Many Palestinians carry their own physical keys with symbolic messages today: that they are the rightful owners to homes in Israel and are waiting to move there.
The skeleton keys are not the actual keys to homes that grandparents abandoned in 1948 while they waited for Arab armies to destroy the nascent Jewish State. These Palestinian keys are representational of their quest to a “right of return” to homes in Israel. It has become a physical manifestation of their view of themselves as refugees. However, both the keys and status are manufactured.
As detailed in “Palestinian “Refugees” or “SAPs”?” there are only about 30,000 refugees alive from 1948, as refugee status cannot be handed down like an inheritance. Further, a refugee is someone who left a country, not a house. International law covers refugees return to a country, not an abandoned building (and Palestine was never a country).
Regardless, the acting President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, continues to put the “refugees” as a key issue in negotiations with Israelis. He does this with the blessings of the United Nations which is complicit in misleading the Palestinians.
The United Nations not only created a unique agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) separate for the agency that handles all other refugees in the world (UNHCR), but uniquely enables the descendants of Palestinian refugees to get services from the UN.As elaborated in “Help Refugees: Shut the UNRWA, fund the UNHCR” the staffing of the UNRWA now exceeds the total number of Palestinian refugees.
The bigger issue with the UNRWA is not their giving extended services to millions of Palestinians who are not refugees, but the UN agency’s active encouragement to Palestinians to seek to move to, and delegitimize Israel.
Both the United Nations and Palestinians have manufactured a particular narrative:
- Palestine was an Arab country in 1948
- Palestinian Arabs were the only indigenous people who had lived there for centuries
- Jews ethnically cleansed Palestine of its Arab inhabitants
- Per the points above, Israel is not a legitimate state as the Jews are interlopers who stole the native Arab land
Such story stands in stark contrast to basic facts:
- Palestine was never an independent country
- The region and Mandate of Palestine had a mixture of Jews and Arabs, with Jews accounting for over 30% of the population in 1948
- More Arabs than Jews moved to Palestine under the British Mandate 1922-1948
- Many Palestinian Arabs were not land owners but tenants in the land
- Most Arabs fled from their homes in 1948, while they hoped and waited for Arab armies from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt to destroy Israel
- Israel welcomed non-Jews, giving 160,000 non-Jews citizenship in 1948, in sharp contrast to the Jordanian and Palestinian Arabs who expelled all Jews from Judea and Samaria
As in the painting “Delivery of the Keys,” UNRWA has handed Palestinians a narrative and right to Israel: the Arabs are the rightful owners of Israel. The key above the portal at the UNRWA refugee camp is a potent symbol to all Palestinians, that it is through the United Nations that millions of Arabs will migrate to Israel.
The Vanishing Point
The vanishing point is where eyes are drawn to in the horizon. It is a place where parallel lines converge giving depth to a two dimensional painting. It is also the point where things that become increasingly smaller and faint, disappear altogether.
In the Perugino painting, the vanishing point is the open door to the Temple of Solomon. It is this worldly portal to the heavens, where man’s prayers ascend to ethereal songs. The viewer of the painting is pulled to the very spot where the material world melts – indeed, the vanishing point.