The Palestinians have international law and justice on their side.
The right of return is a universal right that is binding under international law, enjoyed by every people regardless of where they come from. The idea of universal rights is an ancient one, but one of its first international expressions is found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948 “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations”. One of the core rights set out in the UDHR is the right of return. Article 13(b) of the UDHR states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” Palestinian refugees are entitled to this binding universal right, in the same way that all other refugees are, whether they come from Bosnia, Rwanda, South Africa or anywhere else.
In spite of ill-founded – and quite frankly racist – arguments concerned with denying this universal right to them, the United Nations has frequently insisted on its particular applicability to Palestinian refugees, who constitute the world’s largest refugee population. For instance, General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 2535, passed in 1969, recognises “that the problem of Palestine Arab refugees has arisen from the denial of their inalienable rights under the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. In the same vein, UNGA resolution 3236 reaffirms “the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.”