For the third year, the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) is set to hold ‘Return Week III’, which aims to raise awareness about the inalienable right of return for Palestinian refugees.

“Return Week” provides a platform to a plethora of activists, academics, and political commentators, and to elevate the voices calling for the Palestinian right of return. Return Week is a commemoration of and also falls on the dates of UN Resolution 194, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the founding of the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

This year’s Return Week is exceptional in form and content as it is loaded with positive implications for the Palestinians and their supporters.

Western and non-Western standpoints regarding the Palestinian cause and Palestinians’ inalienable rights have seen a positive turn, as a result of rising changes in international politics, particularly following the Ukraine-Russia war. A global anti-Israel campaign continues to deplore the West's double standard policies on wars in Ukraine and Gaza, describing them as painful and infuriating. The war serves as a reminder of the Palestinian struggle for statehood, a resistance against the continuous illegal annexation of lands in the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza.

A number of western countries have also shown unconditional and biased support for Israel and its occupation of Palestine. This pro-Israel, anti-Palestine lobby has been led by countries like Britain whose former Prime Minister heartlessly pledged to relocate British embassy to occupied Jerusalem city.

This year’s event is a stark and painful reminder that over 8 million Palestinians have been turned into refugees since the Nakbha of 1948, when tens of thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their homes by Zionist militias. Again, Britain holds a historical and moral responsibility as it sold what “it does not own to those who do not have the right to own” through its notorious Balfour Declaration of 1917, pledging a national Jewish home on usurped Palestinian land.

PRC believes this year’s version of the Return Week sends a message to the entire world that the Palestinians will never ever forfeit their inalienable rights, particularly their right to return to their motherland and establish an independent Palestinian State on the 1967 borders. Until this dream comes true, the longest and most legitimate struggle in the world shall not come to an end.