Now they want to 'talk' about 'refugees'
US Special Middle East envoy George Mitchell is in town to talk about 'refugees' and he's been greeted by a nasty article by 'Palestinian' chief Responding to an op-ed piece written by chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat in The Guardian on Friday, one Israeli official said, “Erekat says he wants peace, but by pursuing a hard-line position on refugees, he is actually making peace more difficult.The 'refugee' issue is zero sum. Israel would have to be insane to offer any kind of 'right of return.' Can you say 'Pandora's box'?
“The international community and leading Palestinian moderates have all spoken about the need for the Palestinians to compromise on the traditional position on the refugees, but in his op-ed piece, Erekat reaffirmed the hard-line Palestinian position, and in doing so – rather than showing flexibility – has showed an unwillingness to compromise.”
Erekat, in a piece marking 62 years since UN General Assembly Resolution 194 calling for a return of Palestinian refugees “wishing to live at peace with their neighbors” and compensation for their losses, wrote that “contrary to what Israeli political figures would like the world to believe, the issue of Palestinian refugees is not an academic matter, the solution of which is somehow rendered moot by the passage of time and by the creation of Israeli ‘facts on the ground.’”
Erekat posits as fact that Israel “bears responsibility for the creation of the refugees,” and puts the number of Palestinian refugees today at “more than 7 million people worldwide – 70 percent of the entire Palestinian population.
“Disregarding their legitimate legal rights enshrined in international law, their understandable grievances accrued over prolonged displacement, and their aspirations to return to their homeland, would certainly make any peace deal signed with Israel completely untenable.”
Comparing Palestinian refuges to Bosnian refugees and noting that then-US secretary of state Madeleine Albright called on the Bosnian refugees to return en masse to their old homes, Erekat said that in both “Bosnia and in Palestine, the return of refugees has been considered absolutely necessary for the stability of peace. Any deal that does not respect the rights of refugees has been viewed as bearing the seed of its inevitable failure.”
Responding to Erekat, Israeli officials said he conveniently omitted the fact that the 1948 war during which the refuges were displaced was caused because the Arabs rejected the two-state solution being offered and “embarked on a war of aggression to violently overturn the legitimate decision of the international community.”
Labels: Palestinian refugees, right of return, Saeb Erekat
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:34 AM
3 Comments:
Plus, as I have written before, the whole idea is ridiculous. After creating a brand new country for the Palestinians, the first thing the state wants to do is ship 7 million of its brand new citizens to a neighboring country. Does that make any sense to anybody?
..not only does Erekat insist, enabled by UNRWA but contrary to non-Palestinian refugees, that refugee status accrues multi-generationally wherever and whenever friends-and-descendants-and-second-cousins live and are born, unassimilated for decades in host countires, and insist they be given the right to return to their "original homes", but Elder of Ziyon notes that Erekat mangles history to declare that Israel's right to exist as a state is "conditional" on fulfilling these lunatic diktats. You'd think there'd be nothing else to talk about until the Palestinians stop trying to impose self-liquidation on Israel.
The Palestinians have never forsworn the right of return. Its not going to happen in our lifetime. Saed's Erekat's words are proof of it.
What could go wrong indeed
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