“Arabs have 22 countries; Palestinians can just go live in one of them”

The argument dissolves a specific people into a language group. “Arab” describes a vast cultural-linguistic world stretching from Morocco to Iraq, as diverse as the Spanish- or English-speaking worlds; Palestinians are as attached to Palestine as Mexicans are to Mexico or the Portuguese to Portugal. Common Article 1 of the ICCPR and the ICESCR declares that “all peoples have the right of self-determination” — by virtue of which they freely determine their political status — and the right attaches to a people in its own homeland, not to any place where a similar language is spoken. No one proposes that Austrians should relocate to Germany, or that a people’s eviction is cured by the existence of twenty other nations sharing their tongue.

The international community has never accepted the interchangeable-Arab premise. On 22 November 1974, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 3236 (XXIX) by 87 votes to 8, reaffirming “the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine,” including “the right to self-determination without external interference” and “the right to national independence and sovereignty,” together with the right of Palestinians “to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted.” UN studies on the international status of the Palestinian people record the same recognition across decades of resolutions.

There is also a practical irony: the Arab host states themselves rejected the “they are all Arabs” logic. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt have hosted the refugees of 1948 and 1967 as refugees — pending return — rather than as immigrants to be absorbed, and the Arab states have insisted at the UN since 1948 that the solution lies in the refugees’ right to return to their own country, not in their redistribution across someone else’s. The claim that Palestinians should settle for an Arab country that is not theirs is an argument no nation makes about itself.

Sources

• Right of Self-Determination of the Palestinian People — United Nations study (on Resolution 3236 (XXIX))
• The International Status of the Palestinian People — United Nations study
• The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem, Part I — United Nations