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The Returning Issue of Palestine's Refugees
It's 62 years since the UN passed a resolution on the rights of Palestinian refugees – rights Israel must recognise for peace
Before his murder in 1948, Lord Folke Bernadotte, the first UN mediator to the Arab-Israeli conflict, stated: "It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent [Palestinian] victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine." Lord Bernadotte paid for his candour with his life as Jewish militants assassinated him under the direction of Yitzhak Shamir, the man who would later become prime minister of Israel.
Less than three months after his death, as the war of 1948 ground to a close, and nearly three-quarters of the entire indigenous Palestinian population had been displaced by Israeli forces, the UN passed general assembly resolution 194, calling for the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes and to be awarded compensation for their losses.
On Saturday, 62 years will have passed without this historic resolution being implemented despite being upheld by the UN with nearly universal consensus ever since. In fact, Israel's own admission as a member to the United Nations was contingent on its adherence to the principles of UNGA 194, something it proceeded to disregard once membership was granted.
Contrary to what Israeli political figures would like the world to believe, the issue of Palestinian refugees is not an academic matter, the solution of which is somehow rendered moot by the passage of time and by the creation of Israeli "facts on the ground." Palestinian displacement continues to this day through the revocation of residency cards, land confiscation, home demolitions and evictions. At the same time, Israel has barred Palestinians displaced between 1947 and 1949, and again in 1967, from returning to their homes or receiving restitution for their lost property, making Palestinian refugees the oldest and largest refugee community in the world today.
The fact that Israel bears responsibility for the creation of the refugees is beyond argument. Even if the state still claims amnesia for its deeds, Israeli historians have debunked the traditional Zionist mythology and shown how Zionist leaders prior to 1948 formulated plans to displace the indigenous Palestinian population in order to create a Jewish majority state. Such a state would have been impossible without the mass expulsion of Palestinians, given that Palestinians constituted a majority in every district of historic Palestine prior to 1948 and also owned over 90% of the land.
Even if we accept the Israeli narrative that refugees left voluntarily – which has been proven false for the vast majority – there is no doubt about the fact that when refugees attempted to return according to their legal right, they were blocked by newly drafted Israeli legislation and declared infiltrators on their own property.
This period of dispossession, known to Palestinians as al-Nakba or "the catastrophe", is the seminal Palestinian experience and source of our collective identity. In fact, the current Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is himself a refugee displaced from the city of Safed during the 1948 war when he was only 13-years-old.
Today, Palestinian refugees constitute more than 7 million people worldwide – 70% of the entire Palestinian population. Disregarding their legitimate legal rights enshrined in international law, their understandable grievances accrued over prolonged displacement, and their aspirations to return to their homeland, would certainly make any peace deal signed with Israel completely untenable.
In accordance with past Israeli-Arab agreements based on UN resolutions – most significantly the Egypt-Israeli Camp David Accords based on UN resolution 242's formula of land-for-peace – resolution 194 must provide the basis for a settlement to the refugee issue.
Return and restitution as the remedy of choice has a strong international precedent. For example, in the context of the Dayton Accords, concluded under the auspices of the United States, the return of Bosnian refugees to their homes and restitution of their property was considered a "non-negotiable" right that was critical to crafting a durable solution. American leaders such as Madeleine Albright, then the secretary of state, openly called on Bosnian Muslim refugees to return en masse to their former places of residence.
In Bosnia and in Palestine, the return of refugees has been considered absolutely necessary for the stability of peace. Any deal that does not respect the rights of refugees has been viewed as bearing the seed of its inevitable failure.
When negotiations resume once again, the world must not abandon the refugees of Palestine, nor attempt to coerce their representatives to do so either.
Israel's recognition of Palestinian refugee rights and its agreement to provide reparation and meaningful refugee choice in the exercise of these rights will not change the reality in the Middle East overnight, nor will it lead to an existential crisis for Israel. What it will certainly do is mark the beginning of a new reality that will no longer be rooted in repression, denial of rights, and discrimination. In other words, it will lead to a lasting peace – the kind of peace envisaged by Lord Bernadotte and hoped for by Palestinians and Israelis alike.
24 Comments so far
Show AllI am shocked. This is a very good article by someone whom I thought totally sold out. Is this the result of the heightened Zionist militancy and arrogance, along with Obama Administration weakness aand lack of principle?
Saeb Erakat never sold out, he merely must maintain a diplomatic veneer in order to have a place at the table with Americans and "Israelis" when the cameras are flashing. He can only get "uppity" in publications like the Guardian. Anyone who thinks this article would get published in the Jew-owned NY Times is smoking crack.
That Jew owned NY Times sure is a problem.
Perhaps you can propose a final solution to the Jewish media-ownership problem for us?
hm.
Ethnic cleansing was always high on the agenda of Zionist ideologues. Hitler and Stalin, the most infamous ethnic cleansers of the 20'th century, were boys in obscure villages in 1895 when the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl outlined in Vienna the plan for 'spirit[ing] the penniless population (Palestinians) across the border' once a Jewish state had been established.
Exactly! E.g.:
"We must expel Arabs and take their places." - David Ben-Gurion, 1937
"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." - David Ben-Gurion, May 1948
"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country." - David Ben-Gurion, quoted on pp91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan's Zionism and the Palestinians pp141-2 citing a 1938 speech.
And then statements by Golda Meir:
"This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy." - Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971.
And of particular note, the following statement about the Palestinians by Yitzhak Rabin:
"[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat." - Yitzhak Rabin (a "Prince of Peace" by Clinton's standards), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in The New York Times, 4 April 1983 citing Meir Cohen's remarks to the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee on 16 March.)
And then by Menachem Begin:
"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."
"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it, and for ever." - the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.
And statements by Yitzhak Shamir:
"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple." - 21 February 1997.
"[The Palestinians] would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." - as Israeli Prime Minister in a speech to Jewish settlers, reported in The New York Times 1 April 1988
And Benyamin Netanyahu:
"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories." - when Deputy Foreign Minister, 24 November 1989.
And Ehud Barak:
"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more…"
- 28 August 2000
"If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force..." - 16 November 2000.
"I would have joined a terrorist organization." - Barak's response to Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Ha'aretz newspaper, when Barak was asked what he would have done if he had been born a Palestinian.
"no gods, no masters" --m. sanger
actually if you examine this openly without racist concepts that revolve around the bizzare and dehumanizing notion that all jews think alike another picture emerges. A picture that shows a large number of early zionists committed to the notion of a bi-national and bi-lingual state. Noam Chomsky speaks of the Kibbutz he and his wife worked on as being for a multi-ethnic state.
It is also possible that without outside intervention and influence this is the way Israel would have evolved. Isreal after all was created not by Zionists but by the British! Prior to the British creation of Israel there were Jewish groups that had been living peacefully in palestine all along.
This is a quote from Hans Kohn published in Der Jude, 4 (1919/20) pp. 566-571
"We must refain from national chauvanism, from considering that the country belongs to the Jews.
No country belongs to one nation, it belongs to the people who live there and work peacefully--and in Palestine that will always be not only the Jews, but also the Arabs. Our state institutions must take this into account, they must give both Jews and Arbs the broadest autonomy and self-determination."
I could go on and on with quotes like this from zionist writers and I'm not even interested in the subject. I'm not trying to defend zionism but the world is not a black and white place where all of a group of people act and think the same.
> A picture that shows a large number of early zionists committed to the notion of a bi-national and bi-lingual state.
Michael Neumann's 'The Case Against Israel' goes in detail on the history of this particular conceit and how it's upshot was to serve as a PR ploy that had little relation to reality in anything approximating the real world. Geoffrey Wheatcroft also weighed the likelihood of such an outcome recently and again he too regards it as something divorced from reality given the marginal status and political unpopularity of it's proponents:
http://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Israel-Counterpunch/dp/1904859461
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n15/geoffrey-wheatcroft/on-trying-to-be-portugal
> Noam Chomsky speaks of the Kibbutz he and his wife worked on as being for a multi-ethnic state.
Chomsky found the whole society so racist that he gave up any plans of settling there. Here are his thoughts on his experiences as a twenty-something on a supposedly Socialist and progressive Israeli kibbutz:
...I did have a lot of interest in the kibbutz and I liked it very much when I was there. But there were things I didn't like, too. In particular, the ideological conformity was appalling. I don't know if I could have survived long in that environment because I was very strongly opposed to the Leninist ideology, as well as the general conformism, and uneasy—less so than I should have been—about the the exclusiveness and the racist institutional setting.
What I did not then face honestly was the fairly obvious fact that these are Jewish institutions and are so because of legal and administrative structures and practice. So, for example, I doubt if there's an Arab in any kibbutz, and there hardly could be, because of the land laws and the role the institution plays in the Israeli system. In fact, even the Oriental Jews, some of whom were marginally at the kibbutz or in the immigrant town nearby, were treated rather shabbily, with a good deal of contempt and fear. I also visited some Arab villages, and learned some unpleasant things, which I've never seen in print, about the military administration to which Arab citizens were subjected.
http://www.chomsky.info/books/reader01.htm
> It is also possible that without outside intervention and influence this is the way Israel would have evolved. Isreal after all was created not by Zionists but by the British!
There would be no Israel if there was no "outside intervention" but that is not to say that it was created by the British any more than they created the United States of America. Have you ever heard of something called the Irgun and the violent campaign waged by it's members against the British and once they left the Palestinians?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
> Jewish groups that had been living peacefully in palestine all along.
Yes, Jewish communities had been living as minorities throughout the Middle East for thousands of years, for the most part in peaceful circumstances, but that was before European Jews started colonizing Palestine in earnest at the beginning of the 20th century:
http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/arab_jew.html
> I could go on and on with quotes like this from zionist writers and I'm not even interested in the subject.
If you are going to quote profusely from proponents of a political movement that is highly controversial in every community that was ever touched by it, then perhaps you should do a little more research before speaking your mind on that topic. Hans Kohn was a rare Zionist who actually found the whole idea of a Jewish state in Palestine so fraught with logical and moral contradictions that he left in 1930 soon after riots broke out between Palestinians and Jewish settlers. He later went on to a distinguished scholarly career in which he examined roots of the phenomenon he had encountered in Palestine: nationalism whose final goal is an all or nothing sovereign nation state. Norman Finkelstein quoted Eric Hobsbawm in an epigraph of his fine work, 'Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict':
The logical implication of trying to create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states, each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion or extermination of minorities. Such was and is the murderous reductio ad absurdum of nationalism in its territorial version, although this was not fully demostrated until the 1940s. ... The homogeneous territorial nation could now be seen as a programme that could be realized only by barbarians, or at least by barbarian means.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/pdf/imgreality/introduction.pdf
what a crock of BS, susan. the indigenous jews were few, and they were opposed to Zionism. And secondly, you gotta lot of chutzpah quoting Chomsky in your defense of Israel.
and the British did not create "Israel." They fled amidst a flurry of Jewish terrorism aimed at them and the indigenous population which owned the land, and which still legally owns the land. The reality of Israel is collapsing. Get ready, people...
Dear m156:
However, don't forget too, that most of the European Jews did NOT want what Herzl wanted when he first proposed it. He invisioned a place for European Jews. Ultimately, Hitler did help Ben-Gurion with exchanging money for goods to get the 'European Jews" into Palestine to create their new Zion. This was at the start of Hitler's plans, so the exchange of goods for money was a positive to him. For a while it served both parties.
At one point, Herzl did consider Africa and even South America as the new point of departure. What a different world we would have if that had happened. I think I read that the British weren't too keen on the other continent ideas. However, the fact that Herzl did not origiinally insist that this new nation had to be in Palestine is more than interesting.
Regardless, political zionism is composed of democratic institutions, all which require majority rule. The majority desired to recreate the Jewish homeland exactly where it stood before 135 CE. And they did.
Learn to live with it.
A couple of links for those who want to cut through absurd 2,000 year old mythologies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EmvANgw9Mk
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/02/07/solomon
It's kind of absurd at this point to talk of return as "the beginning of a new reality that will no longer be rooted in repression" when palestinians don't have rights over where they are right now much less where they used to be 62 years ago.
"the beginning of a new reality that will no longer be rooted in repression" starts with UN resolution 242 and 338. Palestine must be a state that can controll it's own residency on its own teritory acording to it's own laws. By implications then this new state could reject further colonizaton and annexation of any portion of it's teritory. End of story.
Then and only then could you worry about restitution and return of what was in the past which IS an important issue.
The way to acheive this is and always has been quite simple. The people of the US of A must demand that their government stop funding and using Israel as a client military base and extension of US power and controll over the middle east. Once the massive power differential with it's neighbors is removed Israel would be forced into a new more normalized position in the region.
No! The United States, the UN, the European Union, and the International Community at large must put much more pressure on Israel to withdraw its troops and rightwing Israeli-Jewish settlers from West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem immediately, and
allow the Palestinians residing in those areas their self-determination in the form of independence, sovereignity, and their own nation-state alongside Israel. That, imho, is the only safe, sane and sensible solution to this decades-old conflict, and it's not too late. The rightwing Israeli Jewish settlers must be evicted, kicking and screaming from the above-mentioned territories, if need be, in order to facilitate the two-state solution.
If one takes a look at Jewish history and the Palestinian history (the Palestinians have a long history of being exploited by the Arab countries, the Jews have a long history of pograms, etc, directed against them), s/he will understand why the two-state solution is the best.
Inotherwords, this:
""the beginning of a new reality that will no longer be rooted in repression" starts with UN resolution 242 and 338. Palestine must be a state that can controll it's own residency on its own teritory acording to it's own laws. By implications then this new state could reject further colonizaton and annexation of any portion of it's teritory. End of story."
could and should definitely be the basis for an independent, sovereign Palestinian nation-state alongside Israel, in West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
Saeb Erekat,the writer of the column,is true to himself as much as he is also true to the United Nations' records on Palestine.
An excellent article! Worth reading,indeed.
Let's have a series of debates on U.S. TV between Saeb Erekat and Ehud Barak.
That would be very helpful to the American voting public for deciding what sort of policies they want regarding this conflict.
The Palestinians would agree in an instant. The Israelis would never agree, for obvious reasons.
Here's an in-depth, on-line book by a reporter who was there at the time.
http://www.controversyofzion.info/Controversybook/index.htm
"62 years since the UN passed a resolution on the rights of Palestinian refugees – rights Israel must recognize for peace"
The resolution - "The refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date, and 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."
Key words - "wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors" It does not appear that the Palestinians have demonstrated or even declared that they wish to "live at peace with their neighbors." Therefore, this conditional opportunity, certainly not a right, has been denied them of their own volition. As for compensation, the collective Palestinian realized that accepting compensation meant having to recognize Israel...
wow - you're even more full of it than Think Freely.
The Palestinians lived at peace with an indigenous Jewish population for hundreds of years (those Shem Jews, I ought to point out, were fiercely opposed to Zionism). Even today, both Hamas and the PLO have, for years, delineated the terms for peaceful coexistence, in line with international law, as Chomsky has pointed out over and over again.
It is Israel who has demonstrated no wish to live at peace with anyone.
Hamas' terms include genocide. Please stand up and be the first on line to receive your fate. The rest of us will resist and hold the line. Unfortunately for the Palestinians and their suppporters, their "right to return" is so much smoke and mirror. The actual refugees have an opportunity to return to their former land only if they desire to live in peace with their neighbors. Apparently you are just as mistaken as Chomsky.
I think that Palestinians are right to just say "no" to what the U.S., Israel, and the entire World do regarding Palestinians. After too many years to count in my lifetime, maybe this is the answer. Do not negotiate, Palestinians. Do not give anything more away for PEACE. By abstaining from having anything to do with the world system, as it exists, is probably your best avenue of approach. Do not count on your fellow human beings, citizens of this WORLD TO HAVE ANY SENSE OF CONSCIENCE or to have any sense of JUSTICE in this world. It seems that we are living in a world oblivious to justice/conscience and, basically, anything you do will be for nothing. I really, really hate that I may be right about this! I wish I could graft something human/humane into people which, obviously, does not exist.
Also, fighting against these international robbers has netted Israelis about 90% more than they owned before. We have to find a way to shut the cracks for profits against them. I am willing to fight for that!
This is all very nice, but, umh....It ain´t going to happen.
It ain't gonna happen, but I propose that all Palestinians come to Louisiana. We need your brain trust (the people in Bethlehem are some of the most educated in the world) and we will love you. I give up on my hopes that Israel will do anything just or noble. Join us! We already have lots of Palestinians living in Louisiana and we want you! Leave Israel...the prophets of Mohamed and the prophets of Christians cannot all be wrong.
It is not that I do not want justice for you; it's just that I am afraid that there never will be justice for you there and I would like for you to have a new beginning.