If only I could avoid responsibility for some of my actions. Being able to start fresh – as if nothing had happened – after making a mistake is the best of all conceivable gifts.
Every aspect of happiness – health, wealth, marital bliss – could easily be assured if one were able to just go back and start anew.
My 401K retirement fund is a mere 65 percent of what it was in 1998. I’d love to go back to my 1998 balance and move all my funds from stocks to money market, thus making myself almost twice as wealthy upon my retirement.
I would be much luckier in my personal life, too, under such an arrangement. Rather than learning the hard way that squabbles often lead to broken relationships, I could just go back and be more considerate right from the start.
By returning to my childhood and investing more in toothpaste and less in candy, I could now boast uninterrupted rows of healthy white teeth.
But the real world does not work this way. Fund managers hold you to your investment decisions, however ruinous in the light of subsequent events. Be it money or health or marriage, there is no shirking the consequences of past actions.
But not everyone plays by this rule. Immediately upon the creation of Israel in 1948, the neighboring Arab countries invaded it in an attempt to throw the Jews into the sea. Many Arabs fled to Arab-controlled territories in the expectation that an Arab victory would be quick and their return swift. But the Arab victory did not materialize and the half-million Arabs who left in 1948 have now become several million ‘Palestinian refugees.’
The proponents of the ‘right of return’ claim these Palestinians have a natural right to live in Israel – as if nothing had happened, as if there had been no Arab invasion of the newborn Jewish state that created the Palestinian refugees in the first place.
This evasion of responsibility is standard operating procedure among Israel’s enemies. For example, the call to end the occupation, remove the settlements and return to the 1967 borders conveniently ignores the fact that were it not for the Arabs’ attempted annihilation of Israel in 1967, there would have been no occupation and no settlements.
Similarly, the suggestion that Israel set the clock back to September 2000 intentionally neglects to take into account the intervening intifada and the terror unleashed by it.
Likewise the demands that Israel release Palestinian prisoners are necessarily silent on what those prisoners were imprisoned for.
In the same vein, the cries for Israel to ‘pull down the wall’ say nothing about what it was that prompted the building of the security fence.
Such irresponsible self-righteousness bedevils any attempt to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Why should the Palestinians be an exception to the rule that actions have consequences? Should they not be held to account for their past decisions? Why, instead of inciting hatred and warfare for half a century, didn?t the Arab leaders who made the bad decision to invade Israel in 1948 help those Arabs who made the equally bad decision to flee?
The Palestinians like to claim that Israel itself utilizes a law of return that allows any Jew to relocate to Israel and receive immediate citizenship. Why, the Palestinians ask, do people from Ukraine and Belarus have a right of return, but we do not?
Interestingly, if the Palestinians were to model their ‘right of return’ on that of the Jews, they would indeed have one. But it would not allow them to return to Israel. Nor to the West Bank or Gaza.
Here’s why: As history tells us, Jews were forcibly expelled from their land, and after surviving for centuries as an unwelcome and persecuted minority wherever they dwelled, finally decided to reclaim their patrimony and began making their way back to their homeland.
The Arabs wound up in Palestine in a rather different manner – through the conquest of neighboring lands. Starting in about 650 CE, the Arabs, through aggression and occupation (to use the words Arabs love to apply to Israeli actions), spread their empire from France through Spain and North Africa all the way to India.
And they tried to conquer the rest of the world – they attacked in France and Asia Minor, only to be repelled on both fronts. Yet the results of their empire-building are as spectacular as those of the Romans and the British. Unlike the British and the Romans, however, the Arab empire did not recede over time: the only lost possessions were Portugal and Spain, which were regained some five hundred years ago by the Christians, and the small sliver of a chunk of Palestine, repossessed in the twentieth century by the Jews.
If the Arabs truly want to be just, they would be well advised to lower the pitch of their voices when talking of ‘Israeli aggression’ and mind the fact that they live off the spoils of Arab imperialism. For all practical purposes, Arafat and Co. are simply trying to keep the Arabs’ colonial booty.
If any Arab wishes to return to his true-blue, rightful homeland – to the land of his forefathers, to the Arab equivalent of Israel, to the land to which they should have an inalienable ‘right of return’ – that place is not hard to find: it’s what today is called Saudi Arabia. This is where any Arab should rightfully expect full welcome; this is where the Palestinians should turn to if they wish for a ‘just solution’ to their refugee problem.
On the other hand, the very idea of Arabs demanding a right of return to their former colonial possession now called Israel is no less ridiculous than the idea of Italians claiming a right of return to England or Englishmen claiming a right of return to India. While no one would deny individuals from these countries a right to apply for residency in their former colonies, it would not be seen as part of any entitlement, of any ‘right.’
Though by the nature of things there really is no such thing as a ‘right of return,’ there is nothing wrong with the Palestinians? dream of a homeland. What is wrong is the address to which they turn with their grievances and claims. It is only Saudi Arabia, not Israel or any other country, that can justly make their dreams of return come true.
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