Andre Oboler

Why are there even places called “refugee camps” in Gaza? And why are two thirds of the people living in Gaza, who were born there and lived there their entire lives, called “refugees” from a war that ended more than seven decades ago? The answers to these question unlock the core of the conflict. Here they are (Part 1; Part 2 in the first comment): 1.The 20th century has been marked by a transition from empires to states. We begin the 20th century when much of the world is divided between empires. We end it when much of the world is divided between states. When lucky, those states were based on the self determination of a people who share a common history, language, ethnicity, background religion and connection to a territory. (Zionism emerged in this context based on the idea of self determination for the Jewish people in the only territory to which they were ever connected as a people). When unlucky those new states were artificially created by receding empires drawing boundaries, forcing different peoples to share one state, leading almost always to civil war, dictatorship, or both. This transition has been bloody. It involved two world wars and numerous regional and civil wars. In the bloody process of empires receding and new states emerging to replace them, tens of millions of people were displaced, fleeing across newly created borders, typically to new countries with an ethnic makeup similar to their own. This was true of Hindus and Muslim, Ukrainians, Poles and Germans, Bulgarians, Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Jews. This was not unique. 2.What was unique is that one group only of refugees from that time and those wars were allowed to maintain themselves as endless refugees in anticipation of one day winning a war they had lost. Those were the Arab refugees from the war of 1948, later to be known as Palestinians. All other refugee groups, except the Palestinians, were presented with a clear message: “it’s tough, it’s tragic, move on”. There was a clear understanding that in the most fundamental sense there is no going back - not in place and not in time (thus, there was no such thing as “a right of return”). To seek to go back would mean endless war. And so the message was forward looking and future facing. Tens of millions of refugees and displaced persons, among them millions of Jews, would build new lives in the new countries to which they fled. 3.Except Palestinians. The war that the Arabs of the land and the surrounding countries waged to prevent a Jewish state from emerging and gaining independence failed to achieve its goals. Despite the violent onslaught of 1947-49, Israel emerged as a sovereign state. But the Arabs of the land, sustained by broader Arab support, refused to accept this outcome. They proceeded to undo it through a variety of means, including repeated wars, economic boycotts, international condemnations and a complete refusal of the refugees themselves to be settled, as it would effectively mean accepting that the war was over. 4.To that end of keeping the war of 1948 alive until its goal of undoing the Jewish state could be achieved, a temporary agency established to resettle the refugees - UNRWA (initially called REWA, but the Arabs insisted on the letters UN so that it would appear to enjoy international legitimacy) - was hijacked by the Arab refugees. As a result of this hijacking UNRWA effectively became a Palestinian entity devoted singularly to sustaining and stoking the idea that uniquely among the world’s refugees, Palestinians don’t need to move on and can keep insisting on “return”, both in space and in time, to a time when there was no Israel. UNRWA thus became the mechanism by which the Jewish people alone were denied the right to to consider their hard won self-determination and sovereign statehood as a done deal. (Part 2 continues in the first comment:)