Debating Palestinians’ ‘Right of Return’

Re “Two-State Solution Again Sells Palestinians Short,” Opinion, Jan. 25: George Bisharat conveniently failed to mention the fact that more than 750,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands in 1948, losing their homes, their property and in some cases their lives, while Palestinians were expelled to Jordan, a neighboring Arab country. Where did they go? They had no place to go but Israel. So where are the reparations, the right of return for these Jewish victims of Arab racism? When Jews can own land in Arab countries, then Palestinians can own land in Israel. When Jews have rights equal to Arab citizens in Arab lands, then Palestinians can have rights in Israel.

Jonathan Grossman

Huntington Beach

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Fifty-five years is too long to deny an indigenous people the right to return to their ancestral homeland, especially while allowing immigrants the right to that same land. So often, when any new plan attempting to resolve the conflict is proposed, the Palestinians’ right of return is either severely restricted by Israeli demands or treated as negligible. The right of 5 million Palestinian refugees to return is not negligible, and any peace plan treating it as such is doomed to fail. The only viable solution is to insist that all peoples in all of historic Palestine be treated as equals under one true democracy.

Alia Hasan

Westwood

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Let’s just pick a point in time and all go back where our ancestors came from. Start with the million or so Jews expelled from Arab lands when Israel was founded. Then, let’s give Persian Jews who fled to the U.S. the right to go back to Iran. (Isn’t it time to explore a way for people to cohabit Iran/Yemen/Iraq/Syria/Egypt/Saudi Arabia and other countries without excluding, dominating and oppressing Jews? And Christians? And women?) And I’m sure I will be welcomed in Germany, Poland and Lithuania when I go to claim the homes my ancestors fled. Just one question: When we all go back where we came from and take our homes back, what do we do with the folks who have been living in them for generations?

Michael Lubic

Pasadena

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Re “In ‘48, Israel Did What It Had to Do,” Commentary, Jan. 26: Then Lt.-Col. Yitzhak Rabin’s forced evictions of 50,000 to 60,000 Palestinians in 1948 was a racist act. Similar evictions of Palestinians from their lands continue on up to the present day. The argument that such actions were “inevitable and made sense” bears a striking resemblance to that made by Adolf Hitler for Germany’s persecution (and subsequent slaughter) of its own ethnic minorities from 1933 to 1945.

Barry Lienert

Waimanalo, Hawaii