Last year Saif Ammous and Richard Witty had a dialogue about Zionism in this comment section. Now Ammous and Seliger are having a dialogue about the right of return, in posts, this being the last, from Ammous, yesterday. I'll keep this up as long as these guys have the stomach for it.
So here's Ralph Seliger:
I believe that Saif Ammous and his family deserve full compensation for the loss of their property during the 1948 war.
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Who is Ralph Seliger to grant refugees a limited right of return? Who are the signatories of the Geneva accord? Have the refugees been consulted, have they had any voice? Is Sari Nusseibah, the scion of an elite family, in any position to speak on behalf of the refugees?
Ralph and others may go with their games and proposals. But in the end, the elites will need to come out of their gated homes, and go and speak to refugees to find a solution. True, many will likely accept compensation, and many will be happy to have citizenship in a country other than Israel. But as long as people in NY, DC and Tel Aviv opine about the issue with no consultation with the people whose right it is they are negotiating, the entire game is academic.
Ralph, will you go to Lebanon or Jordan, and sit and talk to the refugees? Will you listen to their narratives, their hopes, their dreams? Or are they not worthy of your attention? Are they not to be given a voice of their own?
Test
Seliger's avoidance of the question and disingenuous red herrings does a diservice to the debate.
>> I believe in accordance with the Geneva Accord that Palestinian refugees have the right to return to their state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip — which should become reality as part of a peace agreement for two states.
Umm, no: the Geneva Accord states that war refugees have a right to return to their homes and property. What Selinger seems to be implying here is that, if you've been driven from your home in New York, it's ok for someone to relocate you to Kansas. If Selinger thinks this, he should say this. He should not, however, try to claim that the Geneva Accord would sanction the action.
>> I believe that these displaced people also have the moral right to return to their former properties in Israel, but for the most part, these homes no longer exist.
A couple of things: 1. So what if the homes "no longer exist"? The land is still there, isn't it? Why don't you ask a refugee if he'd rather a) stay where he is or b) pitch a tent on his familly's ancestral property? Secondly, one reason the home no longer exist is because they were destroyed by Israel forces in 1948, and often booby-trapped to ensure the owner would not return.
>> Israel has the sovereign right to determine who should or should not live within its borders.
Again, two things: Israel refuses to declare its own borders; and no, a soveriegn country must allow refugees to return to their homes. That is, if it wants to stay within the norms of international law. Israel can ignore international law (which it often chooses to do) but then they should say as much. And so should Selinger.
And then there's all this stuff:
>> even though it was the Arab leadership that tragically chose to go to war in the first place.
Etc. This is all tripe. Morris, Pappe et al now clearly show that there was a top-down effort to ethnically cleanse Mandate Palestine.
Selinger is still unwilling to admit that it is shocking that Israel refuses to allow a familly to return to its home just because they were not born of a jewish mother. For not even acknowledging the moral dimensions of his own beliefs, tha man is a coward.
Seliger's avoidance of the question and disingenuous red herrings does a diservice to the debate.
>> I believe in accordance with the Geneva Accord that Palestinian refugees have the right to return to their state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip — which should become reality as part of a peace agreement for two states.
Umm, no: the Geneva Accord states that war refugees have a right to return to their homes and property. What Selinger seems to be implying here is that, if you've been driven from your home in New York, it's ok for someone to relocate you to Kansas. If Selinger thinks this, he should say this. He should not, however, try to claim that the Geneva Accord would sanction the action.
>> I believe that these displaced people also have the moral right to return to their former properties in Israel, but for the most part, these homes no longer exist.
A couple of things: 1. So what if the homes "no longer exist"? The land is still there, isn't it? Why don't you ask a refugee if he'd rather a) stay where he is or b) pitch a tent on his familly's ancestral property? Secondly, one reason the home no longer exist is because they were destroyed by Israel forces in 1948, and often booby-trapped to ensure the owner would not return.
>> Israel has the sovereign right to determine who should or should not live within its borders.
Again, two things: Israel refuses to declare its own borders; and no, a soveriegn country must allow refugees to return to their homes. That is, if it wants to stay within the norms of international law. Israel can ignore international law (which it often chooses to do) but then they should say as much. And so should Selinger.
And then there's all this stuff:
>> even though it was the Arab leadership that tragically chose to go to war in the first place.
Etc. This is all tripe. Morris, Pappe et al now clearly show that there was a top-down effort to ethnically cleanse Mandate Palestine.
Selinger is still unwilling to admit that it is shocking that Israel refuses to allow a familly to return to its home just because they were not born of a jewish mother. For not even acknowledging the moral dimensions of his own beliefs, tha man is a coward.
The jews came to Palestine in 1920s and after as colonists, not as immigrants, and they were able to colonise in an unarmed fashion because the British imperial presence prevented the native population from resisting colonisation, a British imperial presence persistently under the influence of zionist-lobby groups in London not altogether dissimilarly from the US foreign policy under such influence today.
I think Seliger intentionally omits the fact that Zionism main purpose was to control the land, irrespective of who were living there. While they may have "immigrated" there, it certainly does not put them into the same equation as a recent immigrant who wishes to be a citizen of the host country, ie a Mexican wishing to gain American citizenship status. Zionists always had the agenda of making this land for themselves and to accommodate as little as non-Jews as possible; that was what Herzl envisioned and what every other disciple after strived for. There was no hope for assimilation into an Arab state, it aimed to pre-empt a potential Arab state for a Jewish one (even Transjordan). In fact, the Balfour Declaration was made public back in 1917, well before the first revolt of 1920 (according to Seliger). This was the stamp of approval for Palestinian fears: that the Zionists were giong to control their homes. It may be unimportant to Seliger, but the indigenous people of Palestine viewed these immigrants as invaders for they had no desire to share the land with them. Hence the reason for the revolts.
Among Palestinian society, there was also upheaval and land-grabbing. Laws had changed, powers had changed, the role of the urban relative to the rural had changed.
Please don't be naive enough to state that "Jews caused all the conflict".
Its a lie.
Migration, conflict was occurring among many sectors, and Zionists and Zionism was a component of the change.
The "they were always there" or "things were always stable" is a lie.
Face48:
Sari Nusseibeh has gone to refugee camps to tell people frankly that for most of them, the "right of return" will not mean a literal return to homes that no longer exist and to a country that has been totally transformed in 60 years.
Slim:
First, it would be nice for you to learn to spell my name. Then you should learn to read Benny Morris and other renowned historians and writers on this period on the complicated reality of 1947-'48. You should also go back and read the Geneva Accord (also known as the Geneva Initiative).
It is definitely true that the Arab refugees have a right to their property and/or compensation. As a practical matter, most of these properties no longer exist and no state is required to commit suicide to satisfy another people who sought to destroy their society some generations before.
Of the tens of millions of people displaced by the upheavals and wars that immediately followed in the wake of World War II, none have remained refugees over the decades and none expect to return to where they came from: not the Sudeten Germans, the Balts and other Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, Poland and the USSR, and not the millions of Muslims and Hindus who fled repectively from India and Pakistan.
Joshua,
You should read the Balfour Declaration, which declares that the Jewish effort to reestablish the Jewish homeland in Palestine should not inhibit the rights of its other inhabitants. You should also acknowledge that many Zionists– most prominently Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein– all supported a Jewish homeland that would also be part of a bi-national reality in Israel/Palestine. To others who question the Jewish right to aspire to Palestine as a refuge and a homeland, you should look at the Jewish reality in the early to mid-20th century, with racist and murderous antisemitism prevailing in Russia, making strides in France and most other countries in Europe and becoming genocidal in Nazi Germany. In the meantime, the US severely limited immigration for Jews in 1924 and even in the FDR administration, Undersecretary of State Breckenridge Long actually instructed US consulates to obstruct the lawful efforts of Jews to obtain immigration visas before and during World War II. And the British virtually closed off Palestine to Jewish refugees via its White Paper of 1939.
The "wording" of the Balfour Declaration was rather empty, especially since they did not even mention the inhabitants of Palestine aside from a negative entity opposed to Jewish nationalism. The vagaries of the Western powers to limit immigration to Palestine primarly bordered on reasoning, for they did not want an imbroglio erupting in Palestine as well as neighbouring Arab states whom the British wanted to keep control over. The Zionist issue was one that would spark unity amongst them (under British view, that is) and one that would have the British as their target, for the Arabs were very well aware that it was the British who were (largely) responsible for the Zionist colonisation. The culmination was the White Paper in response to the Arab Revolts, violence against the British because they were held responsible for the usurpation of Palestine.
The purpose of Zionism was to erect a Jewish state for Jews; the non-Jewish presence was a mere afterthought. To question of a right for a refuge is one thing; to pick-and-choose who should get that refuge for the ultimate goal of a Jewish state is another (as we are all well aware that the sick and the elderly were not taken). It was only a "refuge" for the ideologically driven, for those who held Zionist beliefs.
We can note that many Zionists advocated binationalism; we can also note that some Palestinians wanted some form of pragmatism to accomodate the new "reality"; both sides were marginal and both lost out. Each side wanted control over the other even in the form of binationalism. As time went on, the divide went deeper as suspicions of the other were justified with each immigration and violent uproar. Furthermore, even Ben-Gurion feigned at a form of unitary state but his sympathies were very much on transfer; Ben-Gurion is on the left side of the spectrum and the right had an even more dramatic proposal for the Arabs (Iron Wall). This duplicitous speech is a symptom that the West characterised for Arafat and the PLO; why is that litmus test not warranted for the founders of Zionists who wanted to play the right cards to get what they wanted?
Lastly, the Palestinians were independent of the Jewish reality in Eastern-to-Western Europe. The people had just cause in believing that their land were being taken over by foreign powers.