Washington Post Continues Proud Tradition Of Never Getting Anything Right

One of the most irritating talking points in the U.S. regarding Israel/Palestine is that peace isn't possible because the Arab world demands that all the millions of Palestinians refugees be able to exercise their right of return to Israel. They'd all come flooding in, and Israel would be destroyed!

This is completely bogus. If you meet anyone who tells you this, you should ignore everything they say in the future. In fact, Palestinians and the Arab world generally have made their position clear for some time. They need Israel to recognize the right of return in principle, but in reality they accept the number of refugees returning to present day Israel would be very small. Here's how The Truth About Camp David by Clayton Swisher puts it:

After Camp David [in summer, 2000] some Palestinians conceded, off the record, that Arafat had been willing to accept a limited right of return, in all likelihood within the symbolic structures of "family reunification" entertained at Stockholm, so long as the Palestinians received recognition of that right and a viable state with Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. With these compromises in hand, Arafat would be in the strengthened position to go to the Al Aqsa Mosque and address the entire Palestinian diaspora: "There is no reason to go live in Israel now. Come home and help us build the state we have!"

Then in a February, 2002 op-ed for the New York Times, Arafat wrote:

...we seek a fair and just solution to the plight of Palestinian refugees who for 54 years have not been permitted to return to their homes. We understand Israel's demographic concerns and understand that the right of return of Palestinian refugees, a right guaranteed under international law and United Nations Resolution 194, must be implemented in a way that takes into account such concerns.

Then at the Beirut summit in March, 2002, the Arab League endorsed a Saudi peace proposal that called for "a just solution to the Palestinian Refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194."

Those are the facts. How are they reported in the Washington Post? Like this:

Arab foreign ministers agreed to relaunch a five-year-old peace initiative with Israel...

Under the plan, Arab nations would recognize Israel if it gave up land occupied after the 1967 Middle East war and granted Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes lost six decades ago when Israel declared it was a state.

If you were a lawyer, you could argue this is in some narrow sense "accurate," since the 2002 peace initiative referred to Resolution 194, which is the source of the right of return. But in the larger sense the Post article simply reinforces a pernicious, false right-wing narrative. I can only assume the editors there consider reinforcing pernicious, false right-wing narratives to be their job.