#right of return

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Poster by Josh MacPhee

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🔴 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine:

وتمضي الشّعلة حتى التّحرير والعودة..

78 عامًا على النكبة.

The spark of struggle goes on until return and liberation.

78 Years since the Nakba.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Israeli Jew here (just so you know where I’m coming from):

I agree with you that the right of return is unfesable and absurd and that Palestinians need to accept that if we’re going to ever have some semblance of peace

But

How do you reconcile that on moral terms with the large scale aliyot during the Ottoman Empire and British mandate? I’m just curious on an intellectual level how you make the distinction. Do we not argue that Jews had a right to return to their ancestral land?

I think you see a possible contradiction here because you're equating two forms of "return" which are not comparable.

When Zionists talked about Jews "returning," they were talking about immigration and national self-determination. Jews were scattered across dozens of countries, usually persecuted. The goal was to rebuild a national home in the place Jewish history, religion, and identity came from. In practice that meant immigration, land purchases, and eventually statehood.

The Palestinian "right of return" claim is something different. It is usually framed as a legal right for millions of descendants of 1948 refugees to move into Israel itself today for the explicit purpose of destroying Israel.

That difference matters.

One is a claim that a people should be able to build a state in their ancestral homeland.

The other is a claim that millions of people should be able to enter an already existing state in numbers large enough to execute their intent end it.

Those are not the same political demand.

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None of this means the Palestinian refugee problem is fake or trivial.

The 1948 war created a refugee population and many families lost homes and property. That history is real, and any serious peace deal has to address it through things like compensation, resettlement, and perhaps some negotiated return.

But acknowledging a refugee tragedy is not the same as accepting a demand that would effectively dismantle the state that now exists.

So the distinction is actually pretty simple.

Jewish return meant immigration and rebuilding a nation. The Jews agreed to peaceful partition and only a tiny sliver of what had ben mandate Palestine. It was the Arabs who instead choose a war which they lost. That's been the case every single time:

Israel tries for peace

Arabs choose war instead

Arabs lose the war they started

Arabs complain that Israel is evil for winning wars it didn't want and didn't start.

That's what happened in 1948, and every time since.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

The modern Palestinian "right of return" claim is about mass immigration into an existing country.

Once you separate those two ideas, the supposed contradiction mostly disappears.

Imagine any other circumstances in any other nation where a population demands entry to a sovereign nation for the explicit purpose of destroying that nation...and having the chutzpah to call that a "right."

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Why are there so many Palestinian "refugees," though?

Because resettlement was a never a goal of the Arab League, which explicitly, refused to absorb any of them, sought to avoid resettlement anywhere, and instead kept them in an artificial "refugee" status as a weapon against the existence of a Jewish state.

Palestinianism has always been the conscious choice to increase Palestinian suffering for the purpose of weaponizing it against the existence of a Jewish state.

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Thought experiment:

Take Palestinian culture and subtract the feverish, deranged hatred of Israel's existence: What's left?

Really, what else is left to distinguish Gazans from Egyptians? What distinguishes Arabs in the West Bank from Jordanians?

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[sayruq]

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Democratic Socialists of America Makes Support for Israel’s Right to Self-Defense an ‘Expellable Offense’

A protester holds a sign that reads, ”From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” during a pro-Palestinian …

by Corey Walker

At its 2025 National Convention this past weekend, the Democratic Socialists of America adopted a contentious resolution titled “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA,” further crystallizing the far-left organization’s anti-Israel views.

The measure, which passed by a margin of 56 percent to 43 percent, “unequivocally affirms” the DSA’s “commitment” to the Thawabit, a Palestinian nationalist framework that includes the so-called “right of return” for millions of Palestinians and their descendants, claims to Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital, and explicit support for so-called “resistance” against Israel. Palestinian leaders and activists have described the Thawabit as a set of principles aimed at eliminating Israel and establishing a Palestinian state in its place.

The DSA, the largest socialist organization in the US which counts members of the US Congress among its ranks, has previously opposed US military aid to Israel and supported the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state. However, the resolution passed on Sunday marks an escalation.

According to the resolution, various actions in support of Israel, such as “making statements that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself'” and “endorsing statements equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism,” will now be considered an “expellable offense,” subject to a vote by the DSA’s National Political Committee.

The resolution’s passage underscores the widening gulf in the US between far-left activists and mainstream Democrats, who have generally supported Israel’s right to self-defense and to live in security even if they’ve been critical of the Israeli war effort in Gaza. DSA members celebrated the vote as a bold stand for Palestinian liberation, but some observers have suggested that it could alienate allies and normalize extremist rhetoric.

[indecisiveavocado]

sooo sorry we were raped and genocided and ethnically cleansed from our land and prevented from returning. totally our fault.