Clearly, after 64 years, the time has come to achieve historic
justice for Jewish refugees. Moreover, the still-unsolved
problem has an important diplomatic application. Since the ill-
fated Oslo peace process, the “refugee issue”– a core issue in
the conflict between the PLO leadership and Israel — has been
dominated by the Palestinian leadership’s claims on behalf of
some 680,000 Arab refugees, who fled the fighting during the
multi-front wars launched by Israel’s Arab neighbors to destroy
the fledgling nation-state of the Jewish people in 1947-48 and
in 1967. Regretfully, the Palestinian leadership’s branding of
the Palestinian refugees as the indigenous and sole aggrieved
party has come to reinforce a fictitious yet cogent narrative
that Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei promoted at the recent conference
of non-aligned countries hosted in Tehran. Referring to Israel,
he said: An independent country with a clear historical identity
called Palestine has been taken away from its people through the
use of weapons, kil