The most outspoken advocates of a right to return to pre-1948 homes in the Holy Land do not recognize the right of others to return to their pre-70 home.
Repeated efforts to restore peace to the Holy Land have foundered on Arab insistence on a right to return to homes inhabited berfore the 1948 conflict between the new State of Israel and its Arab neighbors. Most notably, the Clinton-brokered near-agreement at Camp David in late 2000 was said to have collapsed over that very issue.
Authorities sympathetic to the late Yasir Arafat have opined that neither he, at that time, nor any Arab representative since could survive a surrender of that right. To illustrate, poignant stories are told of refugee families retaining the worn and ancient keys to long-lost West Bank homes in the unquenchable hope that they will some day be restored to them.The chronology of failed negotiations suggests that the Palestinians or their advocates have passed up the opportunity for an independent state in principled fidelity to the right of return. And to this day, the most conciliatory Arab position reported has been to have Israel accept an unspecified number of 1948 refugees or descendants and compensate the others for their losses.
But, ironically, advocates of these or more extreme positions have little sympathy for the "right of return" exercised by the descendants of Judean residents of the same land forced to flee their homes nearly 2,000 years ago. Most of the world acknowledges a Roman conquest of an approximately 1,000-year-old Jewish state just before the turn of the commonly designated B.C.-A.D. eras. World history records a bloody, crucifixion-studded suppression of Jewish freedom aspirations climaxing in the destruction of the Jewish Temple in the year 70 with concurrent ruin of the land that forced the bulk of the survivors to flee. Sincerely or otherwise, Arafat and many of his successors have denied any connection between the Jews of today and the Israelites or Judeans who populated the Holy Land millennia ago.
There is evidence that a small remnant of Jews persisted in the Holy Land. It is clear, however, that the great majority of Jews were soon scattered over Europe, North Africa, and Asia. And it appears that from the very beginning of what became known as the Diaspora, or dispersion, their prayers and hopes were focused on a return to their homeland. Jews began trickling back in the early 13th century, and the Spanish Inquisition and related persecutions brought a few thousand more in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
The organized flow of Jews back to the Holy Land began in earnest only in the late 19th century, first in response to intensified persecutions in Russia and then as part of a world Zionist movement launched by Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl. It was Herzl, an assimilated Jew, who reluctantly concluded that his people would always be vulnerable to oppression without a land of their own, and that the logical land was their former homeland, then a backwater province of the Ottoman Empire with a largely impoverished Arab population numbering less than a quarter of a million.
However, it was the nearly successful Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe in the 1940's that ultimately moved the post-war world, now organized as a United Nations, to sponsor a Jewish state in that ancient homeland. Understandably, the Arabs view that action as a salving of the conscience of the West, where the Holocaust took place, in a land that they regard as exclusively theirs.
Nor can they appreciate the irony that a right of return they have clung to for all of sixty years has been actually exercised by another people after 2,000 years.
