> Refugees have a right to return to their homes or
> receive restitution.
Ruth Lapidoth makes a convincing argument concerning the legal status of Palestinian refugees <http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp485.htm>
If there are counter-arguments, I'd like to hear them (I mean that sincerely. I'm not a dogmatist about this issue).
In any case, abstract-universalist appeals to international law are problematic. I mentioned the issue of ethnic German refugees expelled from Polish and Cszech territories as a result of the second World War. Should they too be allowed to return to their homelands? Even though the support for the National Socialist regime was extremely high among Schlesier and Sudetendeutschen? The cause of Silesia and the Sudetenland is still very big amongst the most reactionary sections of German society, ranging from Neo-Nazis all the way to the right-wing of the CDU.
I see definite parallels to the Palestinian refugee situation. In both cases, a particular side starts a war which it then loses, only to make an issue out of the right of return for its refugees. Not for nothing are both causes very big with Neo-Nazis.
Wolfgang Pohrt once sarcastically remarked that the PLO was a "großen militanten Heimatvertriebenenverband" (the Heimatvertriebenenverbände are the lobby groups for eastern European ethnic Germans).
>That being
> the case, you have no business demanding that
> Palestinians give up
> what you haven't given up yourself.
But that's not what I'm doing. I'm arguing that Western leftists should not make a cause of Palestinian national liberation. That's something entirely different than making an issue of the occupatied territories outside of the green line, the treatment of Palestinians within the occupied territories, the settlement issue, etc.
And I'm certainly not arguing for an individualist approach, that we all just agree to renounce our citizenship rights of whatever nation we belong to. I am arguing, though, that leftists conceptualize the nation-state for what it is, as a fetish-relationship, just like the value-form. Both are fetish-relationships with material force, but both would have to be done away with to achieve a truly free society.
Wolfgang Pohrt (sorry, I cite him a lot, he's a witty guy) remarks that anyone who truly hates the Palestinians can do no better than to insure that they receive their own state.
>CUPE is merely demanding that Tel Aviv
> not prevent
> Palestinians from returning to their homes of
> origin.
How many 1948 refugees are still alive with any memory of having lived inside the Green line (not a rhetorical question. Are there figures on this?)?
I have the impression that a lot of "refugees" are descendents of refugees and such.
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