The Palestinian people will never renounce the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return,” declares PA Daily

Excerpt of an op-ed by Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, regular columnist for the official PA dailyand former advisor to former PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on national affairs

Headline: “Diskin’s delusion and Lapid’s analysis”

“Former Head of the Israeli Security Agency Yuval Diskin comes to us with an article entitled ‘The greed of the PA’s leaders exceeds Israel’s capabilities’ (PMW was unable to find any such article -Ed.)… and Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Yair Lapid announced on Monday, July 12, 2021, following a meeting with his European colleagues in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, that ‘Currently there is no possibility for the two-state solution.’ …

Do they think that the Palestinian people and its legal leadership or any patriotic Palestinian will agree to less than a state in the June 4, 1967 borders, whose capital is East Jerusalem, with a guarantee of the right of return for the Palestinian refugees, the owners of the Palestinian homeland from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River on the basis of UN Resolution 194 (see note below -Ed.)?”

UN Resolution 194 (Chapter 11, Dec. 11, 1948) states that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return." Palestinian leaders argue this means that all Arabs who left Israel during the war (hundreds of thousands) and their descendants (a few million) have a "right of return" to Israel. Israel argues that the resolution only calls for a limited return and only under certain conditions, especially focusing on the words "wishing to return... and live at peace with their neighbors."