The new bogeyman is the "right of return." Not as a practical problem, to be dealt with in rational terms, but as a hair-raising monster: now the Palestinians' sinister design has been revealed! They want to eliminate Israel by this terrible ploy! They want to throw us into the sea!
The right of return has again widened the abyss, which seemed to have been narrowed to a rift. We are frightened again. The end of our state! The end of the vision of generations! A second Holocaust!
It seems that the abyss is unbridgeable. The Arabs demand that each and every Palestinian refugee return to his home and land in Israel. The Israelis staunchly object to the return of even one single refugee. On both sides, everything or nothing. There goes the peace.
In the following lines I shall try to show that the bogeyman is indeed a bogeyman; that even this painful problem can be resolved; that a fair compromise can even lead to a historic conciliation.
The roots of the conflict
The refugee problem arouses such deep emotions because it touches the root of the conflict between to two peoples.
The conflict stems from the historic clash between two great national movements. One of these, Zionism, sought to establish a state for the Jews, so that, for the first time in thousands of years, they could be masters of their own fate. In the furthering of this aim, Zionism completely ignored the population liv׳ng in the country. It envisioned a homogenous national state, according to the European model of the late nineteenth century, without non-Jews, or with at least as few nonJews as possible.
The Palestinian national movement expressed the struggle of the native Arabs for national freedom and independence. It vehemently opposed the penetration of their homeland by another people. As Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the militant Zionist leader, wrote at the time, any other people would have reacted in the same way.
Without understanding this aspect of the conflict, the events leading to the creation of the refugee problem cannot be understood.
Ethnic cleansing
In the war of 1948, the historic clash came to a head.
On the eve of the war some 1,200,000 Arabs and some 635,000 Jews lived in Palestine. During the course of the war, started by the Arab side to prevent the partition of the country, more than half of the Palestinian people, around 750,000 persons were uprooted. Some were