Is the Right of Return an Intergenerational Right?

[Shusha]

This came up on a different thread, but I think deserves its own topic.

Is the RoR an intergenerational right, that is, a right which is passed on from individuals to their offspring and descendants?

Participants in this thread should be prepared to defend any qualified answer other than a simple yes/no with criteria to establish when it should or should not apply. The expectation being that all criteria should be applied consistently across all cultures, ethnic groups and political situations.

 

[Dante]

The right of return is a political statement that is meaningless without force.

 

[aris2chat]

This came up on a different thread, but I think deserves its own topic.

Is the RoR an intergenerational right, that is, a right which is passed on from individuals to their offspring and descendants?

Participants in this thread should be prepared to defend any qualified answer other than a simple yes/no with criteria to establish when it should or should not apply. The expectation being that all criteria should be applied consistently across all cultures, ethnic groups and political situations.

Those born and left as children from what is today Israel might have have a claim, the generations born outside should not. If they are recognized as palestinian, they should be the responsibility of the authority/state.

Palestinians born in today's Israel and lived there for two years, should have some evidence of ownership of land by their family and willing to pay back taxes. They should be willing to become Israeli citizens, including learning hebrew. They should not have been involved in terrorism of any kind.
Many families were migrant farmers, share croppers, offered the chance to register land but refused to do so or lived there less than two years.

Just having a UN document stamped palestinian refugee should not mean they have a right to return to a place that was not their indigenous home. Most would be beyond working age, have no independent income and will be dependent on social services by the state, which they did not serve or pay into. They were never registered to vote, do military service, pay income tax or otherwise contribute in any way.

Some 100,000 over the years before Oslo were given the chance for family reunification, to return and or file land cases in Israeli courts. They are now citizens.

Estimates vary from 250,000 to 800,000 palestinians that left, but not all left what is Israel, rather some left the WB or G and became refugees. Some 900,000 palestinians stayed put and became Israelis.

Most of the palestinians that became refugees were not forced to leave but urged to do so by the incoming arab armies and their own leadership.

The question of return is not so easy as opening the flood gates and letting in millions of refugees into Israel and find housing and jobs for them.

 

[P F Tinmore]

The RoR has always applied to refugees and their descendants.

 

[Shusha]

The RoR has always applied to refugees and their descendants.

Awesome. Thanks Tinmore. That solves that question. I hope you will endeavor to promote this idea on other threads.

 

[montelatici]

"Most of the palestinians that became refugees were not forced to leave but urged to do so by the incoming arab armies and their own leadership."

Usual Zionist BS.

".......a report prepared by the intelligence services of the Israeli army, dated 30 June 1948 and entitled “The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948”. This document sets at 391,000 the number of Palestinians who had already left the territory that was by then in the hands of Israel, and evaluates the various factors that had prompted their decisions to leave. “At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations.” To this figure, the report’s compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which “directly (caused) some 15%... of the emigration”. A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure of 73% for departures caused directly by the Israelis. In addition, the report attributes 22% of the departures to “fears” and “a crisis of confidence” affecting the Palestinian population. As for Arab calls for flight, these were reckoned to be significant in only 5% of cases..."

The expulsion of the Palestinians re-examined - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition

 

[Boston1]

The RoR has always applied to refugees and their descendants.

Actually it has never applied to refugees or their descendants until the Arab block insisted it be applied to the palestinian so called refugees and only the so called palestinian refugees.

 

[montelatici]

The RoR has always applied to refugees and their descendants.

Actually it has never applied to refugees or their descendants until the Arab block insisted it be applied to the palestinian so called refugees and only the so called palestinian refugees.

Since the UN caused the problem, it was the UN that decided to extend refugee status to the male offspring of the original refugees. Nothing to do with the "Arab Bloc".

 

[Hollie]

The RoR has always applied to refugees and their descendants.

Actually it has never applied to refugees or their descendants until the Arab block insisted it be applied to the palestinian so called refugees and only the so called palestinian refugees.

Since the UN caused the problem, it was the UN that decided to extend refugee status to the male offspring of the original refugees. Nothing to do with the "Arab Bloc".

The UN caused no problem. The problem is rooted in Islamist ideology.

 

[Shusha]

The RoR originated, as a concept, with the Palestinians. Before that there was no such expectation. In fact, quite the opposite.

 

[Hollie]

"Most of the palestinians that became refugees were not forced to leave but urged to do so by the incoming arab armies and their own leadership."

Usual Zionist BS.

".......a report prepared by the intelligence services of the Israeli army, dated 30 June 1948 and entitled “The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948”. This document sets at 391,000 the number of Palestinians who had already left the territory that was by then in the hands of Israel, and evaluates the various factors that had prompted their decisions to leave. “At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations.” To this figure, the report’s compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which “directly (caused) some 15%... of the emigration”. A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure of 73% for departures caused directly by the Israelis. In addition, the report attributes 22% of the departures to “fears” and “a crisis of confidence” affecting the Palestinian population. As for Arab calls for flight, these were reckoned to be significant in only 5% of cases..."

The expulsion of the Palestinians re-examined - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition

The usual Islamo-taqiyya.

Articles: The Expulsion Libel: 1948 Arab

Kenneth O.Bilby, the correspondent in Palestine for the New York Herald Tribune during the War of Independence wrote in a book published shortly afterwards that said:
The Arab exodus, initially at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin el Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine.They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let the Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could return to their homes and be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea.

After the war, the Palestine Arab leaders did try to help people -- including their own -- to forget that it was they who had called for the exodus in the early spring of 1948. They now blamed the leaders of the invading Arab states themselves. These had added their voices to the exodus call, though not until some weeks after the Palestine Arab Higher Committee had taken a stand.


- Kenneth O. Bilby, New Star in the Middle East, (Doubleday, 1950).
And the British news magazine The Economist, no friend of Israel or the Zionist movement, reported on October 2, 1948, while the war was still in progress, that:
Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in [the Palestinian, now Israeli, city of] Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit... It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.


On May 3, 1948, the American news magazine Time reported that
The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city.... By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa .


Sir Alan Cunningham, the last high commissioner for the British administration of Palestine, which was in the process of withdrawing from the country while the fighting raged, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on February 22, 1948, and again on April 28, 1948, that
British authorities in Haifa have formed the impression that total evacuation is being urged on the Haifa Arabs from higher Arab quarters and that the townsfolk themselves are against it.

The American consulate in Haifa had telegraphed Washington on April 25 that "local Mufti-dominated Arab leaders urge all Arabs (to) leave (the) city [Haifa] and large numbers are going." Three days later the consulate followed up this communication with another that said, "reportedly Arab Higher Committee ordering all Arabs (to) leave."

On April 23, Jamal Husseini, the Acting Chairman for the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine , admitted as much in a speech to the United Nations Security Council:
The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce. They rather preferred to abandon their homes, their belongings and everything they possessed in the world and leave the town. This is in fact what they did.
And on April 27, 1950, only two years after the Arab evacuation of Haifa, the Arab National Committee of Haifa asserted in a memorandum submitted to the governments of the Arab states that
The removal of the Arab inhabitants... was voluntary and was carried out at our request... The Arab delegation proudly asked for the evacuation of the Arabs and their removal to the neighboring Arab countries.... We are very glad to state that the Arabs guarded their honour and traditions with pride and greatness.... When the [Arab]delegation entered the conference room [for negotiations with the Jewish authorities in Haifa] it proudly refused to sign the truce and asked that the evacuation of the Arab population and their transfer to neighboring Arab countries be facilitated.

In June 1949, only six months after the conclusion of hostilities, Sir John Troutbeck, the head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and, according to historian Efraim Karsh, "no friend to Israel or the Jews," made a fact-finding visit to Gaza and interviewed some of the Arab refugees there. Troutbeck reported that he had learned from these interviews that the refugees
...express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) [but] they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. "We know who our enemies are," they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their home... I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over.

And the Palestinian Arab newspaper Falastin, only a month after the war ended (Feb. 19, 1949), reported that

The Arab states which had encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees.

 

[Boston1]

The RoR has always applied to refugees and their descendants.

Actually it has never applied to refugees or their descendants until the Arab block insisted it be applied to the palestinian so called refugees and only the so called palestinian refugees.

Since the UN caused the problem, it was the UN that decided to extend refugee status to the male offspring of the original refugees. Nothing to do with the "Arab Bloc".

The UN caused no problem. The problem is rooted in Islamist ideology.

I have to disagree. The UN has caused a lot of problems, mostly through tyranny by majority. The Muslim Arab block outweighs the Jewish block. 49/1 in a body of 197. Which places the Judaic vote at the exact bottom of representation.

The Muslim Arabs have colonized much of the world and would continue to do so if not for the efforts of free people everywhere.

My issue with the UN is that it is demonstrably bias

 

[P F Tinmore]

The RoR has always applied to refugees and their descendants.

Actually it has never applied to refugees or their descendants until the Arab block insisted it be applied to the palestinian so called refugees and only the so called palestinian refugees.

Repatriation has always included descendants. However, the question normally does not come up because repatriation takes place by the first generation. The question only comes up because the repatriation of Palestinians has dragged on for 3-4 generations.

 

[Billo_Really]

There are 8 branches of international law that codify the "RoR".

The legal bases for return can be found in eight branches of international law: (1) inter-State nationality law, (2) law of State succession, (3) human rights law, (4) humanitarian law, (5) law of State responsibility, (6) refugee law, (7) UN law, and (8) natural/customary law. These legal foundations are briefly highlighted here.

(1) inter-State nationality law
Inter-State nationality law is the starting point for refugees’ right of return. The key basis for the right of return is derived from the individual’s nationality. The individual’s possession of Palestinian nationality prior to 14 May 1948, i.e. before the establishment of Israel, constitutes the first basis for the right of return.

(2) law of State succession
The law of State succession reflects the practice of States in regard to nationality. In almost all peace treaties reached in modern history, individuals belonging to a former State have ipso facto acquired the nationality of the succeeding State. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, under which Turkey relinquished its title to Palestine, provided the basis for the Palestine inhabitants’ nationality. It stipulated that Turkish subjects habitually residing in territories detached from Turkey would acquire the nationality of the new State, namely Palestine.

(3) human rights law
The human rights law offers the third basis. Article 13(2) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides: ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.’

(4) humanitarian law
International humanitarian law is the fourth basis for the right of return. Civilian citizens should not be removed from the occupied territory. If they leave the territory willfully or as a result of the armed conflict, civilians should be readmitted.

(5) law of State responsibility
When the State denies refugees the right to return, it means that other States are forced to accept them. No State has an absolute obligation to accept citizens of other States.

(6) refugee law
A key role for international refugee organizations, particularly the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the repatriation, or return, of refugees to their countries of nationality. This is obvious from provisions 1, 8, and 9 of the UNHCR Statute of 14 December 1950.

(7) UN law
UN law renders the right of return unquestionable. It should first be noted that the question of Palestine is the responsibility of the General Assembly (GA) as the successor to the Council of the League of Nations, which issued and supervised the Palestine Mandate.

(8) natural/customary law
All these international legal bases indicate that the right of return for refugees is a customary rule. Such a right has long been deemed to constitute a natural entitlement for any citizen.
​

Now, the answer the question in the OP, can be found in the Law of State Succession.

Palestinian citizens who left the area that became Israel have the right to return, that is to recover their nationality. Each citizen who became a refugee has an individual right to acquire Israeli nationality. Descendants of these refugees have an identical right.​

So if you lived in Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel, you have the RoR. And since Israel was a state created in 1948, there is no Israeli nationality (for Jews who were not living in the area), to re-claim.

To sum it up, European Jews have no right of return.

 

[Billo_Really]

The usual Islamo-taqiyya.

Articles: The Expulsion Libel: 1948 Arab

Kenneth O.Bilby, the correspondent in Palestine for the New York Herald Tribune during the War of Independence wrote in a book published shortly afterwards that said:
The Arab exodus, initially at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin el Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine.They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let the Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could return to their homes and be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea.

After the war, the Palestine Arab leaders did try to help people -- including their own -- to forget that it was they who had called for the exodus in the early spring of 1948. They now blamed the leaders of the invading Arab states themselves. These had added their voices to the exodus call, though not until some weeks after the Palestine Arab Higher Committee had taken a stand.


- Kenneth O. Bilby, New Star in the Middle East, (Doubleday, 1950).
And the British news magazine The Economist, no friend of Israel or the Zionist movement, reported on October 2, 1948, while the war was still in progress, that:
Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in [the Palestinian, now Israeli, city of] Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit... It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.


On May 3, 1948, the American news magazine Time reported that
The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city.... By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa .


Sir Alan Cunningham, the last high commissioner for the British administration of Palestine, which was in the process of withdrawing from the country while the fighting raged, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on February 22, 1948, and again on April 28, 1948, that
British authorities in Haifa have formed the impression that total evacuation is being urged on the Haifa Arabs from higher Arab quarters and that the townsfolk themselves are against it.

The American consulate in Haifa had telegraphed Washington on April 25 that "local Mufti-dominated Arab leaders urge all Arabs (to) leave (the) city [Haifa] and large numbers are going." Three days later the consulate followed up this communication with another that said, "reportedly Arab Higher Committee ordering all Arabs (to) leave."

On April 23, Jamal Husseini, the Acting Chairman for the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine , admitted as much in a speech to the United Nations Security Council:
The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce. They rather preferred to abandon their homes, their belongings and everything they possessed in the world and leave the town. This is in fact what they did.
And on April 27, 1950, only two years after the Arab evacuation of Haifa, the Arab National Committee of Haifa asserted in a memorandum submitted to the governments of the Arab states that
The removal of the Arab inhabitants... was voluntary and was carried out at our request... The Arab delegation proudly asked for the evacuation of the Arabs and their removal to the neighboring Arab countries.... We are very glad to state that the Arabs guarded their honour and traditions with pride and greatness.... When the [Arab]delegation entered the conference room [for negotiations with the Jewish authorities in Haifa] it proudly refused to sign the truce and asked that the evacuation of the Arab population and their transfer to neighboring Arab countries be facilitated.

In June 1949, only six months after the conclusion of hostilities, Sir John Troutbeck, the head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and, according to historian Efraim Karsh, "no friend to Israel or the Jews," made a fact-finding visit to Gaza and interviewed some of the Arab refugees there. Troutbeck reported that he had learned from these interviews that the refugees
...express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) [but] they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. "We know who our enemies are," they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their home... I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over.

And the Palestinian Arab newspaper Falastin, only a month after the war ended (Feb. 19, 1949), reported that

The Arab states which had encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees.

No one leaves a home they've been living in for generations, just because someone asks them to.

Would you?

 

[Shusha]

Now, the answer the question in the OP, can be found in the Law of State Succession.

Palestinian citizens who left the area that became Israel have the right to return, that is to recover their nationality. Each citizen who became a refugee has an individual right to acquire Israeli nationality. Descendants of these refugees have an identical right.​

So if you lived in Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel, you have the RoR. And since Israel was a state created in 1948, there is no Israeli nationality (for Jews who were not living in the area), to re-claim.

To sum it up, European Jews have no right of return.

That, my friend, is a bullshit answer. And I will tell you why. You are using modern laws to grant rights to one set of people while simultaneously denying that same right to another set of people. You are essentially saying that the modern RoR did not come into being until 1948, and therefore all peoples who were expelled prior to 1948 can't access the same rights as those people expelled after 1948. Now that is a bullshit answer which does not set a moral criteria for rights, but only sets a convenient excuse for denying rights.

There is not, and there should not be, a dividing line in time where people who fall on the "wrong" side have no rights and those on the "right" side do. Any identifiable people who exist after the development of laws granting humanitarian rights must be able to access those rights. The existence of rights should not be based on the length of time since expulsion or some cut off "best before" date.

Now, that said, I can still argue for RoR for the Palestinians without requiring they be returned to Israel proper. There is absolutely no provision in customary law for anyone expelled or forced to flee during conflict to return to the exact location of their prior residence. All of these laws depend on a return to the nationality of origin in broad terms. Since Palestinians are demanding a separate and self-determinative government and sovereign nation and that nation is to be constituted from the State of Israel and her sovereign territories, the requirement for the RoR will be fulfilled if the Palestinian refugees and their descendants are returned to the nascent state of Palestine.



And P F Tinmore, you have no business declaring Billo a "winner" for his post when you have already unequivocally stated that RoR is an intergenerational right. If you are now qualifying your answer to mean that it is an intergenerational right only in some cases -- define your criteria for when it is to be applied and when it not.

 

[Kondor3]

The RoR has always applied to refugees and their descendants.

"Mister Marshall has made his decision. Now, let him enforce it."

 

[P F Tinmore]

Now, the answer the question in the OP, can be found in the Law of State Succession.

Palestinian citizens who left the area that became Israel have the right to return, that is to recover their nationality. Each citizen who became a refugee has an individual right to acquire Israeli nationality. Descendants of these refugees have an identical right.​

So if you lived in Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel, you have the RoR. And since Israel was a state created in 1948, there is no Israeli nationality (for Jews who were not living in the area), to re-claim.

To sum it up, European Jews have no right of return.

That, my friend, is a bullshit answer. And I will tell you why. You are using modern laws to grant rights to one set of people while simultaneously denying that same right to another set of people. You are essentially saying that the modern RoR did not come into being until 1948, and therefore all peoples who were expelled prior to 1948 can't access the same rights as those people expelled after 1948. Now that is a bullshit answer which does not set a moral criteria for rights, but only sets a convenient excuse for denying rights.

There is not, and there should not be, a dividing line in time where people who fall on the "wrong" side have no rights and those on the "right" side do. Any identifiable people who exist after the development of laws granting humanitarian rights must be able to access those rights. The existence of rights should not be based on the length of time since expulsion or some cut off "best before" date.

Now, that said, I can still argue for RoR for the Palestinians without requiring they be returned to Israel proper. There is absolutely no provision in customary law for anyone expelled or forced to flee during conflict to return to the exact location of their prior residence. All of these laws depend on a return to the nationality of origin in broad terms. Since Palestinians are demanding a separate and self-determinative government and sovereign nation and that nation is to be constituted from the State of Israel and her sovereign territories, the requirement for the RoR will be fulfilled if the Palestinian refugees and their descendants are returned to the nascent state of Palestine.



And P F Tinmore, you have no business declaring Billo a "winner" for his post when you have already unequivocally stated that RoR is an intergenerational right. If you are now qualifying your answer to mean that it is an intergenerational right only in some cases -- define your criteria for when it is to be applied and when it not.

Could you clarify what you mean?

 

[Shusha]

Now, the answer the question in the OP, can be found in the Law of State Succession.

Palestinian citizens who left the area that became Israel have the right to return, that is to recover their nationality. Each citizen who became a refugee has an individual right to acquire Israeli nationality. Descendants of these refugees have an identical right.​

So if you lived in Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel, you have the RoR. And since Israel was a state created in 1948, there is no Israeli nationality (for Jews who were not living in the area), to re-claim.

To sum it up, European Jews have no right of return.

That, my friend, is a bullshit answer. And I will tell you why. You are using modern laws to grant rights to one set of people while simultaneously denying that same right to another set of people. You are essentially saying that the modern RoR did not come into being until 1948, and therefore all peoples who were expelled prior to 1948 can't access the same rights as those people expelled after 1948. Now that is a bullshit answer which does not set a moral criteria for rights, but only sets a convenient excuse for denying rights.

There is not, and there should not be, a dividing line in time where people who fall on the "wrong" side have no rights and those on the "right" side do. Any identifiable people who exist after the development of laws granting humanitarian rights must be able to access those rights. The existence of rights should not be based on the length of time since expulsion or some cut off "best before" date.

Now, that said, I can still argue for RoR for the Palestinians without requiring they be returned to Israel proper. There is absolutely no provision in customary law for anyone expelled or forced to flee during conflict to return to the exact location of their prior residence. All of these laws depend on a return to the nationality of origin in broad terms. Since Palestinians are demanding a separate and self-determinative government and sovereign nation and that nation is to be constituted from the State of Israel and her sovereign territories, the requirement for the RoR will be fulfilled if the Palestinian refugees and their descendants are returned to the nascent state of Palestine.



And P F Tinmore, you have no business declaring Billo a "winner" for his post when you have already unequivocally stated that RoR is an intergenerational right. If you are now qualifying your answer to mean that it is an intergenerational right only in some cases -- define your criteria for when it is to be applied and when it not.

Could you clarify what you mean?

What do you need clarification on? My response to Billo or my question to you.

 

[Indeependent]

Now, the answer the question in the OP, can be found in the Law of State Succession.

Palestinian citizens who left the area that became Israel have the right to return, that is to recover their nationality. Each citizen who became a refugee has an individual right to acquire Israeli nationality. Descendants of these refugees have an identical right.​

So if you lived in Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel, you have the RoR. And since Israel was a state created in 1948, there is no Israeli nationality (for Jews who were not living in the area), to re-claim.

To sum it up, European Jews have no right of return.

That, my friend, is a bullshit answer. And I will tell you why. You are using modern laws to grant rights to one set of people while simultaneously denying that same right to another set of people. You are essentially saying that the modern RoR did not come into being until 1948, and therefore all peoples who were expelled prior to 1948 can't access the same rights as those people expelled after 1948. Now that is a bullshit answer which does not set a moral criteria for rights, but only sets a convenient excuse for denying rights.

There is not, and there should not be, a dividing line in time where people who fall on the "wrong" side have no rights and those on the "right" side do. Any identifiable people who exist after the development of laws granting humanitarian rights must be able to access those rights. The existence of rights should not be based on the length of time since expulsion or some cut off "best before" date.

Now, that said, I can still argue for RoR for the Palestinians without requiring they be returned to Israel proper. There is absolutely no provision in customary law for anyone expelled or forced to flee during conflict to return to the exact location of their prior residence. All of these laws depend on a return to the nationality of origin in broad terms. Since Palestinians are demanding a separate and self-determinative government and sovereign nation and that nation is to be constituted from the State of Israel and her sovereign territories, the requirement for the RoR will be fulfilled if the Palestinian refugees and their descendants are returned to the nascent state of Palestine.



And P F Tinmore, you have no business declaring Billo a "winner" for his post when you have already unequivocally stated that RoR is an intergenerational right. If you are now qualifying your answer to mean that it is an intergenerational right only in some cases -- define your criteria for when it is to be applied and when it not.

Could you clarify what you mean?

What do you need clarification on? My response to Billo or my question to you.

WARNING, WILL ROBINSON, WARNING! You are now entering Tinmore "Wash, Rinse, Repeat" Territory!