It sounds like you don’t actually know what the Right of Return is. It has nothing to do with being born in Israel, and most of the people who benefit from it had never before set foot in the country. The Right of Return says that Jews from anywhere in the world can return to their ancestral homeland, and be granted citizenship. Of course there are some hairs to split over who precisely counts as a Jew, but it’s interpreted pretty broadly: Basically, anyone who would have been considered a Jew by the Nazis is also considered one by Israel, because the whole purpose was to create a safe haven for those being persecuted.
Chronos, I expect that he was talking about the Palestinian right of return, not the Israeli law of return.
I believe there are two in play in that region, actually. Generally speaking:
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Israel maintains a Right of Return (also called their Law of Return) which states that any Jew from anywhere in the world can readily apply for and be granted Israeli citizenship, though there have been a few notable exceptions over the years, including Mob money-man Meyer Lansky.
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The Palestinians have as a long-standing policy the demand for a Right of Return for Palestinians who fled what is now Israeli territory during the various wars from 1948 onward, as well as extending this to their descendants. Since this would, if implemented, threaten to change Israel from a Jewish-majority to a Muslim-majority country, Israel has little incentive to discuss the idea, let alone agree to it.
I see Tom Tildrum has already noted the distinction, for which I thank him. I was indeed referring to the second case, which is relevant to the issue while the first case is not.
My personal view on this is generally that a person doesn’t have a right to claim something that was not an issue in their lifetime, thus Palestinians born after their parents were refugees don’t; the children of Cuban exiles born in the U.S. after their parents fled in 1959 don’t; reparations for slavery suffered by one’s distant ancestors is a nonstarter, etc. Situations like Israel/Palestine, China/Taiwan, the two Koreas, etc. persist in permanent states of temporariness and within a few decades at most, everyone who was alive for the initial conflict(s) will be gone.
I’m sure there are other examples worldwide, though none come to mind offhand.
Yes, but in general it will please you to recognise reality. Certainly the US has no tradition of withholding recognition from states on the ground, as suggested by watchwolf49, that the state has an oppressive government. There would be a great many unrecognised states if that were the policy or practice.
Where a state is newly established, and/or it’s open to question whether it really has established itself as an independent entity, or is just a front for some neighbouring power, or could collapse at any moment, then there might be debate about whether or when to recognise it, and of course a relevant issue will be whether it’s in the US’s interests to recognise it (usually meaning “will that piss off any of our friends in the region?”) But it’s rarely in the US’s interests to maintain a blatant fiction for too long by recognising a “state” which plainly never existed, or failing to recognise the existence of an actual state.