• POINT 1: Israel created the Palestinian refugee problem.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab policies, not Israel, created the refugee problem. The refugees were a product of the 1948 War. Had Arab leaders accepted the UN Partition Resolution in 1947 instead of going to war, there would have been a Palestinian state and no refugees.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing [the UN plan for] partition and the [creation of a] Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously…." Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee during the 1948 War. Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. [1]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he creation of the refugee problem…was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians-and in their wake, the surrounding Arab states-had launched." Historian Benny Morris [2]
      
      
• POINT 2: Israel started the 1948 War to "ethnically cleanse" Palestine and expel the Palestinians.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab states, not Israel, started the 1948 War.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is…If such a state is to be established, it can only be established over our dead bodies." Jamal al-Husseini, Vice President of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective government of the Palestinian Arabs. November 1947 [3]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "You will achieve nothing with talk of compromise or peace. For us there is only one test, the test of strength….We will try to rout you. I am not sure we will succeed, but we will try. We succeeded in expelling the Crusaders, but lost Spain and Persia, and may lose Palestine. But it is too late for a peaceable solution." Abd al-Rahman Azzam, Secretary General of the Arab League, to delegation of Zionists. September 1947 [4]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We do not deny this. We told the whole world we were going to fight." Jamal Huseeini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman, to the UN Security Council, April 16, 1948 [5]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Egyptian government has declared in a cablegram to the President of the Security Council on 15 May that Egyptian armed forces have entered Palestine and it has engaged in 'armed intervention' in that country. On May 16 I received a cablegram from the Arab League making similar statements on behalf of the Arab states. I consider it my duty to emphasize to that this is the first time since the adoption of the [UN] Charter that Member states have openly declared that they have engaged in armed intervention outside their own territory." Trygve Lie, UN Secretary General, Report to UN Security Council, May 16, 1948 [6]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim inverts the facts. Arab nations, not Israel, waged a war of ethnic cleansing. They were explicit about their genocidal intentions.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League. May 15, 1947 BBC broadcast. [7]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "I declare a holy war, my Muslim brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!" Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and head of the Palestinian government. [8]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs have taken into their own hands the final solution of the Jewish problem. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out." Arab Higher Committee circular. 1947. [9]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Damascus radio called on all Arabs to "undertake the liberation battle that will tear the hearts from the bodies of the hateful Jews and trample them in the dust." Time Magazine, June 2, 1948, p. 20 [10]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The surviving Jews would be helped to return to their native countries, but my estimation is that none will survive." Ahmed Shuqeiri who would later be head of the PLO [11]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Many Arab leaders were anti-Semitic, had collaborated with the Nazis and shared Nazi goals. The Palestinians' leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a wanted war criminal for his collaboration with Hitler. The Mufti's "popularity among the Palestinian Arabs and within the Arab states actually increased more than ever during his period with the Nazis," according to his biographer. [12]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Zionists' goal was just the opposite of ethnic cleansing. They repeatedly stressed that they intended to include Palestinian Arabs in their future state and treat them as full and equal citizens.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "All our aspiration is built on the assumption-proven through all our activity in the land-that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs." David Ben-Gurion, 1937 [13]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab policy of the Jewish state must be aimed not only at full equality for the Arabs, but at their cultural, social and economic equalization, namely, at raising their standard of living to that of the Jews." David Ben-Gurion, 1938 [14]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in its bodies and institutions - provisional or permanent." Israel's Declaration of Independence May 14, 1948 [15]
      
      
• POINT 3: Israel forcibly expelled the Palestinians during the 1948 War, creating the refugee problem.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab policies, not Israel, created the refugee problem. The refugees were a product of the 1948 War. Had Arab leaders accepted the UN Partition Resolution in 1947 instead of going to war, there would have been a Palestinian state and no refugees.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing [the UN plan for] partition and the [creation of a] Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously…." Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee during the 1948 War. Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. [16]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he creation of the refugee problem…was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians-and in their wake, the surrounding Arab states-had launched." Historian Benny Morris [17]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Zionists frequently urged Palestinians not to flee the areas they secured and encouraged them to stay in their homes and communities.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: When Jewish forces secured Tiberias on April 18, 1948, its 6500 Jewish residents urged its 2000 Arab residents to stay. Instead, they asked to be evacuated by British troops. The Jewish Community Council issued a statement afterward: "We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course…Let no citizen touch their property." New York Times, April 23, 1948 [18]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The same was true when the Jews secured Haifa on April 22, 1948. "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe."

      Instead, the Arabs told the British "that the Arab population wished to evacuate Haifa and that they would be grateful for military assistance." Haifa District HQ of the British Palestine Police, April 26, 1948 and Report of Major-General Hugh Stockwell, April 1948 [19]
      
      

    • Supporting Evidence: Even after the war ended, some Palestinians chose to leave rather than live under Israeli rule. The 3,000 Arabs of Faluja, a village near Tel Aviv, asked to be evacuated in March 1949. "Observers feel that with proper counsel after the Israeli-Egyptian armistice, the Arab population might have advantageously remained. They state that the Israeli Government had given guarantees of security of person and property. However, no effort was made by Egypt, Transjordan or even the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission to advise the Faluja Arabs one way or the other." New York Times, March 4, 1949.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The majority of Palestinians fled before full-scale hostilities began and without even seeing an Israeli soldier.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Arab-sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies estimated that 68% of the refugees left without even seeing an Israeli soldier. [20]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Approximately 390,000 Palestinians-over half the highest estimate of the total refugee population-had fled by early June, 1948, just two weeks after the full-scale war had begun. [21]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The first of our fifth-column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses to go to live elsewhere…At the first sign of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle." As Sha'ab (Jaffa Newspaper) January 30, 1948. [22]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Villages were frequently abandoned even before they were threatened by the progress of war." General John Bagot Glubb, British commander of the Arab Legion. London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab and Palestinian spokespeople confirmed that Arab leaders had encouraged Palestinians to leave.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return." Syrian Prime Minister Haled al Azm, 1948-49 [23]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading armies mow them down." Habib Issa, Secretary general of the Arab League, in Al Hoda Newspaper, June 8, 1951.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Some of the Arab leaders and their ministers in Arab capitals declared that they welcomed the immigration of Palestinian Arabs into the Arab countries until they saved Palestine. Many of the Palestine Arabs were misled by their declarations." Arab Higher Command Memorandum to the Arab League, 1952 [24]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The refugees were confident their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two…Their leaders had promised them that the Arab Armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs' very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile." Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Galilee told the Beirut newspaper, Sada-al-Janub, August 16, 1948. [25]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab armies "forced them [the Palestinians] to emigrate and leave their homeland and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettoes in which the Jews used to live." Abu Mazen, Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2003.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live." (PLO Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, 1976. In Falastin a-Thaura, March 1976)
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Independent fact-finding commissions and contemporary news accounts confirmed that Arab leaders had encouraged Palestinians to leave.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit…It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained…and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades." The Economist, October 2, 1948.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: After the war, a British fact-finding commission found that the Palestinian refugees were bitter at the Arab states "who persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes…I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they do come in and take the district over." Sir John Troutback report, 1949 [26]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in." Palestinian refugee, 1954 [27]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians fled because of Arab policies. Propaganda about Israeli atrocities backfired and created panicked flight.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The fabricated atrocity stories about Deir Yassin "were our biggest mistake because Palestinians fled in terror and left the country in huge numbers after hearing the atrocity claims." Hazem Nusseibeh, editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948. BBC Report: [28]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "News of [Deir Yassin] rapidly circulated…was embellished and soon dramatically exaggerated. The fellahin found these accounts wholly credible, for they knew well how their own guerillas had stripped and mutilated Jewish civilians; photographs of the slaughter were peddled openly by Arab street vendors….entire Arab communities were fleeing in terror even before Jewish forces overran their homes." [29]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab exodus from other villages was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews." Yunes Ahmed Assad, refugee from Deir Yassin. April 9, 1953. [30]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously…." General John Bagot Glubb Pasha, British Commander of the Arab Legion. London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: When the Jews attacked Haifa, "Immediately everyone was consumed with terror, and soon the evacuation started. In the hospitals, the drivers of cars and ambulances took their vehicles, assembled their families, and fled in complete disregard of their responsibilities. Many of the ill, nurses, even physicians, departed the hospital wearing the clothes they had on, and fled to the countryside. For all of them the one obsession was to escape at any cost." Jacques de Reynier, a Swiss observer [31]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel did not expel Palestinians. Palestinian leaders--the upper and middle classes--left before the fighting even began, setting off a mass exodus.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them (Palestinians) to leave the country…For instance, in Jaffa the Mayor went on four days' leave 12 days ago and has not returned, and half the National Committee has left…..In all parts of the country the effendi class has been evacuating in large numbers over a considerable period and the tempo is increasing…." General Sir Alan Cunningham, British High Commissioner for Palestine. Telegram to British Colonial Secretary, April 26, 1948 [32]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Forty days after the declaration of a jihad, and I am shattered. Everyone has left me…..Everyone is leaving. Everyone who has a check or some money-off he goes to Egypt, to Lebanon, to Damascus." Hussein Khalidi, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, January 2, 1948 [33]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he leadership itself was the first to take refuge in neighboring lands. The Husseinis and Nashashibis were precisely the intellectual and political elite who were absent when the Palestinians needed them most." Historian Howard Sachar [34]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian civil society collapsed. "The flight of the upper and middle classes entailed the closure of schools, clinics and hospitals, businesses and offices, and in turn engendered unemployment and impoverishment. This was the background to the second state, the mass flight from urban neighborhoods and rural areas…." [35]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: A "psychosis of flight" gripped the Palestinians. "Flight proved to be contagious….[it] radiated pessimism and despair to surrounding villages. In the countryside flight by one clan led to that of neighboring clans and flight from one village to flight from neighboring villages." Historian Benny Morris [36]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israeli troops encouraged or forced only a small percentage of Arabs to leave and this was due to the exigencies of the war itself. Even Benny Morris, the historian most often cited for this claim, reached this conclusion.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Palestine refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a byproduct of Jewish and Arab fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterized the first Israeli-Arab war; in smaller part it was the deliberation creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians." Historian Benny Morris [37]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Israeli forces did on occasion expel Palestinians. But this accounted for only a small fraction of the total exodus, occurred not within the framework of a premeditated plan but in the heat of battle, and was dictated predominantly by ad hoc military considerations (notably the need to deny strategic sites to the enemy if there were no available Jewish forces to hold them)." Historian Efraim Karsh [38]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The border-clearing operations [Israel] carried out between November 1948 and 1951 were primarily motivated by security considerations…." Historian Benny Morris [39]
      
      
• POINT 4: The Palestinians who were expelled had lived in their villages or towns for centuries, and the 1948 War disrupted their ancient, indigenous culture.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: An ancient, indigenous culture was not disrupted. Palestinians were made up of foreigners who had settled in the region only in the previous century. Yet they came to be counted as Palestinian refugees because of the United Nations Rehabilitation and Works' Agency's (UNRWA) unique definition of a Palestinian refugee-someone who had resided for two years in Palestine: "Palestine refugees are persons 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." UNRWA website ( http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/whois.html )
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In the 19th century, "[T]he Ottoman authorities-in an effort at Islamization-transferred tens of thousands of Muslims from the empire's northern and Balkan peripheries (Bukhara, the Caucasus, Albania and Bosnia) to its Levantine core, including Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. This increased the Muslim proportion of the population and, perhaps, intensified Islamic consciousness as well." Historian Benny Morris [40]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: During Egypt's rule of Palestine (1831-1840), the ruler, Mohammed Ali, "sent new settlers to consolidate his rule. The Egyptian settlers scattered to many urban and rural points, appropriated large tracts of land, and lent variety and numbers to the existing population….In a number of villages….there are hundreds of families of Egyptian origin who accompanied the conquering forces….Similarly, in the cities of Samaria and Judea there are hundreds of families which, to this day, are named Masri. The origin of all of them is traceable to those who left Egypt at the time of …" Mohammed Ali. [41]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Moslems from Algeria and other parts of North Africa (Berbers, called Mugrabis) fled to Palestine seeking asylum from the French after 1830. In some areas, travelers would find "a colony of Algerian Arabs, refugees, who still wear the Algerian bournous, and built the gourbis of Mount Atlas. They cordially responded to me when addressed in the patois of North Africa." H.B. Tristam, The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels Through Palestine, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1865, p. 590
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Circassian refugees settled in Palestine after 1878; Turkoman tribes from Iraq arrived in the same period; Arab Yemenites settled in the Jaffa area in 1908. [42]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The German Templars began their colonization project for religious reasons in 1869." [43]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: European companies that contracted to build railroads in Palestine hired Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese laborers in the late 19th century. After World War I, the British Army of Occupation brought in thousands of Egyptians for police duties and building projects. [44]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Berl Repetur, a board member of the Center for Aliya and Labor, recalls that the case made with the representatives of British rule was that the Palestine Government (the British) employed 15,000 foreigners as against only 500 permanent Jewish residents of the country." [45]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Britain brought 30,000 foreign Arab workers into Palestine to assist in the war effort during World War II, at a time when it had closed off immigration to Jews. Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry [46]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The 1948 War did not disrupt a stable indigenous culture. Whatever stability there had been had already been disrupted by the forces of modernization.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: As modernization began after World War I, rural people left the countryside for opportunities in the growing cities, a pattern also occurring in America and Europe. As Benny Morris observed: "[T]here was a growing shift of population from the countryside to urban shantytowns and slums; to some degree this led to both physical and psychological divorce from the land." [47]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]housands.[of small farmers].during the period 1880-1920 moved from the rural areas to the towns or other villages, as a result of debts, a multiplicity of heirs, famine or other causes unconnected to Jewish land purchases." Historian Benny Morris [48]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, " Vast land-holdings, in amounts exceeding five thousand dunams or more, were accumulated in large part owing to fellaheen indebtedness. This [indebtedness] was mostly caused by poor crop yields and unproductive methods of land use. Merchants, rural shaykhs and notables, and urban professionals gradually amassed areas of land as financial investments." [49]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[S]uccessive years of agricultural setback such as those from 1911 to 1920 and from 1930 to 1935 battered the Palestinian fellaheen….Coincidentally, the influx of Jewish capital into Palestine acted as a magnet pulling economically weak fellaheen away from the lands they worked." [50]
      
      
• POINT 5: Over a million Palestinians became refugees as a result of the 1948 War.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The actual number of Palestinian refugees cannot be accurately estimated because exact counts were not taken, but reasonable estimates have been made, and the one million figure is a gross exaggeration. Most scholars place the figure between 520,000 and 750,000.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1945, the UN estimated that 1.2 million Arabs lived in all of the Palestinian Mandate. Approximately 809,000 of them lived in the area that became Israel after the 1948 War. Israel's 1949 census indicated 160,000 Arabs had stayed and lived in the new state. These population figures indicate there could not have been more than 650,000 refugees. [51]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Other estimates are even lower, based on the Mandatory government's statistics. "Before the war 727,000 Arabs had lived within Israel's borders, of whom 165,000 stayed put or returned by the end of 1949. The number of refugees, therefore, could not surpass 562,000. Taking into account fatal casualties and the departure of non-Palestinian Arabs to their home countries, the number of refugees could not exceed 520,000." Historian Yoav Gelber [52]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The United Nations estimated in late 1948 that there were 472,000 refugees and that 360,000 of them required aid. Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine [53]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Even using the smaller figures of likely refugees, the number is very likely inflated. The United Nations was concerned about the humanitarian effects of the 1948 War and wanted to help those who would be in distress after it. The UN was not concerned with the national roots or identities of the individuals who required assistance and many who received aid were not Palestinian refugees. Yet today, Palestinians have converted this humanitarian emergency effort into a stamp of bona fide historical identity.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The aid organizations "definition of a 'refugee', however, was very broad. In addition to Arabs who had fled from territories occupied by Israel, it included displaced Arabs whose homes were not in Israeli territory. This definition also embraced people who stayed in their homes, but lost their source of livelihood because of the war or the armistice agreements (i.e. villagers on the Arab side of the border whose lands ended up on the Israeli side of the armistice line." [54]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The number of refugees is grossly inflated because the UN Committee set up to help Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) did not use any system to determine who was legitimately a war refugee and qualified for the aid which included food, clothes, shelter and medical attention.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: There was no system of identification. Any Arab could register as a refugee and receive free aid. "[A] large number of needy refugees from various countries flocked to the refugee camps, were registered, and thenceforth received their rations. Already by December 1948, when their total could not yet have reached…425,000, the Director of the UN Disaster Relief Organization, Sir Rafael Cilento, reported that he was feeding 750,000 refugees." Joseph E. Katz, Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst [55]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: There was outright fraud, with false people registered and dead people not withdrawn from the welfare rolls. "The history of UNRWA has been a clinical study in frustration…By chicanery it is feeding the dead; by political pressure it is feeding non-refugees…." Dr. Elfan Rees, Century of the Homeless Man, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, November 1957.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Early in 1949…the Arabs handled all the census affairs themselves. At that time, many forged cards had been distributed to people and this inflated their real number…" "The IRC (International Red Cross) issued new cards but an investigation proved that natives of Nablus were also holding them as well as well-to-do people who were not entitled to assistance and others who registered giving false names." IRC report [56]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is reason to believe that births are always registered for ration purposes, but deaths are often, if not usually, concealed so that the family may continue to collect rations for the deceased." UNRWA Director, 1950 [57]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "By the end of 1956, only 39% of the registered [refugees] actually lived in UNRWA camps; yet nearly all of them drew UN rations." Historian Howard Sachar [58]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The number of refugees is grossly inflated because many of them are not war refugees and were not even born or raised in Palestine.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1929, grew up there and had Egyptian citizenship. [59]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Edward Said was born while his family was visiting Jerusalem. His family home and business were in Cairo where he was raised. [60]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Neither Hanan Ashrawi nor her family were refugees. She was born in Nablus, which remained under Arab-control, and she grew up in Ramallah, her "father's ancestral home" which also remained under Arab jurisdiction. Her mother was Lebanese. [61]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The UN defined a refugee as anyone "whose normal pace of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948." By this criteria, the many people who were flocking to the economic opportunities in Jewish areas were counted as refugees even though they had come from other parts of the Mandate and other Arab countries only recently and could likely have returned to their original communities. [62]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Red Cross pressured the United Nations Relief headquarters to recognize as refugees any destitute Arabs in Palestine and let them continue to live in their own homes even though they were not refugees. [63]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The number of refugees was inflated because many of them could not legitimately be called refugees. In the West Bank and Gaza, they in fact were still living in their "homeland"-the Palestine Mandate-if not in their old homes. They were internally displaced, not refugees.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: 80% of the refugees fled to other areas of Mandate Palestine and to Jordan. Approximately 15% went to Lebanon with another 5% going to Syria and smaller groups traveling on to Iraq and Egypt. [64]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The vast majority of them, however, remained inside Palestine: in this sense, most of the Palestinian "refugees" are not refugees at all…" Historian Benny Morris [65]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "As a result of economic and social processes that had begun in the mid-19th century, large parts of the rural population had been rendered landless by the 1940s. In consequence, there was a constant growing shift of population from the countryside to urban shantytowns and slum; to some degree this led to physical and psychological divorce from the land….For some, exile may have become an attractive option, at least until Palestine calmed down." Historian Benny Morris [66]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Other peoples who have had to move to another part of their country because of war have not been called refugees. "When the Soviet Union aggressively conquered parts of Finland at the beginning of World War II, took over the land and exiled Finnish citizens into the Finnish state, those Finns were regarded as displaced persons, not refugees, and have never demanded a 'right of return.'" A.B. Yehoshua, leading Israeli Leftist, March 31, 2000 [67]
      
      
• POINT 6: Today there are approximately 3 to 5 million Palestinian refugees.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The number of refugees is inflated today because it includes Palestinian Arabs who have taken citizenship in other countries, who now are resettled in other countries, or who are still in what was once Palestine even though they no longer live in their homes in Israel.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Since the end of the Second World War, problems affecting forty million refugees have confronted Governments in various parts of the world. In no case, except that of the Arab refugees, amounting to less than two percent of the whole, has the international community shown constant responsibility…In every other case a solution has been found for the integration of refugees in their host countries." Abba Eban, Israel Ambassador to the UN, 1958 [68]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian Arabs who moved to other countries are not refugees. They have become citizens of those countries. The two contenders for the presidency of El Salvadore in 2004 in fact were both born to Palestinian parents who had emigrated from Bethlehem. It is absurd to still categorize them as refugees. [69]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza cannot be called "refugees." They in fact are still living in their "homeland"-the Palestine Mandate-if not in their old homes. "The vast majority of them… remained inside Palestine: in this sense, most of the Palestinian "refugees" are not refugees at all…" Historian Benny Morris [70]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: There is no way Palestinian Arabs living in Jordan can be considered "refugees." Approximately 1,463,000 of them are now citizens of the state of Jordan. They have resettled. [71]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The number is inflated because it includes the children and grandchildren of Palestinian refugees. No other refugee category has also included the children and grandchildren of the original refugees. [72]
      
      
• POINT 7: Israel was obligated to repatriate the Palestinian refugees after the 1948 War because it had started the war.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel had no moral or legal obligation to repatriate Palestinians. Arab states, not Israel, initiated the war that caused the refugee problem.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously…." Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee during the 1948 War. Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. [73]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he creation of the refugee problem…was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians-and in their wake, the surrounding Arab states-had launched." Historian Benny Morris [74]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel was not obligated to repatriate the refugees. It could not do so without threatening its own security. Arab leaders made it clear that their intent with the right of return was to destroy the Jewish state.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "It is well-known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of the Homeland and not as slaves. With a greater clarity, they mean the liquidation of the State of Israel." Egyptian Foreign Minister Muhammed Salah al-Din in Al-Misri, October 11, 1949
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The return of the refugees should create a large Arab majority that would serve as the most effective means of reviving the Arab character of Palestine, while forming a powerful fifth-column for the day of revenge and reckoning." Al Said (Lebanese newspaper) April 6, 1950 [75]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem which will not be based on ensuring the refugees' right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as a desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason." Refugee Conference at Homs, Syria, 1957. Arab states resolution [76]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "If Arabs return to Israel-Israel will cease to exist." Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt. 1961 [77]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel was not obligated to repatriate refugees who would threaten its security.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Since the US has supported the establishment of a Jewish State, it should insist on a homogeneous one which will have the best possible chance of stability. Return of the refugees would create a continuing 'minority problem' and form a constant temptation both for uprisings and intervention by neighboring Arab states." William Burdett, US Consul-General in Jerusalem, 1949 [78]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "No nation, regardless of past rights and wrongs, could contemplate taking in a fifth-column of such a size. And fifth-column it would be-people nurtured for 20 years [in 1967] in hatred of and totally dedicated to its destruction. The readmission of the refugees would be the equivalent to the readmission to the US of nearly 70,000,000 sworn enemies of the nation." New York Times editorial. May 14, 1967
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Cut off from all land contacts, intercepted illicitly in two of its three maritime channels, subjected to blockade and boycott, the object of an officially proclaimed state of war and the target of a monstrous rearmament campaign-this is the picture of Israel's security. Can the mind conceive anything more fantastic than the idea that we can add to these perils by the influx from hostile territory, large or small, of people steeped in the hatred of our very statehood?" Abba Eban, Israel Ambassador to the United Nations. Speech to the United Nations, 1950. [79]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab states refused to absorb the refugees, knowing that their refusal was a "no-lose situation. Israeli refusal to take back the refugees, leaving them in misery, would turn world opinion and perhaps western governments against the Jewish State on humanitarian grounds. Israeli agreement to take back all or many of the refugees would result in the political and possibly military destabilization of the Jewish State, as Israel's leaders appreciated. The refugees had become for the Arab states a 'political weapon against the Jews.'" Historian Benny Morris [80]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel offered to take back 100,000 refugees during peace talks at the Lausanne Conference in July 1949. But Arab states refused.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs insisted that they expected the refugee question to be fully resolved before they would so much as consider peace negotiations." Historian Howard Sachar [81]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel had already fulfilled its obligations regarding refugees. It absorbed the Jewish refugees from Arab countries, effectively enacting a population exchange.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel absorbed 650,000 Jewish refugees who had been forced to flee Arab countries after 1947, about equal to and by some accounts greater than the number of Palestinians who became refugees. [82]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Jews of the Arab states were driven out of their ancient homes [and] shamefully deported after their property was commandeered…[W]hat happened was…a population and property exchange, and each party must bear the consequences….[T]he Arab states…must settle the Palestinians in their own midst and solve their problems." Sabri Jiryis, Israeli-Arab lawyer in Al-Nahar (Beirut) May 15, 1975 [83]
      
      
• POINT 8: Palestinian Arabs were the only refugees created by the 1948 War.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Approximately 850,000 Jews were forced out of the Arab countries where they had lived for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Violence, discriminatory laws, confiscation of their property and denial of civil rights forced them to leave between 1948 and 1960.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Jews of the Arab states were driven out of their ancient homes [and] shamefully deported after their property had been commandeered or taken over at the lowest possible valuation…This is true for the majority of the Jews in question." Sabri Jiryis, Israeli-Arab lawyer in Al-Nahar (Beirut) May 15, 1975 [84]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Iraq "took a series of steps, including anti-Semitic legislation, against its Jewish population. This began with a 1948 amendment to the Penal Code of Baghdad, adding Zionism to other ideologies and behavior (communism, anarchism, and immorality) whose propagation constituted a punishable offense. Laws in 1950 and 1951 deprived Jews of their Iraqi nationality and their property in Iraq, respectively…. Similar patterns…. existed in other Arabic-speaking countries, including Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan." Historian Ya'akov Meron [85]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is another aspect of the Middle East refugee problem that is also frequently ignored. It is necessary to remember that concurrently with the perpetuation of the Arab refugee problem more than 400,000 Jews have been forced to leave their homes in Iraq, the Yemen, and North Africa….[T]hey were forced to leave their homes against their will and to abandon, in the process, all that they possessed. The latest addition to their number are the 20,000 Jews for whom life has become impossible in Egypt." 1957 (This is before more Jews fled the Middle East .) Dr. Elfan Rees, "Century of the Homeless Man," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [86]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Beginning in 1948, Israel absorbed 650,000 of these Arab Jews who fled their countries, leaving their possessions behind. [87]
      
      
• POINT 9: The Palestinians' Right of Return is inscribed in international law in UN Resolutions 194, 393, 394, 513, 1604 and 242.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Right of Return has no basis in law or in any UN Resolutions. All the UN Resolutions advocate repatriation or resettlement in other countries. None of them mention a "right of return."
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: UN Resolution 194, adopted December 11, 1948, does not mention a Right of Return. It even places a qualification on the recommendation that refugees be repatriated. (UN General Assembly Resolution 194 available at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/UN/unga194.html)
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Only one of the Resolution's 15 sections refers to refugees: Section 11.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Section 11 recommends several solutions to the refugee problem: "repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation…and compensation."
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Section 11 says that "refugees wishing to return to their homes…should be permitted to do so." This is clearly not an assertion of the principle of the right of return.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Resolution also includes a significant qualification in its recommendation that refugees be repatriated. They must be willing to live at peace under the government where their homes are located. "(R)efugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so."
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab governments unanimously voted against Resolution 194, in part because it did not mention a "Right of return."
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: UN Security Council Resolution 242 adopted November 22, 1967, does not mention a "Right of Return" nor does it refer specifically to Palestinians. In speaking of refugees, it also implicitly referred to the 850,000 Jewish refugees who had fled Arab lands. (UN Security Council Resolution 242 at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/UN/unres242.html)
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The only reference to refugees is in a subclause in which the UN Security Council "affirms the necessity" for "achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem." There is no mention of a "right of return."
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is another aspect of the Middle East refugee problem that is also frequently ignored. It is necessary to remember that concurrently with the perpetuation of the Arab refugee problem more than 400,000 Jews have been forced to leave their homes in Iraq, the Yemen, and North Africa….[T]hey were forced to leave their homes against their will and to abandon, in the process, all that they possessed. The latest addition to their number are the 20,000 Jews for whom life has become impossible in Egypt." 1957 (This is before more Jews fled the Middle East .) Dr. Elfan Rees, "Century of the Homeless Man," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [88]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: No UN General Assembly Resolutions refer to the principle of the 'Right of Return.' All of them repeat the same formula for resolving the refugee problem: "Reintegration of refugees either by repatriation or resettlement."
    
    
• POINT 10: The Palestinians are the only refugees in modern history who have been denied the right of return.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The principle for a right of return has no historical basis. No refugees in modern history have ever been granted such a right.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "No large scale refugee problem has ever been solved by repatriation, and there are certainly no grounds for believing that this particular problem (Palestinian refugees) can be so solved….The facts we must face force us to the conclusion that for most of the world refugees the only solution is integration where they are." Dr. Elfan Rees, Advisor on Refugees to the World Council of Churches, 1957 [89]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Since the end of the Second World War, problems affecting forty million refugees have confronted Governments in various parts of the world. In no case, except that of the Arab refugees, amounting to less than two percent of the whole, has the international community shown constant responsibility…In every other case a solution has been found for the integration of refugees in their host countries." Abba Eban, Israel Ambassador to the UN, 1958 [90]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1923, after the Greek-Turkish War, 2 million Greeks who had been Turkish citizens relocated to Greece. 500,000 Turks who had been Greek citizens relocated to Turkey. Immovable property left behind was seized by the respective governments and used to resettle the incoming refugees.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: After World War II, 13 million Germans were expelled from eastern and central Europe, where many had lived for centuries. They were relocated into the new, smaller borders of Germany. These refugees received no compensation for the property they left behind.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1948, when India was partitioned into Pakistan and India, 8 million Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan for India while 6 million Muslims fled India for Pakistan. The international community offered no assistance.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Nine million Koreans (from the partition of Korea), 900,000 refugees from the conflict in Viet Nam (1954)….thousands of Turkish refugees from Bulgaria; 440,000 Finns separated from their homeland by a change of frontier, 450,000 refugees from Arab lands….these form the tragic procession of the world's refugee population in the past two decades. In every case but that of the Arab refugees …the countries in which the refugees sought shelter have facilitated their integration." Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, 1958 [91]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The right of return is not sought by any other refugees nor does the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees regard a right of return as the best solution for a refugee problem.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) considers resettlement in other countries as legitimate and just a solution as repatriation. UNHCR "strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily, integrate locally or to resettle in a third country. In more than five decades, the agency has helped an estimated 50 million people restart their lives." UNHCR "History" on its website. [92]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "When the Soviet Union aggressively conquered parts of Finland at the beginning of World War II, took over the land and exiled Finnish citizens into the Finnish state, those Finns were regarded as displaced persons, not refugees, and have never demanded a 'right of return.'" A.B. Yehoshua, leading Israeli Leftist, March 31, 2000 [93]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1948, when India was partitioned into Pakistan and India, 8 million Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan for India while 6 million Muslims fled India for Pakistan. None have demanded a right of return..
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Nine million Koreans (from the partition of Korea), 900,000 refugees from the conflict in Viet Nam (1954)….thousands of Turkish refugees from Bulgaria; 440,000 Finns separated from their homeland by a change of frontier, 450,000 refugees from Arab lands….these form the tragic procession of the world's refugee population in the past two decades. In every case but that of the Arab refugees …the countries in which the refugees sought shelter have facilitated their integration." Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, 1958 [94]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: German refugees have not demanded a right of return."Had a German government insisted in talks about reunification [of East and West Germany] in 1990 that all [10 million] German expellees from Poland and Czechoslovakia have, in principle, a right to return to those countries, it would have been clear that what West Germany had in mind was not reunification, but undoing the consequences of Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945…[N]either I nor any of my colleagues claim the right to go back…[P]eace in Europe today is embedded in this realization." German spokesman at an International Conference on the Middle East, Summer, 2003 [95]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The United States is composed largely of refugees who were forced from their homes and homelands because of persecution, wars, poverty or revolutions. They do not demand a right of return to their original homes.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians who lived in pre-1948 Israel and who now live in the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan cannot legitimately be called refugees. They in fact are still living in their "homeland"-the Palestine Mandate-if not in their old homes. They are internally displaced, not refugees.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: 80% of the refugees fled to other areas of Mandate Palestine and to Jordan. Approximately 15% went to Lebanon with another 5% going to Syria and smaller groups traveling on to Iraq and Egypt. [96]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The vast majority of them, however, remained inside Palestine: in this sense, most of the Palestinian "refugees" are not refugees at all…" Historian Benny Morris [97]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "When the Soviet Union aggressively conquered parts of Finland at the beginning of World War II, took over the land and exiled Finnish citizens into the Finnish state, those Finns were regarded as displaced persons, not refugees, and have never demanded a 'right of return.'" A.B. Yehoshua, leading Israeli Leftist, March 31, 2000 [98]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinian refugee demand for the right of return is unique and unprecedented also because it was their own aggression that made them refugees.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Except for the Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland whom Hitler used as an excuse for war, and who on his defeat were forced into the restricted area of post-war Germany, the Arabs are the only people whose refugees are the product of their own aggression. That aggression, moreover, was designed to nullify a resolution of the UN itself." Joseph Katz, Middle Eastern Political and Religious History analyst. [99]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Indeed if one were to insist on the applicability of international law, here (Palestinian demands for right of return)…..[T]hese same aggressors have been suing to be made whole for the consequences of their own failed aggression. Imagine a defeated Nazi Germany demanding reparations from Britain and the United States, or Iraq demanding compensation for losses it suffering during the 1991 Gulf War. Both legally and morally, the idea is grotesque." Efraim Karsh 2001 [100]
      
      
• POINT 11: It is Israel's fault that Palestinian refugees have not been resettled and are suffering in squalid refugee camps.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab states and the PLO-not Israel-are responsible for the plight of the refugees. Arab nations have intentionally kept the Palestinian refugee issue from being resolved. They have actively prevented Palestinian absorption and resettlement in other host countries.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it 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." Ralph Galloway, former Director of UNRWA, August 1958 [101]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The history of UNRWA has been a clinical study in frustration. No Agency has been better led or more devoutly served but the organized instransigence of the refugees and the calculated indifference of the Arab states concerned have brought all its plans to nought…The net result is that relief is being provided in 1957 to refugees who could have been rehabilitated in 1951 with 'home and jobs' without prejudice to their just claims." Dr. Elfan Rees, Century of the Homeless Man, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, November 1957. [102]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The official attitude of the (Arab) host countries is well known. It is one of seeking to prevent any sort of adaptation and integration…." Research Group for European Migration, 1957 [103]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Unlike refugees in other parts of the world, the Palestine refugees are no different in language and social organization from the other Arabs. Resettlement therefore would be in a familiar environment. If the local governments are unwilling to tackle the problem except on their own terms there is little incentive for outside governments to continue financial support." Report of Special Study Commission to the Near East and Africa by the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, May 19, 1958 [104]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "We refuse to talk about the resettlement of refugees [where they are currently living] because this is a crime….It is the Palestinians' right to return to their homeland." Yasser Arafat, Al-Quds (Palestinian newspaper) September 11, 1999 [105]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Arab governments have frequently offered jobs, housing, land and other benefits to Arabs and non-Arabs, excluding Palestinians. For example, Saudi Arabia chose not to use unemployed Palestinian refugees to alleviate its labor shortage in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Instead, thousands of South Koreans and other Asians were recruited to fill the job." Mitchell Bard [106]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab states have refused to assist Palestinian refugees in order to use their plight as a weapon in the battle against Israel.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The fact is that the Arab states have for ten years used the Palestine refugees as political hostages in their struggle with Israel. While Arab delegates in the United Nations have condemned the plight of their brothers in the refugee camps nothing has been done to assist them in a practical way lest political leverage against Israel be lost." Chairman of the Near Eastern Subcommittee of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1957 [107]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it 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." Ralph Galloway, former Director of UNRWA, August 1958 [108]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Since 1948 Arab leaders…have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is…criminal." King Hussein of Jordan, 1960 [109]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The refugees would "be utilized during the following years by the Arab states as a powerful political and propaganda pawn against Israel." Historian Benny Morris [110]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: 'All the Arab countries want to keep this problem looking like an open wound' to keep world attention focused on Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, said Ana Liria-Franch, regional representative in Cairo for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees." AP story December 30, 2003 [111]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Since 1949, Arab countries, except for Jordan, have programmatically marginalized the Palestinians and made their lives miserable.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Hisham Yousseff, spokesman for the 22-nation Arab League, acknowledged that Palestinians live 'in very bad conditions,' but said the policy is meant 'to preserve the Palestinian identity. If every Palestinian who sought refuge in a certain country was integrated and accommodated into that country, there won't be any reason for them to return to Palestine,' he said." AP story December 30, 2003 [112]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In Egypt: "We can't own a house, land or get a loan from the bank despite the fact that I was born here and have no idea what is Palestine." 35-year-old Ahmed Mahmoud Zahar, born in Egypt to an Egyptian mother and married to an Egyptian. AP story December 30, 2003 [113]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In Egypt: Palestinians have no right to become citizens even if they have an Egyptian parent, were born in Egypt, are married to Egyptians and have children who were also born in Egypt. When Egypt announced in September 2003 that it would grant nationality to children of Egyptian mothers married to foreigners, it did not allow Palestinians to be included. AP story December 30, 2003 [114]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Lebanon: " For 55 years now, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have been oppressed and robbed of their most basic civil rights….a degrading life…." Ibrahim al-Shayeb, who lives in the Ein el-Hilew refugee camp and works for the PLO's media office. AP story December 30, 2003 [115]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Lebanon: Severe restrictions on employment and banned from 72 areas of employment, including medicine and engineering. Denial of access to social services, including schools and health care. No right to become citizens or have legal status. AP story December 30, 2003 [116]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Lebanon: No right to own property. Lebanon's Parliament tabled a proposal to allow Palestinians a limited right to property ownership in October 2003. Reuters Report Nov 3 2003 [117]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Libya: No right to become citizens. 30,000 Palestinians abruptly deported in 1995-6 because Moammar Ghadhafi opposed the peace accords signed between Israel and Arafat. AP story December 30, 2003 [118]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Kuwait: No right to become citizens. 300,000 to 450,000 Palestinians abruptly expelled after the 1st Gulf War because Palestinians had sided with Iraq. Many had been living in Kuwait for three generations. AP story December 30, 2003 Palestinians that remain "live under strict surveillance and enjoy only very limited rights." Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Report 2000 [119]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Jordan: Palestinians are discriminated against as the government has moved to "Jordanize" jobs in the army and other sensitive areas like state radio, television, and the Interior Ministry. AP story December 30, 2003 [120]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: When Israel launched major projects to improve the lives of Arab refugees in the Territories by offering jobs or constructing new housing for them and demolishing their squalid housing, the PLO and UNRWA angrily protested. They persuaded the UN General Assembly to repeatedly pass Resolutions that denounced Israel's humanitarian efforts.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: When Israel offered work to Gaza refugees after 1967, Yassir Arafat and the PLO carried out guerilla attacks "against Arabs and their families who sought work in Israeli enterprises. Thus, in the first year after the June War, over a thousand Arab men, women and children were wounded by guerrilla assaults, and 219 were killed." Historian Howard Sachar [121]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: When Israel built better housing for the Palestinian refugees and tried to raze the hovels in which they had been living, Arab states led the UN General Assembly in denouncing Israel's efforts and "calls upon Israel to desist from further destruction of refugee shelters and from further removal of refugees from their present place of residence." UN General Assembly Resolution 2792 December 6 1971 [122]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The General Assembly "Reiterates strongly its demand that Israel desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip and from the destruction of their shelters….[because it would be] a violation of their inalienable right of return." UN GA Resolution 41/69, Section E December 3, 1986 [123]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The General Assembly "calls once again upon Israel to abandon those plans and to refrain from any action that leads to the removal and resettlement of Palestine refugees in the West Bank and from the destruction of their camps." UN GA Resolution 41/69, Section J, December 3, 1986 [124]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Since 1994, the Palestinian Authority has had jurisdiction over the refugee camps in the Territories. It has actively refused to improve the plight and status of the refugees in order to use them as a political weapon in its battle against Israel.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinian Legislative Council voted to prohibit refugees from participating in PA elections. "The Supreme National Committee for the Protection of the Right of Return - announced yesterday that it opposes the participation of the refugee camps in the local elections that are expected to take place in the Palestinian territories. The committee justified its objection as protecting the unique status of the refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, considering them testimony to the crime that the occupation state made against our nation for 56 years. The committee warned of the dangers of integrating the refugee camps into the urban housing units..." Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 29, 2004 [125]
      
      
• POINT 12: Arab leaders demand the right of return out of a sense of justice and humanitarian concern, not for any other reason.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The contrary is the case. Arab leaders invented the "right of return" to destroy the Jewish state by flooding it with Palestinians. They would win by demographics what they lost in the 1948 War.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "If Arabs return to Israel-Israel will cease to exist." Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt. 1961 [126]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "One of two things will happen: Israel will ultimately accept the decisions of the international organizations-which is a very unlikely possibility-will permit the refugees to return and give up part of the conquered country. In this way, conditions will be changed in favour of the Arabs and new possibilities will be revealed which will lead to the final solution. Another possibility, which is more likely, is that Israel will persist in her refusal, and then it is the Arab position that will be stronger…" Tunisian leader Habib Bourguiba in a letter to Abdel Gamal Nasser, 1965 [127]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "On the international scene the Arabs must demand compliance with UN resolutions. This shows how unsound are the foundations of Israel's existence…Her opposition to the repatriation of the refugees, her thefts of lands, her aggressiveness-all these are violations of UN decisions. The Arab States' demand for the honoring of these decisions means, in practice, cutting away the ground from under the illegal existence of Israel. It is the Palestinian people that is entitled to solve the problems of its country in a revolutionary manner and dictate its future by force of arms, and when it enforces this solution, it will not stand alone." Abd al-Khaliq Hassuna, Secretary-General of the Arab League, 1964 [128]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The demand for the return of the Palestinian refugees…is tantamount to the destruction of Israel…." As'ad Abd-Al Rahman, Palestinian Authority Minister of Refugee Affairs, Al-Dustur (Jordanian newspaper), August 16, 1999 [129]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Unless there is a decisive Arab military victory that forces the Israelis to declare the bankruptcy of the Zionist project…and to cross the Mediterranean Sea back to where they or their parents came from…a long term solution is the only one possible…The return to Nablus does not close the door on the return to Nazareth. On the contrary, the path will be shorter for those who have returned to Palestine, or for their sons…." Tawfik Abu-Bakr, journalist, Al-Ayam (PA Newspaper), September 26, 2000 [130]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinians "want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to pry open the Jewish state. Demography-the far higher Arab birth rate-will, over time, do the rest….Add to that the Arabs in the West bank and Gaza Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority." Historian Benny Morris. 2002 [131]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The demand for a "Right of Return" is an attempt to undo the results of the 1948 War, as refugees from other countries have noted. It is a way to wage war by other means.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Had a German government insisted in talks about reunification [of East and West Germany] in 1990 that all [10 million] German expellees from Poland and Czechoslovakia have, in principle, a right to return to those countries, it would have been clear that what West Germany had in mind was not reunification, but undoing the consequences of Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945…[N]either I nor any of my colleagues claim the right to go back…[P]eace in Europe today is embedded in this realization." German spokesman at an International Conference on the Middle East, Summer, 2003 [132]
      
      
• POINT 13: The Right of Return must be included in any two-state solution to the conflict.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The demand for a right of return repudiates the principle of compromise through a two-state solution as spelled out by the Oslo Accords and the Road Map.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The PLO and Israel agreed to establishing two states-one Jewish and one Palestinian. The Palestinians cannot continue to claim that they have rights to both states or that Palestinians settled in a new Palestinian state are not finally "home."
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: At Oslo, the PLO agreed to recognize the State of Israel, to accept Resolution 242 and to delete from its charter provisions calling for the destruction of Israel. Insisting on the right of return abrogates these commitments which all confirm Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Yasser Arafat, Exchange of Letters, September 9 1993 [133]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "When Arafat returned from Camp David, his masses carried him on their shoulders as a symbol of respect for his achieving nothing….It was the right moment to add conditions making the problem irresolvable, such as adherence to the refugees' right of return to Israel-meaning, simply, the establishment of two Palestinian states." Amin Al-Mahdi, liberal Egyptian author, Al-Hayat (London) September 9, 2002 [134]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "You cannot expect Israel to acknowledge an unlimited right of return to present day Israel and, at the same time, to give up Gaza and the West Bank….for that would threaten the very foundations of the state of Israel, and would undermine the whole logic of peace…and for creating a Palestinian state…And it shouldn't be done." President Bill Clinton, January 8, 2001. [135]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It is the Palestinian leadership's rejection of the Barak-Clinton peace proposals of July-December 2000, the launching of the intifada, and the demand ever since that Israel accept the "right of return" that has persuaded me that the Palestinians, at least in this generation, do not intend peace: they do not want, merely, an end to the occupation-that is what was offered back in July-December 2000, and they rejected the deal. They want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to pry open the Jewish state. Demography-the far higher Arab birth rate-will, over time, do the rest…" Historian Benny Morris, 2002 [136]
      
      
• POINT 14: Israel must show remorse and apologize for the suffering it has caused the Palestinian Arabs.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel is not morally or in fact responsible for the Palestinian refugees and should not apologize for a war that Arab leaders started in 1947 and continue to wage until today.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel has no control or authority over how other nations treat their Palestinian refugees. The refugees in Lebanon are suffering. Israel cannot influence Lebanese policy. Kuwait unceremoniously expelled 300,000 Palestinians in 1991. Israel has no control over Kuwaiti policy.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Hisham Yousseff, spokesman for the 22-nation Arab League, acknowledged that Palestinians live 'in very bad conditions,' but said the policy is meant 'to preserve the Palestinian identity. If every Palestinian who sought refuge in a certain country was integrated and accommodated into that country, there won't be any reason for them to return to Palestine,' he said." AP story December 30, 2003 [137]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In Egypt: "We can't own a house, land or get a loan from the bank despite the fact that I was born here and have no idea what is Palestine." 35-year-old Ahmed Mahmoud Zahar, born in Egypt to an Egyptian mother and married to an Egyptian. AP story December 30, 2003 [138]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In Egypt: Palestinians have no right to become citizens even if they have an Egyptian parent, were born in Egypt, are married to Egyptians and have children who were also born in Egypt. When Egypt announced in September 2003 that it would grant nationality to children of Egyptian mothers married to foreigners, it did not allow Palestinians to be included. AP story December 30, 2003 [139]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Lebanon: " For 55 years now, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have been oppressed and robbed of their most basic civil rights….a degrading life…." Ibrahim al-Shayeb, who lives in the Ein el-Hilew refugee camp and works for the PLO's media office. AP story December 30, 2003 [140]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Lebanon: Severe restrictions on employment and banned from 72 areas of employment, including medicine and engineering. Denial of access to social services, including schools and health care. No right to become citizens or have legal status. AP story December 30, 2003 [141]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Lebanon: No right to own property. Lebanon's Parliament tabled a proposal to allow Palestinians a limited right to property ownership in October 2003. Reuters Report Nov 3 2003 [142]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Libya: No right to become citizens. 30,000 Palestinians abruptly deported in 1995-6 because Moammar Ghadhafi opposed the peace accords signed between Israel and Arafat. AP story December 30, 2003 [143]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Kuwait: No right to become citizens. 300,000 to 450,000 Palestinians abruptly expelled after the 1st Gulf War because Palestinians had sided with Iraq. Many had been living in Kuwait for three generations. AP story December 30, 2003 Palestinians that remain "live under strict surveillance and enjoy only very limited rights." Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Report 2000 [144]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Jordan: Palestinians are discriminated against as the government has moved to "Jordanize" jobs in the army and other sensitive areas like state radio, television, and the Interior Ministry. AP story December 30, 2003 [145]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israelis have shown concern and compassion for the well-being of Palestinians.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Supporting Evidence: The Israeli government and a host of independent Israeli human rights groups have monitored Israel's behavior toward Palestinians, such as Bet'selem, Rabbis for Human Rights, Peace Now and other groups.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Supporting Evidence: Even ISM activists rely on Israeli human rights groups to help them. When on June 10 2003, Huwaida Arraf became concerned about how some Palestinians were being treated at the Huwarra checkpoint, she reported that she "got on the phone with HaMoked, an Israeli human rights organization in Jerusalem that often turns in complaints of abuses to the Military District Coordinating Office…." She noticed that the situation was improving and concluded "perhaps because the HaMoked calls were working." Huwaida Arraf report June 19 2003 [146]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Supporting Evidence: Ten of Israel's human rights groups as listed by a pro-Palestinian web site:(*)

      -"B'Tselem Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
      - Gush Shalom the Israeli "Peace Block", one of Israel's most respected Human Rights organizations
      - Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Nonviolent Direct Action group working against the Israeli Army's policy of home demolitions.
      - Rabbis for Human Rights, Faith-Based Israeli Direct Action group fighting for justice in the Occupied Territories.
      - Yesh G'vul, meaning "There is a Limit," works against Israeli military service in the Occupied Territories.
      - Refuser Solidarity Network, a site dedicated to building support for Israelis who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories.
      - Peace Now, one of Israel's largest and most active peace groups.
      - The Arab Association for Human Rights: Association addressing Human Rights concerns of the Arab minority in Israel.
      - The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, working to protect civil liberties and Human Rights in Israel.
      - Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, Community of Jews and Arabs living together and promoting peace and coexistence" [147]
      
      

    • Supporting Evidence: Supporting Evidence: All Palestinians have access to the Israeli Supreme Court. Many have brought their complaints to the Supreme Court, and the Court frequently decides in their favor, as it did when Palestinian villagers objected to the route of the security fence. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the route had to be altered to ensure that Palestinian lives were not unduly disrupted, even if it increased the risk of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. "Military commanders must consider alternatives," the judges ruled. "Even if they result in a lower level of security, they should bring a substantial - even if not complete - reduction in the harm done to the lives of the local inhabitants." JTA Report, June 30 2004 [148]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Supporting Evidence: During its operation in Rafah in the spring and summer of 2004: "Delegates of the District Coordination Office in Gaza, which have been deployed among IDF forces in the area, are in constant contact with Palestinian officials and with international aid groups in order to coordinate passage of ambulances, medical equipment and other necessary supplies in the city of Rafah and in the area between Rafah and Khan-Yunis. Furthermore the IDF opened special routes for the passage of ambulances and additional humanitarian aid. During the day, the IDF allowed the passage of trucks loaded with dozens of tons of humanitarian aid equipment into the Rafa refugee camp. In addition, the IDF allowed the exit of oxygen canisters from the Gaza Strip in order to refill them in Israel and bringing them back to hospitals in the Gaza Strip." Maariv, May 19 2004 [149]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: During its administration of the Territories, Israel enacted measures to protect and promote the welfare and freedom of Palestinians.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Life expectancy soared from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 while infant mortality plummeted from 60 per thousand live births to 15 per 1000 and childhood diseases disappeared due to systematic Israeli programs to eradicate them. [150]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel brought economic prosperity to Palestinians. Israeli investment in business, industry and infrastructure and the opening of its borders to labor made the Territories the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world in the 1970's and unemployment dropped from an average of 40% or more to below 5%. [151]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel fostered educational development, building 7 universities and 20 community colleges for the Palestinians. Illiteracy dropped from 50% to 30% just between 1967 and 1980. By 1990, only 14% of adults over age 15 were illiterate. [152]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel offered political and civil freedoms, including freedom of association, trade unions, civic organization and opposition parties, none of which had been allowed under Jordan. It also established freedom of the press, even for newspaper hostile to Israel, giving Palestinians the freest press in the Arab world. Historian Howard Sachar [153]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "They [Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank] don't know what freedom is. If anyone over there dared to say one word against Hussein, they would throw him into prison. They don't believe that I can go to Dizengoff Square and shout at the top of my voice against Golda Meir without anything happening to me." Member of the village council of J'at, an Israeli-Arab village. 1970 [154]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Israel launched something entirely new, the first authentically Palestinian administration the local Arabs had ever known. Under Israeli auspices, departments were established for West Bank agriculture, education, posts and telegraphs, commerce and industry. As they operated these departments, the Israelis dealt exclusively with local civil servants…." Historian Howard Sachar [155]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Indeed, Arab nations and Palestinians should be the ones apologizing for the carnage, suffering and destruction they caused in the 1948 War.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In the 1948 War, the Jews "had endured much. The war had taken 6,000 lives and five times that many wounded, an appreciable number for a nation of less than 600,000. Military expenditures alone had consumed nearly $500 million. Once again, as in the 1917-1918 period, the land was desolated. Many of its most productive fields lay gutted and mined. Its citrus groves, for decades the basis of the Yishuv's economy, were largely destroyed." Historian Howard Sachar [156]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel owes no apology. It has acknowledged the Palestinians national aspirations and tried to help them fulfill those aspirations in the Oslo Accords and Camp David. In doing so, Israel has offered them more than any other nation, Arab or Western, has ever offered them.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: When will Palestinian Arabs take responsibility for their actions and apologize for their chronic rejectionism, and for the death, war and suffering they have inflicted on Israelis and on themselves? When will Palestinian extremists stop killing the moderates among them?
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Indeed, one of the characteristics of the Palestinian national movement has been the Palestinians' view of themselves as perpetual victims of others-Ottoman Turks, British officials, Zionists, Americans-and never to appreciate that they are, at least in large part, victims of their own mistakes and iniquities. In the Palestinian Weltanschauung (world view), they never set a foot wrong; their misfortunes are always the fault of others. The inevitable corollary of this refusal to recognize their own historical agency has been a perpetual Palestinian whining-that, I fear, is the apt term-to the outside world to save them from what is usually their own folly." Historian Benny Morris [157]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians don't have a state because they have had "an all or nothing policy," unlike the Zionists. "The Zionists never demanded the impossible….Our leadership….enabled the Zionists to succeed at every opportunity…by rejecting every proposal for compromise, rejecting proposals to give it a state on most of the land of Palestine…" Tawfiz Abu Bakr, Palestinian columnist, 2003 [158]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Because of "this irrational nihilist behavior [of Palestinians about accepting compromise], "Haj Amin Al-Husseini…rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937…Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…." Al-'Afif Al-Akdhar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [159]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [160]
      
      
• POINT 15: Israel intentionally cleared cities of their Palestinian populations in 1948, such as Tiberias, Haifa, and Jaffa.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel did just the opposite in Tiberias, Haifa and Jaffa. It urged Palestinians not to flee these areas and encouraged them to stay in their homes and communities.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: When Jewish forces secured Tiberias on April 18, 1948, its 6500 Jewish residents urged its 2000 Arab residents to stay. Instead, the Arab residents asked to be evacuated by British troops. The Jewish Community Council issued a statement afterward: "We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course…Let no citizen touch their property." New York Times, April 23, 1948 [161]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The same was true when the Jews secured Haifa on April 22, 1948. "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe."

      Instead, the Arabs told the British "that the Arab population wished to evacuate Haifa and that they would be grateful for military assistance." Britain gave them that assistance. Haifa District HQ of the British Palestine Police, April 26, 1948 and Report of Major-General Hugh Stockwell, April 1948 [162]
      
      

    • Supporting Evidence: When Jewish forces were about to capture Jaffa in May 1948, "the local population fled in terror," according to historian Howard Sachar.(*) British observers thought "one of the major causes of the mass exodus from Jaffa….was the flight of the city leaders before and during the battle." Another reason was that Arab irregular troops had been looting, robbing and "defiling women." The remaining Jaffa Arabs "asked that the Jews be allowed to take over and restore law and order." Historian Benny Morris (**) [163]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Even after the war ended, some Palestinians chose to leave rather than live under Israeli rule. The 3,000 Arabs of Faluja, a village near Tel Aviv, asked to be evacuated in March 1949. "Observers feel that with proper counsel after the Israeli-Egyptian armistice, the Arab population might have advantageously remained. They state that the Israeli Government had given guarantees of security of person and property. However, no effort was made by Egypt, Transjordan or even the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission to advise the Faluja Arabs one way or the other." New York Times, March 4, 1949.
      
      
• POINT 16: There are three basic solutions to refugee problems: voluntary repatriation (or return), voluntary host country integration and voluntary resettlement in a third country. Of these three solutions, only repatriation or return is a right recognized under international law.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: An absolute "right of return" is not recognized under international law. All three options are considered just solutions for refugees.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees does not mention a right of return among a refugee's rights. Instead it demands that host countries meet certain humane standards in their treatment of refugees. [164]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The claim that the right of return is recognized in international human rights instruments, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is hotly debated. Therefore, it is yet to be generally accepted as part of customary law." Eyal Benvenisti, Professor of Law, 2003. [165]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "This right (Universal declaration of Human Rights) is intended to apply to individuals asserting an individual right. There was no intention here to address the claim of masses of people who have been displaced as a byproduct of war or by political transfers of territory or populations, such as the relocation of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe during and after the Second World War, the flight of Palestinians from what became Israel, or the movement of Jews from the Arab countries." Stig Jagerskiold, 1981 [166]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The United Nations did not recognize a Palestinian "right of return." In Resolution 194 (1949) and Resolution 394 (1950), it made clear that repatriation or resettlement in host countries or in third countries would comprise a "just settlement" of the Arab refugee issue. In 1966 it rebuked Arab nations for not absorbing and resettling Palestinian refugees. There was no mention of a right of return.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The General Assembly "noted with deep regret that… no substantial progress has been made in the program endorsed…for the reintegration of refugees either by repatriation or resettlement…." General Assembly Resolution 2154 December 2 1966.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The principle for a right of return has no historical basis. No refugees in modern history have ever been granted such a right.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "No large scale refugee problem has ever been solved by repatriation, and there are certainly no grounds for believing that this particular problem (Palestinian refugees) can be so solved….The facts we must face force us to the conclusion that for most of the world refugees the only solution is integration where they are." Dr. Elfan Rees, Advisor on Refugees to the World Council of Churches, 1957 [167]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Since the end of the Second World War, problems affecting forty million refugees have confronted Governments in various parts of the world. In no case, except that of the Arab refugees, amounting to less than two percent of the whole, has the international community shown constant responsibility…In every other case a solution has been found for the integration of refugees in their host countries." Abba Eban, Israel Ambassador to the UN, 1958 [168]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1923, after the Greek-Turkish War, 2 million Greeks who had been Turkish citizens relocated to Greece. 500,000 Turks who had been Greek citizens relocated to Turkey. Immovable property left behind was seized by the respective governments and used to resettle the incoming refugees.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: After World War II, 13 million Germans were expelled from eastern and central Europe, where many had lived for centuries. They were relocated into the new, smaller borders of Germany. These refugees received no compensation for the property they left behind.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1948, when India was partitioned into Pakistan and India, 8 million Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan for India while 6 million Muslims fled India for Pakistan. The international community offered no assistance.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Nine million Koreans (from the partition of Korea), 900,000 refugees from the conflict in Viet Nam (1954)….thousands of Turkish refugees from Bulgaria; 440,000 Finns separated from their homeland by a change of frontier, 450,000 refugees from Arab lands….these form the tragic procession of the world's refugee population in the past two decades. In every case but that of the Arab refugees …the countries in which the refugees sought shelter have facilitated their integration." Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, 1958 [169]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The right of return is not sought for or by any other refugees. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) considers resettlement in other countries as legitimate and just a solution as repatriation.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: UNHCR "strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily, integrate locally or to resettle in a third country. In more than five decades, the agency has helped an estimated 50 million people restart their lives." UNHCR "History" on its website. [170]
      
      
• POINT 17: The Principle of Self-Determination guarantees, inter alia, the right of ownership and domicile in one's own country. The UN adopted this principle in 1947. (The implication is that Palestinians have been denied this right because they have not been allowed the right of return.)
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been offered an opportunity to fulfill their desire for self-determination-in 1937, 1947, 1967-1969, 1979 and 2000. Palestinian and Arab leaders have repeatedly rejected these offers. They have repeatedly snatched the right to self-determination away from the Palestinian people.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinians have not been denied their right to self-determination. The United Nations Partition Resolution (181) in 1947 explicitly offered them a state and the opportunity to fulfill their national aspirations. They rejected the offer because they did not want to share the land with the other indigenous group with national aspirations, the Jews.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestine within its present borders, following a transitional period of two years from I September 1947, shall be constituted into an independent Arab State, an independent Jewish State, and the City of Jerusalem…." UNSCOP Report 1947 Part A # 1 [171]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs rejected the United Nations Partition Plan so that any comment of theirs did not specifically concern the status of the Arab section of Palestine under partition but rather rejected the scheme in its entirety." ….." UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Secretariat General Report July 30, 1949. [172]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Our position is clear, and has been proclaimed on every occasion. It is never to allow the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine and to exclude partition. And our object is to cooperate with the other Arab States in her deliverance." Prime Minister of Transjordan to the Political Committee of the League of Arab States, 1948 [173]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Governments of the Arab States emphasize, on this occasion, what they have already declared before the London Conference and the United Nations, that the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State…" Statement by the Arab League States, May 15, 1948 [174]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab leaders even rejected the UN's alternate suggestion for Arab and Jewish cantons to join together in a federal government-known as the minority proposal. "The Arabs rejected [the Partition Plan] with passion. Indeed, both the majority and the minority plans horrified them." Historian Howard Sachar [175]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinian leaders were offered a chance for self-determination and autonomy in 1969, 1979 and in 2000. In each case, they rejected the offer.
    
    
• POINT 18: The right of refugees to return is sacred.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Sacred is a religious and/or emotional term. It refers only to Al-Awda members' feelings. It has no legal meaning and is not a part of international law.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: There is no historical precedent for the "sacredness" of a right of return.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: Calling the right of return "sacred" is merely another way of asserting a refusal to compromise, to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel's national movement, and to make peace.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians must make a choice about what is "sacred" to them. Do they wish to fulfill their national aspirations and establish a Palestinian state or would they rather attempt to reclaim their homes in another sovereign state, Israel? They cannot have it both ways.
    
    
• POINT 19: The right of return is practicable because 86% of Israel is not densely populated and holds only 22% of the Israeli population. Refugees could easily move into these areas without displacing Israelis.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The practicability of the right of return in terms of population density is irrelevant. The claim to a right of return is a political, social and cultural issue.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: If population density were the issue, the Palestinian refugees would be better off making a case for settling in neighboring Arab states which are among the least densely populated nations in the world and which share their language, religion and cultural, political and social traditions.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel is the 40th most densely populated nation in the world with 282.2 people per square kilometer. The population density would be even greater if the calculation did not include the virtually uninhabitable Negev Desert which makes up 50% of Israel's land mass. [176]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Jordan and Iraq rank 144th and 145th in population density with 51 people per square kilometer. [177]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Sudan ranks 195th in population density with 14.51 people per square kilometer; Libya ranks 225th with 2.84 people per square kilometer and oil-rich Saudi Arabia ranks 206th with 10.9 people per square kilometer. [178]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim exemplifies "how to lie with statistics." 86% of Israel is sparsely populated because 50% of Israel's land mass is the virtually uninhabitable Negev desert.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel's size is approximately 20,770 square kilometers. The Negev Desert is approximately 11,750 square kilometers. [179]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: These statistics are deceptive. Israel is highly urbanized and is the 40th most densely populated country in the world, with 282.2 people per square kilometer. (http://www.photius.com/wfb1999/rankings/population_density_0.html) If the virtually uninhabitable Negev Desert, 50% of Israel's landmass, were excluded, the population density would be significantly higher.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: The West Bank is as densely populated as Israel, (285.66 people per square kilometer) but 50% of its land mass is not uninhabitable. Using the logic of this claim, it could be argued that Palestinian refugees should move to the West Bank and be nationals in their future state. (http://www.photius.com/wfb1999/rankings/population_density_0.html)
    
    
• POINT 20: 86% of Israel's land is sparsely populated and "belongs to the refugees." The right of return is practicable because the refugees could settle this land.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: 86% of Israel's land does not belong to Palestinian refugees and never did.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Of the land that became present-day Israel, 70% was state land not owned by any private individual. It had belonged to the Ottoman Empire and passed to the Mandate authorities after World War I. When Israel became an independent state, this land, in accordance with international law, passed to the State of Israel.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: This land does not "belong to the refugees." It is part of a sovereign state--Israel.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The practicability of the right of return in terms of population density is irrelevant. The claim to a right of return is a political, social and cultural issue.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: None of the tens of millions of refugees produced by border changes and wars since 1923 has continued to claim that lands and homes they left are still "their lands."
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Had a German government insisted in talks about reunification [of East and West Germany] in 1990 that all [10 million] German expellees from Poland and Czechoslovakia have, in principle, a right to return to those countries, it would have been clear that what West Germany had in mind was not reunification, but undoing the consequences of Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945…[N]either I nor any of my colleagues claim the right to go back…[P]eace in Europe today is embedded in this realization." German spokesman at an International Conference on the Middle East, Summer, 2003 [180]
      
      
• POINT 21: Approximately 5,000 refugees live per square kilometer in the Gaza Strip, while over barbed wire (in Israel) their lands are practically empty.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: There is no way the land over the barbed wire can be construed as "their (the refugees) land." Nor is Israel full of empty land.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: Gaza is the 6th most densely populated region in the world with 3,090.7 people per square kilometer. (http://www.photius.com/wfb1999/rankings/population_density_0.html) If Gazans chose to live in less densely population land yet remain in a future Palestinian state, they could move to the West Bank which has virtually the same population density as Israel.
    
    
• POINT 22: The right of return is practicable. In the last few years, Israel absorbed close to a million Russians. It could instead have allowed Palestinians to return to their homes.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel was established, in part, to serve as a refuge for Jews from around the world. Soviet Jewry had suffered from oppression, discrimination and prejudice in the Soviet Union. Israel's mission and obligation is to integrate such refugees into its nation no matter the cost or effort. Israel is the only Jewish majority state in the world. It has no equal obligation to other refugees who can turn to other nations that share their history, culture and traditions.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: The practicability of the right of return in terms of population density is irrelevant. The claim to a right of return is a political, social and cultural issue. There is no reason Israel should absorb a hostile population that shares none of its national aspirations, values, or cultural and political traditions and whose goal is the destruction of Israel.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The demand for the return of the Palestinian refugees…is tantamount to the destruction of Israel…." As'ad Abd-Al Rahman, Palestinian Authority Minister of Refugee Affairs, Al-Dustur (Jordanian newspaper), August 16, 1999 [181]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinians "want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to pry open the Jewish state. Demography-the far higher Arab birth rate-will, over time, do the rest….Add to that the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority." Historian Benny Morris. 2002 [182]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "As one Palestinian mother… puts it: "The children are fed … hatred for the Jews from the day they are born.… All they hear is that we have to get rid of the Jewish enemy. The call to fight is pumped out over the radio and the television. The trucks go through the streets of the camp praising the new martyrs and calling for more." Conscripting children to blow themselves up to kill the Jewish Infidel and live forever in Paradise, far from being a legitimate political strategy, is a horrific form of child abuse." Chris Hedges' War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. [183]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The anti-Semitic indoctrination of children by the Palestinian Authority must stop, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York told her colleagues Thursday. Addressing a Senate hearing on the education and indoctrination of Palestinian children, Clinton denounced recent broadcasts on the Palestinian Authority's state-controlled television station that feature ordinary children expressing their support for terrorism and declaring their desire to become martyrs as an "horrific abuse of children."" Reported October 31, 2003 [184]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: 59% of Palestinians would support continued attacks against Israel even if Israel withdrew from all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, according to a September 2003 poll by Public Opinion and Marketing Research of Israel and the Palestine Center for Public Opinion. [185]
      
      
• POINT 23: As for Israel's security concerns about the right of return, Palestinian refugees broadly accept that exercising their right of return would not be based on the eviction of Jewish citizens but on the principles of equality and human rights.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel's security concerns are not about Jewish citizens being evicted. Israel's security concerns are that returning refugees do not want to "live at peace with their neighbors," as UN Resolution 194 stipulated was necessary if refugees were to return instead of being resettled. There is no indication that refugees have a desire to be citizens of Israel and live at peace with Jews.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The demand for the return of the Palestinian refugees…is tantamount to the destruction of Israel…." As'ad Abd-Al Rahman, Palestinian Authority Minister of Refugee Affairs, Al-Dustur (Jordanian newspaper), August 16, 1999 [186]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinians "want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to pry open the Jewish state. Demography-the far higher Arab birth rate-will, over time, do the rest….Add to that the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority." Historian Benny Morris. 2002 [187]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "As one Palestinian mother… puts it: "The children are fed … hatred for the Jews from the day they are born.… All they hear is that we have to get rid of the Jewish enemy. The call to fight is pumped out over the radio and the television. The trucks go through the streets of the camp praising the new martyrs and calling for more." Conscripting children to blow themselves up to kill the Jewish Infidel and live forever in Paradise, far from being a legitimate political strategy, is a horrific form of child abuse." Chris Hedges' War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. [188]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The anti-Semitic indoctrination of children by the Palestinian Authority must stop, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York told her colleagues Thursday. Addressing a Senate hearing on the education and indoctrination of Palestinian children, Clinton denounced recent broadcasts on the Palestinian Authority's state-controlled television station that feature ordinary children expressing their support for terrorism and declaring their desire to become martyrs as an "horrific abuse of children."" Reported October 31, 2003 [189]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: 59% of Palestinians would support continued attacks against Israel even if Israel withdrew from all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, according to a September 2003 poll by Public Opinion and Marketing Research of Israel. [190]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim exposes the inconsistency of the right-to-return position. Palestinian refugees claim they want to return to their specific properties. But if Jews now inhabit them, then Jews would have to be evicted for refugees to reclaim the property. Why then would the refugees want to "return"? What would they be returning to? They could instead live in the West Bank, just a few miles from their original homes and still be in their former homeland, the Palestine Mandate.
    
    
• POINT 24: International law considers agreements between a military occupier and the occupied to be null and void if they deprive civilians of recognized human rights including the rights to repatriation and restitution. Therefore, any agreements the PA makes that do not include the right of return are null and void.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: There is no such international law. Indeed, the very claim defies common sense. Countries that are defeated in war are usually occupied by foreign troops, but this doesn't mean that peace agreements cannot be made. Quite the contrary. The US militarily occupied Germany and Japan after World War II, but that did not mean that the peace treaties and peace terms they signed are null and void.
    
    
• POINT 25: Israel says it cannot absorb Palestinians but 'all Jews worldwide are encouraged to immigrate to Israel based on the Israeli Law of Return."
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel was established, in part, to serve as a refuge for Jews from around the world. Israel's mission and obligation is to integrate such refugees into its nation no matter the cost or effort. Israel is the only Jewish majority state in the world. It has no equal obligation to other refugees who can turn to other nations that share their history, culture and traditions.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: The practicability of the right of return in terms of population density is irrelevant. The claim to a right of return is a political, social and cultural issue. There is no reason Israel should absorb a hostile population that shares none of its national aspirations, values, or cultural and political traditions and whose goal is the destruction of Israel.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The demand for the return of the Palestinian refugees…is tantamount to the destruction of Israel…." As'ad Abd-Al Rahman, Palestinian Authority Minister of Refugee Affairs, Al-Dustur (Jordanian newspaper), August 16, 1999 [191]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinians "want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to pry open the Jewish state. Demography-the far higher Arab birth rate-will, over time, do the rest….Add to that the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority." Historian Benny Morris. 2002 [192]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "As one Palestinian mother… puts it: "The children are fed … hatred for the Jews from the day they are born.… All they hear is that we have to get rid of the Jewish enemy. The call to fight is pumped out over the radio and the television. The trucks go through the streets of the camp praising the new martyrs and calling for more." Conscripting children to blow themselves up to kill the Jewish Infidel and live forever in Paradise, far from being a legitimate political strategy, is a horrific form of child abuse." Chris Hedges' War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. [193]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The anti-Semitic indoctrination of children by the Palestinian Authority must stop, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York told her colleagues Thursday. Addressing a Senate hearing on the education and indoctrination of Palestinian children, Clinton denounced recent broadcasts on the Palestinian Authority's state-controlled television station that feature ordinary children expressing their support for terrorism and declaring their desire to become martyrs as an "horrific abuse of children."" Reported October 31, 2003 [194]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: 59% of Palestinians would support continued attacks against Israel even if Israel withdrew from all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, according to a September 2003 poll by Public Opinion and Marketing Research of Israel and the Palestine Center for Public Opinion. [195]
      
      
• POINT 26: The Right to return is in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not give émigrés the right to return to another state.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, Clause 2 reads, "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."(*) Palestinian Arab Refugees have never claimed Israeli citizenship and therefore do not have a right to emigrate to Israel. If a Palestinian state were established on land now under Israeli governance, it could grant Palestinian Arab refugees the right to become citizens and live within its borders. [196]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The claim that the right of return is recognized in international human rights instruments, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is hotly debated. Therefore, it is yet to be generally accepted as part of customary law." Eyal Benvenisti, Professor of Law, 2003. [197]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "This right (Universal declaration of Human Rights) is intended to apply to individuals asserting an individual right. There was no intention here to address the claim of masses of people who have been displaced as a byproduct of war or by political transfers of territory or populations, such as the relocation of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe during and after the Second World War, the flight of Palestinians from what became Israel, or the movement of Jews from the Arab countries." Stig Jagerskiold, 1981 [198]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The principle for a right of return has no historical basis. No refugees in modern history have ever been granted such a right.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "No large scale refugee problem has ever been solved by repatriation, and there are certainly no grounds for believing that this particular problem (Palestinian refugees) can be so solved….The facts we must face force us to the conclusion that for most of the world refugees the only solution is integration where they are." Dr. Elfan Rees, Advisor on Refugees to the World Council of Churches, 1957 [199]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Since the end of the Second World War, problems affecting forty million refugees have confronted Governments in various parts of the world. In no case, except that of the Arab refugees, amounting to less than two percent of the whole, has the international community shown constant responsibility…In every other case a solution has been found for the integration of refugees in their host countries." Abba Eban, Israel Ambassador to the UN, 1958 [200]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1923, after the Greek-Turkish War, 2 million Greeks who had been Turkish citizens relocated to Greece. 500,000 Turks who had been Greek citizens relocated to Turkey. Immovable property left behind was seized by the respective governments and used to resettle the incoming refugees.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: After World War II, 13 million Germans were expelled from eastern and central Europe, where many had lived for centuries. They were relocated into the new, smaller borders of Germany. These refugees received no compensation for the property they left behind.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1948, when India was partitioned into Pakistan and India, 8 million Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan for India while 6 million Muslims fled India for Pakistan. The international community offered no assistance.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Nine million Koreans (from the partition of Korea), 900,000 refugees from the conflict in Viet Nam (1954)….thousands of Turkish refugees from Bulgaria; 440,000 Finns separated from their homeland by a change of frontier, 450,000 refugees from Arab lands….these form the tragic procession of the world's refugee population in the past two decades. In every case but that of the Arab refugees …the countries in which the refugees sought shelter have facilitated their integration." Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, 1958 [201]
      
      
• POINT 27: Israel's admission to the UN was conditional on its acceptance of relevant UN resolutions including 194, which called for the Palestinian right of return.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim is an effort to rewrite history. Israel's admission to the UN was NOT conditional nor was it dependent on Israel's acceptance of Resolution 194. Like every other nation admitted to the UN, Israel was admitted on the basis of Article 4 of the Charter (To see the Arab arguments against Israel's admission and Israel's counter-arguments, which were accepted, go to UN records, Application of Israel for admission to membership in the United Nations (A/818), A/AC.24/SR.45, May 5 1949 at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel)%20understood%20tha)
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The UN accepted Israel as a member on the basis of Article 4 of the Charter, which was the same criterion it used to admit all other new members. "Nothing but the provisions of Article 4 were relevant in the consideration of an application for membership. That conviction, based on the spirit and the language of the Charter, had been confirmed by the General Assembly resolution of 8 December 1948 (197 (III)), which stated that juridically no State was entitled to make its consent to the admission of an applicant dependent on conditions not expressly provided by paragraph 1 of Article 4 of the Charter…. Israel held no views and pursued no policies on any questions which were inconsistent with the Charter or with the resolutions of the General Assembly and the Security Council." Abba Eban Record of the 45th Meeting of the General Assembly on the "Application of Israel for Membership," May 5 1949 [202]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Resolution accepting Israel as a member explicitly stated that it was admitted because of its adherence to the principles and obligations of the UN Charter, not specific resolutions."The General Assembly, Acting in discharge of its functions under Article 4 of the Charter and rule 125 of its rules of procedure.

      1. Decides that Israel is a peace-loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations;" UN General Assembly Resolution 273 (III) May 11, 1949 [203]
      
      

    • Supporting Evidence: Even the Arab spokesman opposed to Israel's admission admitted that new states only had to meet criteria of Article 4 of the Charter. He tried to make an exception in the case of Israel but was rejected by the UN. "The General Assembly had to determine first of all the criterion on which to base its decision to admit Israel. Ordinarily, applicant States were merely required to comply with the conditions laid down in Article 4 of the Charter. However, in so far as Israel had actually been created in November 1947 by a resolution of the General Assembly (181 (II)), the Assembly had first to consider the cardinal question of whether the new State in its present structure conformed to the previous decisions affecting it which had been adopted by the United Nations itself." Mr. C. Malik of Lebanon, Record of the 45th Meeting of the General Assembly on the "Application of Israel for Membership," May 5 1949 [204]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Legal scholars emphasize that Israel's admission to the UN did not require it to implement Resolution 194: "As to the claim that Israel, upon its admission to membership in the UN allegedly undertook to implement [Resolution 194], a careful scrutiny of the text of Israel's application for membership and of the discussions that took place in the Ad Hoc Political Committee and in the plenary session of the General Assembly show that no such commitment was made; nor did the General Assembly's Resolution on the admission of Israel impose upon her an obligation to implement that Resolution, and a fortiori did not require such implementation as a condition for admission." Law Professor Ruth Lapidoth. [205]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: It is unlikely the UN would have made Israel's admission dependent on acceptance of any UN resolutions. No other new member state had been required to specify its position on UN resolutions precisely because General Assembly resolutions are recommendations, not binding or enforceable, as Arab states repeatedly emphasized at the time.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "No one can say that compliance is imperative or that the States which do not comply with Assembly recommendations are acting against the Charter or undermining the structure of the United Nations. No one can speak of the General Assembly's resolutions as if they were obligatory decisions ... the Charter and the United Nations will not crumble, will not fall apart if one or more of the General Assembly's resolutions is not put into effect." Egyptian Foreign Minister, 1947 [206]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "On 24 February 1948 the [UN] representative of Syria had said that 'in the first place, the recommendations of the General Assembly are not imperative on those to whom they are addressed' ... The General Assembly 'only gives advice, and the parties to whom the advice is addressed accept it ... when it does not impair their fundamental rights.'" Record of the 45th Meeting of the General Assembly on the "Application of Israel for Membership," May 5 1949 [207]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "On 19 March 1948, [the UN representative of Syria] had said that "not every State which does not apply, obey or execute such recommendations would be breaking its pledges to the Charter." Record of the 45th Meeting of the General Assembly on the "Application of Israel for Membership," May 5 1949 [208]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Referring to Arab opposition to the application of Israel, Mr. Eban stated that the Arab States which now advocated [that Israel's admission to the UN be dependent on] compliance with General Assembly resolutions had in the past assaulted the very foundations of the United Nations by attempting to overthrow a General Assembly resolution by force. The threats they had uttered in various bodies of the United Nations, and which had been translated in destruction and slaughter [the 1948 War], had rested upon the doctrine of the optional character of the resolutions of the General Assembly." Abba Eban, Record of the 45th Meeting of the General Assembly on the "Application of Israel for Membership," May 5 1949 [209]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Although Israel's admission was not dependent on its acceptance of Resolution 194, the UN body was satisfied that Israel in fact accepted and was complying with the Resolution whose overriding purpose was to set up a Conciliation Commission to help bring peace to the Middle East.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The UN General Assembly Resolution admitting Israel as a member state explicitly mentioned it accepted Israel's positions on Resolutions 181 and 194. "Recalling its resolutions of 29 November 1947 [Resolution 181] and 11 December 1948 [Resolution 194] and taking note of the declarations and explanations made by the representatives of the Government of Israel before the Ad Hoc Political Committee in respect of the implementation of the said resolutions, The General Assembly (1) Decides that Israel is a peace-loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations;" UN General Assembly Resolution 273 (III) May 11, 1949 [210]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the debates about Resolution 194, the majority of members agreed that its overriding purpose was to set up a Conciliation Commission and that "three basic objectives underlay the efforts of both the General Assembly and the Security Council: (1) the establishment and maintenance of peace in Palestine; (2) the early attainment of a constructive political settlement which would itself contribute to stability and to economic well-being throughout the Middle East; and (3) reconciliation between the Arab and Jewish communities." Summary of debates and amendments preceding UN acceptance of Resolution 194. Yearbook of the United Nations, 1948-1949, December 31 1949 [211]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The first substantive paragraph in Resolution 194 stated that the body "Establishes a Conciliation Commission consisting of three States members of the United Nations which shall have the following functions:" The subsequent 13 paragraphs spelled out the functions of the Commission and the issues it needed to resolve.UN Resolution 194, December 11 1948 [212]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Resolution 194 did not mention, let alone establish, the principle of a right of return, nor did it establish the right of Palestinian Arab refugees to return to Israel. The Resolution recommended resettlement in neighboring countries OR repatriation.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Resolution 194 was established principally to facilitate peace negotiations between the warring parties, and only incidentally addressed the refugee issue in a minor paragraph-number 11. UN Resolution 194, December 11 1948 [213]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The only section of Resolution 194 that deals with refugees is Paragraph 11. Nothing in its wording mentions or suggests a right of return. "The General Assembly ... 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." General Assembly Resolution, Paragraph 11 [214]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The resolution does not suggest a right of return. Rather it states that "refugees wishing to return to their homes…should be permitted to do so." General Assembly Resolution, Paragraph 11 [215]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The resolution does not suggest either a "right of return" nor does it consider repatriation the only alternative. It clearly states that resettlement is also an option for those who do not wish to return. General Assembly Resolution, Paragraph 11 [216]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: It does not mention a right of return. In fact, it places a restriction on those who can return. They must "be willing to live at peace with their neighbors." General Assembly Resolution, Paragraph 11 [217]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The resolution does not even claim that Israel must be the nation to pay compensation for refugees who choose not to return. Rather, it uses the plural, recommending that the "governments or authorities responsible" should pay compensation. It did not name Israel as responsible. It implied that those responsible for causing the war that created the refugee problem might need to assume responsibility for compensating the refugees.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: When Israel was admitted to the UN in 1949, the UN accepted Israel's position that there had to be a regional solution to the refugee problem. The Arab states, who had created the problem by starting the 1948 War, had to share responsibility for resolving it. "[R]esponsibility lay with the Arab States which, by virtue of having proclaimed and initiated the war which had rendered those refugees homeless, were under moral obligation to take a full share in the solution of their problem…. the Government of Israel contended that resettlement in neighbouring areas should be considered as the main principle of solution. Israel, however, would be ready to make its own contribution to a solution of the problem." " Abba Eban, Record of the 45th Meeting of the General Assembly on the "Application of Israel for Membership," May 5 1949 [218]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The interpretation of Paragraph 11 as a wholesale right to repatriation "does not seem warranted: the paragraph does not recognize any "right", but recommends that the refugees "should" be "permitted" to return. Moreover, that permission is subject to two conditions - that the refugee wishes to return, and that he wishes to live at peace with his neighbours…. The return should take place only "at the earliest practicable date." The use of the term "should" with regard to the permission to return underlines that this is only a recommendation." Ruth Lapidoth, Professor of Law, Journal of International Peace and Organization 2001 [219]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The UN clearly did not intend that Resolution 194 establish the principle of a 'right of return' nor did it consider repatriation the only or most desirable solution to the refugee problem. Resolution 194 also recommended resettlement in neighboring countries, a position the UN would repeat in multiple resolutions for the next two decades. International groups also advocated resettlement of the refugees: they did not mention a 'right of return.'
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Britain did not consider repatriation a feasible option. "Acquainted with Palestine's background, the British had realized the futility of repatriation as an option, since the outset of the mass exodus…Britain advocated extending immediate aid to the refugees and ultimately settling them in the Arab countries….Behind the scenes at the UN General Assembly….the British did not discuss the question of their return at all. Historian Yoav Gelber [220]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he US Consul in Jerusalem, and other American diplomats in the Middle East, shared these [British views about resettlement] views and sent similar appraisals to the State Department." Historian Yoav Gelber [221]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The United Nations itself came to accept the idea that most Palestinian Arabs would have to be resettled elsewhere. In "paragraph 14 of [its second progress] report, the Conciliation Commission fully accepted the principle that the refugees would be distributed among various countries in the Near East, and stated that "in the long run the final solution of the problem will be found within the framework of the economic and social rehabilitation of all the countries in the Near East" Abba Eban, Record of the 45th Meeting of the General Assembly on the "Application of Israel for Membership," May 5 1949 [222]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Conciliation Commission for Palestine (CCP) believed that "an unrestricted repatriation of refugees was neither a feasible option nor a preferred one. The CCP's view was that since 1948 the physical conditions in this area have changed considerably. Therefore, every decision on return must be coordinated with the Israeli government rather than imposed on it, and that there should be an upper limit to the number of refugees whose return would be sought." Law Professor Eyal Benvenisti [223]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The UN General Assembly resolution in 1952 called upon the Arab nations to integrate and resettle the refugees and offered a development fund to help them do so: The General Assembly Urges the governments of the countries in the area to assist, with due regard to their constitutional processes, in the carrying out of this programme and to extend to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency… their co-operation in the elaboration of specific projects and in the general performance of its functions; Invites the United Nations Relief and Works Agency to explore with the governments concerned arrangements looking towards their assuming administration of reintegration projects at the earliest possible date;" UN Resolution 513 (VI) January 26 1952 [224]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The UN General Assembly continued to pass multiple resolutions reaffirming its call for "repatriation OR resettlement" of the refugees in Arab countries. They never alluded to a "right of return."

      • Article 4 of Resolution 393 (V) of December 1950; (*)

      • Article 3 of Resolution 818 (IX) of December 4 1954; (**)

      • Resolution 916 (X) of December 3 1955 (***)

      • Resolution 1018 (XI) of February 28 1957 (****)

      • Article 5 of Resolution 1191 (XII) of December 12 1957 (*****)

      • Resolution 2154 (XXI) of November 17 1966 "Notes with deep regret… that no substantial progress has been made in the programme endorsed in paragraph 2 of resolution 513 (VI) for the reintegration of refugees either by repatriation or resettlement…" (******) [225]
      
      

    • Supporting Evidence: "No large scale refugee problem has ever been solved by repatriation, and there are certainly no grounds for believing that this particular problem can be so solved…..The facts we must face force us to the conclusion that for most of the world refugees the only solution is integration where they are." Elfan Rees, Advisor on Refugees to the World Council of Churches, 1957 [226]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Ironically, Arab states voted against Resolution 194 because it required them to recognize and make peace with Israel and because it did not stipulate a right of return.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Record of the UN vote on Resolution 194: "Against: Afghanistan, Byelorussian SSR, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Ukrainian SSR, USSR, Yemen, Yugoslavia." UN Res 194 vote Yearbook of the United Nations, 1948-1949, December 31 1949 [227]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he fact is that Palestinians and Arab states voted against UN Resolution 194 when it was adopted 50 years ago.They preferred to keep the refugees outside Israel." Dan Kurtzer, US Ambassador to Israel, July 6 2004 [228]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The truth of the matter is that we are not all content with the implementation of UN decisions. And if the Arab statesmen have found a diplomatic and tactical way out of their embarrassment at the UN rostrum and at press conferences, the Arab peoples will not be embarrassed to declare: We shall not be satisfied except by the final obliteration of Israel from the map of the Middle East." Muhammad Salah al-Din, Egyptian Foreign Minister, 1954 [229]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Contrary to the myth that surrounds it, that resolution [194] does not proclaim a "right of return." It must be remembered that the Arab bloc at the United Nations actually voted against the resolution. The Palestinian leadership rejected it precisely because it called for peace and reconciliation with Israel." Daniel Ayalon, Israeli Ambassador to the US, August 24 2003 [230]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: http://www.gamla.org.il/english/article/2001/april/b2.htm [231]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "An agreement concerning populations exchange between citizens of Greece and Bulgaria was secured in the Bulgaria-Greece Treaty of Neuilly of November 27, 1919, which provided for the relocation of 46,000 Greeks from Bulgaria and 96,000 Bulgarians from Greece." Law Professor Eyal Benvenisti [232]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: After the Greek-Turkish War of 1922, "the two enemy countries, provided in their peace treaty for a mutual exchange of populations. Under the treaty, about 2 million Greeks, who had formerly been Turkish citizens, and about 500,000 Turks, who had formerly been Greek citizens, left or were forced to leave for the other side." Law Professor Eyal Benvenisti [233]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It may be asserted that as a result of the exchange the problem of the protection of minorities between the two countries [Greece and Turkey] has disappeared, to the great advantage of peaceful relations between the two countries and of greater stability." Stephen P. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, (1932)
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The architects of the post-World War II world order were impressed by the [Greek-Turkey] solution and decided to repeat it with respect to about 15 million Germans who had lived in Eastern Europe…which was allotted after the war to Poland. The Potsdam Declaration, issued by the Allied Powers at the end of World War II, provided for the transfer to Germany of German populations remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria…." Law Professor Eyal Benvenisti [234]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The dispute between Hindus and Muslims in British India was also resolved through partition into two states (Pakistan and India) and the transfer of populations. "Estimates of the number of relocated people run between 12 million to more than 30 million." Law Professor Eyal Benvenisti [235]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: It is unlikely that the UN would have established a right of return. In this historical era, transfer of populations was considered a reasonable way to resolve ethnic and religious conflict and was even specified in peace treaties between warring states.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Record of the UN vote on Resolution 194: "Against: Afghanistan, Byelorussian SSR, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Ukrainian SSR, USSR, Yemen, Yugoslavia." UN Res 194 vote Yearbook of the United Nations, 1948-1949, December 31 1949 [227]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he fact is that Palestinians and Arab states voted against UN Resolution 194 when it was adopted 50 years ago.They preferred to keep the refugees outside Israel." Dan Kurtzer, US Ambassador to Israel, July 6 2004 [228]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The truth of the matter is that we are not all content with the implementation of UN decisions. And if the Arab statesmen have found a diplomatic and tactical way out of their embarrassment at the UN rostrum and at press conferences, the Arab peoples will not be embarrassed to declare: We shall not be satisfied except by the final obliteration of Israel from the map of the Middle East." Muhammad Salah al-Din, Egyptian Foreign Minister, 1954 [229]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Contrary to the myth that surrounds it, that resolution [194] does not proclaim a "right of return." It must be remembered that the Arab bloc at the United Nations actually voted against the resolution. The Palestinian leadership rejected it precisely because it called for peace and reconciliation with Israel." Daniel Ayalon, Israeli Ambassador to the US, August 24 2003 [230]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: http://www.gamla.org.il/english/article/2001/april/b2.htm [231]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "An agreement concerning populations exchange between citizens of Greece and Bulgaria was secured in the Bulgaria-Greece Treaty of Neuilly of November 27, 1919, which provided for the relocation of 46,000 Greeks from Bulgaria and 96,000 Bulgarians from Greece." Law Professor Eyal Benvenisti [232]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: After the Greek-Turkish War of 1922, "the two enemy countries, provided in their peace treaty for a mutual exchange of populations. Under the treaty, about 2 million Greeks, who had formerly been Turkish citizens, and about 500,000 Turks, who had formerly been Greek citizens, left or were forced to leave for the other side." Law Professor Eyal Benvenisti [233]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It may be asserted that as a result of the exchange the problem of the protection of minorities between the two countries [Greece and Turkey] has disappeared, to the great advantage of peaceful relations between the two countries and of greater stability." Stephen P. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, (1932)
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The architects of the post-World War II world order were impressed by the [Greek-Turkey] solution and decided to repeat it with respect to about 15 million Germans who had lived in Eastern Europe…which was allotted after the war to Poland. The Potsdam Declaration, issued by the Allied Powers at the end of World War II, provided for the transfer to Germany of German populations remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria…." Law Professor Eyal Benvenisti [234]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The dispute between Hindus and Muslims in British India was also resolved through partition into two states (Pakistan and India) and the transfer of populations. "Estimates of the number of relocated people run between 12 million to more than 30 million." Law Professor Eyal Benvenisti [235]
      
      
• POINT 28: There are Palestinian refugees who are in exile throughout the world and also refugees within Palestine and in what has become Israel. In a sense, all Palestinians are refugees because we have all be alienated and separated from our rights and our history.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This is rhetorical nonsense. It makes the preposterous claim that ALL Palestinians are refugees. This is an intentional manipulation of the term "refugee," one that is not used for any other people in the world. In fact, the vast majority of Palestinians cannot be considered refugees by any definition of the term. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) considers refugee status ended after the refugee is resettled. Most Arabs who claim to be Palestinian refugees have either resettled, remained in their "homeland" or were not even "Palestinians" in the first place.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: UNHCR "strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily, integrate locally or to resettle in a third country. In more than five decades, the agency has helped an estimated 50 million people restart their lives." UNHCR "History" on its website. [236]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "No large scale refugee problem has ever been solved by repatriation, and there are certainly no grounds for believing that this particular problem (Palestinian refugees) can be so solved….The facts we must face force us to the conclusion that for most of the world refugees the only solution is integration where they are." Dr. Elfan Rees, Advisor on Refugees to the World Council of Churches, 1957 [237]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Some of the most prominent spokespeople for the Palestinian cause were not even born(*) or raised in the Palestine Mandate area. There is no way they can be considered refugees. Edward Said's parents had relocated to Cairo before he was even born; Yasser Arafat was born and raised in Egypt;(**). George Bisharat was born and raised in the United States; Hanan Ashrawi's "ancestral home" was Ramallah, which never became a part of Israel.(***) [238]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian Arabs who moved to other countries are not in exile. They have become citizens of those countries. The two contenders for the presidency of El Salvadore in 2004 in fact were both born to Palestinian parents who had emigrated from Bethlehem. It is absurd to still categorize them as refugees. [239]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza cannot be called "refugees." They in fact are still living in their "homeland"-the Palestine Mandate-if not in their old homes. " The vast majority of them… remained inside Palestine: in this sense, most of the Palestinian "refugees" are not refugees at all…" Historian Benny Morris [240]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: There is no way Palestinian Arabs living in Jordan can be considered "refugees." Approximately 1,463,000 of them are now citizens of the state of Jordan. They have resettled. [241]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The claim that Israeli-Arabs are Palestinian refugees is the most transparent abuse of the term. They do not fit the definition of refugee by ANY criteria. They are still in or near the homes they lived in before 1948. They are citizens of Israel with full political, civil and human rights. The only reason to call them "refugees" is to deny the legitimacy of the state of Israel.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: There is no way all Palestinians can be called "refugees." Oslo, Camp David and the Road Map have offered Palestinians an opportunity to create a state of their own and "ingather" their people to their own nation.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians intentionally manipulate the term refugee because they refuse to accept the results of the 1948 War that they unleashed and give up their claims to Israel. Since 1948, they have used the refugee issue as a weapon against Israel in hopes of defeating Israel demographically even if they could not win on the battlefield. They want to undo the results of the 1948 War.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The fact is that the Arab states have for ten years used the Palestine refugees as political hostages in their struggle with Israel. While Arab delegates in the United Nations have condemned the plight of their brothers in the refugee camps nothing has been done to assist them in a practical way lest political leverage against Israel be lost." Chairman of the Near Eastern Subcommittee of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1957 [242]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The refugees would "be utilized during the following years by the Arab states as a powerful political and propaganda pawn against Israel." Historian Benny Morris [243]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "If Arabs return to Israel-Israel will cease to exist." Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt. 1961 [244]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The demand for the return of the Palestinian refugees…is tantamount to the destruction of Israel…." As'ad Abd-Al Rahman, Palestinian Authority Minister of Refugee Affairs, Al-Dustur (Jordanian newspaper), August 16, 1999 [245]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The return of the refugees should create a large Arab majority that would serve as the most effective means of reviving the Arab character of Palestine, while forming a powerful fifth-column for the day of revenge and reckoning." Al Said (Lebanese newspaper) April 6, 1950 [246]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem which will not be based on ensuring the refugees' right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as a desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason." Refugee Conference at Homs, Syria, 1957. Arab states resolution [247]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Unless there is a decisive Arab military victory that forces the Israelis to declare the bankruptcy of the Zionist project…and to cross the Mediterranean Sea back to where they or their parents came from…a long term solution is the only one possible…The return to Nablus does not close the door on the return to Nazareth. On the contrary, the path will be shorter for those who have returned to Palestine, or for their sons…." Tawfik Abu-Bakr, journalist, Al-Ayam (PA Newspaper), September 26, 2000 [248]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinians "want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to pry open the Jewish state. Demography-the far higher Arab birth rate-will, over time, do the rest….Add to that the Arabs in the West bank and Gaza Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority." Historian Benny Morris. 2002 [249]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: None of the over 50 million refugees produced by border changes, wars and revolutions since 1923 has continued to claim that the homes they left are still theirs or claimed that they are still refugees. The Palestinians alone refuse to acquiesce to the consequences of a war they started and lost.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Had a German government insisted in talks about reunification [of East and West Germany] in 1990 that all [10 million] German expellees from Poland and Czechoslovakia have, in principle, a right to return to those countries, it would have been clear that what West Germany had in mind was not reunification, but undoing the consequences of Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945…[N]either I nor any of my colleagues claim the right to go back…[P]eace in Europe today is embedded in this realization." German spokesman at an International Conference on the Middle East, Summer, 2003 [250]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Except for the Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland whom Hitler used as an excuse for war, and who on his defeat were forced into the restricted area of post-war Germany, the Arabs are the only people whose refugees are the product of their own aggression. That aggression, moreover, was designed to nullify a resolution of the UN itself." Joseph Katz, Middle Eastern Political and Religious History analyst. [251]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]hese same aggressors [Palestinians] have been suing to be made whole for the consequences of their own failed aggression. Imagine a defeated Nazi Germany demanding reparations from Britain and the United States, or Iraq demanding compensation for losses it suffering during the 1991 Gulf War. Both legally and morally, the idea is grotesque." Efraim Karsh 2001 [252]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1948, when India was partitioned into Pakistan and India, 8 million Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan for India while 6 million Muslims fled India for Pakistan. The international community offered no assistance. Neither Pakistanis nor Indians claim that they are still refugees.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Nine million Koreans (from the partition of Korea), 900,000 refugees from the conflict in Viet Nam (1954)….thousands of Turkish refugees from Bulgaria; 440,000 Finns separated from their homeland by a change of frontier, 450,000 refugees from Arab lands….these form the tragic procession of the world's refugee population in the past two decades. In every case but that of the Arab refugees …the countries in which the refugees sought shelter have facilitated their integration." Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, 1958(*). None of these groups still call themselves refugees or make incessant claims to "their land." [253]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This definition of refugee defies credulity. It is simply a refusal to compromise, to accept the outcome of the 1948 War and the existence of Israel. By its logic, Americans and Canadians should give their homes and house keys to the Native Americans who were defeated-some in the Western United States around the very time that Zionists were returning to Palestine--; Latin Americans of Spanish descent should turn their homes and house keys over to the Indians of their countries; Australians should turn their homes and house keys over to the Aborigines. Are they ready to do so?
    
    
• POINT 29: The international community ignores the Palestinians. They still live in "fly-covered, floorless tents."
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim is a distortion of the truth, an insult to those who have worked to help the refugees-the UN and the refugees themselves-and a blatant propaganda ploy. The refugees live in homes and apartment houses no different from those of their non-refugee neighbors.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "I expected rows and rows of tents. No. No tents. The camps today look like towns or cities, a tight complex of drab apartment houses. To the untrained eye, there is nothing to indicate that they are refugee camps." Barbara Wolf, Human Rights activist with Global Mediations Network, January 2000 [254]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The UN set up the [refugee] camps as tented areas in the years following the 1948 War. In the 1960's, refugees agreed to allow the UN to replace the tents with cinder-block shelters. Today…the camps resemble the poorer neighborhoods of Middle Eastern cities. The refugees don't own their individual plots of land, but they do own the shelters and are free to make improvements on them." Peter Kessler, information officer for UNHCR and Maher Nasser of UNRWA [255]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In Jordan, "Many of the camps are now surrounded by residential areas as a result of the growth in the Jordanian population…The camps have developed into quarters resembling the neighborhoods around them due to the refugees themselves who have worked hard to improve their conditions and to the Government of Jordan, which has invested large amounts of funds to provide the camps with basic infrastructure." UNRWA report on refugee camps in Jordan [256]
      
      
• POINT 30: Seventy percent of Palestinians are refugees.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This is a preposterous claim and an intentional manipulation of the term "refugee," one that is not used for any other people in the world. In fact, the vast majority of Palestinians cannot be considered refugees by any definition of the term. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) considers refugee status has ended after the refugee is resettled. Most Arabs who are called Palestinian refugees either resettled, remained in their "homeland" or were not even "Palestinians" in the first place.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: UNHCR "strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily, integrate locally or to resettle in a third country. In more than five decades, the agency has helped an estimated 50 million people restart their lives." UNHCR "History" on its website. [257]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "No large scale refugee problem has ever been solved by repatriation, and there are certainly no grounds for believing that this particular problem (Palestinian refugees) can be so solved….The facts we must face force us to the conclusion that for most of the world refugees the only solution is integration where they are." Dr. Elfan Rees, Advisor on Refugees to the World Council of Churches, 1957 [258]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Some of the most prominent spokespeople for the Palestinian cause were not even born (*) or raised in the Palestine Mandate area. There is no way they can be considered refugees. Edward Said's parents had relocated to Cairo before he was even born; Yasser Arafat was born and raised in Egypt;(**) . George Bisharat was born and raised in the United States; Hanan Ashrawi's "ancestral home" was Ramallah, which never became a part of Israel. (***) [259]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian Arabs who moved to other countries have become citizens of those countries. The two contenders for the presidency of El Salvadore in 2004 in fact were both born to Palestinian parents who had emigrated from Bethlehem.(*) It is absurd to still categorize them as refugees. [260]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza cannot be called "refugees." They in fact are still living in their "homeland"-the Palestine Mandate-if not in their old homes. " The vast majority of them… remained inside Palestine: in this sense, most of the Palestinian "refugees" are not refugees at all…" Historian Benny Morris [261]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: There is no way Palestinian Arabs living in Jordan can be considered "refugees." Approximately 1,463,000 of them are now citizens of the state of Jordan. They have resettled. [262]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: There is no way 70% of all Palestinians can be called "refugees." Oslo, Camp David and the Road Map have offered Palestinians an opportunity to create a state of their own and "ingather" their people to their own nation.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians intentionally manipulate the term refugee because they refuse to accept the results of the 1948 War that they unleashed and give up their claims to Israel. Since 1948, they have used the refugee issue as a weapon against Israel in hopes of defeating Israel demographically even if they could not win on the battlefield. They want to undo the results of the 1948 War.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The fact is that the Arab states have for ten years used the Palestine refugees as political hostages in their struggle with Israel. While Arab delegates in the United Nations have condemned the plight of their brothers in the refugee camps nothing has been done to assist them in a practical way lest political leverage against Israel be lost." Chairman of the Near Eastern Subcommittee of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1957 [263]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The refugees would "be utilized during the following years by the Arab states as a powerful political and propaganda pawn against Israel." Historian Benny Morris [264]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "If Arabs return to Israel-Israel will cease to exist." Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt. 1961 [265]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The demand for the return of the Palestinian refugees…is tantamount to the destruction of Israel…." As'ad Abd-Al Rahman, Palestinian Authority Minister of Refugee Affairs, Al-Dustur (Jordanian newspaper), August 16, 1999 [266]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The return of the refugees should create a large Arab majority that would serve as the most effective means of reviving the Arab character of Palestine, while forming a powerful fifth-column for the day of revenge and reckoning." Al Said (Lebanese newspaper) April 6, 1950 [267]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem which will not be based on ensuring the refugees' right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as a desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason." Refugee Conference at Homs, Syria, 1957. Arab states resolution [268]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Unless there is a decisive Arab military victory that forces the Israelis to declare the bankruptcy of the Zionist project…and to cross the Mediterranean Sea back to where they or their parents came from…a long term solution is the only one possible…The return to Nablus does not close the door on the return to Nazareth. On the contrary, the path will be shorter for those who have returned to Palestine, or for their sons…." Tawfik Abu-Bakr, journalist, Al-Ayam (PA Newspaper), September 26, 2000 [269]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinians "want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to pry open the Jewish state. Demography-the far higher Arab birth rate-will, over time, do the rest….Add to that the Arabs in the West bank and Gaza Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority." Historian Benny Morris. 2002 [270]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: None of the over 50 million refugees produced by border changes, wars and revolutions since 1923 has continued to claim that the homes they left are still theirs or that they are still refugees. The Palestinians alone refuse to acquiesce to the consequences of a war they started and lost.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: quot;Had a German government insisted in talks about reunification [of East and West Germany] in 1990 that all [10 million] German expellees from Poland and Czechoslovakia have, in principle, a right to return to those countries, it would have been clear that what West Germany had in mind was not reunification, but undoing the consequences of Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945…[N]either I nor any of my colleagues claim the right to go back…[P]eace in Europe today is embedded in this realization." German spokesman at an International Conference on the Middle East, Summer, 2003 [271]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Except for the Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland whom Hitler used as an excuse for war, and who on his defeat were forced into the restricted area of post-war Germany, the Arabs are the only people whose refugees are the product of their own aggression. That aggression, moreover, was designed to nullify a resolution of the UN itself." Joseph Katz, Middle Eastern Political and Religious History analyst. [272]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]hese same aggressors [Palestinians] have been suing to be made whole for the consequences of their own failed aggression. Imagine a defeated Nazi Germany demanding reparations from Britain and the United States, or Iraq demanding compensation for losses it suffering during the 1991 Gulf War. Both legally and morally, the idea is grotesque." Efraim Karsh 2001 [273]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1948, when India was partitioned into Pakistan and India, 8 million Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan for India while 6 million Muslims fled India for Pakistan. The international community offered no assistance. Neither Pakistanis nor Indians claim that they are still refugees.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Nine million Koreans (from the partition of Korea), 900,000 refugees from the conflict in Viet Nam (1954)….thousands of Turkish refugees from Bulgaria; 440,000 Finns separated from their homeland by a change of frontier, 450,000 refugees from Arab lands….these form the tragic procession of the world's refugee population in the past two decades. In every case but that of the Arab refugees …the countries in which the refugees sought shelter have facilitated their integration." Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, 1958 (*). None of these groups still call themselves refugees or make incessant claims to "their land." [274]
      
      

[1] Emil Ghoury, Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. Excerpt online at http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[2] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,653594,00.html

[3] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 8

[4] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948 2002, p. 20

[5] Security Council Official Records, Special Supplement, 1948, p. 20

[6] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[7] Cited at http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/warindep.html

[8] Cited at http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/warindep.html

[9] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 8

[10] Time Magazine. June 2, 1948, p. 20. Cited at http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/warindep.html

[11] Cited at http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/warindep.html

[12] Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti, 1993, p. 100 cited in Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, p 56

[13] Ben-Gurion letter to his son, 1937, cited in Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History, 2002, p.47

[14] Ben-Gurion, Protocol of Jewish Executive Agency Meeting, June 7, 1938, cited in Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History, 2002, p. 45

[15] Declaration of Independence available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/israel.htm

[16] Emil Ghoury, Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. Excerpt online at http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[17] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,653594,00.html

[18] New York Times April 23, 1948; Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 45; also available at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mfl14.html

[19] Secret memo dated April 26, 1948, from the Superintendent of Police, regarding the general situation in Haifa. Cited at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mfl14.html, at http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html and Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, pp. 45-46

[20] Peter Dodd and Hamlin Barakat, River Without Bridges:, Beirut 1969, p. 43

[21] Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 88

[22] Cited at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mf14.html

[23] Cited in Alan Dershowtiz, The Case for Israel, p. 84

[24] Cited in Joseph B. Schectman, The Refugees in the World, 1963, pp. 197-198

[25] Cited at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mf14.html#c

[26] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, p. 91

[27] Ad Difaa (Jordanian Daily) September 6, 1954

[28] Cited at http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_war_diryassin.php

[29] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2001 p. 335

[30] Cited at http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[31] Cited in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2001 p. 335

[32] Telegram 1148, Cunningham Papers, III/4/71, p. 189 cited in Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History, 2002, p. 27

[33] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 89

[34] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2001, p. 309

[35] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001p 255

[36] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 255

[37] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, 1998, p. 286

[38] Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 89

[39] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 1998 edition p. 253

[40] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 13

[41] Arieh L. Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs 1878-1948, 2002 edition, pp. 14-15

[42] Arieh L. Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs 1878-1948, 2002 edition, pp. 16-18

[43] Arieh L. Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs 1878-1948, 2002 edition, p. 24

[44] Arieh L. Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs 1878-1948, 2002 edition, pp. 27-29

[45] Cited in Arieh L. Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs 1878-1948, 2002 edition, p. 30

[46] Anglo-American Committee, Survey, vol. 1, p. 212.

[47] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 253

[48] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 123

[49] Kenneth W. Stein, “The Jewish National Fund: Land Purchase Methods and Priorities, 1924-1939,” Middle Eastern Studies, April 1984.

[50] Kenneth W. Stein, “The Jewish National Fund: Land Purchase Methods and Priorities, 1924-1939,” Middle Eastern Studies, April 1984.

[51] Arieh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession, 1984 p. 272; Benjamin Kedar, The Changing Land Between the Jordan and the Sea, 1999, p. 206

[52] Yoav Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 2001, p. 272

[53] Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine, Submitted to the Secretary General for Transmission to the Members of the United Nations, General Assembly Official Records: Third Session, Supplement No. 11 (A/648), Paris, 1948, p. 47 and Supplement No. 11A (A\689, and A\689\Add.1, p. 5

[54] Yoav Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 2001, p. 272

[55] At http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[56] IRC report cited and quoted in Yoav Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 2001, p. 272

[57] UN Document A/1451, pp. 9-10

[58] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 442-443

[59] Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, 2003, p. 11

[60] Justus Reid Weiner, “My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” Commentary Magazine, September 1999, archived at http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/glosses/weinerAttackOnSaid.html

[61] Hanan Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 1996 edition, p. 22 and p. 24

[62] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 253; Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, pp. 85-88

[63] Joseph E. Katz, Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst

[64] At http://www.netanyahu,org/refugeeissue.html

[65] http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[66] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 253

[67] Translated at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archieves&ID=SP8300

[68] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[69] http://dominionpaper.ca/international_news/2004/04/06/us_accused.html

[70] http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[71] At http://www.world.std.com/~camera/docs/backg/rret.html

[72] Slan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, Chapter 12

[73] Emil Ghoury, Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. Excerpt online at http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[74] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,653594,00.html

[75] Cited in Terence Prittie, “Middle East Refugees,” in Michael Curtis et al, The Palestinians, 1975, p. 69

[76] Beirut al Massa, July 15, 1957). At http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mf14.html#j

[77] Interview in Zibicher Woche, September 1, 1961, cited in http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[78] Burdett letter to the US Secretary of State, February 1949, cited in Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949, 1987 edition, p. 257

[79] Cited in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 440

[80] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949, 1987 edition, p. 255

[81] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 439

[82] http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/maps/refs.html , and http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_refugees_jews_why.php

[83] Ya’akov Meron, “Why Jews Fled the Arab Countries,” Middle East Quarterly, September 1995 at http://www.meforum.org/article/263 Also in Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial, p. 29

[84] Ya’akov Meron, “Why Jews Fled the Arab Countries,” Middle East Quarterly, September 1995 at http://www.meforum.org/article/263 Also in Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial, p. 29

[85] Ya’akov Meron, “Why Jews Fled the Arab Countries,” Middle East Quarterly, September 1995 at http://www.meforum.org/article/263

[86] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[87] http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/comment/comment-littman120302.asp

[88] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[89] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[90] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[91] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[92] http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/basics

[93] Translated at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archieves&ID=SP8300

[94] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[95] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Jpost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1058413673474

[96] At http://www.netanyahu,org/refugeeissue.html

[97] http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[98] Translated at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archieves&ID=SP8300

[99] At http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[100] “The Palestinians and the Right of Return,” Commentary Magazine, May 2001

[101] Cited at http://www.world.std.com/~camera/docs/backg/rret.html

[102] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[103] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 157

[104] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 160 Myths and Facts, 2001, p. 184

[105] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SR00401

[106] Myths and Facts, 2001, p. 184

[107] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[108] Cited at http://www.world.std.com/~camera/docs/backg/rret.html

[109] Cited in Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, pp. 88-89

[110] Benny Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1998 edition, p. 296

[111] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage; http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[112] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[113] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[114] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[115] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[116] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[117] http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/story/jsp?id=200311032143000

[118] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[119] http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/MEPP/PRRN/hammarberg.html

[120] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[121] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p 685

[122] http://ods-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/328/08/IMG/NR032808.pdf?OpenElement

[123] http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/41/a41r069.htm

[124] http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/41/a41r069.htm

[125] Translated in Palestine Media Watch Bulletin, June 30 2004 at http://www.pmw.org.il/

[126] Interview in Zibicher Woche, September 1, 1961, cited in http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[127] In al-Amal, April 30 1965, cited in Y. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes To Israel, tr. Misha Louvish, 1974, pp. 479-480

[128] Weekly newspaper Ruz al-Yusuf, October 24, 1964, cited in Y. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes To Israel, tr. Misha Louvish, 1974, p. 20

[129] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SR00401

[130] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SR00401

[131] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002

[132] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Jpost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1058413673474

[133] http://www.mideastweb.org/osloletters.htm

[134] Translated by MEMRI http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP42202

[135] Ha’aretz, January 8, 2001, cited at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Peace/clintplan.html

[136] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002

[137] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[138] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[139] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[140] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[141] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[142] http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/story/jsp?id=200311032143000

[143] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[144] http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/MEPP/PRRN/hammarberg.html

[145] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[146] http://www.green-rainbow.org/pipermail/needtoknow/2003-June/001152.html (visited 1/1/04)

[147] (*) Resource Center for Non-Violence at http://www.rcnv.org/rcnv/archives/2003/pacestudy.htm

[148] http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=14225&intcategoryid=1

[149] http://maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=7563

[150] Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine, July /August 2002, p. 49 http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0bzz0

[151] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 686-688 and Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine, July /August 2002, p. 49

[152] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 686-688 and Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine, July /August 2002, p. 49 and http://www.paktoday.com/deserve.htm

[153] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp 861-863 and Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine, July /August 2002, p. 49

[154] Cited in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 707

[155] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p 679

[156] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 353

[157] Benny Morris, “The Rejection,” The New Republic, 4/21/03 at http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[158] Al-Ayyam (Palestinian newspaper) September 3, 2003, translated at MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD57303

[159] Al-Hayat, London, July 14, 2002. Translated at MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SP40102

[160] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SP40402

[161] New York Times April 23, 1948; Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 45; also available at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mfl14.html

[162] Secret memo dated April 26, 1948, from the Superintendent of Police, regarding the general situation in Haifa. Cited at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mfl14.html, at http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html and Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, pp. 45-46

[163] (*) Historian Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 308.

(**) Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, 1998, pp. 97-101

[164] http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/protect/+LwwBmeJAIS_wwww3wwwwwwwxFqzvqXsK69s6mFqA72ZR0gRfZNhFqA72ZR0gRfZNtFqrpGdBnqBzFqmRbZAFqA72ZR0gRfZNDzmxwwwwwww1FqhuNlg2/opendoc.pdf

[165] Eyal Benvenisti, “The Right of Return in International Law: An Israeli Perspective,” http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:iCC8gbsypj0J:network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-S/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvinisti_paper.doc+%22Eyal+Benvenisti%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 or http://www.network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-5/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvenisti_paper.doc

[166] The International Bill of Rights, 1981, cited in http://www.network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-5/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvenisti_paper.doc

[167] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[168] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[169] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[170] http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/basics

[171] http://www.mideastweb.org/unscop1947.htm

[172] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/4ecbf3578b6149c50525657100507fab!OpenDocument

[173] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/4ecbf3578b6149c50525657100507fab!OpenDocument

[174] http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/alpart.html

[175] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel 2000, p. 285

[176] http://www.photius.com/wfb1999/rankings/population_density_0.html and http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_basics.php and http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_overview.php

[177] http://www.photius.com/wfb1999/rankings/population_density_0.html

[178] http://www.photius.com/wfb1999/rankings/population_density_0.html

[179] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_basics.php and http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_overview.php

[180] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Jpost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1058413673474

[181] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SR00401

[182] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002

[183] Cited in Miriam Greenspan, “What's New About Anti-Semitism?” Tikkun Dec 2003 at http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0311/article/031111a.html

[184] Jerusalem Post, October 31, 2003, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1067489843223&p=1006688055060

[185] http://www.pmw.org.il/new/Latest%20bulletin.html#poll

[186] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SR00401

[187] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002

[188] Cited in Miriam Greenspan, “What's New About Anti-Semitism?” Tikkun Dec 2003 at http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/

[189] tik0311/article/031111a.html Jerusalem Post, October 31, 2003, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1067489843223&p=1006688055060

[190] http://www.pmw.org.il/new/Latest%20bulletin.html#poll

[191] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SR00401

[192] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002

[193] Cited in Miriam Greenspan, “What's New About Anti-Semitism?” Tikkun Dec 2003 at http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0311/article/031111a.html

[194] Jerusalem Post, October 31, 2003, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1067489843223&p=1006688055060

[195] http://www.pmw.org.il/new/Latest%20bulletin.html#poll

[196] (*) http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

[197] Eyal Benvenisti, “The Right of Return in International Law: An Israeli Perspective,” http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:iCC8gbsypj0J:network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-S/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvinisti_paper.doc+%22Eyal+Benvenisti%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 or http://www.network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-5/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvenisti_paper.doc

[198] The International Bill of Rights, 1981, cited in http://www.network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-5/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvenisti_paper.doc

[199] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[200] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[201] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[202] UN records, Application of Israel for admission to membership in the United Nations (A/818), A/AC.24/SR.45, May 5 1949 at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel" TARGET="_blank">http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel)%20understood%20tha

[203] http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH00xq0

[204] UN records, Application of Israel for admission to membership in the United Nations (A/818), A/AC.24/SR.45, May 5 1949 at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel" TARGET="_blank">http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel)%20understood%20tha

[205] Ruth Lapidoth, "The Right of Return in International Law, with Special Reference to the Palestinian Refugees," Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, Vol. 16, 1986)

[206] http://www.gamla.org.il/english/article/2001/april/b2.htm

[207] UN records, Application of Israel for admission to membership in the United Nations (A/818), A/AC.24/SR.45, May 5 1949 at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel" TARGET="_blank">http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel)%20understood%20tha

[208] UN records, Application of Israel for admission to membership in the United Nations (A/818), A/AC.24/SR.45, May 5 1949 at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel" TARGET="_blank">http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel)%20understood%20tha

[209] UN records, Application of Israel for admission to membership in the United Nations (A/818), A/AC.24/SR.45, May 5 1949 at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel" TARGET="_blank">http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel)%20understood%20tha

[210] http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH00xq0

[211] Archived at the UN website on Palestine, UNISPAL at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/2dac0ed54bcd6af68525629f00718b98!OpenDocument

[212] http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/c758572b78d1cd0085256bcf0077e51a!OpenDocument

[213] http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/c758572b78d1cd0085256bcf0077e51a!OpenDocument

[214] Resolution archived at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/c758572b78d1cd0085256bcf0077e51a!OpenDocument

[215] Resolution archived at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/c758572b78d1cd0085256bcf0077e51a!OpenDocument

[216] Resolution archived at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/c758572b78d1cd0085256bcf0077e51a!OpenDocument

[217] Resolution archived at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/c758572b78d1cd0085256bcf0077e51a!OpenDocument

[218] UN records, Application of Israel for admission to membership in the United Nations (A/818), A/AC.24/SR.45, May 5 1949 at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel" TARGET="_blank">http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel)%20understood%20tha

[219] Ruth Lapidoth, "Legal Aspects of the Palestinian Refugee Question," Journal of International Peace and Organization, 76: 2001, pp. 2-3, pp. 211-240, archived at http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp485.htm

[220] Yoav Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 2001, p. 265

[221] Yoav Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 2001, p. 265

[222] UN records, Application of Israel for admission to membership in the United Nations (A/818), A/AC.24/SR.45, May 5 1949 at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel" TARGET="_blank">http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174!OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel)%20understood%20tha

[223] Eyal Benvenisti*, "The Right of Return in International Law: An Israeli Perspective," Stocktaking Conference on Palestinian Refugee Research, Ottawa Canada, June 17-30 2003 at http://network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-S/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvinisti_paper.doc

[224] http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/83b95395f3058956852560eb006e3227!OpenDocument

[225] (*) http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/ab0321085344ab2a852560eb006a51fa!OpenDocument

(**) http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/b69b5cd4c1bf4825852560ed0049b34e!OpenDocument

(***) http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/f750b9e2a6aee8b0852560df00685dd5!OpenDocument

(****) http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/c4697cd804d61b05852560df006a284a!OpenDocument

(*****) http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/d90e8eed183f194f852560df006c19d1!OpenDocument

(******) http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/091d547820f8a669852560df0056a621!OpenDocument

[226] Elfan Rees, "Century of the Homeless Man," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1957.

[227] Archived at the UN website on Palestine, UNISPAL at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/2dac0ed54bcd6af68525629f00718b98!OpenDocument

[228] Cited in "Kurtzer Slams Settler Movement," Ha'aretz, July 6 2004 at http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=237407&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

[229] Al-Misri (Egyptian newspaper), April 12, 1954, cited in Y. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes To Israel, tr. Misha Louvish, 1974, p. 28

[230] Daniel Ayalon, "Israel's Right to Be Israel," Washington Post, August 24 2003 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A34480-2003Aug22¬Found=true

[231] 0

[232] Eyal Benvenisti*, "The Right of Return in International Law: An Israeli Perspective," Stocktaking Conference on Palestinian Refugee Research, Ottawa Canada, June 17-30 2003 at http://network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-S/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvinisti_paper.doc

[233] Eyal Benvenisti*, "The Right of Return in International Law: An Israeli Perspective," Stocktaking Conference on Palestinian Refugee Research, Ottawa Canada, June 17-30 2003 at http://network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-S/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvinisti_paper.doc

[234] Eyal Benvenisti*, "The Right of Return in International Law: An Israeli Perspective," Stocktaking Conference on Palestinian Refugee Research, Ottawa Canada, June 17-30 2003 at http://network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-S/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvinisti_paper.doc

[235] Eyal Benvenisti*, "The Right of Return in International Law: An Israeli Perspective," Stocktaking Conference on Palestinian Refugee Research, Ottawa Canada, June 17-30 2003 at http://network.idrc.ca/uploads/user-S/10576079920Session_2_Eyal_Benvinisti_paper.doc

[236] http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/basics

[237] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[238] (*) Justus Reid Weiner, “My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” Commentary Magazine, September 1999, archived at http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/glosses/weinerAttackOnSaid.html

(**) Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, 2003, p. 11

(***) Hanan Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 1996 edition, p. 22 and p. 24

[239] http://dominionpaper.ca/international_news/2004/04/06/us_accused.html

[240] http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[241] At http://www.world.std.com/~camera/docs/backg/rret.html

[242] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[243] Benny Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1998 edition, p. 296

[244] Interview in Zibicher Woche, September 1, 1961, cited in http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[245] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SR00401

[246] Cited in Terence Prittie, “Middle East Refugees,” in Michael Curtis et al, The Palestinians, 1975, p. 69

[247] Beirut al Massa, July 15, 1957). At http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mf14.html#j

[248] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SR00401

[249] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002

[250] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Jpost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1058413673474

[251] At http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[252] “The Palestinians and the Right of Return,” Commentary Magazine, May 2001

[253] (*) Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[254] Barbara Wolf, “Falling Through the Cracks: Reflections on the Palestinian Refugee Camps,” The Ambassadors Online Magazine, January 2000 at http://ambassadors.net/archives/issue7/opinions_gaza.htm

[255] Cited by Julie Bosman, “What is a Palestinian Refugee Camp?” May 10 2002 at http://slate.msn.com/id/2065656

[256] Cited at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/UN/unrwa4.html

[257] http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/basics

[258] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[259] (*) Justus Reid Weiner, “My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” Commentary Magazine, September 1999, archived at http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/glosses/weinerAttackOnSaid.html

(**) Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, 2003, p. 11

(***)Hanan Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 1996 edition, p. 22 and p. 24

[260] (*) http://dominionpaper.ca/international_news/2004/04/06/us_accused.html

[261] http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[262] At http://www.world.std.com/~camera/docs/backg/rret.html

[263] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[264] Benny Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1998 edition, p. 296

[265] Interview in Zibicher Woche, September 1, 1961, cited in http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[266] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SR00401

[267] Cited in Terence Prittie, “Middle East Refugees,” in Michael Curtis et al, The Palestinians, 1975, p. 69

[268] Beirut al Massa, July 15, 1957). At http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mf14.html#j

[269] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SR00401

[270] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002

[271] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Jpost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1058413673474

[272] At http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/refugees.html

[273] “The Palestinians and the Right of Return,” Commentary Magazine, May 2001

[274] (*) Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154