The West Misses the Point: Palestinians Don’t Want a State

France, Britain and Canada are preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the next UN General Assembly meeting in September. There’s a problem with that: Palestinians don’t want a state. If they did, they’d have one by now. They could have had a state after the UN General Assembly called for partition in 1947. Instead, they started a war against the Yishuv. Yasser Arafat could have worked toward a state after he signed the Oslo Accords in 1993. Instead, in a radio address in Arabic, he reassured his followers that this was only a step – part of his “phased strategy” – toward the elimination of the Jewish state. In 2000, he walked away from the offer of a state at Camp David and started the second intifada. Similarly, Mahmood Abbas turned down the offer of a state in 2008. Since then, notwithstanding ongoing opportunities, the Palestinians have made no serious moves toward statehood.

What Palestinians do want, more than anything, is to eliminate the Jewish state, imposing Arab hegemony “from the river to the sea.” Unable to accomplish that by force, they are employing the demographic threat of the so-called right of return. And the UN has become complicit in their effort.

During the 1948 Israeli war of independence, approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from what is now the state of Israel. Shortly after the war, the UN formed the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to manage the welfare of the refugees. UNRWA’s original mandate was to resettle the refugees in their host countries. Under international law, that was the established practice for refugee populations at the time. However, Arab states and Palestinian leaders immediately called for recognition of a right of the refugees to return to their homes. At the same time, they made clear that this would mean the destruction of the state of Israel. As the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi has noted, “The concept of a right of return was thus fostered by the early Palestinian organizations and later by the PLO as a central mobilizational slogan.” The “right of return” and the goal of eliminating the Jewish state have been linked ever since. And it wasn’t long before the UN shared that goal.

In the face of Arab opposition to any resettlement, UNRWA began advocating the return of the refugees to their former homes. UNRWA then took the unprecedented position that the original 1948 refugees and all their descendants are entitled to refugee status. That now amounts to approximately five million people who, UNRWA maintains, have a “right of return” to what is now the state of Israel. It’s important to be clear on this point: The “right of return” is not actually about return. It’s about mass immigration into Israel by millions of people who have never lived there. Today, there is nothing more central to Palestinian identity than this supposed right. It has come to dominate Palestinian nationalism and politics. It has also come to dominate the thinking of Western pro-Palestinian activists, particularly the “anti-colonial” movement.

The charade peaked in November 1974, when the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3236 (XXIX). There, it “reaffirmed” the so-called “inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they [had] been displaced and uprooted, and call[ed] for their return.” (The UNGA gave no indication of where or when such a right might have been previously “affirmed.”) That right, the resolution provided, would go hand-in-hand with the Palestinian “right to self-determination” and “right to national independence and sovereignty.”

The first thing to know about Resolution 3236 is that it’s the product of the same anti-Israel cabal that produced the “Zionism is racism” resolution (UNGA Resolution 3379). During the sixties, as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) grew, American influence at the UN declined. In September 1973, Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi, having competed for leadership of the NAM, agreed to work together to take control of the UN, further weaken the role of the United States, and end the existence of the State of Israel. To help achieve that goal, Qaddafi enlisted the Organization of the Islamic Conference while Castro enlisted the Soviet bloc. They also gathered support from sub-Saharan African states.

In line with that approach, the UNGA granted observer status to the Palestine Liberation Organization and invited Arafat to address the 1974 session of the Assembly. There, he declared that “Zionism is an ideology that is imperialist, colonialist [and] racist.” Indeed, referring to Israel, Arafat used the words “racist” or “racism” more than a dozen times. Most importantly, he asked the UNGA to aid the Palestinian “people’s return to its homeland.” Nine days later, the UNGA did exactly that, adopting Resolution 3236, which purported to recognize a Palestinian right of return. Continuing their mission, the proponents of Resolution 3236 convinced the UNGA to adopted the “Zionism is racism” resolution a year later. It was not revoked until 1991.

Any argument that Resolution 3236 establishes a right of return must contend with the issue of Israeli sovereignty. As international law scholar Kurt Rene Radley has written, “At the very least, [Resolution 3236] proposes that the displaced Palestinians have an absolute right to return to Israeli territory despite any objections that that state might interpose. Such a proposition would alone render meaningless the concept of ‘sovereign equality’ of states upon which, according to Article 2(1) of the [UN] Charter, the United Nations is based. But Resolution 3236 goes even further to state that the displaced Palestinians have not only an absolute right to return to the Israeli state but also have the right to do so for the purpose of pursuing their separate nationalist identity. It is difficult to imagine how much closer the General Assembly could have come to endorsing the destruction, in part or whole, of a member state.” In fact, that destruction is exactly what the proponents of Resolution 3236 had in mind.

As Radley and others have demonstrated – see, for example, The War of Return by Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf – the claim that Palestinian refugees have a right to return to what is now the state of Israel is a legal fallacy. Unfortunately, it is a fallacy that the West has indulged and failed to debunk. As a result, for decades, the claimed right of return has been the major stumbling block, the root of Palestinian intransigence, in peace negotiations. Thus, the biggest obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state is of the Palestinians’ own making. Western leaders might want to stop their posturing and consider that.