(JNS) If people want a resolution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, then the first step must be to take the so-called “right of return” off the table. That needs to begin by having citizenship granted to the so-called “Palestinian refugees” who have been living stateless in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan for decades, thereby ending their hereditary refugee status.

These three countries are in desperate need of assistance and recognition from the United States and the West, and they must be prevailed upon to contribute their share by doing what every other country in the world has done over the years—grant citizenship to the Palestinian refugees who already live within their borders. Needless to say, this is a population that is culturally and religiously close to these states: a Muslim, Arabic-speaking population with almost identical cultural characteristics.

Since 2007, Gaza has effectively been a Palestinian state. It is an Islamist emirate ruled by the Hamas terrorist organization with a recognized international border with Israel, as well as a border and border crossings with Egypt, which controlled the Gaza Strip until the Six-Day War in 1967. After Hamas’s invasion and genocide on Oct. 7, 2023, it became clear that this model of a ground incursion—slaughter, rape and the murder of Israeli civilians by Islamist terrorists—could be replicated in many places in the West, as well against the majority Christian population, using Islamist enclaves as safe havens for raiders.

In Gaza, as in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, Palestinians still defined as refugees are now in their fifth generation, 77 years after the establishment of the State of Israel. The only Arab state that has partially naturalized Palestinians is Jordan.

Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, holds Jordanian citizenship and owns a luxury home there, yet he still calls himself a refugee from Safed in northern Israel. Palestinians as a whole rely on the United Nations and donor-country aid to preserve their refugee status, while Arab states and other actors who wish to perpetuate the conflict with Israel treat them as a political bargaining chip.

It is worth noting that Arabs who remained in Israel when seven Arab states launched their attack at the very moment of its re-establishment in 1948 live today as full citizens in democratic Israel. Arab Israelis, who make up 21% of the population, enjoy equal rights and citizenship, and experience a level of prosperity unmatched by Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East. At the same time, when the modern-day State of Israel was founded, Jews were expelled from Arab countries where they had lived for hundreds of years, stripped of their citizenship and property, and subjected to pogroms.

In effect, since Israel’s establishment, there was an exchange of populations: Most Jews from Arab countries fled and came to help build the newly founded State of Israel, while many Arabs (they were not yet called “Palestinians” at the time) fleeing the war left for Arab countries. A good example is my own family. My parents and their relatives, who knew that they needed to leave Iraq after the Farhud pogrom of 1941, fled to Israel in 1949 and 1950.

Anat Berko’s mother, Claire Salman, also shown with her older brother, Solomon Salman, in front of their house in Al-Alawiya, Baghdad, Iraq. Credit: Courtesy of Anat Berko.

Until 1948, about 900,000 Jews lived in Arab and Muslim countries—Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya and more. They suffered persecution, death threats, harassment, confiscation of property, laws restricting movement and speech, anti-Jewish legislation and the stripping of their citizenship.

Since Israel’s founding, the Islamic world has effectively become Judenrein, and its ancient Jewish communities have been destroyed. These Jews were never recognized by the United Nations or anyone else as refugees. My family shed the mantle of refugeehood, built full lives in Israel, raised six children and educated us to work hard to become productive citizens of the young state. Life was hard. Many people lived in tent camps under harsh conditions, but they kept their heads down, learned Hebrew, found work and raised their children on the right path.

By contrast, Palestinian refugees are “eternal” refugees with a special privilege, passing their status on by inheritance. There has been no resettlement and no giving up the refugee label. This is the only refugee population for which the United Nations created a special agency, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), in 1949 as a “temporary” measure, which became permanent and a source of disincentive to resettle and shed their refugee status. Other refugees worldwide do not receive such privileges; they are handled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees under a very narrow definition of refugee status that is not hereditary.

Only among Palestinians is refugeehood passed down from generation to generation, with their numbers continuing to grow, even if they obtain citizenship elsewhere. This means that even an American citizen can be counted as a Palestinian refugee. A case in point: US Muslim millionaire Mohamed Hadid, father of five, including two famous fashion models, is classified under UNRWA as a Palestinian refugee. Hadid was born in Nazareth in November 1948, months after Israel’s founding, during the War of Independence. His family moved to Lebanon, then to Syria, and finally settled in the United States. This is an example of the absurdity in the definition of Palestinian refugeehood.

If we truly want to change the status quo, we must start with the total dismantling of UNRWA, which has become a platform for the death industry in the service of Hamas, a murderous terrorist group in the Muslim Brotherhood tradition. In some cases, Hamas even infiltrated terrorists into UNRWA’s workforce. UNRWA’s schools have included antisemitic materials that poison young Palestinian minds, and its facilities are used for terrorism. President Donald Trump understood this during his first term. Unfortunately, the Israeli leadership was shortsighted, viewing UNRWA as a convenient arrangement that “took care of the Palestinians,” without realizing that this had freed Palestinian terrorist groups to invest vast resources in their diversified terror industry since the founding of the PLO.

By way of reminder, here is just a partial list of the “contributions” that Palestinian terrorism has made to the world: airline hijackings, suicide bombings, beheadings, raping, human trafficking and kidnappings, car-ramming attacks, stabbings and the slaughter of civilians with knives, among others. The United Nations as a whole has not only lost its relevancy but become an organization that serves the interests of terrorist groups, an issue that deserves its own separate discussion.

As Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism has pointed out numerous times, the United Nations has actually become an agent of terrorism. “The hideous role of UNRWA officials in carrying out rape, murder and kidnappings in the Hamas-organized attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 is unprecedented. But hopefully we might see a jury in the US finally apportion long-awaited blame on UNWRA and its US-based partner in crime, UNWRA USA. A new superseding lawsuit is about to be filed by Richard Heidemann and various co-counsel that spells out in horrific detail the atrocities carried out by UNWRA on Oct. 7—atrocities made possible by the blood money of the United Nations and various charitable entities such as UNWRA USA.”

Trump, who does not shy away from his responsibilities or leadership, has proven himself able to act for the benefit of America and the entire free world. He demonstrated this by joining Israel’s fight against Iran and leading US strikes on the Shi’ite theocracy’s nuclear facilities, which threaten the whole world.

Therefore, to reduce the existential conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to manageable proportions, we must remove the “zero-sum equation” in which Palestinians say they want their own state but also demand “return,” meaning settling their people inside Israel, a country smaller than New Jersey. In other words, Palestinians do not want a state next to Israel, but aim to eliminate it—the world’s only Jewish, Hebrew-speaking state.

When Israel was founded, it absorbed Holocaust survivors, real refugees, from Europe and Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Now it is the turn of chaotic Arab states, which have bred death and terrorism within their borders, to naturalize their fellow Muslim, culturally similar Palestinians who live among them. This would be the first step toward some kind of solution to the Palestinian problem—not the synthetic, meaningless format promoted by weak European leaders intimidated by Islamist immigrants with voting rights who threaten Europe’s democratic character.

By perpetuating the “right of return,” the Palestinians shift from the murderous barbarity seen in the Oct. 7 genocide of Israelis to a posture of eternal victimhood, perpetuating misery and refugeehood. They must take their fate into their own hands. The terrorism they carry out is no different from that of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram or Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

One day, the world will not be able to ignore it because terrorism is now found everywhere, led by Islamists associated with radical groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and from Shi’ite Iran. The Gulf States and Egypt have long understood this, outlawing the Brotherhood and banning Al Jazeera, the Qatari Islamist propaganda channel, from broadcasting on their soil.

The time has come for change, and Trump—with his confident leadership and grip on reality—is the person who can make it happen.

Originally published by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.