For decades western peace­makers and com­ment­at­ors shook their heads in disbelief as Palestini­an leaders rejected offer after offer for the estab­lish­ment of a viable and inde­pend­ent Palestini­an state over the equi­val­ent of the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the pre­dom­in­antly Arab neigh­bour­hoods in eastern Jerusalem.  The Palestini­ans, they concluded, were making the perfect the enemy of the good.

For Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf in the ‘War of Return’, this focus on the ter­rit­ori­al aspects of the Israel-Palestini­an conflict misses the point.  Far more prob­lem­at­ic in their view is the Palestini­ans’ con­cep­tion of them­selves as “refugees” who have a “right of return” to “their homes” located within the State of Israel.

Palestini­an leaders and the UN Relief and Works Agency have nourished the con­vic­tion of gen­er­a­tions of Palestini­ans that their land was “stolen”, and that they each have a private legal right to live in Israel.

The Palestini­an lead­er­ship have thereby painted them­selves into a corner.  They cannot now present their people with any peace proposal, no matter how generous it may be in ter­rit­ori­al terms, that does not guarantee each and every Palestini­an “refugee” the option of exer­cising this “right”.

The Palestini­ans know perfectly well that with more than 5 million people now offi­cially registered as “Palestine refugees”, this is a demand to which Jewish Israelis cannot accede without ceasing to be a majority in their own land, and com­mit­ting national suicide.

Indeed, as the authors reveal in their impress­ively detailed but very readable his­tor­ic­al survey, that is precisely why the Palestini­ans pursue this demand.  While pro­fess­ing to have made an “historic com­prom­ise” in which they are prepared to settle for 22% of the territory of Palestine under the British Mandate, they do not see any such outcome as the end of the conflict.

Instead, it would be a first step in liquid­at­ing any kind of Jewish sov­er­eignty and statehood in the region, and reversing decades of inter­na­tion­al endorse­ment of the principle of two States for two peoples, a principle the Palestini­ans have always opposed.

This book is not a partisan Zionist diatribe.  The authors, who come from Israel’s political left, painstak­ingly pick apart each layer of mythology on which the Palestini­an claim of a right of return to Israel is founded.

Far from being colo­ni­al­ist usurpers, the Jews of Israel are exer­cising their inter­na­tion­ally-endorsed right of national self-determ­in­a­tion.  Jewish polities and state insti­tu­tions had existed in the land for more than a mil­len­ni­um until the first century CE; yet no Palestini­an state or other political entity identi­fy­ing itself spe­cific­ally as the polity of the Palestini­an people existed anywhere at any time until the Palestini­an Authority was estab­lished in 1994 under an agreement with Israel.

It was not the 1947 UN res­ol­u­tion to partition the land that displaced 700,000 Palestini­ans, but rather their leaders’ ini­ti­ation of a war seeking to prevent partition, as they frankly acknow­ledged at the time.

Fewer than one percent of those registered as Palestini­an refugees have ever lived the refugee exper­i­ence of fleeing from their homes in former Palestine.  The rest are the des­cend­ants of refugees, and many of them are natives of other countries and enjoy full cit­izen­ship rights or permanent residency in other countries.  The notion of refugee status being inherited auto­mat­ic­ally and passed down in per­petu­ity to remote des­cend­ants who have never fled from their homes is without parallel in inter­na­tion­al law. This auto­mati­city in per­petu­at­ing refugee status in one’s des­cend­ants ad infinitum is not applied to, nor is it claimed by, any other refugee group.

UN General Assembly res­ol­u­tion 194 (1948) does not confer a “right of return” upon the Palestini­ans, as they now claim. The words “right of return” do not appear in res­ol­u­tion 194; the res­ol­u­tion is not legally binding; its language is not mandatory; a return of refugees can occur only if “permitted” by Israel, and only if the returnees wish “to live at peace with their neigh­bours”.

Sig­ni­fic­antly, all six Arab League countries then rep­res­en­ted at the UN voted against res­ol­u­tion 194.  Yet the Arab states and the Palestini­ans now demand that Israel comply with a UN res­ol­u­tion which they them­selves rejected, and which they have sub­sequently sought to rein­ter­pret for their own purposes in order to overcome the reasons for their rejection.

The authors note that some 800,000 Jews from Arab countries were made refugees when they were expelled after 1948.  Most of them were absorbed by Israel.  The authors point to com­par­able refugee situ­ations involving much larger refugee pop­u­la­tions which were resolved when all parties accepted an exchange of pop­u­la­tions resulting from military conflict as a fait accompli.

The authors argue that Arab gov­ern­ments and Palestini­an leaders should do likewise, espe­cially as they bear the primary respons­ib­il­ity both for ini­ti­at­ing the war which displaced the Palestini­ans and for the expulsion of the Jewish refugees and con­fis­ca­tion of their assets.

Finally, the authors highlight the dif­fer­ence between the Jewish and Palestini­an con­cep­tions of national “return”. Jews returning to Israel have never claimed to be exer­cising a private legal right as refugees. Rather, they have claimed a col­lect­ive right of national self-determ­in­a­tion which entitles Jews, wherever they may live, to return to their ancient homeland, now the State of Israel.  Israel has long accepted that Palestini­ans too have a col­lect­ive right of national self-determ­in­a­tion which would entitle them, wherever they may live, to return to a future State of Palestine, but not to Israel.

This book should be read by everyone inter­ested in getting to the heart of the Israel-Palestini­an conflict.  The nor­m­al­isa­tion of relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan which occurred shortly after the book was published have made its insights even more com­pel­ling.

Peter Wertheim is the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry