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Tsvi Bisk – Israel: “Refugees: and Settlers”

The Palestinian leadership affirms the “right of return” according to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194. Israel counters that this means the destruction of the Jewish State and of Jewish self-determination, and since self-determination is defined as a right in the United Nations Charter, Resolution 194 runs counter to the United Nations Charter. Most thinking Palestinians realize that Israel will never submit on this issue. Yet the Palestinian leadership cannot submit on the “right of return” as long as so many Palestinians live in the squalor of refugee camps. The solution is to make the Palestinian “refugee” problem a non-issue by turning them into middle-class consumers in their present places of residence.

1. The European Union and the United States could promote a 10 percent yearly economic growth rate in Jordan over the next 10 to 15 years. Sixty percent of Jordan’s citizens are Palestinian, constituting the largest Palestinian “refugee population”. Jordan has 90 percent literacy (15 percent with a post-high school education). In other words, they have the human resources to support such a growth rate over a sustained period. A vastly improved standard of living would lessen grassroots pressure regarding the actual “right of return,” thus providing greater diplomatic flexibility.
2. About 400,000 Palestinian “refugees” live in Lebanon. These are more internment than refugee camps. Unlike Jordan, they have no rights and live in hopeless squalor. They are the most radical regarding the “right of return.” The European Union and the United States must pressure Lebanon to grant full citizenship while declaring the refugee camps “tax-free zones,” enabling free access to European and American markets. A special investment bank should be established to generate such economic activity. As with the Jordanian example, within 10-15 years these people would become middle class and lessen the grassroots pressure on Palestinian leadership regarding the “right of return.”
3. In support of these two steps, Israel should forego the 3.5 billion U.S. dollar aid package from the United States and propose that 2 billion of this should be dedicated to Jordanian economic growth and 1.5 billion to Lebanese refugee camp economic development. This aid constitutes significantly less than 1 percent of Israel’s GDP and many Israelis (including myself) view our constant pleading for this aid to be a national disgrace, given that Israel is a developed country and could easily make up this so-called loss of revenue by slightly increasing Israel’s VAT or eliminating the self-evident inefficiencies in Israel’s byzantine and often corrupt bureaucracy.
4. Since 1948, monies directed to the refugee ‘problem’ by way of UNRWA have been quadruple that given to Europe, per individual, under the Marshall Plan, yet these people are mostly still living in squalor. Perhaps it is time for the West to initiate and manage a mini-Marshall Plan to resolve the material plight of Palestinians in refugee camps. This would be much cheaper than perpetuating it by way of a morally compromised UNRWA.

 

UNRWA plays a major role in the Palestinian propensity to never say yes to anything. It is an enabler of the corruption infecting Palestinian society, which is a disincentive for corrupt leadership to advance peace because it is much easier to steal in anarchy. UNRWA actually manufactures refugees on an industrial scale. According to international law, refugees are persons that have to flee their country of birth and don’t have citizenship or legal residence in another country. Descendants of refugees cannot inherit refugee status. A third-generation Palestinian lawyer legally living in Michigan or Canada is not a refugee. Descendants of refugees that have not acquired citizenship or legal residence are stateless persons, not refugees. UNRWA is an obstacle to peace and should be absorbed by the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR).

 

Intellectual clarity has a place in resolving problems: e.g. differentiating between “The Right of Return,” “The Right of Self Determination,” and a “Law of Return.” Rational Israelis in 2022 have little problem with Palestinian self-determination and their desire to create their own state, or with them adopting a “Law of Return” to that state (on the Israeli model). But if they have a ‘right of return’ to anywhere in historical Palestine because their forefathers came from there, then the settlers can also claim a right of return to anywhere in historical Israel because their forefathers came from there.

Gaza and the Settlers

The EU, United States, and relevant Arab states could initiate doubling the land mass of the Gaza Strip by reclaiming land from the sea and building a port, an LNG facility, a desalination plant,  power station, and airport on the reclaimed land in exchange for Israel annexing all the land west of the security barrier. Excluding Jerusalem, there are approximately 450,000 Jewish residents in the West Bank, less than 100,000 of them east of the security barrier. In other words, about 350,000 of them live on 2 percent of the land contiguous to Israel proper. The Palestinians have already agreed that these areas can be annexed to Israel in return for an equal amount of land from Israel contiguous to the Gaza Strip—the well-known land swap concept. Since Israel would be required to remove dozens of settlements in order to fulfill such a deal (a total political non-starter) the land reclamation scheme is a much more practical alternative. Such a deal would greatly ameliorate Gazan economic stress while making the settler dilemma more manageable. Jerusalem is, of course, a distinctly separate and much more complicated issue.

 

Forests do not pop into existence in all their full-grown glorious majesty; neither does peace. Both grow slowly out of tiny seeds carefully planted and nourished. I offer the above as seeds that might potentially grow into a confederation model as the true path to peaceful coexistence.

Tsvi Bisk is an Israeli-American Futurist. His most recent book is The Suicide of the Jews.