To the Editor:

In his article “The Palestinians and the ‘Right of Return’ ” [May], Efraim Karsh writes that “neither Arab propagandists nor Israeli ‘new historians’ have ever produced any evidence of a Zionist master plan to expel the Palestinians during the 1948 war. For such a plan never existed.”

Perhaps Mr. Karsh can explain these comments, taken right from the horse’s mouth—that is, from David Ben-Gurion:

• “We must expel Arabs and take their places.” (Quoted in Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs by Shabtai Teveth, Oxford University Press, 1985)
• “We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. [Yigal] Allon repeated his question, ‘What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’ ” (Yitzhak Rabin, leaked uncensored version of his memoirs, New York Times, October 23,1979)
• “We must do everything to ensure [the Palestinian refugees] never do return.” (Ben-Gurion, in his diary, July 18, 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice Hall, 1967)

Considering that Mr. Karsh is well-known for accusing Israel’s new historians of “fabricating history”—while side-stepping their lengthy quotations from damning official Israeli documents—it is no surprise he came up with this chestnut.

Nigel Parry
St. Paul, Minnesota

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To the Editor:

Contrary to Efraim Karsh, there are a number of UN resolutions that specifically use the words “right of return.” For example, Resolution 33/28, dated December 7, 1978, says in part:

A just and lasting peace in the Middle East cannot be established without the achievement, inter alia, of a just solution of the problem of Palestine on the basis of the attainment of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return and the right to national independence and sovereignty in Palestine.

Mr. Karsh makes many good points, but it is not fair to leave out simple, easily obtainable material like this.

The real arguments against the Palestinian definition of the right of return are that this right would require the satisfaction of one group of refugees by the creation of a new group of refugees and the destruction of the state of Israel. But this idea clearly contradicts the spirit and meaning of Resolution 194 and all subsequent United Nations affirmations, which are not about erasing the establishment of Israel but about creating peace through the satisfactory settlement of refugees.

In essence, the Palestinians do have a recognized “right of return”—that is, a right to settlement in a Palestinian state, compensation for land lost in 1948, and some settlement within Israel. These meet the essential goals of the UN, which are to turn refugees into permanent citizens and help create regional peace. But the Palestinians have perverted this humane concept into little more than a cry for vengeance to undo the results of the 1948 war. No UN resolution intends this.

Jonathan Kurtzman
Brookline, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

Efraim Karsh’s superb article is a welcome response to the Arab campaign for a Palestinian “right of return.” The notion that millions of Palestinians should be permitted to pour into Israel is so preposterous that many well-meaning people seem to find it hard to take it seriously. Meanwhile, however, it has been gaining sympathy around the world, as exemplified by recent statements from organizations like the World Alliance of YMCA’s, the National Council of Churches of Christ, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the American Green party.

In March, a survey sponsored by several national Jewish organizations found that while Americans view Israel much more favorably than they do the Palestinian Authority, attitudes about the right of return were less encouraging. Asked if Palestinian refugees should have “the right to return to their villages in Israel, [which could] mean the end of the Jewish state,” 33 percent of the public agreed and 22 percent said they did not know. Only 45 percent took the position that refugees should move to a “Palestinian state that will be created in the West Bank and Gaza.” Supporters of Israel need to take seriously the fact that a majority of respondents failed to reject out of hand a plan that could spell the destruction of the Jewish state.

Of course, Israel is not interested in committing national suicide. Still, allowing the Jewish state to be portrayed as rejecting the rights of a suffering people has hurt its position in the international community. The fact is that the responsibility for the plight of the Arab refugees has always lain with Arab leaders, as Mr. Karsh’s article plainly demonstrates. That message should be broadcast widely and often.

Leonard A. Cole
Chairman
Jewish Council for Public
Affairs
New York City

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Efraim Karsh writes:

One of the more confounding aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict is its total impermeability to the fundamental rule of cause-and-effect. Ever reluctant to take responsibility for their own actions, Arab regimes and societies have consistently cast themselves in the role of hapless victims, putting the blame for their own numerous failures on third parties, whether the West or non-Arab actors like Turks and Jews.

With the passage of time and the fading of first-hand collective memory, the line between fact and fiction has become increasingly blurred, even in the minds of those who once knew better. The sustained effort by Palestinian (and Arab) leaders, from Hajj Amin al-Husseini to Yasir Arafat, to abort the Jewish national revival and to expel the largest possible number of Jews from their ancestral homeland has been largely eclipsed. Instead, Israel has been charged with harboring a longstanding grand design to dispossess the Palestinian Arabs from their land. It matters little that neither Arab propagandists nor their Israeli and Western sympathizers have ever produced any evidence of such a design. Through a tendentious use of documentary evidence, including carefully culled misquotations from Zionist leaders, a picture has been painted that grotesquely falsifies Jewish aspirations and policies.

Nigel Parry seems to have been sufficiently convinced by this propaganda to repeat some of its standard claims. But the handful of second-hand citations he provides only serve to negate those claims. Consider his first “comment” by David Ben-Gurion: “we must expel Arabs and take their place.” In fact, Ben-Gurion’s original letter, which can be found in the Israeli archives, says precisely the opposite: “We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their place.” Moreover, the full paragraph in Shabtai Teveth’s book, from which Mr. Parry chooses to quote a single truncated sentence, clearly states that Ben-Gurion “did not wish to do so [i.e., expel the Palestinians], for ‘all our aspiration is built on the assumption—proven throughout all our activity—that there is enough room for ourselves and the Arabs in Palestine.’ ”

In this particular distortion of Ben-Gurion’s (and Teveth’s) words, Mr. Parry takes his cue from the Israeli “new historian” Benny Morris. In his Hebrew-language writings, Morris has cited Ben-Gurion correctly. But in the English-language version of his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987), Morris himself presents Ben-Gurion as saying the opposite. Could it be because he knew his audience would not be able to check for itself the wording of the original Hebrew letter?

Nor does Yitzhak Rabin’s recollection of the battle for Lydda (Lod) in july 1948 indicate any master plan for mass expulsion. As I noted in my article, the expulsion of the town’s residents occurred not in the framework of a premeditated plan but rather in the heat of battle—as a result of a string of unexpected developments on the ground. The action, as I wrote, was “in no way foreseen in military plans for the capture of the town.” Nor was it discussed during the pre-operation briefings. Nor did the initial occupation of the town suggest any intent to expel Arab inhabitants. It was only when their forces encountered stiffer resistance than expected that the local Israeli commanders decided to “encourage” the population’s departure to Arab-controlled areas a few miles to the east. The purpose was twofold: to avoid leaving a hostile armed base at the rear of the advancing Israeli Defense Forces and, by clogging the main roads, to forestall a possible counterattack by Transjordan’s highly effective Arab Legion.

Even on the assumption that Ben-Gurion did meaningfully wave his hand as he was taking his leave from a meeting with local commanders, as Rabin recalled some 30 years later, his alleged gesture could have signified many things other than an intention to “drive them out.” This can be inferred not only from the admission of Rabin’s commander, Yigal Allon, that he himself had already given orders “to help the Lydda inhabitants leave” prior to Ben-Gurion’s arrival, but also from the entry in Ben-Gurion’s war diary to which Mr. Parry refers. Contrary to Mr. Parry’s claim, there is no trace in this entry, made less than a week after the battle for Lydda, of any assertion to the effect that “we must do everything to ensure [the Palestinian refugees] never do return.” What the entry does contain are the following lines on the occupation of Nazareth, which suggest something entirely different:

Yesterday Moshe Carmel gave an order to uproot the Nazareth population. The commander of the brigade hesitated. Upon receiving a query on the matter I immediately cabled that the population should not be removed.

So much for Ben-Gurion’s grand dispossessionary designs.

Jonathan Kurtzman raises the issue of the legal basis of the Palestinian “right of return.” I did not contend that this “right” has never been mentioned in UN resolutions. Rather, I argued that it has no basis whatsoever in General Assembly Resolution 194, or indeed in international law, and that the increasing invocation of this “right” since the late 1960’s reflects a spurious reading of the letter and spirit of Resolution 194 by the Arabs and their Soviet and third-world allies.

Mr. Kurtzman’s suggestion that the refugees should be free to return to a newly established Palestinian state is sensible enough; not so, his proposal of compensation and partial repatriation to Israel. Arab propaganda has succeeded in transforming failed aggressors into hapless victims. The truth is that in 1948 the Palestinians and the Arabs attempted to “cleanse” a neighboring ethnic community. Their failure to achieve this goal does not make them any more deserving of compensation than were the millions of Germans who became refugees as a result of the Nazi war of aggression.

In any case, Mr. Kurtz-man’s formula is totally unacceptable to Palestinian and Arab leaders. They have not perpetuated the refugee problem for so long only to accept something they could have received decades ago. They have done so with a view to weakening, and eventually destroying, the Jewish state. As Israelis have learned to their horror following the collapse of the Barak government’s peace efforts, the Arabs are not, in the foreseeable future, going to relinquish their most efficient anti-Israel weapon.

And why should they? As is aptly noted by Leonard A. Cole, support for the “right of return” in the West far exceeds support for the Palestinian cause as a whole. Substantial audiences that are not instinctively hostile to Israel, or that may even sympathize with its cause, have been convinced by decades of sustained Arab propaganda that the refugee problem is essentially a humanitarian issue rather than an instrument of warfare whose purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state. It is this purpose that must be exposed, understood, and resisted.

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