaza, refugees could exercise their right of return by going there. They would be returning to Palestine. Just not to the specific houses their grandparents left in Haifa or Jaffa.

The Demographic Fear

Behind all the legal arguments lies a simpler, starker reality: numbers.

Israel defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state. About 74 percent of its current population is Jewish. But if five million Palestinian refugees were allowed to return, Jews would become a minority. Israel would face a choice: remain democratic and cease to be a Jewish state, or remain Jewish and cease to be democratic.

This is the demographic argument against the right of return, and it is the one that Israeli leaders of all political stripes take most seriously. Even Israeli liberals who support Palestinian statehood and oppose the occupation of the West Bank are generally unwilling to accept a right of return to Israel proper. They see it as an existential threat to the Zionist project.

Some Palestinians have acknowledged this reality. In November 2012, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, gave an interview in which he seemed to suggest that he personally did not intend to return to Safed, the city of his birth. His claim, he said, was to a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, not to his original hometown. Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza, immediately denounced this as a betrayal. Abbas later clarified that he was only expressing his personal views, not renouncing the right of return as a collective Palestinian position.

The incident illustrated the bind that Palestinian leaders find themselves in. Any peace agreement with Israel will almost certainly require some compromise on the right of return—perhaps limiting it to a symbolic number of refugees, or substituting compensation for actual return. But publicly accepting such limits is politically suicidal. The right of return is not just a legal claim or a bargaining chip. For many Palestinians, it is a core element of their identity, a refusal to accept that the Nakba was permanent.

The Parallel Exodus

There is another displacement that occurred during this same period, one that is often invoked as a counterweight to the Palestinian refugee story.

Between 1948 and the early 1970s, approximately 800,000 to one million Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries. They came from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. Many came to Israel, where they and their descendants now make up about half the Jewish population. Others went to France, the United States, or elsewhere.

The circumstances of their departure varied enormously. In some countries, like Iraq and Yemen, Jews faced deadly violence and had little choice but to flee. In others, like Morocco, the departure was more gradual and the element of coercion less clear. But what is undisputed is that ancient Jewish communities that had existed for millennia—in some cases since before the Islamic conquests—largely ceased to exist.

In 2000, during the failed Camp David peace talks, the issue of these Jewish refugees became a deliberate political strategy. Advisors to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, along with American Jewish organizations, began an intensive campaign to secure recognition of Jews from Arab lands as refugees. The explicit goal was to create a counterweight to Palestinian claims. If Palestinians demanded compensation for lost property, Israel could demand compensation from Arab states for Jewish property. If Palestinians had a right of return, so did Jews—many of whom had, in effect, already exercised that right by moving to Israel.

This framing is deeply controversial. Palestinians argue that the two situations are not comparable—that they were not responsible for what happened to Jews in Arab countries, and that linking the two issues is a cynical attempt to muddy the waters. Some scholars of the Jewish exodus argue that Israel itself encouraged or even orchestrated the departure of some Jewish communities in order to boost Jewish immigration. The history is genuinely complicated, and attempts to draw simple parallels tend to obscure more than they illuminate.

What the Land Looks Like Now

Sometimes the most telling details are the most concrete ones.

In 1945, of 26.4 million dunams of land in Mandate Palestine—a dunam is about a quarter of an acre—12.8 million was owned by Arabs, 1.5 million by Jews, 1.5 million was public land, and 10.6 million was the largely uninhabited Negev Desert. By 1949, Israel controlled 20.5 million dunams. Of this, only 6 percent was privately owned by Arabs. The remaining Arab property had been either purchased, confiscated, or declared "absentee property" and taken over by the state.

What happened to the villages? Many were demolished. Israeli forces systematically destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages to prevent refugees from returning. Where the buildings still stood, they were often repurposed—turned into Jewish settlements, or left to crumble. Today, a visitor to Israel can find the ruins of Palestinian villages in forests planted by the Jewish National Fund, or beneath the foundations of Jewish towns that bear no trace of what came before.

The Israeli government established a policy of faits accomplis. A "Transfer Committee" worked to prevent any refugee return. "Absentee property" was placed under government control. The message was clear: there was nothing to return to.

And yet the refugees remember. They remember the names of their villages. They remember the mulberry trees and the olive groves. They pass down the keys.

The Moral Dimensions

Certain historical comparisons recur in discussions of the Palestinian right of return, and they are worth examining honestly.

Some commentators draw a parallel between compensation owed to Palestinians and the restitutions that Germany made to Israel and to individual Holocaust survivors for property stolen during the Nazi era. The logic is straightforward: if theft creates an obligation to return property or pay compensation, then the obligation should apply regardless of who the victims are. European Jews successfully claimed restitution for property lost in World War II. Why shouldn't Palestinians be able to do the same?

Others draw a different historical parallel—to the ethnic Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II. Between 12 and 14 million Germans were forced from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other countries in the aftermath of the war. They too lost their homes and property. They too had descendants who might claim a right of return. Yet today, no one seriously proposes that those descendants should be allowed to return to their ancestors' homes in what is now Poland or the Czech Republic. The expulsions are acknowledged as a historical injustice, but they are treated as settled history, not an ongoing claim.

Which parallel is more apt? The question is unanswerable, because historical analogies are always imperfect. What the comparisons reveal is that the right of return is not just a legal question or a political question. It is a moral question about how long historical injustices remain actionable, about when the clock runs out on claims to lost property and lost homelands.

A Personal Right, or a Political Tool?

Perhaps the deepest division in this debate is not between Israelis and Palestinians, but between two different conceptions of what the right of return actually is.

One view holds that it is a personal, individual right. Each refugee—and each descendant of refugees—has a right to return to their own home, or at least to the land where their family once lived. This right belongs to them as individuals. It cannot be negotiated away by any government or representative. It has no expiration date. It is, in the language of international law, inalienable.

The other view holds that the right of return is really a political claim that must be resolved through negotiation. In this view, what matters is not individual rights but collective outcomes. A peace agreement might involve some refugees returning, others receiving compensation, and still others being resettled in a new Palestinian state or in their current countries of residence. The goal is not to vindicate every individual claim but to reach a comprehensive settlement that allows both peoples to move forward.

These two views are not entirely compatible. If the right of return is truly individual and inalienable, then any peace agreement that limits or trades away that right is illegitimate. But if no agreement can ever fully satisfy the right of return, then no peace agreement is possible—because no Israeli government will ever accept the return of five million Palestinians.

This is the knot that has defied untangling for three-quarters of a century. And it is why the question of the Palestinian right of return remains, for now, a question without an answer.

Where Things Stand

As of the 2010s, demographers estimated that only 30,000 to 50,000 of the original 1948 refugees were still alive. The rest had died in exile, never seeing their homes again. Their children and grandchildren number in the millions, scattered across the Middle East and the world.

In the camps of Lebanon and Jordan, in the densely packed neighborhoods of Gaza, in diaspora communities from Detroit to Berlin, they wait. Some still believe they will return. Others have made lives elsewhere but refuse to renounce the claim. Still others have given up hope but cannot bring themselves to accept a final settlement that would close the question forever.

The keys pass from generation to generation. The maps are drawn and redrawn. The names of villages are recited like prayers.

And the question remains: Should people who were displaced from their homes be allowed to go back?

Simple to ask. Perhaps impossible to answer. But as long as the question remains open, so does the wound.