Atallah, a Palestinian refugee living in Bethlehem:
People try to frame Arafat's refusal of a peace agreement as a grave mistake. This is not accurate. Arafat rejected an agreement which would have given away more than 80% of the historic land of Palestine, and would have also forgotten about some 6 million Palestinian refugees. According to the proposed plan, those refugees would have never had a chance to return to their land, a right of return guaranteed by international law. Arafat's rejection of this agreement in fact saved the lives and saved the hopes of millions of Palestinian refugees living around the world.
1 comment:
Yeah Arafat definitely should have held out for a Palestinian state that would include Eilat and Tel Aviv. Refugees were never going to return to the places their grandparents left in 1948. They could have had a country in the West Bank and Gaza instead, but now "hope" is all they'll ever have.
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