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The Refugee Price Tag
Isabel Kershner
Palestinian officials begin to examine the previously taboo subject of compensation for the refugees of 1948, while Israel drops its old condition for reciprocal compensation for Jews from Arab countries
Daoud Barakat is standing in the street, staring quietly up at the once elegant single-story villa that was his childhood home. It's only the second time he's been back to the house, in the Baka neighborhood of West Jerusalem, since he and his family left the city in a hurry in 1948 and became Palestinian refugees.
The Barakats, a well-to-do family of merchants, left by car. Daoud, age 6 at the time, remembers picking up his mother, various brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins along the way from two more of his extended family's homes in the Abu Tor neighborhood opposite Mount Zion. Leaving almost all their possessions behind, they headed down to Jericho, then to Jordan, where they rented new accommodations in a village.
Daoud grew up in Jordan, went to university in Germany, became active in student politics and joined the PLO. He worked for the organization in several Arab countries and went on to serve as PLO "ambassador" in Geneva and Moscow, traveling on an Algerian diplomatic passport.
In 1994, following the Oslo Accords, the Israeli authorities allowed Daoud Barakat back into the Palestinian territories, along with the thousands of other "returnees" accompanying Yasser Arafat. He settled in Ramallah and is now deputy head of the PLO department of refugee affairs. He works out of Orient House, the PLO headquarters in East Jerusalem.
His first visit to the Baka house a year ago, with one of his brothers, left him fuming. "They made it so ugly," he says. "Look at that shed stuck in the front garden. And all the trees are gone. That's what upset me most of all." He also notes that the prefabricated annex tacked onto the right-hand side of the house serves as a synagogue.
Today, Barakat hasn't come here in anger. He has no intention of knocking on doors and making the current occupants of the house feel uncomfortable. In fact, he's come at the request of The Report, for illustrative purposes more than anything else; to match a human face to a case of abandoned Arab property taken over by Jewish immigrants in the early years of the state and to the issue of compensating refugees for the property they lost.
But as we stand in the street, taking a few photos and jotting down the phone number of the real estate agency from the "For Sale" sign attached to the house - understandably, Barakat is curious about the price - the front door flies open and a wiry man marches out, gruffly demanding to know what we're up to.
Barakat doesn't follow the Hebrew, but he understands the tone well enough and maintains a diplomatic silence. I explain as gently as I can that we're on a nostalgia visit; that the gentleman on my left, who is now a ranking PLO official, once lived in this house as a child. I'm waiting to be told to clear off. But the Baka man seems suddenly transformed.
"Walla! Is that a fact?" he says, his voice hushed in wonder. Within seconds, he's ushering us up to the front porch, offering us coffee and introducing us to his wife. Soon enough, Barakat and Avraham Iluz, who is of Moroccan origin, are swapping stories in Arabic. The house next door, Barakat relates, used to belong to the family of Afif Safiyeh, the PLO representative in London. Iluz brings out the coffee and his collection of old Israeli and British Mandate coins. Avraham's wife, Esther, joins us on the porch, hesitantly at first, and is soon showing us around inside.
The house is now split into three apartments - like most of Baka's large houses, it was raggedly divided between immigrant families after 1948. The Iluz's flat, on the right side of the house, is the one for sale. Avraham is asking $370,000 for the narrow living quarters, now divided into four compact rooms. With gentrification in full swing, Arab-style houses and apartments in the central old neighborhoods of Jerusalem, such as Baka, are today among the most valuable real estate in the country.
The story of Daoud Barakat's former family home is typical. The Barakats were unable to return after the war, and their empty houses in Baka and Abu Tor - like thousands all over the country - were taken over by Israel's hastily appointed Custodian for Abandoned Property. Under the Absentee Property Law of 1950, the Barakats lost the rights to their homes.
The law was enacted by a young state facing an influx of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries who desperately needed accommodation. It provided for all abandoned property to be held in trust by the state and administered by a Custodian of Absentee Property working under the aegis of the Finance Ministry. The letter of the law is draconian. An "absentee" is defined as a person who, at any time between November 29, 1947, and the day on which the state of emergency declared in 1948 ceases to exist, became a citizen or a national of an Arab country, or visited one; or who simply left his place of residence for any place outside Israeli-held territory before September 1, 1948. The state of emergency remains in effect to this day.
The Custodian, for his part, may hold on to property, sell it to the Development Authority (a branch of the Israel Lands Authority), or lease it out. Any proceeds from these transactions, minus legal and administrative fees, are to be held in trust by the custodian in a special fund - presumably for the absentees, until the time when the state of emergency is declared over.
Avraham Iluz's father's family arrived in Israel from Morocco with nothing. The government placed them together with several other families in the house in Baka. Eventually, the home was divided between three different families. Avraham and his wife eventually ended up with the Iluz's part. They paid rent to Amidar, the government housing corporation. A few years ago, when they were given the opportunity to buy it from Amidar at a preferential rate, they took it. Paying the mortgage hasn't been easy, though, and the Iluz's are now renting out one room.
The encounter ends with Avraham inviting Daoud to come back any time, and to bring his brothers. Esther Iluz is moved to tears. "It doesn't matter, Jew or Arab, we're people all the same," she says softly. "We personally aren't to blame for anything. All that's happened is the government's business. Still, we're all human beings."
Back in the car, Barakat is also clearly moved. "This is the stuff real peace is made of," he says. He states that he doesn't want the house itself back, but he does want "justice. To be able to sign papers that acknowledge the Barakat family's ownership, along with a settlement, a sale or whatever." There ought to be a joint Israeli-Palestinian commission, he adds, to deal with individual claims.
From Baka, Barakat goes to Ramallah to attend a meeting of Palestinian officials and experts on the once taboo subject of compensation. The agenda includes initiating a study of abandoned Arab houses and the beginnings of a discussion on Palestinian strategy and methodology to secure refugee compensation.
For the past half a century, the mere mention of compensation for the refugees has been anathema to the Palestinians, just as the PLO demand for the refugees' "right of return" still is for Israel.
According to U.N. Resolution 194 of December 1948, long the Palestinians' main point of reference on the refugee issue, "the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and ... 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."
Politically, the PLO, the official body representing the refugees, has always refused to discuss compensation in the absence of an option of return. The homeland, Palestinians argue, is not for sale. In the meantime, the original refugee population of some 700,000, together with their descendants, has swelled to over 3.7 million registered refugees according to U.N. statistics, while Palestinian officials estimate the total number at around 5 million.
Israel, for its part, adopted the principle of compensation early on as a way of resolving the refugee issue that was preferable to return. David Ben-Gurion raised the idea with the U.N. Palestine Conciliation Commission in 1949. But Israel insisted that it, rather than an international body, should determine the amount of compensation, and was careful to stress that any payment would constitute a humanitarian gesture, not an admission of responsibility for a refugee problem created by a war that Israel didn't start. By the early 1950s, Israel had linked the issue of compensation for Palestinian refugees with that of compensation for property abandoned by hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, with the intended effect of all but canceling out any Palestinian claims. U.N. records note that in 1951 Israel reserved the right to deduct the value of frozen Jewish assets in Iraq from any refugee compensation payment, and that has remained Israel's policy for more than 50 years.
Now, though, in the context of efforts by Israel and the PLO to reach a final settlement that would end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all, the almost fossilized parameters of the compensation debate have slowly begun to move, and maximalist positions on both sides have started giving way.
Palestinians are now seriously addressing the question of compensation as part of a refugee package. "We won't discuss compensation without linkage to the issue of repatriation," stresses Salim Tamari, a member of the Palestinian negotiations team on refugees and editor of a recently published book in English on "Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and their Fate in the War." He adds, though, that the PLO is now compiling files on Palestinian absentee property for use in final status negotiations on compensation.
Palestinian thinking on compensation is in its early stages, and the strategy is still in disarray. While some PLO departments have focused on Palestinian absentee property in Jerusalem as a separate case, on the grounds that Jerusalem is being negotiated as a separate final status issue, Tamari, whose own family left behind properties in Jaffa, says "the Palestinian side is not distinguishing between Jerusalem property and the rest." Nor are the Palestinians clear on whether they would prefer to have the PLO or some other authority making claims on behalf of the individual refugees, or whether the individuals themselves should be able to make claims through an institutional body. "I believe there will have to be both kinds," Tamari concludes. It is clear, though, that the Palestinians will be demanding not only the restitution of, or compensation for, lost property, but that they will also demand compensation for the decades of suffering brought on by the refugee experience.
When the PLO presented its "pre-negotiation" position paper on refugees at the final status talks, says Barakat, with restitution and compensation as a central point, Israeli team head Oded Eran reacted furiously. The most basic principles at the core of the refugee problem, such as responsibility for the Palestinians' flight and the definition of who is a refugee, are still matters of heated controversy.
Nevertheless, where the issue of compensation is concerned, there has been a shift on the Israeli side too. Israeli Foreign Ministry sources list the components of a solution to the refugee problem as no admission of Israeli responsibility; no return to Israel proper; the rehabilitation of refugees where they currently reside as a partial solution; and compensation.
Israel proposes the setting up of an international apparatus which would administer a global lump sum for rehabilitation and compensation, to be contributed by donor countries. The body would deal with both the rehabilitation of refugees in host countries, as well as individual compensation claims for property and for the "refugee experience." Israel would contribute to the fund as a donor country, avoiding connotations of responsibility. Jews from Arab countries would be able to make their own claims to the same body.
Israeli researchers in non-official forums have placed the amount of compensation to be paid in the region of $10-$20 billion. Recent unconfirmed reports of a final deal in the Israeli paper Yediot Aharonot spoke of a rehabilitation fund of $100 billion over 20 years, with billions going to host countries including Lebanon, Jordan and the future Palestinian state.
But notably absent is the old precondition of reciprocal compensation, the direct linkage between the Palestinian claims and Jewish claims from Arab countries. (The Jerusalem Report's September 27, 1999 cover story "Private Property: Keep Out!" reported that the Netanyahu government had initiated the compilation of a register of Jewish assets left in Arab countries 50 years ago, for use in offsetting Palestinian refugee compensation claims.) While the Foreign Ministry doesn't admit to a policy change, as such, an official acknowledges that the former position "was a propagandist stance; this is reality."
Having crossed the mental barrier on compensation, the next challenge for the Palestinians is to try and put a price on the extent of their claims. When it comes to the question of privately owned land lost in 1948, they are beneficiaries of the fact that the British kept meticulous administrative records during the Mandate, including land titles, tax returns, some aerial photography and carefully compiled statistical surveys. Building on this basis, the U.N. Palestine Conciliation Commission set up a land survey committee in 1951 that, over the next decade, arrived at a global assessment of refugee property that amounted to 120 million Palestinian pounds (valued at over U.S. $480 million in 1947 terms and nearly $24 billion in 1998 terms adjusted for inflation and 4 percent real rate of return).
The UNPCC archives contain over 450,000 records detailing 1.5 million private holdings and are said to take up some 1,000 linear feet of shelf space. As a resource, says Tamari, "This is unparalleled. There's nothing like it in the annals of refugee history." The U.N. archives are not open to the public, but copies of the files, including maps, were distributed in the 1960s to the PLO, Jordan, Syria, the Arab League and Israel. The records are now in the process of being computerized after which they will likely become available to a wider number of researchers.
Israeli legislation regulating the effective expropriation of former Palestinian property included the Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law of 1953 and the compensation amendment to the Absentees' Property law of 1976. But under those laws, compensation was only due to displaced Arabs still living in Israel, at prices fixed at the former value and with short cut-off dates by which claims had to be made. The vast majority of potential claimants decided on principle to ignore the option of the measly compensation being offered.
In the decades since the UNCPP completed its work, Palestinian researchers have pointed out its shortcomings. For one thing, the U.N. records didn't take into account the Palestinian tradition of collective land ownership, only evaluating land under the Western model of registered ownership. That meant that the Beduin lands in the Negev were ignored, as were communal village lands around the country. Nor did the U.N. calculations include an evaluation of immovable property - the houses and commercial buildings left behind. The only known records of the abandoned houses are closely guarded by the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property in Jerusalem, to which all access is denied. The Report's request to interview the Custodian was denied; questions submitted to the Custodian and the Finance Ministry went unanswered.
In recent years, Palestinian geographer Khalil Tufakji has been conducting his own research into absentee property out of Orient House. His work is limited to property in Jerusalem, both because Jerusalem is a separate final status issue and because it is more of a known quantity: Most of the refugees from West Jerusalem moved to East Jerusalem or the West Bank, and are more accessible as sources of information than those who ended up in Lebanon, Jordan or scattered around the world.
Tufakji's office is a hub of activity. Computers buzz with aerial images of Jerusalem showing every parcel and bloc of land mapped by the advanced Geographical Information System. All the property of East Jerusalem, including former and current Jewish-owned property, has now been identified. Tufakji can zoom in on the screen, type in a family name and have all that families' property, building by building, light up in yellow. When it comes to former Palestinian-owned property in West Jerusalem, Tufakji says he has collected documentary evidence of 5,700 separate houses so far. "These have all been documented by the people," he says, explaining that those former home owners who could specify the plot went to the Israeli Tabu office (the Land Registry, still known by its Turkish name), paid a 55 shekel fee and came out with a historical deed proving that the house once belonged to them.
There is no estimate of their total value, though on today's market, some of the houses are worth millions of dollars each. "We have all the properties in a data base, but the next step would be to send a surveyor to every house," Tufakji says.
The takeover of former Palestinian houses and land formed the building blocks of the new state of Israel. Without it, Israeli and Palestinian experts argue, resettling the influx of Jewish immigrants would have been a near impossible task.
Says Danny Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and expert in Jerusalem affairs known as an advocate of Palestinian rights: "It's obviously a very unpleasant issue in Israel's past, but I think it was a necessary evil. There's no such thing as a vegetarian national liberation organization, and that was the non-vegetarian part."
There are no public records of how much of the property under Israeli custodianship has since been sold off. Usama Halabi, an East Jerusalem lawyer who has specialized in Israel's land laws, reckons that within the first three years, "thousands of houses and most of the absentee land were transferred or sold by the Custodian to the Development Authority," becoming state land that, by law, cannot be sold. "Once land has been transferred into the reservoir of state lands," says Halabi, "it's very hard to get out. What's left for the Palestinians is compensation."
The final status negotiations have sparked some interest, at home and in Western diplomatic circles, about how much money may have been deposited, at least theoretically, in the Custodian of Absentee Property fund. The Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, a non-governmental organization, is seeking funds to petition the Supreme Court on the matter under the Public Information act. But experts don't lay much store by the proceeds of the fund. Seidemann notes that the Custodian sold property at its nominal value in 1948 or soon after, and that the "sources of any compensation scheme are going to have to be found elsewhere. I don't think Baige (Israeli Finance Minister Avraham Shochat) could get on a bus with the money in that fund."
Meanwhile, Palestinian researchers have been earnestly working in recent years on new assessments of what they believe the total Palestinian claims are worth. Sami Hadawi, a Palestinian land expert who worked for the British and then the UNCPP, wrote a seminal work in 1988, "Palestinian Rights and Losses in 1948," reassessing the UNCPP's work. Atif Kubursi, a professor of economics at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, made his own more recent evaluations taking into account additional factors such as psychological suffering and lost income, coming to a global figure of around $236 billion at 1998 prices. Another researcher, Salman Abu Sitta, cites more outlandish figures like half a trillion dollars. None of these estimates include any element of compensation to countries that have hosted the refugees.
When it comes to assessing the claims, Palestinians refer repeatedly to the model of compensation received from Germany by victims of Nazism as a valid yardstick, as well as to the more recent legal precedents of restitution and compensation pio-neered by Jewish organizations in Eastern Europe. Terry Rempel, an expert in international refugee law with Badil, a grassroots Palestinian resource center for refugee rights, notes that Jewish organizations have been battling legal obstacles in Eastern European countries very similar to Israel's own absentee property and land laws, which require claimants who do qualify for compensation, for example, to pay back-taxes to 1948, making the claim not worthwhile. Privately, Palestinian sources say that some of the European committees that have dealt with Jewish restitution are now opening their files to the PLO.
To Israel, all comparisons between the results of the 1948 war and the Holocaust experience are completely irrelevant. "There's no precedent and nothing to compare," says a Foreign Ministry source. "Any attempt at comparison is morally, politically and legally repugnant."
The real challenge, notes Badil's Rempel, is to ensure that any final deal on the Palestinian refugee issue is comprehensive enough to be durable - to satisfy not only the leaders, but the refugees themselves.
For Daoud Barakat, outside his former home in Baka, the solution is clear. "Ownership should go back to the original owners, without people being moved. They should pay rent, or lease fees, to the original owners. No one contests Israeli trusteeship over this country," he concludes, "but there are collective and individual rights that have to be addressed for the new era, to end the last 100 years and enter into the next."
2000
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