Peter Beinart & the Bourgeois strategy.

Peter Beinart writes in Jewish Currents-

IN APRIL, when Joe Biden announced that he would restore US funding for The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA),

Biden's announcement was a riposte to China's five point plan for the region- including negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis to be held in Beijing. 

which provides education, health care, and other services to Palestinian refugees, establishment American Jewish groups reacted with dismay. A letter signed by Hadassah, B’nai B’rith, and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) blamed UNRWA’s schools for teaching Palestinian refugees “lessons steeped in anti-Semitism and supportive of violence.” AIPAC accused the organization of “inciting hatred of Jews and the Jewish state.”

Why are the Palestinians treated differently from other displaced people? Why are they excluded from the protection of the UNHCR? 

The fact is, unlike UNRWA, UNHCR has a specific mandate to assist refugees in eliminating their refugee status by local integration in the current country, resettlement in a third country or repatriation when possible. The Palestinians lost greatly by this differential treatment, though this may not have been obvious at the time. After all, state capacity in the region seemed low in the early Fifties. Politically, it may be argued, they gained because they were being treated as a nationality with an entitlement to a State. But that State never materialized. After 1967, Israel- which had taken responsibility for all refugees on its soil- preferred to work with the UNRWA. The result was that Palestinians in the occupied territories were consigned to a second class status. But, increasingly, they were vulnerable elsewhere in the Middle East. Had they been under the UNHCR, other States would have taken over responsibility for them in return for cash.

 Israel's deal with the UNRWA was meant to be a temporary arrangement but it has dragged on and on. Since UNRWA is exclusively concerned with Palestinians- who make up almost all its 30,000 workforce- it naturally has a Palestinian identity. Once Hamas took control of Gaza, it was inevitable that UNRWA would work with them. Indeed several prominent Hamas politicians work or worked for the UNRWA Schools. This is what led to the defunding by the US in 2018. America didn't want to pay for the propagation of hate against itself. Interestingly, UNRWA fears it is losing a turf war- and thus funding- in East Jerusalem. The Hamas rocket attacks, which are a means of asserting itself in that region, are in their interest. 

But AIPAC and the ZOA did not merely accuse UNRWA of miseducating Palestinian refugees.

Thus turning them into implacable foes of the Jews. 

Along with Israeli government officials, they have questioned whether most of the Palestinians that UNRWA serves are refugees at all.

They are not displaced people. It is only because of UNRWA that they failed to get Civil and Settlement rights. This made them vulnerable to expulsion from numerous Arab countries.  

More Jews fled Muslim countries in the region than Palestinians fled Israel. Most of the Jews were assimilated into Israel- though they received less help than emigrants from Europe- and have done well. By 1963, their camps had turned into townships. Those who emigrated elsewhere probably did even better. Not having a UN bureaucracy to look after you seems to have a salutary effect.

AIPAC has slammed UNRWA’s “misguided definition of refugees.” ZOA called UNRWA’s clientele “the descendants of Arab refugees.” Israel’s Ambassador to the US and the UN, Gilad Erdan, declared that, “this UN agency for so-called ‘refugees’ should not exist in its current format.” 

It was Israel which asked UNRWA to stay on in 1967. It is difficult to see what could replace it. In any case, the General Assembly- which alone can disband it- is in no mood to further harm the Palestinians. China, now it is heading the UNSC, is courting Arab and Islamic goodwill on this issue in a statesmanlike way while Biden flounders. 

Still, the UNRWA is a good example of a bureaucracy which harms its clients. 

The fundamental problem with UNRWA, according to this line of argument, is that it treats the children and grandchildren of Palestinians expelled at Israel’s founding as refugees themselves.

Yes. That was written into its remit. It is now responsible for about 5.6 million people. But they fare worse than refugees handled by UNHCR. From the legal point of view-  under Article 1A of the 1951 Convention, displaced Palestinian would be entitled to the benefits of the Refugee Convention “ipso facto” when they no longer enjoyed protection or assistance from the two UN agencies set up specifically for the Palestinian refugees (the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)).

It is interesting that 1948 refugees in Jordan who did not register with UNRWA fared better (because of Black September) than those that did. 

Establishment Jewish critics don’t blame UNRWA merely for helping Palestinians pass down their legal status as refugees, but their identity as refugees as well.

I think it is their identity as the enemies of Jews in the region which is what bothers Israelis. 

In The War of Return, a central text of the anti-UNRWA campaign, the Israeli writers Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf allege that without UNRWA, refugee children “would likely have lost their identity and assimilated into surrounding society.”

This is a fair point. UNRWA indoctrinates kids in a particular ideology which, however, has little connection with reality. 

Instead, with UNRWA’s help, Palestinians are “constantly looking back to their mythologized previous lives” while younger generations act as if they have “undergone these experiences themselves.” To Schwartz and Wilf’s horror, many Palestinians seem to believe that in every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Palestine.

A cash strapped UNRWA can't do much of that sort of thing in Lebanon- where Palestinians are worst affected.  

As it happens, I read The War of Return just before Tisha B’Av, the day on which Jews mourn the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem and the exiles that followed. On Tisha B’Av itself, I listened to medieval kinnot, or dirges, that describe those events—which occurred, respectively, two thousand and two thousand five hundred years ago—in the first person and the present tense.

Did those kinnot encourage Beinart to go off and kill Romans or Babylonians? 

In Jewish discourse, this refusal to forget the past—or accept its verdict—evokes deep pride.

But the Jewish state will lock you up if you run around trying to kill Arabs or Assyrians or whatever. 

The late philosopher Isaiah Berlin once boasted that Jews “have longer memories” than other peoples. And in the late 19th century, Zionists harnessed this long collective memory to create a movement for return to a territory most Jews had never seen. “After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion,” proclaims Israel’s Declaration of Independence. The State of Israel constitutes “the realization” of this “age-old dream.”

The Jews came as peaceful settlers paying good money to buy land. The position of the Palestinians worsened- not just in Israel, but also in other countries in the region- because their leaders took to terrorism and gangsterism.  

Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for Palestinians?

Because they will be killed if they try to kill Jews.

Asking the question does not imply that the two dreams are symmetrical. The Palestinian families that mourn Jaffa or Safed lived there recently and remember intimate details about their lost homes.

But Israeli settlers have yet more recent memories. 

They experienced dispossession from Israel-Palestine. The Jews who for centuries afflicted themselves on Tisha B’Av, or created the Zionist movement, only imagined it.

Because they were taught to do so. The suggestion is UNRWA is teaching Palestinian kids to kill to get back their patrimony. Since Israel is much stronger, that's not a very helpful type of education. 

It may be that the Jewish ethos or remembering their homeland helped them succeed in their lives. What is certain is that Jews were considered a peaceful- perhaps even cowardly- people. They tended to do well in commerce and the arts and sciences and the legal profession. It is only relatively recently that Jews have become associated with martial prowess.  

“You never stopped dreaming,” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once told an Israeli interviewer. “But your dream was farther away in time and place . . . I have been an exile for only 50 years. My dream is vivid, fresh.” Darwish noted another crucial difference between the Jewish and Palestinian dispersions: “You created our exile, we didn’t create your exile.”

Darwish was only barred from Israel after he joined the PLO. But some twenty years later he was allowed back to settle. He did return but didn't like it and left once again. He created his own exile. Had Palestinians been a peaceful people it is doubtful that any would have been displaced from the country- though no doubt some would have lost valuable land. But that happens to weaker groups all over the world.  

Still, despite these differences, many prominent Palestinians—from Darwish to Edward Said to law professor George Bisharat to former Knesset member Talab al-Sana—have alluded to the bitter irony of Jews telling another people to give up on their homeland and assimilate in foreign lands.

Rather than get killed when they try to kill Jews. There is no 'irony' here. The fact is the Palestinians drew the sword but then the Jews drew a machine gun. Ultimately the reason that the Jews prevailed was because their State was economically viable and willing to submit to the Rule of Law and a Representative form of Government which ensured that leaders had to deal with their voters' bread and butter issues. 

Reliance on the UNRWA was a fatal mistake for the Palestinians. Their leaders had less incentive to feed and clothe and educate them properly. Charity is a poisoned chalice. 

Even for many Jews passionately opposed to Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, supporting Palestinian refugee return remains taboo.

Why? Because Palestinians do kill Jews and their families get money if they are 'martyred' by security forces.

But, morally, this distinction makes little sense.

Yet this distinction is made by other countries in the region.  

If it is wrong to hold Palestinians as non-citizens under military law, and wrong to impose a blockade that denies them the necessities of life, it is surely also wrong to expel them and prevent them from returning home.

But it isn't wrong if they are trying to kill your people. Obama thought it perfectly moral to send SEALs to grab Osama from Abbotabad. He was killed and his body tossed in the sea. 

For decades, liberal Jews have parried this moral argument with a pragmatic one: Palestinian refugees should return only to the West Bank and Gaza, regardless of whether that is where they are from, as part of a two-state solution that gives both Palestinians and Jews a country of their own. But with every passing year, as Israel further entrenches its control over all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterannean Sea, this supposedly realistic alternative grows more detached from reality.

There would be no Palestinian refugees if their leaders had not thought they could prevail by the sword. True, they would have been economically exploited. But they would not have been expelled. 

There will be no viable, sovereign, Palestinian state to which refugees can go.

This is the crux of the problem. Jordan should have been the de facto Palestinian State. But the PLO got greedy and tried to kill the King. 

The Palestinians weren't the only people in the region to dwell on grievances and cultivate a mystique of the terrorist and the assassin. Some Armenians got into that game as well. But both Palestinian and Armenian terrorism tended to turn into an extortion racket. The problem was Arafat operated on a bigger scale. Thanks to him Palestinians kept getting expelled from even Kuwait and Iraq. 

What remains of the case against Palestinian refugee return is

that these guys have crazy leaders who might get them to run amok till they are shot.  

a series of historical and legal arguments, peddled by Israeli and American Jewish leaders, about why Palestinians deserved their expulsion and have no right to remedy it now. These arguments are not only unconvincing but deeply ironic, since they ask Palestinians to repudiate the very principles of intergenerational memory and historical restitution that Jews hold sacred. If Palestinians have no right to return to their homeland, neither do we.

A right only exists if it is linked to a remedy under a bond of law. A Jew refused 'Aliyah' by Israeli authorities may petition the Israeli Courts. I believe non-Orthodox converts have recently gained this right. One reason why an ethnicity may seek a State of its own is so as to turn 'moral rights' into actual rights. But State formation is difficult. Failed States can't give rights. That is the crux of the Palestinian problem. But they are not alone in this matter. Many terrorist groups have failed to create States. Israel too could have failed. 

The consequences of these efforts to rationalize and bury the Nakba are not theoretical.

What practical consequences flow from a purely rhetorical matter? None at all. This is why Armies don't employ moral philosophers to pontificate. They train people to kill. 

They are playing themselves out right now on the streets of Sheikh Jarrah.

But who will lose there? The answer is the guys who have stones, not guns.  

The Israeli leaders who justify expelling Palestinians today in order to make Jerusalem a Jewish city are merely paraphrasing the Jewish organizations that have spent the last several decades justifying the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 in order to create a Jewish state.

Nothing succeeds like success. The fact that Israel is stronger and better off now than ever before justifies everything it did to get to this position. A Jewish Jerusalem may well be a more prosperous Jerusalem.  

What Ta-Nehisi Coates has observed about the United States, and Desmond Tutu has observed about South Africa—that historical crimes that go unaddressed generally reappear, in different guise—is true for Israel-Palestine as well.

Beinart says he is a Zionist. Apparently he likes 'historical crimes'.  

Refugee return therefore constitutes more than mere repentance for the past. It is a prerequisite for building a future in which both Jews and Palestinians enjoy safety and freedom in the land each people calls home.

Had Jews felt safe with Palestinians, there would have been no refugees.  

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST REFUGEE RETURN begins with a series of myths about what happened in 1948, which allow Israeli and American Jewish leaders to claim that Palestinians effectively expelled themselves.

Some Palestinians did not fight for their rights. Paradoxically, this benefited them because they became citizens of Israel. But many other Palestinians showed great courage in fighting for their ancestral land. Some middle class people may have left hoping to return once things settled down. They were to be sadly disappointed. 

The most enduring myth is that Palestinians fled because Arab and Palestinian officials told them to. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) asserts that many Palestinians left “at the urging of Arab leaders, and expected to return after a quick and certain Arab victory over the new Jewish state.”

This was effective propaganda because everybody knew the truth was that all Arab leaders loved the Palestinians but none wanted to confer citizenship upon them. 

The Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi debunked this claim as early as 1959. In a study of Arab radio broadcasts and newspapers, and the communiques of the Arab League and various Arab and Palestinian fighting forces, he revealed that, far from urging Palestinians to leave, Palestinian and Arab officials often pleaded with them to stay.

Or just go somewhere else. This makes sense. If you can't defend your own land, you aren't going to be much use to us militarily. 

Decades later, employing primarily Israeli and British archives for his book, The Birth of the Refugee Problem Revisited, the Israeli historian Benny Morris did uncover evidence of Arab leaders urging women, children, and the elderly to evacuate villages so Arab fighters could better defend them. Still, he concluded that what Arab leaders did “to promote or stifle the exodus was only of secondary importance.” It was Zionist military operations that proved “the major precipitants to flight.” Zionist leaders at the time offered a similar assessment. Israel’s intelligence service noted in a June 1948 report that the “impact of ‘Jewish military action’ . . . on the migration was decisive.” It added that “orders and directives issued by Arab institutions and gangs” accounted for the evacuation of only 5% of villages.

 This Zionist myth was useful in the Fifties. But nobody with any power was taken in. It was obvious that there would be forcible population transfer idea like the 1923 Greek-Turkish exchanges. Indeed, by the Twenties, smart Indian politicians could see this would happen in their own country even though Muslims and Hindus had exactly the same culture and language. 

 A cross subsidy from Jewish to Arab areas was mooted by the Peel Commission in 1937 on the basis of similar arrangements for Sindh and Burma within the Raj. However, it was unworkable because the Palestinians had no state building capacity while the regime in Trans-Jordan still seemed alien to Levanters and, in any case, wasn't much more developed.  Subventions from the Jewish areas would not be substantial and could not be guaranteed. Furthermore, the Muslims of the Empire would have been outraged by a forcible transfer of 200,000 Palestinians. 

The truth is, while the Brits remained in India, nothing much could be done about Palestine though the Mandate had clearly failed completely. 

 During the course of the Second World War, some Brits came to see the Jews- whom army officers generally disliked with one or two exceptions like Orde Wingate- as allies and comrades. However, it was the wider Muslim world which was more essential to British strategic interests. On the other hand, Stalin backed the creation of Israel while Jews were supposed to have Truman's ear. Thus if an Israeli State was inevitable, it might as well be big enough to satisfy its battle scarred peoples. Zionists played up the notion that the lean and lanky, bespectacled and neurotic Jew would turn into a blonde, bronzed, snub nosed farmer working the land. Arabs, on the other hand were just one step up from niggers.

After the War, there were huge numbers of displaced people in Europe. It was obvious that victors would take their spoils and those on the losing side would have to run for their lives none cared whither. The Palestinians were one of many losers. It turned out that their Grand Mufti Husseini hadn't played a blinder by getting chummy with Hitler. 

Why did the Palestinians not realize that the Jews were more advanced in all economic and military matters? How is it that they demanded the whole cake time and time again even though less and less was offered from decade to decade? This is the crucial question. 

The Jewish establishment’s narrative of Palestinian self-dispossession also blames Arab governments for rejecting the United Nations proposal to partition Mandatory Palestine. “Zionist leaders accepted the partition plan despite its less-than-ideal solution,” the ADL has argued. “It was the Arab nations who refused . . . Had the Arabs accepted the plan in 1947 there would today be an Arab state alongside the Jewish State of Israel and the heartache and bloodshed that have characterized the Arab-Israeli conflict would have been avoided.”

This is understating matters. If the Palestinians had accepted the Jordanian Hashemites as their leader, they would have done pretty well. Their big mistake was to trust their own leaders who, however, couldn't get along with each other.  

This is misleading. Zionist leaders accepted the UN partition plan on paper while undoing it on the ground.

In other words, they were smart.  

The UN proposal envisioned a Jewish state encompassing 55% of Mandatory Palestine’s land even though Jews composed only a third of its population. Within the new state’s suggested borders, Palestinians thus constituted as much as 47% of the population. Most Zionist leaders considered this unacceptable. Morris notes that David Ben-Gurion, soon to be Israel’s first prime minister, “clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible in the Jewish State.” As early as 1938, he had declared, “I support compulsory transfer.”

He had been eavesdropping on the Peel Commission's deliberations. He knew very well that the British military saw no other solution.  

Ben-Gurion’s logic, concludes Morris, was clear: “without some sort of massive displacement of Arabs from the area of the Jewish state-to-be, there could be no viable ‘Jewish’ state.”

But this was the military logic common to all soldiers. A State has to be defensible. There's no point drawing lines on a map if the thing can't then defend itself.  

Establishment Jewish organizations often link Arab rejection of the UN partition plan to the war that Arab armies waged against Israel.

The truth is more complicated. In 1947, the Jews looked weak. Arab irregulars seem to be getting the better of them. True, some 100,000 middle class Arabs fled (hoping to return) while the Jews held their ground but the fact was Jews were on the receiving end. Thus, the Arab League initially rejected a retired general's advise that the Palestinians would be defeated. However, this view changed when refugees came flooding across the borders. It was thought that the main problem was Palestinian cowardice. Interestingly, in the sub-continent, the two displaced groups who fared worst- Bihari Muslims and Hindu Bengalis- had a reputation for cowardice. The Biharis redeemed themselves by killing Bengalis along with the Pakistani Army but Pakistan clamped down on repatriation and so a number of Biharis remain trapped in camps in Bangladesh.

In Palestine as in India, the Brits did little to avert a humanitarian disaster while being assiduous in saving their own skins.  They encouraged Jordan to take over territory so as not to leave a vacuum but otherwise did little save press on with their own evacuation. America had withdrawn support for the Partition plan. It was in this context that the Arabs expected a walkover. It has been suggested that the traditionally anti-Semitic British officer class influenced Cairo in this matter. The truth is the odds were in the Arab's favor when the war began. They had air-power and sea-power and much more fire-power.  However, the Jews had been merely biding their time. Moreover, once their weakness became apparent, France (because of Algeria) came to their aid as did Czech arms shipments. Thus the Israelis gained disproportionately from every truce while Egyptian and Iraqi soldiers became demoralized and Jordan played a double game. Still, it was not obvious that the Jews, who could not resist twisting the tail of the departed British lion, would not be taken down a peg by the swift vengeance of the RAF.

Why did the Arab armies fare so badly? One answer is that, with the exception of Jordan, their soldiers wanted to topple their Kings. There were always rumors of massive corruption and officers who were considered considered 'radical' being sent off on suicide missions. Most people would say that it was Jordan's perfidy which upset the applecart. Another theory, championed by Ba'athists was that Stalin had secretly sent Soviet soldiers to help the Israelis. Oddly the originator of this story- Fawzi al-Qawuqji (one of the few non-Palestinians to contribute to their Nakba) was a Soviet prisoner of war. Why did they send him back to fight in Palestine? Perhaps he was supposed to be a counterweight to the Husseinis. 

Whatever the causes of Arab weakness, one thing became clear. The Jews were more advanced and modern in their thinking. They could build State capacity while projecting force across the spectrum. Though there was some suspicion of extremist Jewish groups, overall, the Jews were cohesive. 

In game theory, 'the bourgeois strategy' is 'the most stable strategy for a population. This strategy resists invasion by either hawks (which always attack) or doves (which always retreat).' The Jews possessed this strategy because they genuinely were 'bourgeois'. The emerging Palestinian intelligentsia had a hawkish strategy- or its 'cheap talk' equivalent- while many peasants and 'bazaari' middle class people had a more fatalistic, 'doveish' strategy. This is easily understandable given the history of that part of the world. 

The bourgeois strategy is what makes 'oikeiosis' more and more productive and economically viable. It involves costly signals which become the basis of a 'separating equilibrium'. The Rule of Law, which links rights to incentive compatible remedies, is a separating equilibrium. It may be couched in 'universalist' terms but is actually based on uncorrelated asymmetries. Sadly, tossers with MPhils in I.R and other such useless subjects are ignorant of this.

A bunch of doves being constantly screeched at to turn into hawks are going to lose what little they have. Iqbal was always going on about how Pakistanis should be 'shahin' falcons. Now Bangladesh has over taken it in per capita terms. 

And it is true that, even before the Arab governments officially declared war in May 1948, Arab and Palestinian militias fought the embryonic Jewish state.

During the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt,  based on an analysis of the British statistics, Walid Khalidi estimates 19,792 casualties for the Arabs, with 5,032 dead: 3,832 killed by the British and 1,200 dead because of "terrorism", and 14,760 wounded.[1] Over ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between 20 and 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled.

It is believed that about 7000 Palestinians died during the '48 conflict. The truth is the Brits were more brutal than their successors. 

In February and March of 1948, these forces even came close to cutting off Jewish supply routes to West Jerusalem and other areas of Jewish settlement. Arab forces also committed atrocities. After members of the right-wing Zionist militia, Etzel, threw grenades into a Palestinian crowd near an oil refinery in Haifa in December 1947, the crowd turned on nearby Jewish workers, killing 39 of them. In April of 1948, after Zionist forces killed more than 100 unarmed Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin, Palestinian militiamen burned dozens of Jewish civilians to death in buses on the road to Jerusalem. In May of that year, Arab fighters vowing revenge for Deir Yassin killed 129 members of the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion, even though they were flying white flags.

Jews living in other Arab countries were subject to attack even if they had lived there peacefully for hundreds or thousands of years. 

What the establishment Jewish narrative omits is that the vast majority of Palestinians forced from their homes committed no violence at all.

More Jews were expelled from Arab countries than Palestinians from Israel. They had never posed any type of threat.

Population exchange is an unpleasant business. But it happened after both World Wars on a massive scale. Israel is similar to Pakistan in this respect. 

Their presence was intolerable not because they had personally threatened Jews but because they threatened the demography of a Jewish state.

Whereas Jews expelled from Iraq etc. posed no demographic threat.  

But what the establishment Jewish narrative omits is that the vast majority of Palestinians forced from their homes committed no violence at all.

Just like the Jews.  

In Army of Shadows, Hebrew University historian Hillel Cohen notes that, “Most of the Palestinian Arabs who took up arms were organized in units that defended their villages and homes, or sometimes a group of villages.” They ventured beyond them “only in extremely rare cases.” He adds that, frequently, “local Arab representatives had approached their Jewish neighbors with requests to conclude nonaggression pacts.” When such efforts failed, Palestinian villages and towns often surrendered in the face of Zionist might. In most cases, their residents were expelled anyway. Their presence was intolerable not because they had personally threatened Jews but because they threatened the demography of a Jewish state.

This is also what happened in Pakistan and parts of India. One group is expelled to make way for displaced people from elsewhere. The difference is that Arab countries- with the exception of Jordan- expelled Jewish citizens but denied citizenship to Palestinians. The question is- why? After Black September, the answer was obvious. Palestinians be kray kray. But it remains a puzzle as to why the thing wasn't done in the Fifties. Was it UNRWAs fault? Perhaps. By 1965, there was the Casablanca accord which should have regularized the position of Palestinians in Arab countries. Why was it not implemented? The answer is that Arafat and the PLO started creating havoc. By 1978, Egypt set the precedent of treating Palestinians as a hostile and alien community. When Kuwait expelled the Palestinians- because Arafat had sided with Saddam- Gazans, who carried Egyptian travel papers, had no where to go because the Egyptians wouldn't let them in. In 1995, Libya- angered by Arafat's deal with Israel- chucked out some 30,000 Palestinians. Lebanon, of coure, is even worse for Palestinians- but then the Lebanese have a good reason to be angry with the Palestinians.

IN FOCUSING ON THE BEHAVIOR of Arab leaders, the Jewish establishment tends to distract from what the Nakba meant for ordinary people.

It meant the same thing as any similar population exchange after a War. The difference is that other displaced people didn't have crazy leaders or a special UN Agency to fuck them up in perpetuity. They worked hard and got citizenship wherever they could.  

Perhaps that is intentional, because the more one confronts the Nakba’s human toll, the harder it becomes to rationalize what happened then, and to oppose justice for Palestinian refugees now.

Only if you ignore the one thing which comes to mind when you hear the word 'Palestinian'. That word is 'terrorism'.  

In roughly 18 months, Zionist forces evicted upwards of 700,000 individuals, more than half of Mandatory Palestine’s Arab population. They emptied more than 400 Palestinian villages and depopulated the Palestinian sections of many of Israel-Palestine’s mixed cities and towns. In each of these places, Palestinians endured horrors that haunted them for the rest of their lives.

Whereas nothing similar happened to Jews. It is not the case that six million of them died.  

It may be a good thing for Israelis to learn the unvarnished truth about how their ancestors created a decent country for them. But that can't be what Beinart wants. After all, it was guys like Menachem Begin who were doing the dirty work. Thus, they thought doing more of it would pay off. This was the 'olive tree vs the Lexus' fallacy. It is better to invest in R&D re. high tech weaponry which you can sell to other countries rather than grab land. 

I have argued previously that Jews could not only survive, but thrive, in a country that replaces Jewish privilege with equality under the law.

Jews do thrive in countries where they are equal under the law- provided that law aint administered by Arabs. But this is also true of many Arabs.  

A wealth of comparative data suggests that political systems that give everyone a voice in government generally prove more stable and more peaceful for everyone.

Really? That's the big lesson from Lebanon? The truth is political systems where the dominant group is smart and likes the rule of law are stable even if they don't give any voice to nutters.  

But, even in the best of circumstances, such a transformation would be profoundly jarring to many Jews. It would require redistributing land, economic resources, and political power, and perhaps just as painfully, reconsidering cherished myths about the Israeli and Zionist past.

Why not redistribute women and young boys? Why not suggest that every Jewish man offer himself for buggery to every Palestinian with a taste for that sort of thing. To do less is rank homophobia!

At this juncture in history, it is impossible to know how so fundamental a transition might occur, or if it ever will.

Start with offering yourself for sodomy, Beinart. Lead by example.  

To ensure that this reckoning never comes, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies have offered a range of legal, historical, and logistical arguments against refugee return.

But they have not offered any arguments against your offering up your backside to Palestinian sodomites. Thus, you should do so immediately.  

These all share one thing in common: Were they applied to any group other than Palestinians, American Jewish leaders would likely dismiss them as immoral and absurd.

No. They would also regard handing America back to the First Nations, or any part of it to Mexico as stoooopid. 

Consider the claim that Palestinian refugees have no right to return under international law. On its face, this makes little sense. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, passed in 1948 and reaffirmed more than a hundred times since, addresses Palestinian refugees specifically. It asserts that those “wishing to return to their homes and to live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

But Arafat pretty much gave up that right at Oslo! In any case, America itself is not itself letting in 'Operation Wetback' deportees or their descendants. 

In the decades since World War II, the international bodies that oversee refugees have developed a clear ethical principle: People who want to return home should be allowed to do so.

But neither Israel, nor Pakistan adheres to this. Indeed, no country does. Not even Buddhist Bhutan.  

Opponents of Palestinian return have rejoinders to these documents. They argue that General Assembly Resolutions aren’t legally binding. They claim that since Israel was only created in May 1948, and Palestinian refugees were never its citizens, they would not be returning to “their country.” But these are legalisms devoid of moral content.

But they have legal content. Morality is not itself a source of law. 

In the decades since World War II, the international bodies that oversee refugees have developed a clear ethical principle: People who want to return home should be allowed to do so.

But if the locals make clear they will fuck those returnees up, then they mustn't be sent back.  

Although the pace of repatriation has slowed in recent years, since 1990 almost nine times as many refugees have returned to their home countries as have been resettled in new ones.

And now the Danes are threatening to send the Syrians back. It seems 'international bodies' can't do very much.  

And as a 2019 report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) explains, resettlement is preferred only when a refugee’s home country is so dangerous that it “cannot provide them with appropriate protection and support.”

Can Israel provide appropriate protection and support to Palestinians? No. Why not? Israel can't stop Palestinians from being motivated to attack Jews. But if they do so, they get shot.  

When the refugees aren’t Palestinian,

and don't want to kill Jews 

Jewish leaders don’t merely accept this principle, they champion it.

If it suits them. Jews aren't different from anyone else in this respect. 

The 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended years of warfare between Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, states: “All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin” and “to have restored to them property of which they were deprived in the course of hostilities.” The American Jewish Committee—whose CEO, David Harris, has demanded that Palestinian refugees begin “anew” in “adopted lands”—not only endorsed the Dayton agreement but urged that it be enforced with US troops.

So what? Lots of other people did so at the time.  Harris is a good bloke who fought the 'Zionism is racism' canard. Standing up for Muslims in the Balkans won him goodwill from Muslim diplomats and statesmen. He had previously shown his courage by standing up to the Soviets. The world has become better for Jews because of people like him. 

In 2019, AIPAC applauded Congress for imposing sanctions aimed at forcing the Syrian government to, among other things, permit “the safe, voluntary, and dignified return of Syrians displaced by the conflict.”

Good for them. That sort of thing goes down well with the Saudis. 

That same year, the Union for Reform Judaism, in justifying its support for reparations for Black Americans, approvingly cited a UN resolution that defines reparations as including the right to “return to one’s place of residence.”

Africa? Fuck were these guys thinking? 

Jewish leaders also endorse the rights of return and compensation for Jews expelled from Arab lands. In 2013, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder claimed, “The world has long recognized the Palestinian refugee problem, but without recognizing the other side of the story—the 850,000 Jewish refugees of Arab countries.” Arab Jews, he argued, deserve “equal rights and treatment under international law.”

So, there is an offsetting claim. Cool.  

Given that international law strongly favors refugee return,

and Beinart's offering his bum for Palestinian buggery 

the logical implication of Lauder’s words is that Arab Jews should be allowed to go back to their ancestral countries. But, of course, Lauder and other Jewish leaders don’t want that; a Jewish exodus from Israel would undermine the rationale for a Jewish state.

Coz Jews are really eager to go off to some country where Muslims can take their time with them.  

What they want is for the world to recognize Arab Jewish refugees’ rights to repatriation and compensation so Israel can trade away those rights in return for Palestinian refugees relinquishing theirs.

No! It is obvious that these people are claiming a right to bugger Arab bums! Why will no one see that most of these pronouncements arise from an insensate passion for sodomy?  

As McGill University political scientist Rex Brynen has noted, during the Oslo peace process Israeli negotiators privately acknowledged that they were using the flight of Arab Jews as “a bargaining chip, intended to counterweigh Palestinian claims.” In so doing, Israeli leaders backhandedly conceded the legitimacy of the very rights they don’t want Palestinians to have.

In the same manner that I have proved that both the Israeli and the Palestinian and every other claim to be a Nation State is a backhanded way of conceding the legitimacy of everybody being allowed to sodomize Peter Beinart.  

The double standard that suffuses establishment Jewish arguments against the Palestinian right of return

& right to sodomize Beinart 

expresses itself most glaringly in the debate over who counts as a refugee.

It is clear that everybody has the right to return to Beinart's rectum with their cock or strap on. Thus everybody and everything counts as a refugee- at least in that respect. 

Jewish leaders often claim that only Palestinians who were themselves expelled deserve the designation, not their descendants.

Why? Is it because they are actually parrots? Who gives a fuck about what leaders claim when it is obvious that their Army can kill anyone who fucks with it?  

It’s a cynical argument: Later generations of Palestinians would not need refugee status had Israel allowed their expelled parents or grandparents to return.

But no Palestinian would now be a refugee if people thought of them as peaceful folk who are likely to work hard and pay taxes and stay out of trouble. 

It’s hypocritical too. Distinguishing between expelled Palestinians and their descendants allows Jewish leaders to cloak their opposition in the language of universal principle—“refugee status should not be handed down”—while in reality, they don’t adhere to this principle universally.

Nobody does. That's how come people who are considered as unskilled or terroristic are unwanted. Meanwhile countries around the Globe are vying with each other to attract Hong Kong citizens unhappy with Chairman Xi.

There was a time when many Jews were poor and some of their ideologues were kray kray. That's when nobody wanted them.  

Across the globe, refugee designations are frequently handed down from one generation to the next, yet Jewish organizations do not object. As UNRWA has noted, “Palestine refugees are not distinct from other protracted refugee situations such as those from Afghanistan or Somalia, where there are multiple generations of refugees.”

But Palestinian refugees are distinct from Indian refugees from Pakistan or Afghan refugees who have received Indian citizenship. Why? Indians are viewed as a model minority. Saudi Arabia is plenty chummy with India but is very annoyed with Hamas. Oddly, a Palestinian Doctor would find it more, not less, difficult to get a permit to work in the Gulf than an Indian.  

Moreover, the same American Jewish leaders who decry multigenerational refugee status when it applies to Palestinians celebrate it when it applies to Jews. In 2018, AJC CEO David Harris expressed outrage that UNRWA’s mandate “covers all descendants, without limit, of those deemed refugees in 1948.” The following year, Harris—who was born in the United States to a refugee father who grew up in Vienna—announced that he had taken Austrian citizenship “in honor and memory of my father.”

The Austrians, like other countries, view Jews as smart and peaceful people. They aren't similarly enamored of Muslims. I wonder why?  

In 2016, after Spain and Portugal offered citizenship to roughly 10,000 descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula more than 500 years ago, the AJC’s Associate Executive Director declared, “We stand in awe at the commitment and efforts undertaken both by Portugal and Spain to come to terms with their past.”

Those guys realized a little too late that getting rid of Jews was a bad idea. Holland took them in and did very well.  

Jews did not go to war with Catholics in Spain or Portugal. Muslim powers in the region did go to war with Catholics. They get nothing now. 

NOT ONLY do Jewish leaders insist that Israel has no legal or historical obligation to repatriate or compensate Palestinians;

because there was an exchange of populations. The Palestinian claim should be against Egypt and Jordan and Britain as the mandatory power. The fact is the Palestinians fought the Jews. They lost. Tough luck.  

they also claim that doing so is impossible. Israel, the ADL notes, believes that “‘return’ is not viable for such a small state.” Veteran Republican foreign policy official Elliott Abrams has called compensating all Palestinian refugees a “fantasy.” Too much time has passed, too many Palestinian homes have been destroyed, there are too many refugees. It is not possible to remedy the past. The irony is that when it comes to compensation for historical crimes, Jewish organizations have shown just how possible it is to overcome these logistical hurdles. And when it comes to effectively resettling large numbers of people in a short time in a small space, Israel leads the world.

Only if those being resettled are Jews or, at least, don't want to kill Jews. 

More than 50 years after the Holocaust, Jewish organizations negotiated an agreement in which Swiss banks paid more than $1 billion to reimburse Jews whose accounts they had expropriated during World War II.

Jews had not stolen any money from the Swiss nor had they gone to war with them. Anyway, smart Bankers don't want Jews mad at them because...urm...how should I put his delicately? The Jews aren't notoriously spendthrift.  

In 2018, the World Jewish Restitution Organization welcomed new US legislation to help Holocaust survivors and their descendants reclaim property in Poland. While the Holocaust, unlike the Nakba, saw millions murdered, the Jewish groups in these cases were not seeking compensation for murder. They were seeking compensation for theft. If Jews robbed en masse in the 1940s deserve reparations, surely Palestinians do too.

No. The Palestinians went to war with the Jews. The Jews did not go to war with the Poles. At this very moment, Palestinians are trying to kill Jews. True, Jews are killing about twenty times as many Palestinians but that didn't stop the Palestinians from just going ahead and firing off rockets.  

Lots of Germans lost land and property to Poles and Czechs and so forth. Will they get any reparations? No. They started the war. Then they lost so badly that they decided it was safer to have an Army which does rifle drill with broomstick handles painted black. That is why they are now very prosperous. 

There is a hint here for the Palestinians. 

When Jewish organizations deem it morally necessary, they find ways to determine the value of lost property. So does the Israeli government, which estimated the value of property lost by Jewish settlers withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in order to compensate them. Such calculations can be made for property lost in the Nakba as well.

It was certainly possible for Arab states, or later on for the PLO, to raise such matters. If they failed to do so, there is no legal claim. Laches applies. Beinart refuses to see that Palestinians have either misused or slept upon their rights. No unilateral action by Israel can remedy this.  

UN Resolution 194, which declared that Palestinian refugees were entitled to compensation “for loss of, or damage to, property,” created the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) to tally the losses. Using land registers, tax records, and other documents from the British mandate, the UNCCP between 1953 and 1964 assembled what Randolph-Macon College historian Michael Fischbach has called “one of the most complete sets of records documenting the landholdings of any group of refugees in the twentieth century.” In recent decades, those records have been turned into a searchable database and cross-referenced with information from the Israeli Land Registry. The primary barrier to compensating Palestinian refugees is not technical complexity. It’s political will.

The Palestinians did raise the compensation issue in 1999 and Clinton was prepared to fund it if Arafat had accepted 92 per cent of the West Bank. But Arafat said no. Then 9/11 happened and suddenly Muslim terrorists were on everybody's shit list. It appears that there was political will in Israel for a settlement and Clinton tapped into that. The problem was that no Palestinian leader could do what Sadat did. Arafat's final years were miserable. The tide had turned against his people. It now seems that the one thing the Palestinians can do is keep Bibi in power while pissing off the Saudis and dwindling to the status of Iran's cat's paw. By contrast, Iran stands by its Shia allies in Syria and Lebanon and won't use them as cannon fodder. Palestinians are now the pariahs of the Sunni world. It is likely that the next American President to offer a 'deal of the century' will offer less than even Trump. But, perhaps, Americans will just give up on that part of the world. Why pump money into a 'spite slum'? Let the Chinese take over Gaza and turn it into a low-wage SEZ. Poverty is the stern school of Virtues of a bourgeois type. Once the Palestinians have a bourgeois strategy, even their own leaders won't be able to create more Nakbas for them. On the other hand, a rift in the Democratic party with BLM & anti-Zionists on one side and Biden on the other is exactly what the Doctor ordered for the Republicans. Crazy is the gift which keeps giving. Virtue signaling can only take you so far. To really change History- for the worse- you have to move from moral indignation to foaming at the mouth. Beinart has taken the first couple of steps down that path. China may rise too quickly for him to go completely bonkers. As the world's greatest trading nation, it makes sense for them to take increasing charge of vital choke points on global shipping lanes. Apparently, the Chinese- like the Koreans- have a great fondness for Jews. They also seem to know a lot about how to keep Muslims peaceful. Israel may be at the dawn of a secure and prosperous era where the MENA regains its former glory as central to the global oikumene. But Uighur type re-education camps may be a feature of this brave new world.