Is It
Realistic To Demand The Right Of Return Of Palestinian
Refugees?
3 December 2009By John Spritzler
Many Americans, myself included, want our government
to stop supporting Israel because Israel oppresses
Palestinians. The root of the Israel/Palestine
conflict is that Israel carries out ethnic cleansing
of Palestinians in order to ensure that the great
majority of the population inside Israel remains
Jewish. The biggest grievance of Palestinians against
Israel is that it does not allow Palestinian refugees
to return to their homes and villages inside of what
is now Israel. They demand the right of return as a
basic human right.
Many people who oppose Israel's oppression of
Palestinians, however, do not emphasize the right of
return demand; some avoid mentioning it altogether.
Instead, they focus on the demand that Israel end its
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. How come?
Their reasoning goes like this. Yes, the best solution
would be for Palestinians to win the right of return
with compensation from Israel for the property that
was stolen from them by Zionists, and with the right
to live as the equals of Jews under the law in all of
Palestine. But this is a demand that is impossible to
win. Israel would never allow it because it would mean
the end of the Jewish state. The American political
elite would never support it because they are
committed to defending the security of Israel as a
Jewish state. We must be realistic. The best that can
be hoped for is to persuade American politicians to at
least put pressure on Israel to withdraw from the
occupied territories. This is a realistic goal,
because it doesn't challenge the idea of a Jewish
state, and it is what American politicians (and other
world leaders) already claim to support. It won't
address the fundamental grievance of Palestinians, but
it will at least end the terrible oppression of them
in the occupied territories. It is a realistic
strategy. If we start demanding the right of return
and, in doing so, challenge the rightness of the
Jewish state idea itself, we will lose whatever
influence we might otherwise have among the people
with the real power to change things. Demanding the
right of return is an unrealistic strategy.
But is it really? As Dr. Phil would say, "How is your
'realistic' strategy working for you?" Few would deny
that it has accomplished nothing. The Occupation shows
no sign of ending, and the oppression is only getting
worse, as the recent slaughter of people in Gaza
highlights. Even if Israel officially ended its
occupation of the West Bank it would continue to
oppress Palestinians there just as it oppresses
Palestinians in Gaza, which it purports not to be
occupying now. The "practical" strategy is based on a
false assumption--that American and Israeli leaders
want a peaceful resolution of the conflict and can be
nudged and persuaded to make it happen. All of the
evidence indicates, on the contrary, that they want to
keep the conflict going indefinitely.
There is a reason why they do. The conflict
strengthens both the Israeli and the American ruling
elites' control over their own people--always the top
concern of any ruling elite. Israel's ruling class of
billionaires and generals and politicians needs the
conflict to continue in order to ensure that the
Israeli public remains so frightened of "Arabs" that
they will obey their rulers who claim to be protecting
them. The American ruling class of billionaires
likewise uses the "War on Terror" to control
Americans, and this requires that Americans stay
frightened of "Arab terrorists." The Israel/Palestine
conflict provides the American mass media the film
footage it needs to keep American TV sets filled with
images of what the media say are "anti-Semitic
hate-driven Arab terrorists."
This is why the truly practical strategy is a
revolutionary one: forget trying to persuade the
politicians to do the right thing and focus instead on
building a revolutionary movement among ordinary
people. Building such a movement means talking to
people about lots of things besides the
Israel/Palestine conflict, but when we do talk about
that conflict--which we very much need to do--the
approach should be to focus precisely on the
fundamental injustice at its root, which is Israel's
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and refusal to let
them return to their homes and villages inside Israel
and live as the equals of Jews before the law. Unlike
politicians beholden to the rich, ordinary people care
very much about what is right and what is wrong. When
they learn that the conflict in Israel/Palestine is
actually between those who value equality versus those
who value inequality, they rapidly take the side of
equality and oppose Zionism.
When it comes to persuading ordinary people that
Israel is wrong, focusing on the occupation, rather
than the ethnic cleansing and the wrongness of the
Jewish state idea, is a loser. When one only talks
about the occupation, the pro-Israel side wins the
argument by replying this way: "Israel hates
oppressing Palestinians but it has no choice. It needs
to maintain the occupation in order to make the Jewish
state secure. Otherwise Palestinians who deny Israel
has a right to exist would be able to mount an attack
on Israel from the West Bank. You don't deny that
Israel, the Jewish state, has a right to exist, do
you?"
What is at stake here are not "long range" versus
"short range" goals. Focusing on the occupation to be
persuasive with politicians loses in both the short
run and the long run. Relying on ordinary people by
explaining the root of the conflict, and building a
movement that aims, frankly, to overthrow the
anti-democratic rule of the American plutocracy, wins
in both the short and the long run. In the long run it
makes it possible to actually win what we want--a more
equal and democratic world based on justice and
concern for one another. In the short run it maximizes
the pressure on the ruling elite because what they
fear more than anything else is a revolution. This is
not to say that the elite will necessarily respond by
oppressing people less; they might increase the level
of repression instead. The only thing that the
revolutionary approach can guarantee in the short run
is the satisfaction of knowing that one is doing the
only thing that has any realistic chance of ever
solving the problem. The non-revolutionary approach
cannot even accomplish that.
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