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Jerusalem -According to the PLO, the Palestinian «right of return» is legally supported by U.N. Resolution 194 and morally sheltered by the history of the conflict. In truth, however, both points are incorrect.

Consider:

Resolution 194 of Dec.11, 1948, makes no reference of the expression «right of return.» This was a Palestinian invention. This resolution encompasses refugees from the 1948 war, not their descendants.

This resolution was adopted by the General Assembly, whose decisions are nonmandatory. Additionally, all the Arab states voted against this resolution, precisely because it did not establish a «right of return» – something they now conveniently forget.

But this one was not the only U.N. resolution that Arab nations rejected at the time. A year earlier they had rejected Resolution 181, better known as the Resolution for the Partition of Palestine, which determined the establishment of two states to live side by side; one Jewish, the other Arab. Not only did they reject it but actually launched a war of extermination against the newly born state of Israel. They exhorted their Arab brethren in Palestine (people who after 1967 started to call themselves Palestinians) to abandon their houses to allow the holy warriors to attack and «throw the Jews into the sea.»

When the sublime attack turned into a humiliating defeat, the Arab world confined the fleeing Palestinians in camps along the borders. As Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), now one of the top Palestinian negotiators, put it in the 1976 March issue of the PLO journal in Beirut: «The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live.»

By refusing to integrate them into their economies and societies and, in effect, keeping their brothers in camps under extremely poor conditions, Arab rulers perpetuated their plight thus sustaining a collective resentment, turning it into the oldest active refugee problem in the world.

Only two countries absorbed Palestinian refugees, granting them citizenship and civil rights: Jordan and Israel. The 150,000 Palestinians who had stayed within the borders of Israel were integrated into Israeli society – an action hardly fitting with PLO propaganda of Israeli «expulsions.» Today they have their own representatives in the Israeli parliament and constitute almost 20 percent of the population. In 1949, then-Israeli Primer Minister David Ben-Gurion offered to accept about 100,000 Palestinian refugees (a figure tantamount at the time to one-sixth of the Jewish population in the Israeli state), but the Arab nations rebuffed the initiative.

From the 1950s until 1993, Israel allowed 125,000 refugees to return to Israel under a family-reunification program; and since 1993, another 90,000 Palestinians were allowed to enter the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This, when Israel had to absorb its own 850,000 Jewish refugees expelled en masse from Arab lands in the 1948 war.

Incredibly, the Arab world and the PLO are demanding from Israel to pay the price for a military defeat that they suffered in a war of aggression that they themselves initiated. This moral absurdity is nonetheless surpassed by a logical absurdity of even greater proportions, as was expounded by Israeli military analyst Zeev Schiff: Not only do the Palestinians expect Israel to concede territory but that it also absorb Palestinian refugees inside its reduced borders.

The rate of natural growth of the Muslim sector in Israel doubles that of the Jewish population; in a short period of time, the 3.5 million Palestinian refugees democratically could turn the Jews into a minority into their one and only tiny state in the entire globe.

Actually, the Palestinian «right of return» is nothing but a euphemism for the destruction of Israel. Gamal Abd-el Nasser put it clearly in 1960: «If the refugees return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist.» It is evident then that if the PLO insists on materializing the right of return within Israel, the chances of reaching a peace accord will be buried. But if the right of return is realized, it is the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel what will be buried indeed. If this is what Arafat truly wants, then the time finally has arrived to call him for what he really is: not a peace-seeker but an unreconstructed warmonger bent on Israel’s destruction.

Julian Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.