What Does UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 Say About the Palestinian Right of Return? Reading the Text, the 1974 Vote and the Instruments Around It

UN General Assembly Resolution 3236, adopted on 22 November 1974 by 89 votes to 8 with 37 abstentions, supports the Palestinian right of return in one operative sentence. Its paragraph 2 “reaffirms also the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.” The verb “reaffirms” points back 26 years, to Resolution 194 of 1948, which said refugees “should be permitted” to return and offered compensation to those choosing not to. Resolution 3236 raises that wording to an “inalienable right” and drops the compensation alternative. It carries the force the UN Charter gives the Assembly, which under Article 10 “may make recommendations.” The one instrument Israel and the PLO have both signed on the subject, the 1995 Interim Agreement, lists refugees among the issues left for permanent status negotiations.

Key Findings

• Resolution 3236 paragraph 2 (UN General Assembly, 1974) calls return an “inalienable right” and “calls for their return.” It was adopted on a roll call by 89 votes to 8, with 37 abstentions; the 8 against were Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Iceland, Israel, Nicaragua, Norway and the United States.
• Resolution 194 paragraph 11 (UN General Assembly, 1948) set return beside a remedy: “compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.” Resolution 3236 carries no compensation clause.
• Resolution 3376 (UN General Assembly, 1975) created a 20-member committee to recommend a programme for implementing Resolution 3236. It did not create a body that administers return.
• Article XXXI(5) of the Interim Agreement (Israel and the PLO, 1995), signed 21 years after Resolution 3236, lists “refugees” among the “remaining issues” for permanent status negotiations.
• Resolution 3236 contains no population figure. The earliest UN estimate is about 711,000 “refugees from Israel-controlled territory” (United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1950), dated 7 September 1949.

What does Resolution 3236 actually say about return?

On 22 November 1974, at its twenty-ninth session, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 3236. Its paragraph 2 “reaffirms also the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return” (UN General Assembly, 1974). Every later description of the resolution’s support for return traces to that sentence.

The sentence makes three separate moves. It calls the right “inalienable,” a word the resolution applies throughout to the rights it lists. It names a destination, “their homes and property,” rather than a territory. It then goes beyond recognition with an operative request: the Assembly “calls for their return.”

Paragraph 1 sets the frame. It “reaffirms the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine,” including “the right to self-determination without external interference” and “the right to national independence and sovereignty.” The word “also” in paragraph 2 ties return to that list. The subject shifts between the two paragraphs. Paragraph 1 speaks of “the Palestinian people,” a collective. Paragraph 2 speaks of “the Palestinians,” the individuals who were displaced. Paragraph 3 then “emphasizes that full respect for and the realization of these inalienable rights of the Palestinian people are indispensable for the solution of the question of Palestine.”

Several things are absent from the text. Paragraph 2 names no territory, no date of displacement, no eligibility rule, no procedure, no administering body and no number of people. The sections below take each of those in turn, because each was supplied, or left unsupplied, by an instrument other than Resolution 3236.

Did Resolution 3236 create the right or restate it?

Resolution 3236 restated a right the General Assembly had first addressed 26 years earlier. Its paragraph 2 opens with “reaffirms.” The 1948 text it reaffirms, Resolution 194 paragraph 11, resolved that refugees “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date” (UN General Assembly, 1948).

The common reading holds up on the text. Resolution 3236 is the strongest General Assembly statement of return, and its wording goes further than the 1948 paragraph. What it did was recast that paragraph rather than originate it. Set side by side, the two texts differ on five points:

Source: UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948, and Resolution 3236 (XXIX), 22 November 1974, adopted texts.

The 1948 paragraph was framed as a set of options. Its second clause “instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation.” Resolution 3236 keeps only the first of those, repatriation, and drops both the condition of living at peace and the reference to practicability.

The years between the two texts are documented by the Conciliation Commission itself. Its Secretariat’s 1961 working paper, “Historical Survey of Efforts to Secure the Implementation of Paragraph 11 of General Assembly Resolution 194 (III),” records the implementation file from 1948 to 1961 (United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1961). That is the record Resolution 3236 inherited. The adoption of the 1948 paragraph, including its vote, is covered in the Institute’s report on the legal instruments behind the right of return.

Does 3236 keep Resolution 194’s compensation alternative?

Resolution 3236 drops the compensation alternative that Resolution 194 paragraph 11 set beside return in 1948. The only UN valuation of what that alternative would have priced, the Conciliation Commission Refugee Office’s estimate of September 1951, put the abandoned land at £P100 million (United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1961).

The 1948 text provided that “compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” That gave a refugee two remedies, return or payment. Resolution 3236 mentions property only as the place of return, “their homes and property,” and contains no clause for anyone who does not return. On the 1974 text, the remedy is restitution alone.

The Commission’s valuation sets out the scale of what the dropped clause covered. Annex V of the 1961 working paper gives the extent of “abandoned land which has passed to Jewish hands” as 16,324 square kilometres, of which 4,574 were cultivable. The exact total of the valuation is £P100,383,784, made up of £P69,525,144 in rural land, £P21,608,640 in urban land and £P9,250,000 in Jerusalem. The Refugee Office warned that its estimates “must inevitably be regarded as approximate ones.” It also declined to rely on the records of Israel’s Custodian of Absentee Property, because “it would be inappropriate to assess compensation entirely on the basis of information furnished by an interested party,” and built its estimate from the Mandatory government’s Village Statistics of 1945.

The fullest archival account of that file is Michael Fischbach’s 2003 history, “Records of Dispossession,” published by Columbia University Press. It is built largely on the Conciliation Commission’s own archives and follows the refugee property question from 1948 to the collapse of Camp David II (Fischbach, 2003). The statutes that governed the property those refugees left are the subject of a separate Institute report. The textual point here is narrower: whatever the property file came to, Resolution 3236 addresses it only through return.

How did the General Assembly vote on Resolution 3236?

The General Assembly adopted Resolution 3236 by 89 votes to 8, with 37 abstentions, on a roll call at its 2296th plenary meeting on 22 November 1974, according to the meeting’s verbatim record (UN General Assembly, 1974). The eight votes against were Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Iceland, Israel, Nicaragua, Norway and the United States. Israel’s position on the resolution therefore sits in the UN record as a roll-call vote against it.

Of the 134 delegations that voted or abstained, 89 (66.4%) voted in favour, 8 (6.0%) voted against and 37 (27.6%) abstained. Those three shares are of the 134 recorded positions, not of the full UN membership in 1974. Delegations that recorded no position are outside the count. Resolution 3237, put to the vote immediately afterwards at the same meeting, passed by 95 votes to 17 with 19 abstentions, so the text inviting the PLO as an observer drew more than twice as many votes against as the text on return.

The division matters to how the resolution is described. A “formal UN affirmation” is accurate, but the formality came from an Assembly majority. Just over a quarter of the recorded positions were abstentions, and one of the eight votes against came from Israel, the state inside whose post-1949 lines the Conciliation Commission’s 1951 survey located the property refugees claimed. The recorded vote is the most direct official evidence of how states received the text on the day it was adopted. Later sections cover what the Assembly did next and what the parties themselves signed.

Which homes and property does the resolution’s wording cover?

The text of Resolution 3236 names no territory. The earliest UN survey of property claimed by refugees, the Conciliation Commission’s 1951 sampling of refugee families in Jordan, recorded claims to 3,508,540 dunums of land abandoned in Israel (United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1951). That places the claimed homes and property inside Israel’s post-1949 lines.

Paragraph 2 describes the property only by what happened to its owners: property “from which they have been displaced and uprooted.” It contains no geographic noun, no boundary line and no date. Any statement about which homes the paragraph reaches is therefore an interpretation of the text. W. Thomas Mallison and Sally V. Mallison, in a 1979 study the United Nations published at the request of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, read the phrase as covering homes and property in the State of Israel and in the territories occupied since 1967. The study states that its views are those of its authors. That reading is theirs; it does not appear in the operative clause.

The 1951 survey records the claims for the first of those two categories. It worked from the relief agency’s fact-sheets for the 84,000 heads of refugee families in Jordan, about 540,000 persons, one question of which asked for a general statement of property abandoned in Israel. Of those families, 66% (55,400) claimed buildings or land or both, and 34% claimed no property at all. The survey’s text says 49,500 families claimed houses; its own summary table totals 49,000. The Secretariat noted that “the claims on which the survey is based were unchecked and not documented.”

Two limits follow from the survey’s design. It covers refugees in Jordan only, so it is not a figure for all refugees of 1948. It also predates 1967 by sixteen years, so it cannot speak to the second category in the Mallisons’ reading. The 1974 text leaves both categories unstated.

What body did the Assembly create to implement it?

The General Assembly’s implementing step came in Resolution 3376 of 10 November 1975. That resolution established a Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People made up of 20 member states, and asked it to recommend a programme of implementation for the rights recognized in paragraphs 1 and 2 of Resolution 3236 (UN General Assembly, 1975).

The Committee’s name repeats the vocabulary of Resolution 3236, and its mandate mirrors that resolution’s limits. Resolution 3376 asked the Committee to consider and recommend. It did not give the Committee power to register claimants, adjudicate property, arrange transport or admit anyone to any territory. The Committee’s product was to be a report and recommendations, returned to the General Assembly.

Resolution 3376 then pointed beyond the Assembly. It requested the Security Council to consider, after the Committee reported in 1976, the exercise by the Palestinian people of the rights recognized in paragraphs 1 and 2 of Resolution 3236. That referral is the resolution’s own acknowledgement of where binding decisions sit in the Charter’s structure, which the next section takes up.

Resolution 3236’s phrase “calls for their return” was therefore followed, within a year, by a recommending body rather than an executing one. The path from the 1974 text to any return on the ground ran through three further steps: the Committee’s recommendations, action by the Security Council, and the consent or agreement of the states concerned. Resolution 3376 supplied the first step. The other two were left to bodies and parties whose decisions no General Assembly resolution controls.

Does a General Assembly resolution bind any state?

Article 10 of the UN Charter, the treaty text that sets the General Assembly’s powers, provides that the Assembly “may make recommendations” to members or to the Security Council. Resolution 3236 was adopted under that power, and it carries a recommendation’s force (United Nations, 1945).

The Charter draws the contrast itself. Under Article 25, “The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.” No equivalent undertaking attaches to Assembly resolutions on matters of this kind. No Security Council resolution restates the language of Resolution 3236 paragraph 2, so the right as the 1974 text words it has not passed through the Charter’s binding channel. The Security Council referral in Resolution 3376 shows that the Assembly itself saw that channel as the next step.

This is the precise sense in which the resolution “does not create an enforcement mechanism”. The limit is set by the Charter’s own allocation of powers, not by any gap in the 1974 drafting. A General Assembly text can reaffirm, recognize, call for and request. It cannot oblige a state to admit a person.

Andrew Kent, then an associate professor at Fordham Law School, examined this legal effect in a 2012 article in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, a student-edited law review that is not peer-reviewed (Kent, 2012). The article asks whether Israel violated international law during the 1947 to 1949 conflict by expelling civilians or by later refusing repatriation. It argues that the law then in force, together with General Assembly resolutions that recommend rather than decide, did not establish return as a binding obligation. Kent states that he assumes the factual premises about 1947 to 1949 for the sake of argument. His article is a doctrinal argument, and it is not evidence of what happened in those years.

What have Israel and the PLO since signed about refugees?

In 1995, 21 years after Resolution 3236, Israel and the PLO signed the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its Article XXXI(5) lists “refugees” among the “remaining issues” for permanent status negotiations, which were to begin “not later than May 4, 1996” (Israel and the PLO, 1995).

The clause reads in full: “Permanent status negotiations will commence as soon as possible, but not later than May 4, 1996, between the Parties. It is understood that these negotiations shall cover remaining issues, including: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, relations and cooperation with other neighbors, and other issues of common interest.” The text was signed at Washington on 28 September 1995 and witnessed by the United States, the Russian Federation, Egypt, Jordan, Norway and the European Union.

Article XXXI(6) preserves each side’s starting position: “Neither Party shall be deemed, by virtue of having entered into this Agreement, to have renounced or waived any of its existing rights, claims or positions.” The clause is symmetrical. It keeps any claim resting on Resolution 3236 intact for the PLO, and it keeps Israel’s opposition, recorded in its 1974 vote, equally intact. Article XXXI(7) adds a mutual standstill: “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.” On the refugee question, the signed text fixes procedure and leaves the substance open.

The Agreement is published in English by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a party to it. The citation runs to both signatories, because the instrument is bilateral.

Does repeated reaffirmation turn the resolution into law?

Andrew Kent, writing in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law in 2012, argues that General Assembly resolutions supply no binding legal basis for return. Victor Tadros, writing in Politics, Philosophy & Economics in 2017, argues that the right persists morally across generations but expressly declines to defend a duty on Israel to permit it (Kent, 2012; Tadros, 2017).

The two authors answer different questions. Kent’s is doctrinal: what the law required of states in 1947 to 1949, and what legal effect a recommendation carries. On his account, reaffirming a recommendation many times does not change what kind of instrument it is. His article is a student-edited law review piece, not peer-reviewed.

Tadros, Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Warwick, writes moral philosophy in a peer-reviewed journal. His article argues that Palestinians hold a right to return to territory governed by Israel. He argues that the current generation keeps a significant interest in return because the political struggle to return has been sustained across generations. His abstract then draws its own boundary: “However, it does not defend the duty on Israel to permit return. Whether there is such a duty depends on whether the economic, social and security costs override that right.” It is an argument about moral rights. It is not a reading of what international law requires, and it makes no claim that repeated General Assembly votes create legal obligations.

The disagreement is therefore sharper than a single split over the resolution. On Kent’s account, the legal status of return is unchanged by repetition. On Tadros’s account, persistence matters, but through political struggle, not through Assembly voting, and a moral right still does not settle a state’s duty. Neither author treats Resolution 3236 as having converted the 1948 recommendation into a treaty obligation. The separate question of customary-law status is covered in the Institute’s report on the legal instruments behind the right of return.

Whose count sets how many people the right covers?

Resolution 3236 contains no population figure. The earliest UN estimate of the people it concerns is the Conciliation Commission Technical Committee’s figure of about 711,000 “refugees from Israel-controlled territory,” dated 7 September 1949 and published in the Commission’s 1950 report (United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1950).

That figure is an estimate and was never a census. The Technical Committee considered a census, judged one inadvisable, and described its result as only as accurate as circumstances permitted. The Committee also recorded that the relief rolls carried a higher number than 711,000, and attributed the difference to duplicated ration cards, to people displaced from areas other than Israel-held territory, and to people who were destitute without having been displaced. By construction, the estimate excludes people displaced inside Israel. It records where refugees came from. It does not record why they left.

Other bodies reach nearby totals by other methods. Michael Fischbach’s “Records of Dispossession,” published by Columbia University Press in 2003, gives more than 726,000 Palestinians uprooted from late 1947 through 1948, according to the publisher’s description of the book (Fischbach, 2003). Benny Morris’s archival history, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, carries roughly 700,000 as its own estimate (Morris, 2004). The Israel Law Review’s 2018 report of a Hebrew University workshop on the 1948 refugees records two historians side by side: Morris said the United Nations concluded in 1949 to 1950 that the figure was “just over 700,000,” and Mahmoud Yazbak said about 400 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed and about 80 per cent of the residents of the regions on which Israel was established were expelled or fled (Israel Law Review, 2018). The report is a summary of the speakers’ presentations, not peer-reviewed research.

Later totals come from bodies that register people on their own definitions, and Resolution 3236 neither adopts nor names any of them. The number of people the right covers is supplied from outside the resolution by whichever body is counting, on that body’s definitions. For the dispute over what caused the 1948 displacement, Morris’s locality-by-locality account is the archival starting point.

Methodology and limitations

This report draws on three types of evidence. The first is primary and official records: the adopted texts of General Assembly Resolutions 194 (III), 3236 (XXIX), 3237 (XXIX) and 3376 (XXX), the roll-call vote on Resolution 3236 in the verbatim record of the 2296th plenary meeting (A/PV.2296), the UN Charter, the Conciliation Commission documents A/1367/Rev.1 (1950), A/AC.25/W/60 (1951) and A/AC.25/W/81/Rev.2 (1961), the Interim Agreement of 1995, and Israel’s Law of Return of 1950. The second is scholarly books from university presses (Fischbach, 2003; Morris, 2004). The third is journal scholarship (Kent, 2012; Tadros, 2017) and the Israel Law Review’s 2018 report of a workshop on the 1948 refugees, which summarises its speakers’ presentations.

Each type measures something different. The resolutions and the Agreement record what bodies adopted or signed, never what occurred. The recorded vote records positions on a date. The Conciliation Commission figures are estimates: the 711,000 is a 1949 statistical estimate, the 1951 property survey extrapolates from samples of 400 among refugee families in Jordan only and rests on undocumented claims, and the 1951 valuation is the Commission’s own approximation made without the Custodian’s records. Kent’s article appears in a student-edited law review, is not peer-reviewed, and assumes its factual premises. Tadros’s article is peer-reviewed moral philosophy and is cited here only for its moral argument. The 1979 study that reads paragraph 2 as reaching 1967 territory is named as its authors’ interpretation, which the study itself says it is, not as operative text.

No Security Council resolution restating paragraph 2 of Resolution 3236 appears in the record. The Interim Agreement is quoted from the English text published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Conclusion

How does Resolution 3236 support the right of return? Through the strongest wording the General Assembly has used on the subject. The resolution calls return “inalienable,” ties it to “homes and property,” and “calls for their return,” and it did so on a recorded vote of 89 to 8 with 37 abstentions.

The record around that sentence is equally clear. The resolution restates a 1948 paragraph rather than originating the right, and in restating it drops both the condition of living at peace and the compensation alternative that the Conciliation Commission later priced at £P100 million. The Assembly’s follow-up was a 20-member committee to recommend a programme. The Charter it acted under makes Assembly texts recommendations and reserves binding decisions for a Council that has not restated the paragraph. The two parties, in the one agreement both signed, placed refugees on a list of issues to negotiate. The number of people the right concerns, from 711,000 upward, is counted by bodies outside the text. What Resolution 3236 contributes is language: it defines the right as inalienable without defining its territory, its beneficiaries or its mechanism.

That leaves a question the 1974 text raises and does not close. When a right is declared inalienable by one body and deferred to negotiation by the parties themselves, which of the two instruments governs whether any displaced family goes home? It is a question for readers, and for the states and negotiators who have held both texts since 1995.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Resolution 3236 relate to Resolution 3237?

The General Assembly adopted both on 22 November 1974. Resolution 3237 invited the Palestine Liberation Organization to take part in the Assembly’s sessions and work as an observer (UN General Assembly, 1974). Resolution 3236 set out the rights, and 3237 dealt with who would speak for them in the Assembly.

What else did Resolution 194 establish in 1948?

Paragraph 2 of Resolution 194 established a Conciliation Commission of three UN member states (UN General Assembly, 1948). Paragraph 11 of the same resolution instructed that Commission to facilitate repatriation, resettlement and compensation. The Commission later produced the 1949 refugee estimate and the 1951 property valuation.

Is the Palestinian right of return the same as Israel’s Law of Return?

No. Section 1 of Israel’s Law of Return of 1950 provides that “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh,” a Jewish immigrant (Knesset, 1950). It is a domestic Israeli statute on Jewish immigration, while Resolution 3236 is a General Assembly recommendation concerning displaced Palestinians.

What date did the Conciliation Commission use to value abandoned property?

The Refugee Office valued property as at 29 November 1947 (United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1961). It chose that date because it “was the last date before the exodus of refugees when land values in Palestine were reasonably stable.” Buildings and trees were valued as part of the land they stood on.

Were refugee bank accounts part of the compensation question?

Separately from land, accounts that Arab refugees held in Israel were blocked. Release began in the summer of 1953, and by 31 August 1956 a total of £2,633,175 had been released (United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1961). That figure is a released balance, not compensation for property.

How does Morris explain the causes of the 1948 exodus?

Benny Morris attributes the exodus to multiple causes that varied by locality and phase: military attack and fear of attack, expulsions in certain sectors, and flight (Morris, 2004). He rejects both a single master expulsion plan and the claim that departures were voluntary.

Sources

• Fischbach, Michael R., 2003. Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Columbia University Press, Institute for Palestine Studies Series. ISBN 9780231129787. Scholarly book (university press).
• Israel and the PLO, 1995. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Article XXXI. Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs text. https://www.gov.il/en/Departments/General/the-israeli-palestinian-interim-agreement. Official record (signed instrument).
• Israel Law Review, 2018. 1948 Refugees: Proceedings of an international workshop, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law, 14 to 15 December 2016. Israel Law Review 51(1), 47 to 110. Cambridge University Press. DOI 10.1017/S0021223717000280. Workshop proceedings (rapporteur’s summary of presentations).
• Kent, Andrew, 2012. Evaluating the Palestinians’ Claimed Right of Return. University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 34(1), 149. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jil/vol34/iss1/3. Law review article (student-edited, not peer-reviewed).
• Knesset, 1950. Law of Return, 5710-1950. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns1_return_eng.pdf. Official record (enacted legislation).
• Morris, Benny, 2004. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521009676. Scholarly book (university press).
• Tadros, Victor, 2017. The Persistence of the Right of Return. Politics, Philosophy & Economics 16(4), 375 to 399. DOI 10.1177/1470594X17736265. Peer-reviewed.
• United Nations, 1945. Charter of the United Nations, Articles 10 and 25. Treaty text. Official record.
• United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1950. General Progress Report and Supplementary Report, A/1367/Rev.1, Appendix 4. Official record.
• United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1951. Sampling Survey of Abandoned Property Claimed by Arab Refugees, A/AC.25/W/60. Official record.
• United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1961. Historical Survey of Efforts to Secure the Implementation of Paragraph 11 of General Assembly Resolution 194 (III): Question of Compensation, A/AC.25/W/81/Rev.2. Official record.
• United Nations General Assembly, 1948. Resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948. Official record (resolution text).
• United Nations General Assembly, 1974. Resolution 3236 (XXIX), 22 November 1974, and the recorded vote on it in the verbatim record of the 2296th plenary meeting, A/PV.2296, paragraph 110. Official record (resolution text and recorded vote).
• United Nations General Assembly, 1974. Resolution 3237 (XXIX), 22 November 1974. Official record (resolution text).
• United Nations General Assembly, 1975. Resolution 3376 (XXX), 10 November 1975. Official record (resolution text).