The ‘Right of Return’ Isn’t a Right — It’s a Means to Attack Israel

In the wake of the October 7th massacre and the war Hamas launched from Gaza, one might expect that Western democracies would take a moment to reassess their assumptions about the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict. Instead, countries like Ireland, Spain, Norway, and Canada are rushing to unilaterally “recognize” a Palestinian Arab state — a move they claim is a step toward peace.

But there is a fatal contradiction at the core of this effort, one that goes almost entirely unexamined: the Palestinian demand for a “right of return.” It is this demand — not settlements, not borders, not Jerusalem — that has repeatedly scuttled any possibility of a negotiated peace.

That’s because this so-called “right” is not a call for compromise. It is a weaponized fantasy, one designed to eliminate the world’s only Jewish state through a back-door diplomatic conquest. It is not about coexistence — it is about replacement. And in backing a Palestinian “state” whose leadership still strenuously clings to this demand, Western governments are not promoting peace. They are underwriting the continuation of war by other means.

In the obsessive international discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict, “right of return” has become a sort of incantation. Palestinian officials brand it a moral imperative. NGOs declare it a human right. And diplomats in Brussels and Ottawa parrot it as a required ingredient for peace.

But this “right of return” is not about justice or reconciliation. It is not even about return. It is a carefully constructed euphemism for demographic warfare — a strategy to undo what conventional warfare failed to accomplish between 1947 and 1973.

It’s the idea that the Jewish State — the only one among the 195 nations on Earth — should agree to import millions of hostile foreign nationals, the descendants of refugees from a war started by five Arab armies and multiple Arab militias trying to destroy it. All while the actual Arab nations that initiated the war continue to hold most of these “refugees” in permanent limbo, denied citizenship and rights in their countries for more than 75 years.

This is not a peace plan. It’s the slow-motion implementation of the PLO’s 1964 charter, which never contemplated statehood beside Israel — but rather statehood instead of Israel.

The phrase “right of return” originates in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed in 1948 at the tail end of the first Arab war to annihilate Israel. That resolution was non-binding, conditional, and explicitly stated that refugees must “wish to live at peace with their neighbors” to be considered for return.

It was intended for individual refugees, not for their descendants, and certainly not as a vehicle to reverse Israel’s existence.

But for decades, Palestinian leaders have mutated this non-binding suggestion into an inherited, irrevocable, and universal “right” — not just for those displaced by a war the Arab League started in 1948, but for their grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great-great-grandchildren, most of whom have never seen Israel, never lived in Israel, and whose ancestors often fled at the behest of Arab leaders who promised Israel would soon be destroyed.

Their goal isn’t to return to homes that no longer exist. It is to settle in sovereign Israel, in places like Haifa, Jaffa, and Ashkelon — not Ramallah or Gaza — to end Israel’s Jewish majority and destroy the Jewish state from within.

Those who advocate for this demographic conquest often argue: “But Israel has a Law of Return. Why shouldn’t Palestinians?”

The comparison is not only false — it’s intentionally deceptive.

Israel’s Law of Return enables Jews, members of an indigenous people who were exiled, persecuted, and nearly annihilated over the course of two millennia, to return to their ancestral homeland.

Critically, Israel’s Law of Return does not seek to displace anyone. It does not call for Jews to “return” to Baghdad, Sana’a, or Warsaw. It does not challenge another state’s sovereignty. It merely provides a refuge and a home within Israel’s own borders.

The Palestinian “right of return” is the opposite: a demand that millions of non-citizens — people who are not from the State of Israel — be granted entry, not into a future Palestinian state, but into Israel itself.

The Palestinian “right of return” is often framed as if it conforms to international norms. But no such norm exists. Many countries, including Greece, Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Poland, have “right of return” laws — granting citizenship or immigration priority to descendants of former citizens or ethnic diasporas.

But all these programs apply to descendants returning to the current sovereign state. No Greek descendant has the “right to return” to Smyrna, now called Izmir in Turkey. No Italian has the right to “return” to Istria or Dalmatia, now part of Croatia and Slovenia. And no German refugee from Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) has the right to “return” and alter Russian demographics.

Only in the case of Israel is a concocted “right” weaponized to try and erase a sovereign country altogether.

Modern history is replete with population transfers: Hindus and Muslims displaced during the Partition of India; Greeks and Turks exchanged en masse after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, etc.

The descendants of these refugees do not claim a right to “return.” No international body insists that they should. And no one pretends that peace or even justice requires it.

So why is the world still entertaining the delusion that five generations of Palestinians — most born in Syria, Lebanon, or Jordan or North America or Brazil– must be able to “return” to Tel Aviv?

Palestinian leaders, from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, to Mahmoud Abbas, have always viewed Israel as a temporary aberration, not a neighbor. Abbas has declared repeatedly: “I will never recognize the Jewishness of the State of Israel.”

This fantasy of return is how war that Haj Amin el-Husseini’s violent rejectionism lost in 1948 is kept alive in diplomatic lobbies and UN chambers.

That’s why Palestinian leaders rejected Ehud Barak’s peace offer in 2000 and Ehud Olmert’s in 2008. Both offered a contiguous Palestinian state in nearly all the so-called “West Bank” and Gaza. Both offered shared control of Jerusalem. And both were answered with “no”–because they required Palestinian leaders to give up the “right” to flood Israel with millions of non-citizens.

There is no “right” to undo another nation’s existence. There is no international principle that compels one people to surrender sovereignty so that their state can be destroyed (a state created because of a defensive war that they won).

Until the Palestinian leadership abandons this claimed “right of return” there will be no two-state solution — because the refusal to abandon this made-up “right” means they don’t want two states. It means they want one. And they want the Jewish state to vanish.

Pretending otherwise is not peacemaking. It’s dangerous enabling, designed to ensure the conflict never ends.