"The right of refugees to return to their homes is enshrined in international law," wrote Prof James Bowen of UCC last week. No, it isn't - not in any meaningful sense.
Otherwise the Sudetenland would be full of Germans in lederhosen, slapping their thighs and claiming back their ancestral acres, and Smirna would have crowds of Greek visitors planning to return to the old homestead. Those fleeing the catastrophe of the Famine could certainly claim to be refugees: no doubt the Kennedy clan are covetously eyeing some townland in Wexford.
Anyway, in the absence of international police and international courts, international law has all the might of a county council vote condemning global warming. The professor was making his point in the context of the recent election of Mahmoud Abbas as head of the Palestinian Authority. In essence, he declared this to be invalid, because only Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were able to vote in the election, but not the 58 per cent who live in the diaspora.
The really interesting question here is that these people are still considered Palestinians. Why? After all, the exodus of Arabs from the land that is now Israel occurred nearly 60 years ago. Are the descendants of those refugees not nationals of the countries they moved to? The answer is no. Arab solidarity with their Palestinian brothers, such as it is, means that "Palestinians" have been denied citizenship by the very countries where they have been raised.
Which just shows you something of the Arab definition of brotherhood. When Northern Catholics were driven out in the pogroms in 1921-22, the Free State did not house them in refugee camps for generation after generation. When the Serbs were driven from Krajina by Croat forces a few years ago, Serbia uncomplainingly absorbed them all, though their ancestors had been living in the lands from which they had been expelled for 500 years.
But the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and 1967 were shown no such compassion by their fellow Arabs. These unfortunates have now been corralled in evil, dreary camps for generation after generation, to go mad from boredom or become easy pickings to whatever religious or terrorist lunatic comes their way. Hardly any wonder that they might still consider themselves "Palestinians"; and hardly any wonder that the election to the head of the Palestinian Authority did not include those "electorates" living in remote exile.
These wretched people, fed by their host-regimes on a diet of dire poverty, social exclusion and unrealisable fantasy, would never vote for anyone who is not going to insist on their right to "return" to a land almost none of them have seen. But Israel is not going to permit 4.5 million Arabs to come to the lands where their families were living in 1948, to join the one million Arabs who already have Israeli citizenship. It is just not going to happen, and it is foolish to pretend that it even might.
The Jewishness of the state of Israel is already threatened demographically by the natural increase of the Palestinian population. Israel is simply not going to accept the presence of 8.8 million Palestinians - the number cited by James Bowen - any more than we would accept the right of millions of Americans with Irish ancestry to come and live in Ireland, or to vote in our general elections from afar. The descendants of the exiled must all in common sense forfeit any right of return - as indeed must all the descendants of Ap Owen to live in Wales.
Not talking unrealistic nonsense is the only way of even beginning to deal with the endless and intractable tragedy in the Middle East. Moreover, the Arab countries which have refused to allow their fellow Arabs citizenship because their families hailed from what is now Israel are primarily responsible for the horrors of the refugee camps today.
Let us admit: what happened to the Arabs in 1948 was wrong, as was what happened in 1945 to the Germans of eastern Europe, as was what happened to the Protestants of West Cork and the Catholics in East Belfast and the Turks of Salonika in 1922. But only a political agenda shaped on time-machine delusions, in which we imagine that it is possible to revisit history and undo what we do not like about it, allows those who sympathise with the Palestinians to present the impossible as negotiable and the fantastic as realisable.
To be sure, one can argue hypothetically against the real need for a Jewish state, just as one can regret how it has attracted from these shores the greater part of an energetic and enriching minority. But this is unproductive stuff. Israel now is. That is that. And neither the people of Israel, the greater Jewish population of the world nor the United States of America will permit any project, demographic or otherwise, to threaten the existence of that state. Israel, after all, is smaller than Munster, whereas the greater Arab world that has steadfastly refused homes or citizenship to the Palestinian refugees and their descendants has the same land-mass as the US.
So those Arabs of Palestinian origin living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere should get used to those countries - because that's where they're staying. And the appalling plight of these unfortunate people can only be ended when their friends abroad talk sense rather than fantasy, and their cynical Arab hosts - and in effect, their jailers - cease to use them as pawns to be deployed against Israel.