WHAT ABOUT THE PALESTINIAN 'RIGHT OF RETURN'?
One of the thorniest obstacles on the road to Middle East peace is the question of Arab Palestinians displaced by the creation of the nation of Israel. This issue should not be confused, however, with Yasser Arafat's demand for a 'right of return' for all Palestinians. The reason is that Arafat an Egyptian terrorist has never defined 'Palestinian' in his demand for a 'right of return'.
There has never been a 'Palestinian' culture, a 'Palestinian' language, a 'Palestinian' government or a 'Palestinian' nation. Until the 1920s, the term 'Palestinian' was universally understood to mean the Jewish people living in the region of the Ottoman Empire called Palestine. Only after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 did the idea of a separate Arab Palestinian people come onto the scene.
There are really three groups of Arab 'Palestinians' to be dealt with now:
Non-Jews who were living in the lands apportioned to the Jewish State in May of 1948
Arabs who have moved into Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights and Gaza since the creation of Israel
The flood of anti-Jewish thugs Arafat has been bootlegging into Israeli territory to further his goal of destroying the young Jewish State.
Only the first group, fewer than a million people, has a legitimate claim. They deserve our sympathy, because they have been shown none at all by their Arab 'brothers' in the surrounding Islamic despotisms; these have chosen to do absolutely nothing for legitimate Arab refugees, because they want to use them as cannon-fodder in their propaganda war against Israel.
There were approximately the same number of Jewish refugees resident in the Arab nations of the Middle East as Arabs resident in Israel. Persecuted in Muslim nations, the Jews were re-settled in Israel. Not so the Palestinian Arabs: they were told by Trans-Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to wait in refugee camps in Trans-Jordan; they were promised that the Jews would be driven into the sea, and then the Arab Palestinians could have the Jews' lands and houses.
Israeli Tourism Minister Benny Elon's peace plan would accommodate the legitimate Arab refugees: Trans-Jordan, the state created by the League of Nations in 1921 for Arab Palestinians, would be recognized as their homeland, but they would also be recognized as Jordanian nationals resident in Israel. Their 'right of return' would be the right to go to Jordan as citizens of the Hashemite kingdom if they chose; their right to reside as foreign nationals in Israel would be respected as long as they were law-abiding.
The millions of other, spurious 'Palestinians' like Arafat himself would be expected to return to their legitimate homelands in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the other Muslim lands from which they have been imported as PLO mujihadeen, or 'holy' warriors against Israel.
The attached file can be opened with Acrobat Reader. If you do not have Acrobat Reader you can download it free from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readerstep.html Be sure to install it after downloading.