Egypt was spectacularly uninterested in taking Gaza back when they made peace with Israel. And that was before it was full of the Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan fought off a Palestinian coup against King Hussein in the 1970s and the PLO helped destabilize Lebanon in the 1980s prompting an Israeli invasion.
The idea that 5 million Palestinians could immigrate into Israel and coexist seems fantastical given historical Palestinian attitudes and the current attitudes that see Hamas with strong support. Are there any Palestinians with any kind of power that are actually interested in coexistence? And before we start talking about the Palestinian Authority, Abbas is an old man and the PA is famous for its corruption. Is it even going to survive Abbas's death?
It is very difficult for Israelis to accept a "right to return."
One thing that seems omitted from these discussions is how Arab countries expelled or compelled their Jewish populations to leave during the 20th Century. These states offer neither a "right to return" or political protection for Jewish persons who would chose to return.
The Palestinian population is generally hostile to an Israeli state and mass in-migration of said population into Israel creates a real physical security threat for those already living there. The Jewish population rightfully fears a repeat of Pogroms and their own expulsion.
Arab states refusing to give political rights or safe harbor to Palestinians is just part of the intransigence on the part of Muslim Arabs that makes the two state solution impossible. They rejected the 1947 two state solution from the UN while Israelis accepted it. This is because they believed they could claim everything and expel 1/3 of the population by force.
There just doesn't seem to be a credible negotiating partner on the Palestinian side. They do not give up irredentism. They do not promise peace. They start with "give us everything and you get nothing" as their bargain.
In one sense I agree this is all very complicated. In another it seems very simple. As long as the relevant Palestinian authorities persist in fighting a war they've been losing overwhelmingly for 75 years they are going to keep losing it and the Palestinian people are going to keep paying the price. The position of Hamas seems to be that the Palestinian cause merits fighting to the last Palestinian person. The only alternative to that outcome is for some authority, internal or external, to find the capacity to keep Hamas or whoever else from making war on Israel on Gaza's behalf.
It's important to note that Israel took in similar numbers of Arab Jews. Like the Palestinians, these Jews were displaced, lost property, wealth, etc. Some would say ethnically cleansed. But Israel took them in and paid to resettle them. The Zionist position that other Arab states should do the same for Palestinians doesn't seem as draconian when viewed through that lens. Since we're talking about how Arabs view the right of return - Israeli's views on Mizrahi Jews are also cornerstone to their position. American progressives / liberals (myself included!) would be well served to better understand that viewpoint because there is an intrinsic fairness to it and these ideas don't seem to make it into in our discourse here in the U.S.
There was a lot of ethnic cleansing going around in 1948. Germans were driven out of their homes in Silesia and Pomerania, what is now the "Recovered Territories" of western Poland. Other Germans were driven from Sudetenland by Czechoslovakia. Hungarians were driven out of Transylvania, Bulgarians out of Dobruja, both by Romania.
In all of these cases, they were granted citizenship; the children and grandchildren of those driven out came to accept that, while they might visit, they were not going to be able to return. All of these people have had the right of return for approaching 20 years, as their common EU citizenship has meant they had the right to live in those countries.
There are other cases in Europe where the EU doesn't create the right to return - Poles and Lithuanians pushed out of Belarus, Poles from Ukraine, Moldovans from Ukraine.
I do think that one big failure of understanding about the Palestinian conflict is that many Israelis (and lots of outsiders) see Palestinians as just Arabs "from the River to the Sea", and don't conceive of them as being a different nationality from Syrians or Jordanians or Egyptians, which - to many Israelis - are just geographical divisions of Arabs, in the same way that, say, Texans and New Yorkers and Californians are just geographical divisions of Americans. Palestinians very much don't see themselves in those terms; they don't think that they could move to another Arab state and feel at home there; there isn't a sense of a disunited Arab people that happen to be spread across many states - unlike, say Italy or Germany in 1850. The United Arab Republic was a failed experiment in the 1970s.
Pan-Arab nationalism (in the sense of wanting to create a single state from the Atlantic to the Tigris, from the Taurus mountains to the Indian Ocean) is dead. And that means that Palestinians won't easily accept becoming citizens of another Arab country. I suspect that if there had been a Palestinian state in 1948, it might have been different - those expelled across the Green Line might well have settled within the West Bank - but that branch of the trousers of time is now closed to us.
I think you missed a big aspect of why the Arabs states aren’t taking the Palestinians in. For the last 75 years, the Palestinian leadership has done a remarkable job of making their people unwelcome. In the 1970s, the fedayeen tried to depose the Jordanian government and made two assassination attempts on the king. After the bloodbath, they wound up in Lebanon, where they played a major role in instigating the civil war. And during the Gulf War, the PLO brilliantly decided to back Saddam, prompting Kuwait to expel 350k Palestinians.
It’s not just that Egypt doesn’t have the money or doesn’t like refugees generically (though these things are true). Hamas (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) is a mortal enemy of the Egyptian government. They don’t want to let in a population that’s bound to include radicalized, Islamist elements.
We should recognize that the "right of return" coupled with a binational state has no real historical predecessor. The Czech Republic isn't a binational state, even though it was 30% German before WW2. The Germans were ethnically cleansed at the end of the war, and their ethnic cleansing was accepted. Germans can move to Czechia now as part of the EU, but if they became a significant minority and agitated for a binational state, I suspect the Czech Republic would not accept that. Similarly for Kaliningrad, Poland, Slovakia. We just witnessed the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh and no one is saying anything. There is no claim for a "right of return" for India/Pakistan/Bangladesh. In fact, there are Urdu speakers in Bangladesh now who Pakistan refuses to repatriate. I'm actually struggling to find a right of return accepted that didn't involve a war and massive ethnic cleansing. So I think the position is clear here, the right of return imagines an Arab majority in a state covering historical Palestine and the Jews would be either murdered, cleansed, or a political minority with limited rights. I never have found the statements about a binational state to be at all convincing.
This is the first article in American media that I read about the conflict since the October 7 massacre (yes, I skipped Matt's article from last week as well), just because I found its title oddly specific (for an American). And ... I'm very pleasantly surprised! Thank you, Matt! Given the general insanity about the issue in American media, I'm pretty sure that this is one of the best two or three articles written on this side of the Atlantic.
Thank you for this very clear article, which definitely taught me something new. I had no idea that the descendants of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and other countries remained stateless. It reminds me of the way Northern Irish Catholics' struggles for equal treatment was often conflated with the cause of a united Ireland. I'm also struck that it would be really unusual to find this kind of clear and relatively neutral analysis anywhere in the media - is this just because I'm looking in the wrong place or because other media feels obliged to nod towards the expectations of its readers more explicitly?
1) It makes the world easier to deal with when you know who you can count on to at least try to be fair and honest. (Especially on this subject!) So thanks, Matt!
2) As late as the Nineties, Jewish kids were still being taught that old "We didn't drive out the Palestinians, the other Arabs told them to leave" tale, even after evidence from Israeli sources had started to come out that it was a crock? Does it even make any sense that invading armies would want to deprive themselves of sources of supplies and information?
3) If you listen to the rhetoric the Palestinians used at Camp David--the right of return is non-negotiable but the mechanics of implementing of it is, recognize the right in principle and we'll be willing to take your demographic concerns into account--and tell me it doesn't sound like diplomaticspeak for "We need some sort of face-saving formula that'll let us compromise while pretending that we're not."
4) The argument that "Nobody else gets to return to their ancestors' homes after 75 years! Why do the Palestinians deserve such a special privilege!" would be less, well, insulting if it wasn't coming from people who claimed that right after 2000 years.
In any short term peace deal, not everyone is going to be able to live where they want. Israeli lunatics are not going to be able to claim their preferred hilltops in Judea. Palestinians are not going to be able to reclaim their great grandma’s particular olive grove. At least not yet. It genuinely sucks for them, but it’s the reality of launching and losing a long series of wars.
In the longer term, I think the peace deal could include provisions for gradual freedom of residency and movement on both sides. But that’s going to require trust building and a psychological deescalation that could take a generation or more. You cannot pull shit like 10/7 and expect your people to saunter through the streets of Tel Aviv a year later.
I don’t believe that peace requires justice, as the saying goes. Almost nobody gets justice in geopolitics. Peace requires a settlement where your kids have a shot at a decent future.
I think at this point this is basically the right conclusion (i.e. this is very, very intractable). The observation that people can be more bitter and incapable of overlooking expropriation than actual murder is not a new one - Macchiavelli noted back in 1509 that if you're going to take a family's stuff you might as well kill them because they *will not ever* stop hating you. For examples that are more congenial to Western readers, there are Jewish families still suing for return of stuff stolen in the 1930s, and I don't think people find that strange, and there aren't that many people saying 'let it go, it's in the past'.
The only even vaguely plausible solution to this I ever saw (and this was in the late 1990s, when things were bad but less bad than now) was some combination of a formal recognition of the Nakba, some limited rights of return for then older (now very elderly people) who were directly expropriated, a direct and substantial payment stream to the relevant families and of course full return of the Occupied Territories as a place where those people could go and live. Basically, recognition and compensation, but not full restitution or right of return (because that can't be combined with any Zionist principles). But I can't see Netanyahu's Israel doing anything like that, especially after last week.
Matthew, if you were to open access to this article: 1) it would be a huge contribution to the public discourse, 2) it would attract subscribers. If I weren't already a subscriber, I'd be signing up right now. Thank you.
It’s further important to recall that both Jews and Palestinians were displaced in 1948, in fact Jews much more thoroughly than Palestinians: no Jew was left in the areas the Arabs conquered at the end of the war whereas a sizable Arab minority remained in newly created Israel, and were given equal citizenship forthwith, as promised by Israel’s Declaration of Independence. This state of affairs isn’t surprising seeing the sides official position at the eve of the war:1. The Jewish community accepted the partition plan and vowed to give equality to all Arabs in its territory. The Palestinian/Arab leadership promised publicly to kill all the Jews. When the war was over each side basically lived up to its promises. Almost complete ethnic cleansing of Jews from all Arab states (including Jewish communities that were literally millennia old as in Iraq), equal citizenship to Arabs remaining in Israel.
In addition to all that israel that was just born out of a terrible war surviving a genocide attempt a mere 3 years after the Holocaust, *also* had to absorb all the Jewish refugees from the Arab world and the Holocaust refugees. All became citizenship so that the number of new citizens (Jewish AND Arab) far outnumbered Israel’s founding population. (Can you imagine any other country accepting more refugees than its own citizens, all within a few years? ). While tensions remains internally, descendants of these Palestinians Arabs became doctors, government ministers, Israeli Supreme Court judges etc Descendants of Jewish refugees cleansed from Arab states where even better integrated into Israel
Meanwhile as Matt alludes the Palestinians refugees in the Arab lands mostly were intentionally left without citizenship and in refugee camps, and were given a unique refugee status that is inherited intergenerationally contra to how all other refugees, including Jewish refugees of the very same conflict, are defined.
All this matters. Even as Palestinian supporters complain of “genocide” against them their population keeps growing under Israeli occupation (or within Israel as equal citizens). By contrast Palestinians *keep* calling for ethnic cleansing and genocide of Jews, never anllowed annd have no plans to allow a single Jew to live under their rule, and *practice* the genocide they preach whenever they can, as we saw demonstrated horrifically just last week. One cannot be taken seriously as an interlocutor by Israelis (of all political stripes) without acknowledging these facts.
Egypt was spectacularly uninterested in taking Gaza back when they made peace with Israel. And that was before it was full of the Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan fought off a Palestinian coup against King Hussein in the 1970s and the PLO helped destabilize Lebanon in the 1980s prompting an Israeli invasion.
The idea that 5 million Palestinians could immigrate into Israel and coexist seems fantastical given historical Palestinian attitudes and the current attitudes that see Hamas with strong support. Are there any Palestinians with any kind of power that are actually interested in coexistence? And before we start talking about the Palestinian Authority, Abbas is an old man and the PA is famous for its corruption. Is it even going to survive Abbas's death?
It is very difficult for Israelis to accept a "right to return."
One thing that seems omitted from these discussions is how Arab countries expelled or compelled their Jewish populations to leave during the 20th Century. These states offer neither a "right to return" or political protection for Jewish persons who would chose to return.
The Palestinian population is generally hostile to an Israeli state and mass in-migration of said population into Israel creates a real physical security threat for those already living there. The Jewish population rightfully fears a repeat of Pogroms and their own expulsion.
Arab states refusing to give political rights or safe harbor to Palestinians is just part of the intransigence on the part of Muslim Arabs that makes the two state solution impossible. They rejected the 1947 two state solution from the UN while Israelis accepted it. This is because they believed they could claim everything and expel 1/3 of the population by force.
There just doesn't seem to be a credible negotiating partner on the Palestinian side. They do not give up irredentism. They do not promise peace. They start with "give us everything and you get nothing" as their bargain.
In one sense I agree this is all very complicated. In another it seems very simple. As long as the relevant Palestinian authorities persist in fighting a war they've been losing overwhelmingly for 75 years they are going to keep losing it and the Palestinian people are going to keep paying the price. The position of Hamas seems to be that the Palestinian cause merits fighting to the last Palestinian person. The only alternative to that outcome is for some authority, internal or external, to find the capacity to keep Hamas or whoever else from making war on Israel on Gaza's behalf.
It's important to note that Israel took in similar numbers of Arab Jews. Like the Palestinians, these Jews were displaced, lost property, wealth, etc. Some would say ethnically cleansed. But Israel took them in and paid to resettle them. The Zionist position that other Arab states should do the same for Palestinians doesn't seem as draconian when viewed through that lens. Since we're talking about how Arabs view the right of return - Israeli's views on Mizrahi Jews are also cornerstone to their position. American progressives / liberals (myself included!) would be well served to better understand that viewpoint because there is an intrinsic fairness to it and these ideas don't seem to make it into in our discourse here in the U.S.
There was a lot of ethnic cleansing going around in 1948. Germans were driven out of their homes in Silesia and Pomerania, what is now the "Recovered Territories" of western Poland. Other Germans were driven from Sudetenland by Czechoslovakia. Hungarians were driven out of Transylvania, Bulgarians out of Dobruja, both by Romania.
In all of these cases, they were granted citizenship; the children and grandchildren of those driven out came to accept that, while they might visit, they were not going to be able to return. All of these people have had the right of return for approaching 20 years, as their common EU citizenship has meant they had the right to live in those countries.
There are other cases in Europe where the EU doesn't create the right to return - Poles and Lithuanians pushed out of Belarus, Poles from Ukraine, Moldovans from Ukraine.
I do think that one big failure of understanding about the Palestinian conflict is that many Israelis (and lots of outsiders) see Palestinians as just Arabs "from the River to the Sea", and don't conceive of them as being a different nationality from Syrians or Jordanians or Egyptians, which - to many Israelis - are just geographical divisions of Arabs, in the same way that, say, Texans and New Yorkers and Californians are just geographical divisions of Americans. Palestinians very much don't see themselves in those terms; they don't think that they could move to another Arab state and feel at home there; there isn't a sense of a disunited Arab people that happen to be spread across many states - unlike, say Italy or Germany in 1850. The United Arab Republic was a failed experiment in the 1970s.
Pan-Arab nationalism (in the sense of wanting to create a single state from the Atlantic to the Tigris, from the Taurus mountains to the Indian Ocean) is dead. And that means that Palestinians won't easily accept becoming citizens of another Arab country. I suspect that if there had been a Palestinian state in 1948, it might have been different - those expelled across the Green Line might well have settled within the West Bank - but that branch of the trousers of time is now closed to us.
I think you missed a big aspect of why the Arabs states aren’t taking the Palestinians in. For the last 75 years, the Palestinian leadership has done a remarkable job of making their people unwelcome. In the 1970s, the fedayeen tried to depose the Jordanian government and made two assassination attempts on the king. After the bloodbath, they wound up in Lebanon, where they played a major role in instigating the civil war. And during the Gulf War, the PLO brilliantly decided to back Saddam, prompting Kuwait to expel 350k Palestinians.
It’s not just that Egypt doesn’t have the money or doesn’t like refugees generically (though these things are true). Hamas (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) is a mortal enemy of the Egyptian government. They don’t want to let in a population that’s bound to include radicalized, Islamist elements.
This is absolutely counter-productive for peace but I have empathy for how living in such terrible conditions is radicalizing
We should recognize that the "right of return" coupled with a binational state has no real historical predecessor. The Czech Republic isn't a binational state, even though it was 30% German before WW2. The Germans were ethnically cleansed at the end of the war, and their ethnic cleansing was accepted. Germans can move to Czechia now as part of the EU, but if they became a significant minority and agitated for a binational state, I suspect the Czech Republic would not accept that. Similarly for Kaliningrad, Poland, Slovakia. We just witnessed the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh and no one is saying anything. There is no claim for a "right of return" for India/Pakistan/Bangladesh. In fact, there are Urdu speakers in Bangladesh now who Pakistan refuses to repatriate. I'm actually struggling to find a right of return accepted that didn't involve a war and massive ethnic cleansing. So I think the position is clear here, the right of return imagines an Arab majority in a state covering historical Palestine and the Jews would be either murdered, cleansed, or a political minority with limited rights. I never have found the statements about a binational state to be at all convincing.
This is the first article in American media that I read about the conflict since the October 7 massacre (yes, I skipped Matt's article from last week as well), just because I found its title oddly specific (for an American). And ... I'm very pleasantly surprised! Thank you, Matt! Given the general insanity about the issue in American media, I'm pretty sure that this is one of the best two or three articles written on this side of the Atlantic.
Thank you for this very clear article, which definitely taught me something new. I had no idea that the descendants of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and other countries remained stateless. It reminds me of the way Northern Irish Catholics' struggles for equal treatment was often conflated with the cause of a united Ireland. I'm also struck that it would be really unusual to find this kind of clear and relatively neutral analysis anywhere in the media - is this just because I'm looking in the wrong place or because other media feels obliged to nod towards the expectations of its readers more explicitly?
1) It makes the world easier to deal with when you know who you can count on to at least try to be fair and honest. (Especially on this subject!) So thanks, Matt!
2) As late as the Nineties, Jewish kids were still being taught that old "We didn't drive out the Palestinians, the other Arabs told them to leave" tale, even after evidence from Israeli sources had started to come out that it was a crock? Does it even make any sense that invading armies would want to deprive themselves of sources of supplies and information?
3) If you listen to the rhetoric the Palestinians used at Camp David--the right of return is non-negotiable but the mechanics of implementing of it is, recognize the right in principle and we'll be willing to take your demographic concerns into account--and tell me it doesn't sound like diplomaticspeak for "We need some sort of face-saving formula that'll let us compromise while pretending that we're not."
4) The argument that "Nobody else gets to return to their ancestors' homes after 75 years! Why do the Palestinians deserve such a special privilege!" would be less, well, insulting if it wasn't coming from people who claimed that right after 2000 years.
"but the Palestinians see themselves as proposing one state for Palestinians and a second binational state."
I don't know if this was your intention but, when you put it that way, the Palestinian position sounds *completely* unreasonable.
In any short term peace deal, not everyone is going to be able to live where they want. Israeli lunatics are not going to be able to claim their preferred hilltops in Judea. Palestinians are not going to be able to reclaim their great grandma’s particular olive grove. At least not yet. It genuinely sucks for them, but it’s the reality of launching and losing a long series of wars.
In the longer term, I think the peace deal could include provisions for gradual freedom of residency and movement on both sides. But that’s going to require trust building and a psychological deescalation that could take a generation or more. You cannot pull shit like 10/7 and expect your people to saunter through the streets of Tel Aviv a year later.
I don’t believe that peace requires justice, as the saying goes. Almost nobody gets justice in geopolitics. Peace requires a settlement where your kids have a shot at a decent future.
I think at this point this is basically the right conclusion (i.e. this is very, very intractable). The observation that people can be more bitter and incapable of overlooking expropriation than actual murder is not a new one - Macchiavelli noted back in 1509 that if you're going to take a family's stuff you might as well kill them because they *will not ever* stop hating you. For examples that are more congenial to Western readers, there are Jewish families still suing for return of stuff stolen in the 1930s, and I don't think people find that strange, and there aren't that many people saying 'let it go, it's in the past'.
The only even vaguely plausible solution to this I ever saw (and this was in the late 1990s, when things were bad but less bad than now) was some combination of a formal recognition of the Nakba, some limited rights of return for then older (now very elderly people) who were directly expropriated, a direct and substantial payment stream to the relevant families and of course full return of the Occupied Territories as a place where those people could go and live. Basically, recognition and compensation, but not full restitution or right of return (because that can't be combined with any Zionist principles). But I can't see Netanyahu's Israel doing anything like that, especially after last week.
Matthew, if you were to open access to this article: 1) it would be a huge contribution to the public discourse, 2) it would attract subscribers. If I weren't already a subscriber, I'd be signing up right now. Thank you.
It’s further important to recall that both Jews and Palestinians were displaced in 1948, in fact Jews much more thoroughly than Palestinians: no Jew was left in the areas the Arabs conquered at the end of the war whereas a sizable Arab minority remained in newly created Israel, and were given equal citizenship forthwith, as promised by Israel’s Declaration of Independence. This state of affairs isn’t surprising seeing the sides official position at the eve of the war:1. The Jewish community accepted the partition plan and vowed to give equality to all Arabs in its territory. The Palestinian/Arab leadership promised publicly to kill all the Jews. When the war was over each side basically lived up to its promises. Almost complete ethnic cleansing of Jews from all Arab states (including Jewish communities that were literally millennia old as in Iraq), equal citizenship to Arabs remaining in Israel.
In addition to all that israel that was just born out of a terrible war surviving a genocide attempt a mere 3 years after the Holocaust, *also* had to absorb all the Jewish refugees from the Arab world and the Holocaust refugees. All became citizenship so that the number of new citizens (Jewish AND Arab) far outnumbered Israel’s founding population. (Can you imagine any other country accepting more refugees than its own citizens, all within a few years? ). While tensions remains internally, descendants of these Palestinians Arabs became doctors, government ministers, Israeli Supreme Court judges etc Descendants of Jewish refugees cleansed from Arab states where even better integrated into Israel
Meanwhile as Matt alludes the Palestinians refugees in the Arab lands mostly were intentionally left without citizenship and in refugee camps, and were given a unique refugee status that is inherited intergenerationally contra to how all other refugees, including Jewish refugees of the very same conflict, are defined.
All this matters. Even as Palestinian supporters complain of “genocide” against them their population keeps growing under Israeli occupation (or within Israel as equal citizens). By contrast Palestinians *keep* calling for ethnic cleansing and genocide of Jews, never anllowed annd have no plans to allow a single Jew to live under their rule, and *practice* the genocide they preach whenever they can, as we saw demonstrated horrifically just last week. One cannot be taken seriously as an interlocutor by Israelis (of all political stripes) without acknowledging these facts.