Visualizing Palestine, a Lebanese-based nongovernmental organization, created an interactive map that shows the shrinking Palestinian population in Palestine between 1918 and 2015. The graphic, “Palestine Shrinking, Israel Expanding,” demonstrates in a clear and simple way the catastrophe that has befallen the Palestinians as a result of Zionist immigration to Palestine and their (direct and indirect) expulsion.

The Zionist narrative falsely claims that Palestine is a “land without a people for a people without a land.” In the process of colonization and settlement by Jewish immigrants, Palestinians were dispossessed and made stateless. They have remained stateless for 67 years.

Palestinians have repeatedly said that the right of return enshrined in various United Nations resolutions is non-negotiable and does not have an expiry date. Palestinians want Israel to recognize its legal and historic responsibility for the refugee crisis, but they have also said that while this right is inalienable, its implementation is subject to negotiation. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas went even further in 2012 and said on Israel TV that he no longer has any desire to live in the city in which he was born and raised, Safad, but would not mind visiting it. In February 2014 in Ramallah, he also told a group of 300 visiting Israelis that Palestinians are not interested in “flooding Israel with Palestinian refugees.”

Resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem was taken up in Resolution 194, passed by the UN General Assembly in December 1948. It is also addressed in the Arab Peace Initiative. Unlike various attempts by Israel and its apologists who insist the problem is insoluble, the Arab plan approaches the refugees' case as something that can be accomplished by consensus rather than clashes. The text on refugees in the Arab peace plan reads, “Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.”