Elder of Ziyon again has a great scoop – another “Palestine Paper” the Guardian chose to bury.
This document demonstrates that, in 2008, the PLO wrote a paper describing the legal rights of Jews to lands that they owned prior to 1948 in Judea and Samaria (land confiscated by the Jordanians when they took control of the territories after 1948 war).
Here’s one paragraph:
“Jews who owned land have the right to have their land restored to them or to be compensated, if restitution is not materially possible. Jews are entitled to compensation for other material and non-material losses, including lost profits, lost income, etc. caused by their displacement and dispossession.”
As we reported during the “Palestine Papers” expose, the Guardian didn’t so much as mention compensation for such refugees, and, indeed, in a piece prior to the “Palestine Papers”, Rachel Shabi completely dismissed the broader issue of Jewish refugees from Arab lands – characterizing the issue as relatively unimportant, and Israeli efforts to highlight the plight of such Jews, during the course of negotiations, as insincere or cynical.
As Elder noted, the Palestinians likely wrote the above passages to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy in the context of their own demands regarding the rights of Palestinian refugees.
Apparently, such moral consistency (concerns about the appearance of employing double standards) is not something the Guardian spends too much time worrying about.
