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Why don't Palestinian refugees just assimilate where they live?
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In brief: Would you tell a family violently forced from their home by colonial settlers anywhere else to simply accept permanent exile?
Would you tell a family violently forced from their home by colonial settlers anywhere else to simply accept permanent exile? That Palestinians are expected to do so is profoundly dehumanizing. It attempts to make their rights conditional rather than universal, demanding they accept a colonial crime and participate in their own erasure.
Why doesn't Israel just fulfill its obligation to realize the return of Palestinian refugees, a condition inscribed in the very resolution that admitted it to the UN in 1949? The right of return is universal and inalienable. From UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948) to the 2024 International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion, international institutions have repeatedly reaffirmed Palestinian refugees' rights to return, restitution, and compensation. Instead of complying, Israel has spent eight decades preventing return, creating new generations of refugees and internally displaced Palestinians, and even working to dismantle the very institutions that protect them, such as UNRWA.
This is colonial deflection. Demanding that a dispossessed people abandon their homes, land, identity, and internationally recognized right to return is an attempt to absolve Israel of its ongoing responsibility. The obligation to end refugeehood lies with the state that caused it, not with the victims.
The right of return cannot be unilaterally abrogated by third parties. Host countries are neither legally nor morally required to naturalize Palestinian refugees, nor would doing so resolve the injustice or absolve Israel of its responsibility. States, together with the United Nations and international human rights organizations, have repeatedly reaffirmed that the refugee question can only be justly resolved when Israel fulfils its obligations of repatriation, restitution, and compensation.
Ethnic cleansing does not become legitimate with time, nor does the right to return disappear because the perpetrators prolonged the injustice. Palestinian refugees remain entitled to return, restitution, and compensation regardless of how many decades have passed.
Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Chile, the United States, and elsewhere have contributed enormously to the societies where they live while continuing to preserve the keys to their homes and struggle for their return. Regardless of whether they enjoy citizenship and rights elsewhere, the right of return has never ceased to be a central pillar of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
Global precedent supports return, not forced assimilation. Around the world, refugees displaced by war, genocide, and ethnic cleansing, from Bosnia to Rwanda, Guatemala, and Mozambique, have been supported in returning to their homes. Palestinians should not be treated differently.