EU justice for refugees

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
21 March '10

There's no reason to blame yourself if you missed the media coverage of last week's Middle East visit by the EU's new foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, England. To be sure, the media dutifully reported on the visit, but it didn't exactly dominate the headlines. Many people may therefore be unaware that Lady Ashton followed President Obama's example and tried to win Muslim "hearts and minds" with a speech in Cairo.

Since there is already an excellent analysis of this speech by Emanuele Ottolenghi at Commentary's Contentions blog, I would like to focus here just on one of the issues raised by Ashton, namely her declaration that "we need a just solution of the refugee issue."

The context of this remark indicates that Lady Ashton only had Palestinian refugees in mind when she raised this point. As usual, there was no mention of the inconvenient fact that the number of Jewish refugees systematically driven from their ancient communities and dispossessed by Arab states is actually higher than the number of Palestinians who fled their homes during the war waged by the Arabs to prevent or undo the establishment of Israel.

We can obviously only speculate as to what Lady Ashton and the EU would consider a "just solution of the refugee issue", but we know by now that in the negotiations between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, the Palestinians demanded that 150,000 refugees should be allowed to "return" to Israel as part of a peace agreement. Interestingly enough, this number is only stated in the English translation of a relevant document, authored by Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, while the original Arabic version does not specify any number.

The long-standing Arab demand that, different from all the world's other refugees, the Palestinians should be allowed hereditary refugee status and should be able to claim a "right of return" for several generations has often been refuted.

A recent ruling by the European Court of Human Rights has once again illustrated that there is little basis for Palestinian claims of a "right of return". The court rejected the "right of return" claimed by Greek refugees from Northern Cyprus who had fled to the southern half of the island during the Turkish occupation in the 1970s. A majority of the court's judges accepted the Turkish argument that developments in the following decades had created a new reality that should not be undone, and that the refugees therefore could only claim financial compensation for their lost property.

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