Chutzpah by Alan Dershowitz

In his book "Chutzpah", Alan Dershowitz writes about Palestinian refugees:

"The big issue between 1948 and 1967 was the Arab "refugees" who had left Israel and moved to areas under the control of Arabs. There was great controversy, both within Israel and outside, over whether these Arab refugees had been pushed out by Israel or had left on instructions of Arab leaders with the promise of a glorious return. There is obviously some truth to both positions. Certainly, many Arabs were frightened away by Israeli soldiers; some obviously left after hearing of civilian "massacres". (Whether these accounts were true, false, exaggerated or covered up is not as relevant as whether they were believed by the Arabs who left.)

"As a civil libertarian and human rights activist, I was never much moved by the claims of these refugees. Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary. Making Arab families move - intact - from one Arab village or town to another may constitute a human rights violation. But in the whole spectrum of human rights issues - especially taking into account the events in Europe during the 1940's - it is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal or other projects that require large-scale movement of people. For example, the building of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt necessitated the relocation of 100,000 Arabs and the destruction of numerous Arab villages. There were certainly numerous precedents following both world wars, as well as other dislocating events of history - including the establishment of new states. There were so many refugee groups throughout the postwar world, and in so much worse condition, that it is difficult to understand why this particular dislocation assumed such international proportions.

"For example, following the end of World War II, approximately fifteen million ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from their homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and other Central and Eastern European areas where their families had lived for centuries. Two million died during this forced expulsion. Czechoslovakia alone expelled nearly three million Sudeten Germans, turning them into displaced persons. The United States, Britain, and the international community in general approved these expulsions, as necessary to secure a more lasting peace. [...] President Franklin Roosevelt's assistant Harry Hopkins memorialized his boss's view that although transfer of ethnic Germans "is a hard procedure, it is the only way to maintain peace." [...]

[Dershowitz describes other population transfers in the Middle East, primarily hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews who left their ancient communities in Arab lands for Israel.]

"But the Arab leaders did not want peace. They used the refugee issue to encourage continuing belligerency. It became an excuse for not making peace - for not accepting the reality that the ancient land of Israel-Palestine could be populated by two peoples and divided into two nations. It should be recalled that between 1948 and 1967, Israel posed no barrier to the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. There was no Palestinian state because the Arab leaders did not want a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state. Their collective goal was the total destruction of the Jewish state. The Palestinian refugees would better serve that goal if they were kept in camps as a homeless people than if they were allowed to move out of the camps and establish their own state.

"I believed then, and I believe now, that those who singled out the "plight" of the Arab refugees were more interested in singling out those who had allegedly caused the problem - namely the Jews - than they were in helping those who were its victims. Elevating the Arab refugee problem above the more compelling problem of other groups was a form of indirect international anti-Semitism, acceptable in a world too close to the Holocaust to legitimate direct anti-Jewish bigotry.

[Dershowitz adds here in a footnote:]

"A New York Times story of August 12, 1990, described the plight of 'fifteen million men, women and children' who have been 'internationally recognized as refugees.' Following World War II, the number was between thirty-three and forty-three million, and at the time the Palestinian refugee problem began - with 600,000 to 750,000 refugees - the number throughout the world was between sixteen and eighteen million. Many of the current group are refugees from Islamic nations. Yet the world knows little of their situation. Only the Palestinian refugees have received widespread international support. It is fair to ask why."

[...]

"All of this is not to diminish the suffering of the Palestinian people between 1948 and 1967, but it is to emphasize how much of that suffering was deliberately engineered by the leaders fo those Arab nations that were determined not to settle the Palestinian issue in a manner that permitted the continued existence of the Jewish state."