Daniels Pipes, writing in National Review Online, reckons that the descendents of Palestinian refugees who were pushed from their homes and lands in what is now Israel in 1948 are ‘fake refugees’. He comes to this conclusion thus:
The fetid, dark heart of the Arab war on Israel, I have long argued, lies not in disputes over Jerusalem, checkpoints, or “settlements.” Rather, it concerns the so-called Palestine refugees.
So called because of the nearly 5 million official refugees served by UNRWA (short for the “United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East”) only about 1 percent are real refugees who fit the agency’s definition of “people whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.” The other 99 percent are descendants of those refugees, or what I call fake refugees.
While he doesn’t say it in so many words, Pipes’ argument clearly infers that ‘fake refugees’ – as he calls them – have no claim to right of return to their homelands.
However, Pipes has left himself wide open with this argument.
Quite simply, if the descendents of those who became refugees from Palestine only 64 yeas ago have no right of return, then how can Jews, many of who are descendents of converts to Judaism and have never had any connection whatsoever with Palestine, have a claim to right to return? I’m sure they’d be insulted if I called them ‘fake Israelis’. And how can even descendents of real Jews who moved away from Palestine hundreds of years ago have more of a right of return and those descendents of Palestinian refugees from only 64 years ago who don’t seem to have any rights?
Hypocrisy and arrogance, the values that ‘they’ hate about ‘us’.
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