[BRIEF NOTE] Wishful thinking
May. 10th, 2008 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldFor a month or so, I've seen posters pasted on the sides of lampposts advertising a protest organized by Palestine House commemorating the al-Nakba, the displacement of the Palestinians from their homes in 1948, for today at 1 o'clock outside of Queen's Park, site and informal name of the Ontario Provincial Parliament building.
The poster carried the slogan "Palestinian Refugees Will Return."
No they won't.
Leave aside the profound unlikelihood of Israelis allowing a mass return of Palestinians--angry people, with claims on property now owned by Jews or the Israeli state, wanting compensation--that would make a Jews a minority within the frontiers of even the 1948 state. Leave aside the further unlikelihood that anyone would be interested or even capable of making Israel do this.
As a point of fact, the international community has generally ratified the results of ethnic cleansing so long as said acts were particularly thorough and/or sufficiently distant in time. Don't believe me? Look at Srebrenica, the community that in 1995 saw the horrific massacre of eight thousand men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces (see Wikipedia, Gendercide, PBS, and the BBC for more). This genocidal act, all but televised, was one of the things that may have triggered both the highly successful joint Croatian-Bosnian offensive against various Serb forces and an international tribunal charged with investigating war crimes.
Despite all this, Srebrenica is now a city located within the Republika Srpska and a community that further possesses a Serb majority. Despite the largest massacre in European history in the Second World War, and despite the overwhelming superiority of NATO over the Republika Srpska, and despite the wishes of survivors that Srebrenica be removed from the Republika Srpska, the results of the 1995 ethnic cleansing of that city have been ratified by the international community.
The Palestinians just don't have a chance.
The poster carried the slogan "Palestinian Refugees Will Return."
No they won't.
Leave aside the profound unlikelihood of Israelis allowing a mass return of Palestinians--angry people, with claims on property now owned by Jews or the Israeli state, wanting compensation--that would make a Jews a minority within the frontiers of even the 1948 state. Leave aside the further unlikelihood that anyone would be interested or even capable of making Israel do this.
As a point of fact, the international community has generally ratified the results of ethnic cleansing so long as said acts were particularly thorough and/or sufficiently distant in time. Don't believe me? Look at Srebrenica, the community that in 1995 saw the horrific massacre of eight thousand men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces (see Wikipedia, Gendercide, PBS, and the BBC for more). This genocidal act, all but televised, was one of the things that may have triggered both the highly successful joint Croatian-Bosnian offensive against various Serb forces and an international tribunal charged with investigating war crimes.
Despite all this, Srebrenica is now a city located within the Republika Srpska and a community that further possesses a Serb majority. Despite the largest massacre in European history in the Second World War, and despite the overwhelming superiority of NATO over the Republika Srpska, and despite the wishes of survivors that Srebrenica be removed from the Republika Srpska, the results of the 1995 ethnic cleansing of that city have been ratified by the international community.
The Palestinians just don't have a chance.
