Sublime

The Palestinian refugee issue has always been a ploy designed to turn Israel into a Palestinian state, and Arafat’s rejection of the generous Barak offer demonstrated this with little ambiguity.

Upper Galilee, born and raised in a refugee camp outside Sidon in southern Lebanon, educated in Beirut and Europe. His

Dayan reminded his listeners that there was nothing surprising about Arab resentment and violence. “Let us not hurl blame at the murderers,” he said. “Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where th

In 1988, another Muslim organization, Hamas, was founded. For Hamas’s followers, a central religious obligation was the liberation of all of historic Palestine from “Zionist occupation,” claiming that the land “from the river to the sea” was a Muslim waqf, or “endowment.” They vowed to wage holy war, or jihad, against Israel.

made a remarkable decision to change the definition of refugee—only for purposes of defining who is an Arab refugee from Israel—to include any Arab who had lived in Israel for two years before leaving.41 Moreover, an Arab was counted as a refugee if he moved just a few miles from one part of Palestine to another—even if he returned to the village i