You'll have to make up your mind about "abstract universals": if you want to have Israel judged by the same standard -- i.e., an abstract universal -- that other countries get judged by, you must also accept that all who leave their countries of origin, including you and Palestinians, must possess the same right to return, i.e., an abstract universal. If you expect not to have your right to return to your country (be it Germany or any other) arbitrarily violated, you cannot deny the same right to Palestinians.
Ruth Lapidoth's article is nothing but bad faith and red herrings.
It doesn't matter if it is Israel or Arab states are to blame for the 1948 and 1967 wars: whatever the cause or reason -- even if Palestinians left historic Palestine just for the heck of it in peacetime -- Tel Aviv doesn't have the right to prevent them from coming home if they want, just as the country of your origin doesn't have the right to prevent you from coming home if you want.
As for an estimated number of Palestinian refugees, Tel Aviv doesn't give a damn about that. It has never said, "Look, we'll only accept 538,000 Palestinians who we estimate were original refugees, not their spouses, children, parents, let alone grandchildren and great grandchildren." Its position has always been that it won't recognize the right to return of _any_ Palestinian refugee and that it won't accept a "two-state solution" either.
What we are seeing is basically a Jewish state in which all others are either second-class citizens (inside the Green Line) or colonial subjects (in the OPTs) by law, not just by custom, from the river to the sea; and Washington, ruled by the right-wing US power elite, making great efforts to remake the Middle East according to the right-wing Israeli power elite's desire as well as their own geopolitical greed.
> But that's not what I'm doing. I'm arguing that
> Western leftists should not make a cause of
> Palestinian national liberation.
The right of return is an individual human right, not a group right for national liberation. Palestinian citizens of Israel -- e.g., residents of Ayn Hawd -- internally displaced during the 1948 war have that right also, even if there were NO Palestinians AT ALL in Gaza, the West Bank, or anywhere else.
<blockquote>500 DUNAM ON THE MOON [1]
A famous short story, "Facing the Forests," written by Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua in 1964, tells of a Palestinian man with a severed tongue and his young daughter whose job it is to help keep the forest from catching fire. As it turns out, the forest was planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in order to cover the ruins of the old man's village, which was destroyed by the Israelis in 1948. At the end of the story, after being incited to do so by an Israeli fire scout, the Palestinian sets the forest ablaze himself.
In 1948 Israeli forces expelled between 650-950 Palestinians from Ayn Hawd, a 700 year old Moslem village in the Southern Carmel hills. [2] Most of Ayn Hawd's inhabitants ended up in refugee camps on the West and East Banks of the Jordan, while some 150 villagers managed to remain inside the borders of Israel after the war and became what are known in Israel as "Present Absentees." [3]
In 1953, while some 418 Palestinian villages depopulated by Israeli forces during the war were being razed to the ground, the village of Ayn Hawd was designated for preservation as an artist's colony. Under the vision of Marcel Janco, a Romanian Jewish refugee who was one of the founders of the Dada movement, Ayn Hawd was repopulated with Israel's finest painters, sculptors, and potters. In 1954 the name of the village was officially changed to "Ein Hod" which in Hebrew means "The Spring of Glory" (the Arabic "Ayn Hawd" means "Spring of the Trough"). Today, Ein Hod is the site of a world renowned sculpture biennale, as well as home to numerous galleries, exhibits, festivals, and concerts. It has served as a mecca of Israeli cultural production. The village mosque was transformed into a restaurant/bar modeled after the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich, where Dada was first conceived.
Meanwhile, in the hills above Ein Hod, Some of Ayn Hawd's Present Absentees, headed by Muhammad Mahmoud 'Abd al-Ghani Abu al-Hayja (also known as "Abu Hilmi"), settled in a hamlet on what used to be their pastures, and today is a Jewish National Fund forest (planted in 1964) and administered by the Carmel National Park Authority (established in 1973). Ayn Hawd al-Jadida: "the New Ayn Hawd," is an unrecognized village according to Israeli law, and all of its 35 houses are considered illegal, and are slated for demolition. As an unrecognized village, they receive no governmental services such as water, electricity, sewage, a health clinic, an access road, or a public school. Despite the fact that Ayn Hawd al-Jadida first received official recognition from the Israeli Ministry of Interior in 1994, nothing has changed in the make-shift village over the past eight years. The residents measure the passing of time according to the various landmark events which have shaped their consciousness, if not their lived reality: "the first demolition order," "the second demolition order," "the first recognition," "the second recognition," etc..
For years, these refugees worked as gardeners, construction workers, and "handymen" in their former village. [4] The Dada movement, a guiding force for Ein Hod's artists, called for the negation of bourgeois linguistic and pictorial conventions, and for a return to a generalized, indigenous, primitive art, with an emphasis on paradox in the form of nihilistic satire. To these artists, Ayn Hawd is a found object. Its glory: the ruins-aesthetic (in stark contrast with the perceived artificiality of modern Israeli architecture), and its inhabitants have gone to great length to preserve this "distressed" look, thanks, in part, to the services and know-how of the village's original owners.
<http://www.500dunam.com/story.html></blockquote>
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>