The right of return

I know few passages in literature as searing as the Melian Dialog. It is evergreen.

“The right of return inside Israel is only championed by a tiny extremist ultra-left minority, and by some of the Arab parties.”

It might be true that it’s a position only held by a tiny minority, but by calling it “extremist-ultra left” you seem to be delegitimizing a priori a position that can be considered perfectly legitimate. It just seems fair to me to acknowledge that these people (the Palestinians) have a sensible claim and it should certainly be considered as, if not politically viable, at least a morally sound demand.

“those families still dreaming of their orange trees and clutching their title deeds.”

Anyone know the libertarian views on the right of return?

Many libertarian ideas about transition have to deal with situations where property was stolen by someone and given to someone else; for example, every dollar I own was stolen by someone sometime (the government, most likely). Does that mean I have to give it all back?

Usually, what I hear is that if someone can prove that they would be the owner of a particular piece of property but for the government stealing it from them, then they have the right to have their property returned.

It sounds like the situation Chris describes is exactly this; people have proof that their property was stolen, and but for that they would be the rightful owners. Am I correct? Are there nuances I am missing?

marzi,

It might be true that it’s a position only held by a tiny minority, but by calling it “extremist-ultra left” you seem to be delegitimizing a priori a position that can be considered perfectly legitimate.

I’m not delegitimizing anything. Within the wide spectrum of political parties and opinions in Israel, this position is extremist, and using commonly accepted definitions of political camps, it is ultra-left. This description doesn’t prevent anyone who so wishes from considering it to be legitimate, morally right, etc.

If you’re going to talk about the right of return as a matter of “morality” and “justice,” you should also acknowledge the Jewish people’s right of return. Why don’t you call on the Arab states to return the property or otherwise compensate the million or so Jews that they expelled in the 40s, 50s, and 60s?

And on a related matter of evenhandedness, why do you assume that Jewish settlements in the West Bank “undermine any prospect of reconciliation?” Lots of Arabs live in Israel. Why couldn’t Jews live in a Palestinian state? What kind of “reconciliation” is it if a Palestinian state bans Jews?

“But nor should there be a denial of what they are legitimately entitled to. And an acknowledgement of that entitlement as part of negotiations would necessitate that Israel accept a duty to compensate the dispossessed as the price of the Palestinians relinquishing their right (as it is up to them to do).”

Chris, I agree with you completely, but I think the way you perhaps unintentionally make your point–talking about titles to land and the compensation for such entitlements–in a way allows for Steve’s criticisms. If the right to return is to be understood strictly as a transaction in holdings–as something that, if not fulfilled, requires equal material compensation, some sort of provisio to make good the original bad taking–then Steve is entirely justified in asking why anyone should bother, given that practically everyone acknowledges that such strict compensation, so long as the current state of Israel continues to exist, is not and will not be (and which few people besides Tony Judt fully believe should be) forthcoming.

I think you make your point better when you speak of a “reconciliation [that affects]…enough people, and certainly enough reasonable people, to allow feelings of searing injustice and bitter resentment to subside, to calm passions sufficiently that people put aside their hatred (even if they still feel it) sufficiently to get on with the things that human beings otherwise do.” As I see it, what you’re talking about here is not compensation, per se, but recognition. The language necessary to Palestinian recognition by Israel, which Bush’s actions have greatly complicated, must of course include issues of material compensation, but are not tied to that issue alone.

Chris,

“Morality” and “Justice” aren’t in “scare quotes.” They’re in good, old-fashioned quotes, to indicate that I’m quoting your words. I ain’t no literary critic; I don’t use no fancy “scare quotes.”

Maybe Tony Blair could use the White House influence he has gained, by backing the war in Mesopotamia, to revive the road map? That would make the whole Iraq War more justified.
Just kidding.

One other issue that I think is relevant to the question of the right of return (or of compensation) is obviously the question of family. Chris writes that the right of return is about “justice for those people and their descendants.” But “and their descendants” extends the idea of justice and compensation in a peculiar and far-from-obviously-correct way. Those Palestinians who were displaced in 1948, who lost their land and their homes, etc., deserve to be compensated. But Palestinians born after 1948 have no claim on Israeli land. There is no right to live where your parents or grandparents lived. A 20-year-old Palestinian has a right to elect his own government, a right not to be bullied or beaten or shot by Israeli soldiers, a right to have a real job. But he doesn’t have a right to live in Haifa. That’s one reason why I always thought the obsession with return — the dreaming of the orange trees — was a mistake for the Palestinians. It’s the wrongs that are being done to them in the present that should be their concern, not the wrongs done (not to them, but to their ancestors) in the past.

Ditto.

But Palestinians born after 1948 have no claim on Israeli land.

At the least, they have whatever property claims they have directly inherited from Palestinians dispossessed in 1948.

Steve: Why does the palestinian not have the right to live in Haifa? The obsession with the right of return is unhelpful only because Israel is a failure as a secular state. The moral force of Israel’s right to exist comes from the way that most of those who reject would like to see it cease to exist, not because there is anything particularly glorious or impressive about a state that only works if most of the people under its rule are not full members. Similar propositions have been rejected in Northern Ireland, South Africa and many other places. What makes Israel special on this score?
The example of the 20 year old is misleading because many of the people kicked out are still alive and many other are being kicked out of their homes even now and even that is being accepted. Not only that there is a sharp contrast between the pragmatic view the Palestinians are expected to take and the romantic reasons that dictated that Israel be where it is and that drive much of its support.
As I understood it the right of return was always expected to be given up but that it would be traded for “facts on the ground”. Most negotiations involve deciding what is a reasonable starting point for each side and then meeting in the middle. What has happened is that the Palestinian box of concessions has been emptied by main force.
Arguing whether the clear moral right of return is actually practical is not the point. Its importance was as a bargaining chip to trade for the clearly morally wrong but factually on the ground existence of the settlements.
Now that the US has said that Israel need not bother with the right of return and has accepted the existence of the facts on the ground the acceptability of any likely settlement must be gravely in doubt from a Palestinian point of view.
The wrongs that are being done now are usually justified by Palestinian terrorism even if the numbers don’t really stack up. As a result they don’t get much traction. If earlier injustices go uncorrected, how to have confidence in the force of new ones?

What about the former residents of Koenigsberg or Breslau? I for one don’t think that Poland or Russia owes anyone a dime, nor are the modern Germans trying to get those places back. The fact is, Germany tried to annihilate those two countries and they lost. Why should the Arabs be treated any differently?

History just isn’t fair. If we tried to right every wrong ever committed, where do we stop? Do the Magyars have to move back to the Urals? Do we have to depopulate much of North America? What’s so special about this case?

The Palestinians are in the unfortunate position of living on the (literal) high ground that Israel needs to defend itself.

It’s a while since I last reread “Anarchy, State and Utopia”, but I seem to remember that there is a strand in extremist libertarian thought which holds that the gentlemanly thing to do if someone else owns land that you need is to buy it.

“they have whatever property claims they have directly inherited from Palestinians dispossessed in 1948”

Yes, and those property claims should be recognized or compensated for.

But ownership of property and citizenship are two different things. A person from China can buy a building or business in the U.S. and not be a U.S. citizen. In fact, that person could be denied a request for U.S. citizenship on a number of grounds.

Israel has two responsibilities: to recognize property rights regardless of the ethnicity or religion of the owner, and to ensure its own political and military security. In the context of these two responsibilities, the correct course of action regarding Palestinian expats would be to recognize/compensate claims while enforcing a sane immigration policy.

On a related note, given that the two-state solution is the only realistic one in the context of two immiscible ethnic populations, Palestinian expats and their descendents will never be allowed to return wholesale to Israel. The reason is simple: the two-state plan requires one Jewish and one Palestinian state, and the right of return would produce two Palestinian states.

If the Palestinians have a right of return to pre-1967 Israel, the Germans have a right of return to Danzig and a few other places in Eastern Europe.
Start up those Panzers now…

Anatoly and Steve Carr have pretty much covered it.

Chris is seeing what he wants to see.

Bush didn’t reject justice or compensation he rejected, what Chris pretty much concedes, that Israel cannot accept or should not accept that phsyical right of return, and yet Chris manages to call Bush immoral for his[works for both] rejection.

Over at the Volokh conspriracy David Bernstein wonders, well go see

http://volokh.com/2004_04_11_volokh_archive.html#108203637397913374

now his musing might not be true but it helps us see how at best Chris claim is problematic.

And if his claim is problematic he should at a minimum lighten up on the rhetoric.

A narrower critique critique of Bush’s comments would have been better. Perhaps an explanation as to how Bush was unwise to reject the right return, because Palestinians would understand such a rejection, not as a rejection of a physical right of return, but as a rejection of compensation and a just settlement.

Though I find it at least as likely that Palestinians mean exactly what they say by right of return. They know what they are asking for and what it means and unlike Chris are not serious about the nonsensically idea of neogiating away a right.

That perhaps Chris just sees what he wants to see in both sides.

OK, to frame it a slightly different way:

The primary difference between Jews forced out of the Arab countries in the ’50s and ’60s (who did not all settle in Israel, but also in the U.S., Australia, etc.) and the Palestinians forced out of what is now Israel in ’48 is that none of the Jews in any country are living as permanently stateless pariahs. Particularly in Lebanon, as I understand things, but throughout the Arab world, Palestinians have been granted at best tolerance but never the simple benefits of citizenship (whatever that might be worth in your typical Arab country), even when they were born in the country, even when their parents were born in the country.

It seems that if you are a second-generation native of a country that does not allow you civil rights, the ability to freely own property or hold the job of your choosing, that country has a serious human-rights problem. Now, Lebanon has many problems, of course, but why shouldn’t the countries where these people live simply accept them?

Of course, many countries have preferred to use the Palestinian refugees as a weapon against Israel. Those poor people just get kicked from every side.

With no facts to back me up, I would speculate that the United States has been the country that most freely accepted and granted citizenship to Palestinian refugees. That is doing as much practical work for peace as anything. But does anyone know if there’s any data about where the Palestinian refugees and their descendants are — and what their legal status is?

On another point, whatever Fisk’s sometimes laughable politics (and his all-but-praise for the mob that beat him up on the Afghan-Pakistani border is classic), he’s always been a hell of a reporter with a rare feel for the humanity of every side to these conflicts. I miss columns since they disappeared behind the Independent’s pay wall.

D-squared,

Despite your sarcasm, asserting property rights in this situation is hardly a moderate position. Here in the real world, property rights are modified for the sake of building highways, protecting endangered species, and beach access. To suggest that property rights should rule in life or death situations is quite an extremist position.

“because the Germans have a state . . . “

So if the Palestinians were provided with a state somewhere, this difference would vanish, right?

“and are not living . . . in a country that murdered thousands upon thousands of them.”

About a third of Germans were living in such a country until the Berlin Wall fell.

I would have liked the Bush/Sharon announcement much more if the carte blanche for a land grab was accompanied by a declaration of support for the universal rights of the Palestinians, including the right to vote in a meaningful election—which would mean voting as citizens of Israel.
Color me prejudiced if you like, but I don’t understand why I need to accept the fascist statement that Israel cannot exist without a Jewish majority. That is morally equivalent to the statement that the US will lose its identity if the majority is no longer white and of European descent, and is just as repellent.

I just read DJW’s point. The thought that the Palestinian right of return might go away after a few generations juxtaposed with a situation in which a 2000 year old right of return has been exercised is beyond parody, as JMM would say.

“Pity the Nation” is a fine book, though Bob Fisk is a dab hand at turning on the waterworks .. those orange groves and olive orchards or vice versa. I’ll take you home again, Kathleen, across the oceans wild and wide. Where my heart has always been. The women in the uplands digging praties. Just to hear again the ripple of the trout stream. Thank God we’re surrounded by water.

Etcetera .. very moving stuff, but shit happens and sometimes we lose the land whose furrows one day we hope to water with [sarcasm on] impure Jewish blood [sarcasm off] (adapted from La Marseilleise, in case you didn’t know). Cry me a river: most people just get on with their lives instead of brooding over their lost battles until kingdom come. It’s not that the Palestinians haven’t been unjustly treated – nobody denies that. But, as other commenters have pointed out, millions of innocent people have been driven from their homes over the past century, starting with the Armenians. In fact, the ones who were driven from their homes were, if anything, the lucky ones. Most victims of nationalist or Communist or fascist violence weren’t just driven from their homes – they were raped, gassed, starved, massacred. To lose your home is not quite like losing your life. And why the selective indignation? Why focus on one particular group of victims? Because they specialise in suicide bombings, perhaps?

Here’s a citation from Amos Oz’ “In the Land of Israel”, page 43 (Oz is quoting an unnamed Jewish acquaintance):

“What’s justice, anyway? There’s ten, maybe twenty million Jews in the world … Don’t the Arabs have enough countries? Let the Palestinians go live in our houses in Morocco.
…. My parents had a house in Casablanca, three stories high, all marble; let the Arabs go over there.”

I know, it’s a ‘hoary’ old Zionist argument – but what’s faulty with it? Why don’t Jews who were driven from Baghdad or Alexandria have the same ‘right of return’ as the Palestinians? If Israelis somehow share collective responsibility for the fate of dispossessed Arabs, why don’t Arabs share the same responsibility for the Jews that they banished from their countries?

The ‘right of return’ is a non-starter. The problem is the colonisation of the West Bank by Jewish settlers. And the real problem as regards those who sympathise with the Palestinian cause is that they can’t even argue their own case with any degree of sophistication – they tend to lose track and put forward ridiculous claims that every smart-assed Zionist can blow out of the water straight away. Like the ‘right of return’ ….

“Drapeto suggests a potential way to draw a line, but it’s an immense challenge, both philosophically and practically.”

The practical side mandated by the fact that in *this world* property rights are valid is handled easily by the distribution of a sum of money to the existing refugees.

http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/mepp/new_prrn/background/

puts the number at 3.2M. Give each one $50,000. That’s $155B. For the price of a couple of years of liberal adventure and troop hardening in Iraq, we can settle with the Palestinians once and for all.

Marky writes:

“I don’t understand why I need to accept the fascist statement that Israel cannot exist without a Jewish majority. That is morally equivalent to the statement that the US will lose its identity if the majority is no longer white and of European descent, and is just as repellent.”

Being concerned about one’s country’s ethnic breakdown isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but what’s ‘fascist’ about it? Marky is right to criticise the double standards often applied by Zionists on the population issue, but branding everybody who is opposed to Israel’s losing its Jewish ethnic identity as a ‘fascist’ is a cheap shot. It’s true, of course, that what’s sauce for the goose should also be sauce for the gander. So — since almost all Arabs detest Jews so much that won’t even accept a Jewish minority of 1% in their countries — does that mean that almost all Arabs, and certainly 99% of the Palestinians, are fascists too?

Sebastian, you summarized the history of the Palestinian loss of their land in a tendentious manner. So we are to believe they “fled before the Arab invasion”? Some fled, and some were driven out. There’s some disagreement about the early stages–in his book “Sacred Landscapes”, Meron Benvenisti makes a distinction between the driving out of Palestinians which occurred under Plan Dalet in the spring of 1948, which he sees as having some possible military justification, and what happened in the later months, which was deliberate ethnic cleansing. Others wouldn’t make that distinction. But the Palestinians as a whole didn’t simply flee before the Arab invasion.

As for whether they should have the right of return, perhaps it is true that the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds have a better chance of living together in a democratic state than the Israeli Jews and Palestinians. I’m not just being sarcastic–that might very well be true. So the Palestinians will have to accept compensation, or perhaps a compromise where a small, non-demographically threatening (love that concept) number are allowed back in.

And the Arab regimes which drove Jews out should fork out cash for their crimes as well. Or they could let them back in, though I suspect no one would want to take them up on the offer.

You can’t cure an injustice by duplicting it against the grandchildren of those who committed it.

true. you can only cure injustices by duplicting (?) against the grandchildren of even weaker people, as the history of european colonialism shows (wrt puritans, jews, convicts, ex-US-slaves etc).

pity the poor palestinians, who are turning against their disposessors rather than moving on to some other people to grind under their heel.

The Palestinian refugees chose to leave; the Arabs that did stay in Israel are Israel’s citizens today. Those that decided to leave have no moral claim on the land they left behind.

The Palestinian refugees chose to leave; the Arabs that did stay in Israel are Israel’s citizens today. Those that decided to leave have no moral claim on the land they left behind.

So when I leave my home, I can forget getting back in again. I choose to leave so, well, tough luck, no property rights, no citizens rights nothing. All forsaken because I left my home.

This madness is still law in Israel. If you are no Israeli citizen and live in East Jerusalem and leave for a period longer than 7 years you have forsaken your right to get back in, whether you were born there or not. This law has softened a bit in 1999 but is still in place.
This law is there for the ethnical cleansing of Jerusalem, ofcourse this law doesn’t apply for Jews.

http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/archive/articles/1999/East%20Jerusalemites%20will%20not%20be%20stripped%20of%20Permane

anti-something,

if you abandon your home, then, yes, its not longer yours. i don’t see whats so mad about it.

“So what is the deal for the Palestinians?”

The Palestinians have had their chances at deals. Now they will get what they get out of a unilateral withdrawal and a fence.

Andrew: The right of return is only unrealistic because the Palestinians could not force the Israelis to grant it but that is just saying that the Israelis are more powerful militarily and that is mostly because of massive US aid. Once that becomes a justification for anything the world gets pretty nasty.

Detached Observer: It isn’t just to Israel that the right to return applies. the effect of Bush’s statement is that any change to the highly illegal status quo is now a concession on the part of the Israelis. Palestinians are being dispossesed as we type. It is also not as if they only started complaining about things now. If the lesson is that a slow solution is no solution what would you do? In particular would you be less radical or more radical in your actions?
It is quite shocking that a country founded on the importance of govenmental accountability should be so willing to inflict itself on others.

Detached observer:

The Palestinian refugees chose to leave; the Arabs that did stay in Israel are Israel’s citizens today. Those that decided to leave have no moral claim on the land they left behind.

Not entirely true as recent research shows. True, many did, in the knowledged that they would return after the Jews had been expelled and my view on them is tough luck, they got it wrong. But many were expelled by military force or left because they feared becoming the next Deir Yassin. Are you conceding they should be allowed back?

You know what, the more I read the writings of Israeli appologists for laws that say one thing for jews and another for non-jews the more I think ‘screw them’. No the world would be a better place if the State of Israel were disolved and replaced by a democracy.

I’m not sure that post Deir Yassin one could regard fears that Arabs would be harmed as completely without foundation. The Israeli historian Benny Morris has done signficant work in this area and it is clear that what you were taught is only part of the reason for why Palestinians left. Some were driven out literally at gunpoint while others feared they would be murdered.

Re the British loyalists, of course there is no case for compensation and I think they were resettled in Novia Scotia with the rights of British subjects in any case. But I wouldn’t necessarily be so definite if this were 1836 and there were people still alive who’d lost their property as a result of the revolution. Intuitively I feel these sort of claims start to erode at the third or fourth generation when you would think that the impact of dispossession must be outweighed by more immediate factors.

“I’m not sure that post Deir Yassin one could regard fears that Arabs would be harmed as completely without foundation. ”

Even if this were true — can a state be held accountable for the (logical) deducation of those who abandon their homes?

Hypothetical: suppose that I am an American citizen of Arab descent who concludes, not illogically, based on the numerous cases where American citizens were held without a right to trial, that I’m in grave danger. I decide to flee the country. If it helps make this more realistic, assume I’ve given money to some charity that I found out later was linked to terrorism. Not keen on the possibility of being flown to Guantanamo, I leave the country.

Can descendants demand the right of return 50 — or 225 — years down the line?

Detached observer: No, no objective reason at all. My reasoning runs along the lines that if we can identify someone who has been harmed then to the extent that they did not contribute to that harm (which means I think a hierarchy of compensation with the Arab ordered out of his village at gunpoint at the top and the Arab who left happy in the prospect of returning a few weeks later to find all the Jews dead at the bottom – and I think the evidence is pretty clear that the cases did range across this spectrum)then we either compensate them or reinstate them in full. But their children are certainly disadvantaged as a result of this and so have some claim but not as much because one would expect other factors to become significant in determining their life outcomes. The third generation even less so and by the fourth generation one would expect the impact of dispossession to have been largely dissipated. This doesn’t mean incidentally that I don’t accept the Palestinians are still suffering from the effects of the Nakba, rather that by now other factors should have countered this. The fact that they have not is only in small part the fault of the Israelis.

I should add as a somewhat gratuitous aside, any situation where a Palestinian right of return erodes in this way is to say the least inconsistent with the current situation where a Jew in New York can decide he would like to live in the West Bank and move there tomorrow. If the right of return is to be abrogated by the Palestinians and I think it must be to a great extent, then there can be no case for a Jewish right outside the 1967 borders unless you approach it from the perspective of a religious Jew, which I presume most posting here are not.

The practical side mandated by the fact that in this world property rights are valid is handled easily by the distribution of a sum of money to the existing refugees. [McGill] puts the number at 3.2M. Give each one $50,000. That’s $155B.

Your numbers are both too high and too low. On the one hand, compensation is likely to be by household rather than by person – the heirs of each property owner will share his claim. There were about 750,000 refugees in 1948 – say, about 180,000 families at a generous estimate – and that’s how many claims will exist.

On the other hand, $50,000 per claim is far too little, because it’s (1) less than the fair market value of the properties today, and (2) less than the WB and Gaza settlers are likely to receive for their evacuation. I doubt the Palestinians would settle for less than what the settlers get, so instead of 3.2 million claims at $50,000, there would be 180,000 at $250,000 to 500,000.

In any event, I didn’t see anything in Bush’s statement that ruled out financial compensation or even the United States’ right to insist on such compensation. Needless to say, I think the refugees should be compensated, and this is true no matter who was originally at fault for the refugee problem, simply because Israel has benefited from their property.

Steve,

“I would deny the great-nephew of the woman who fled in the 1930s the right of compensation. There was no harm done to the great-nephew. What is he being compensated for? You may be able to inherit property — in an ideal world, I’d be against this, but I think people have to be able to dispose of their stuff as they wish — but you can’t inherit a moral claim.”

The woman still had title to her property; the property can be stolen, but not the title. She can then transfer title to her great-nephew, either by bequest or other methods. That means that the great-nephew has a right to the property.

I don’t know enough of the history to tell if this is what happened, but in this case it is clear that the great-nephew has a claim, no? He is suffering harm by not being allowed access to his property (i.e. property to which he has title).