Nope, No Basis

I have touched on Zochrot before.

In an invitation of theirs, they write:-

Right of Return is the moral and political basis for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Actually, it isn't.

The moral basis for peace was shattered by Arabs from, for convenience sake for those who don't like that many details and that long a period for the 'conflict', 1920. They rejected any political presence of Jews in the Land of Israel. Now, for the sake of you who don't agree with me, the Balfour Declaration, San Remo Conference, Versailles Conference and the League of Nations were anathema for the Arabs here. But to adopt a position that no Jew belongs anywhere in this country as a future sovereign and, after 1937, no compromise of partition was to be accepted, means - again, in a moral sense - that the Arabs were immoral.

And in rejecting the 1947 partition, they continued in their immorality.

This immorality was not only political and diplomatic but quite physical. Jews, only because they were Jews, no matter what age or sex, were killed. They were killed in initiated political violence in waves in 1920, 1929 and 1936-39 and very year in between. Jews who had been living in the country of families who arrived hundreds of years ago were slaughterd and raped as well as those who arrived just the other day.

The Arabs attempted ethnic cleansing, as I have pointed out at this blog. They rejected any recognition of Jews as bearing a nationalist character. The Mufti turned the dispute into a religious one over the false claim of the Temple Mount.

With these paramters, the decision to go to war in 1947, morally and politically, disallows any so-called "right of return". That 'basis' is gone, non-existent. It doesn't belong to the equation. Some 800,000 Jews were forced or encouraged out of Arab lands, losing much more in property and money than the Arabs. That the Arabs were kept in camps makes those Arab hosts part and parcel of their own internal immorality.

In sum, Zochrot and other similar groups like Al-Awda cannot argue from a moral or political position/basis that Israel has to permit any 'return' of those who in 1948 sought to destroy Israel, the international crime of politicide, those who were members of terrorist groups acting against international law during 1949-1967 in killing Israeli civilians, those in 1967 who sought again to destroy Israel and who have continued since then to operate illegally as terrorists.

That wasn't right and they get no rights.