Back to Haunt the Peacemakers
Isabel Kershner

With Israelis and Palestinians ready to hammer out a final-status agreement, there is now no escaping the toughest issue of all: the refugees of 1948. And yet there is no common language: The PLO says that millions of refugees must 'come home' to Jaffa and Safed; but for Israelis, that amounts to a threat to destroy the state.

It's early July at the Deheishe refugee camp on the edge of the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Dozens of children have gathered to mark the end of their "Al-Quds" ("Jerusalem") day camp in a spartan concrete school yard. A tall stone monument in the shape of mandatory Palestine looms over the wall, a memorial to local victims of the Intifada. Graffiti inside the schoolyard reads: "Fifty years under the tent."

After a reading from the Koran and a rendition of "Biladi," the Palestinian anthem, a boy of 12 or so begins beating a drum and four motley groups of schoolboys march in with banners bearing the legends "Jaffa," "Ramlah," "Safed" and "Hittin" - three once-Arab cities in what's today Israel, and the site of the decisive defeat of the Crusaders at the hands of Saladin. In rough unison they yell the names of the lost towns and cities of pre-1948 Palestine - places that, for them, exist only in a hazy, idealized collective memory; places changed almost beyond recognition, transformed into Jewish towns or erased from the map, that lie just a car ride away.

These children are third-generation Palestinian refugees, whose parents were born in Deheishe, and whose grandparents fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 war in the hundreds of thousands. Today, in refugee camps of the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, a fourth generation is being born.

The boys move on to classic summer camp activities like athletic displays. The girls perform a short play on a "Save the Trees" theme for the audience of mothers and children. Then the locally famed Deheishe girls dance troupe takes the floor in traditional dress to dance the dabkeh.

Muhammad Jaradat, an activist from the Bethlehem-based Badil Resource Center for Palestinian residency and refugee rights, points to these activities as an example of the movement of "continuity," a reawakening among refugee youth that started with the signing of the Oslo Accords. It's a popular initiative, he says, an advance warning to political leaders against any ideas they may be harboring about compromising on the refugee issue. Badil, founded in 1993 as part of the movement, films events such as these, and daily scenes from the camps, and sends the clips to Palestinian children in the refugee camps of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The idea, says Jaradat, is to forge a communal identity after decades of physical separation.

For 50 years, the refugees have demanded the right to return to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel, spurred on by the PLO and buttressed by U.N. Resolution 194 of December 1948. That resolution recommended, among other things, that refugees wishing to return 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."

For 50 years, Israelis across the spectrum have rejected return as an impossibility. The almost total consensus on this, of all issues, is not surprising: Mass return would existentially threaten the Zionist enterprise by creating an Arab majority, or at least numerical parity, in the Jewish state. Israelis have essentially closed their eyes and hoped the refugees would go away.

So sensitive is the issue that even discussing its origins became a national taboo. A decade ago, Israeli historian Benny Morris published his "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," arguing that while some Palestinians fled in panic and many to escape Jewish assaults, at least some were deliberately expelled by Israeli troops. Morris was almost universally attacked by establishment historians, and for years was an academic pariah.

But the refugees haven't gone away. Only multiplied. The sole records kept are those of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which puts their number today at over 3.5 million. Israel says UNRWA's figures are inflated, and unofficially estimates the number of refugees at closer to 2 million. The PLO asserts that if refugees who never registered with UNRWA are taken into account, the total amounts to some 5 million.

Now, with Prime Minister Ehud Barak's commitment to reach a permanent settlement with the Palestinians, the two sides will finally have to tackle the refugee problem - one of the five issues, along with Jerusalem, borders, settlements and water - left for the permanent status talks.

President Bill Clinton shot an unexpected opening salvo in early July when, during a press conference, he said he would like the Palestinians "to feel free and be free to live wherever they like" - an apparent deviation from traditional American neutrality on the refugee issue. Barak responded tersely that Clinton's remarks were "unacceptable," while Washington issued clarifications that the issue should be resolved in negotiations between the parties.

There's agreement on just one thing: that without closing the file on the refugees, there will be no end to the Israel-Arab conflict. Yet, says Joseph Alpher, director of the American Jewish Committee's Israel/Middle East office and a member of a Harvard-sponsored working group that studied the refugee problem from 1994 to1998, "On this of all the final status issues, each side has the lowest level of awareness regarding the degree of trauma on the other side."

In an ironic twist, Palestinians increasingly cite, by way of precedent, Jewish organizations' family-by-family restitution claims for the property and non-material losses of Holocaust victims and their heirs. Where Israel has always agreed, in principle, to settle the refugee issue through collective compensation, the Palestinians demand, along with the right of return, individual compensation and reparations for the refugees' material losses and suffering.

"There's a huge movement among Palestinian intellectuals in Europe in favor of taking all our legal rights, and we're taking our lead from the Jewish community," says Abbas Shiblak, a mild-mannered Oxford University-based academic and founder of the Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Center, Shaml, headquartered in Ramallah. If the leaders come up with a half-baked solution to the refugee problem, he warns, "there'll be lawsuits."

POLAR VISIONS

In MAY 1948, a war broke out. By the time armistice agreements were signed in 1949, some 700,000 Palestinians had become refugees in Arab countries. The question of who was to blame still lies at the core of the conflict.

As Abba Eban, then Israel's ambassador to the U.S., told the Special Political Committee of the U.N. General Assembly in 1958: "Let there be no mistake. If there had been no war against Israel, with its consequent harvest of bloodshed, misery, panic and flight, there would be no problem of Arab refugees today." To this day, Israel has not wavered in its insistence that the Arabs, who went to war to stop Israel's establishment, created the problem. In the Palestinian narrative, by contrast, the refugees were booted out by the Zionists.

The Palestinian memory is of killings and rumors of massacres. Israelis invariably refer to Arabic radio broadcasts allegedly urging local residents to flee their villages and clear the arena for the Arab armies. A recent study on the refugee issue by the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI) found that 85 percent of refugees surveyed in the West Bank and Gaza said they, or their parents, left out of fear for their lives or the lives of their children. Most said they had no access to radios at the time, though one 67-year-old man from Jaffa did recall having heard calls over the radio to leave.

"What do you do when a war is coming to your village?" asks Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist who participated, with Alpher, in the Harvard working group. "Do you leave your wife and kids there? Are Kosovo refugees to be blamed for having left their villages? And if someone promises that if you leave, they'll fight for you, then bring you back, does that mean that you have no right to return home ever again?"

But even the most liberal of Israelis cannot contemplate taking moral responsibility for the refugees' flight. To do so, says IPCRI director Gershon Baskin, whose political credentials are on the dovish fringe of the Israeli debate, would be "to admit that Israel was born in sin." Conversely, no Palestinian can forget the perceived Israeli wrong, and forfeit the right of return.

Israel refuses to issue any apology for the refugee problem, and believes that its solution lies in the long-overdue resettlement and rehabilitation of the refugees in the Arab states - or anywhere outside Israel. In 1949, at the Lausanne Conference, David Ben-Gurion's government did offer family reunification for 100,000 refugees as part of a comprehensive peace, but the Arabs rejected the offer and it has never been repeated.

Today, Israel is offering collective compensation for the refugees - an unspecified lump sum to be paid into a general fund for the refugees' rehabilitation. "There's a broad consensus among Israelis who deal with this," says Alpher. "To get into every single house, every orchard, every goat from 1948 and calculate its worth today would be an impossible task and would only end in more acrimony."

What's more, Israel argues, the Palestinian refugees must be seen as part of a Jewish-Arab population exchange: Some 450,000 Jews fled Arab countries for Israel. Many lost all their property, for which Israel demands reciprocal compensation.

The Palestinians don't buy that argument. Jewish property in the Arab world, they say, is none of their business. Moreover, experts note, bringing Jewish property in would require complex negotiations with several Arab governments, some of which have no relations with Israel. And Israel set a precedent undermining its case when it signed a peace treaty, with Egypt 20 years ago, that overlooked abandoned Jewish assets in that country.

Beyond reiterating the principle of reciprocal compensation, Israeli representatives who deal with the refugee issue are tight-lipped. They claim that while the matter of Jewish property "will certainly be factored into the equation," nothing has officially been done to estimate its worth.

Knowledgeable sources, however, say Israel privately admits that Palestinian assets in Israel are worth more than the abandoned Jewish assets in the Arab world. That's before Jordan and other Arab states make claims, as they plan to do, for the burden they've borne over five decades of hosting refugees.

The PLO, for its part, sticks to the letter of U.N. Resolution 194 which, its representatives note, has been reaffirmed in the U.N. 110 times. Asad Abd al-Rahman, the roving PLO Executive Committee member in charge of the refugee file, says the PLO "insists on the recognition of the right of return for all the refugees, the 5 million. When they're given that right, and only then, we'll see who wants to go back and who doesn't." He adds that when he went to Brussels last February to address the European Union task force on refugees, "they wanted me to reveal scenarios, our fall-back position. I told them our only scenario is Resolution 194. Still, if there is a need to phase implementation for practical reasons... or start with those in the most miserable conditions, the refugees in Lebanon and Gaza, we're willing to act according to the stipulation of practical needs - so long as no limit is placed on numbers."

Although it looks as if nothing is being done, Israeli and Palestinian representatives have in fact been sitting down together in sporadic meetings over the past six years under the umbrella of the Refugees Working Group, one of the two surviving multilateral negotiating tracks set up after the Madrid conference in 1991.

But the brief of the group, which is chaired by Canada, is limited to improving the living conditions of the refugees where they now reside. Israel has rebuffed attempts to try to deal with wider issues of principle.

The chief Israeli representative to the RWG, Yossi Hadass, a former director general of the Foreign Ministry, is cagey on details. He refers vaguely to the RWG's work on Israel's long-standing, though not always active, family reunification program, which was first instituted in the 50s. According to Andrew Robinson, the Canadian official who currently chairs the RWG, the parties agreed on allowing 2,000 cases per year (or up to 6,000 individuals), mostly from Jordan, to rejoin families living under Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Robinson says that Israel hasn't always met the quota. Still, at a March meeting, Israel agreed to raise it to 3,000.

The several hundred thousand "displaced persons" who left the West Bank in the wake of the 1967 war, mostly for Jordan, are also being dealt with separately. The Oslo Accords established a special Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian-Egyptian committee to discuss their readmission to the West Bank and Gaza. But on this track too, progress has been notoriously slow.

BLUEPRINT FOR NEGOTIATIONS

While near deadlock has reigned for decades at the official level, Israeli and Palestinian academics have been quietly trying to bridge the chasm.

In 1995, Shlomo Gazit, a former head of Israeli Military Intelligence, wrote a study suggesting that the solution to the refugee problem lies in the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip along with the institution of a Palestinian "Law of Return" that would allow every Palestinian in the diaspora to hold Palestinian citizenship and if need be, to immigrate to the new state.

Similarly Palestinian academics and thinkers - among them Ziyad Abu Zayyad. who is now a minister in Yasser Arafat's cabinet, and Abbas Shiblak of Oxford - have acknowledged that a mass return to homes and lands in pre-48 Palestine would be impossible, arguing that one must distinguish between the principle of the right of return and the practicality of exercising that right. The idea of a "symbolic" return, of several tens of thousands of refugees to Israel proper, is a recurring theme. Meanwhile, the word watan, homeland, traditionally used to mean Palestine in general, increasingly takes on the connotation of the new Palestinian state-in-the-making - implying that refugees from Lebanon could perhaps "return" to the West Bank, rather than to villages in the Galilee.

Not that the prospect of refugees flooding the West Bank is a comfort to many Israelis. The Likud's Ariel Sharon has written that "if these people find themselves resettled once again in miserable refugee camps in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, gazing out from them upon their towns and the remains of their former villages, the tension and anger will be enormous. We cannot count on their wanting to stay put."

Another reservation often cited against an influx of refugees into the West Bank is the short supply of water in the area. The PLO retorts that the water shortage was never an issue when the mass immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union was underway.

The working paper that resulted from the Harvard-sponsored study group, co-authored by Joseph Alpher and Khalil Shikaki, probably represents the cutting edge of academic work on the refugee issue today. It's the outcome of a years-long thinking process by respected, mainstream Israelis and Palestinians. Even so, it fails to present a joint proposal. Instead it offers a Palestinian compromise position and an Israeli compromise position, while highlighting the considerable gaps that remain.

The Palestinian proposal calls for Israeli acceptance of responsibility for creating the refugee problem and acknowledgement of the "individual moral right" of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. But when it comes to the actual exercise of that right, the return of only a "limited number" is seen as feasible. All Palestinians not returning to Israel proper would have the right to immigrate to the new Palestinian state. Individual compensation would be paid to those opting not to exercise their right of return, along with collective compensation to the Palestinian state for absorption projects. Israel would be responsible for raising these funds, regardless of its claims against Arab states.

But even that, Shikaki argues, would require other tradeoffs - like more land for the Palestinians: "Since the Palestinians will take the burden of absorbing the refugees, they would want the maximum control over the land, meaning a state up to the 1967 borders, including control over water resources."

The Israeli compromise solution envisages Israeli acknowledgement of at least some practical (but not moral) responsibility, shared with the other parties involved, "for the plight and suffering of the refugees." It accepts the right of return to the Palestinian state, but not to Israel proper. The Palestinian state would commit itself to limit the flow according to its absorptive capabilities. And Israel would allow the "repatriation" of "tens of thousands" of Palestinian refugees to its territory under its family reunification program. Compensation for lost property would be collective, reciprocated by Arab collective compensation of Jewish refugees from those states.

The Harvard document raised hackles on both sides, says Alpher. "People thought we'd gone too far, even though we didn't come to an agreement."

Typically, the report got no response >from Israeli officials. But mainstream Israeli journalist Dan Margalit wrote a scathing op-ed piece about it in the daily Ha'aretz entitled "A Crime We Did Not Commit," in which he concluded: "It is a shame that respected Israelis are drawing up initiatives (which will serve as the basis for negotiations toward the final settlement) with unyielding Palestinians."

The PLO's Asad Abd al-Rahman, for his part, blasts what "appears to be pure, innocent brainstorming" by some seemingly well-intentioned intellectuals, accusing them of putting up "balloons for testing" that are designed to lower expectations. "Not the PLO, and not even a fully sovereign state, can cancel the right of return, which is also an individual right," says Abd al-Rahman. "I could say OK, as the man in charge of this file, and my brother could tell me to go to hell, that I and the PLO don't represent him anymore."

If Abd al-Rahman is only grandstanding, he could have fooled the special European Union Task Force on Refugees. In the paper he presented in Brussels, he laid out a detailed PLO plan for the return. It shows how for starters, the repatriation of the refugees from Lebanon to the sparsely populated areas in the Galilee from which they hailed, and the return of the refugees from Gaza to "their almost totally empty land" in southern Israel, would impinge on "only 154,000 rural Jews who live in the land of the expelled refugees." To Israeli ears, that sounds like a plan for erasing the Jewish state.

A CARNIVAL OF FIGURES

In recent weeks, a petition for Palestinian restitution has been making the rounds from Europe to Australia, on paper and the Internet, as part of a media campaign launched by the Badil Resource Center in conjunction with Palestinian researchers Rosemary Sayigh in Beirut and the Kuwait-based Salman Abu Sitta, an enfant terrible of the refugee academic scene.

The text begins: "More than 50 years after the Holocaust, Jews around the world continue to fight for and receive restitution for material and non-material losses inflicted by the Nazi regime throughout Europe. More than 50 years after the Palestinian people were displaced and dispossessed by an exclusive Jewish state established in Palestine in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities in Europe, Palestinians are still being dispossessed, dispersed and denied any kind of restitution." It is to be presented to the European Parliament in the fall.

At first, says Badil's team of Muhammad Jaradat, Ingrid Jaradat-Gasnner, a native of Austria, and Canadian Terry Rempel, Palestinians had reservations about raising the issue, and particularly about the wording. Says Jaradat: "There isn't even a word for restitution in Arabic. We had to make up a term which translates literally as 'restoring the rights.'" Restitution, here, includes the right of return.

The cue for the petition is the work of Jewish organizations who have sought family-by-family reparations and restitution of everything from nationalized Jewish properties to stolen art. "I think we have lots to learn from the Jewish experience," says Abd al-Rahman.

Israeli experts who deal with the refugee issue say they are aware of the apparent conflict of interests. "Still, should we just ignore the claims of people who had insurance in Poland, or art that's now hanging in the Louvre?" asks one, adding that there's "a difference. While in Europe, you're speaking of the annihilation of a community, here there was a war. And I didn't provoke that war. The moral comparison," he says, "is not acceptable."

For now, a flood of individual suits against the Jewish state is unlikely. There's still a strong consensus among Palestinians that the refugee issue should be solved politically, and not through individual cases. Furthermore, says Abd al-Rahman, "if a Palestinian went to an Israeli or international court and lost, it would set a precedent. It's better to stick to Resolution 194."

When it comes to the general subject of compensation, however, the numbers game is under way. Israeli, Palestinian and international academics were due to meet in Canada in mid-July for a conference on compensation, the latest in a series of informal gatherings on the refugee issue dubbed the "Ottawa Process." Badil's Rempel remarks that "if the right of return is going to be symbolic, then the level of compensation has to be substantial. Yet people speak symbolically about that too, citing figures in the $5 billion to $10 billion range."

The Palestinians reject that. Between the Ottomans and the British, pre-1948 Palestine was well-mapped terrain. Rempel says the ill-fated U.N. Palestine Conciliation Commission established in 1949 identified over 450,000 records representing 1.5 million individual holdings. Now, Palestinian researchers translate those material losses into sums of up to $250 billion at today's worth. Once lost income, psychological trauma and other non-material losses are factored in, they arrive at the sum of $500 billion. Taking into account the billions that'll be claimed by host countries like Jordan, says Ingrid Jaradat, "It ends up a carnival of figures. Half a trillion, a trillion ..."

Nobody is any clearer as to where the funds might come from. The AJC's Alpher doesn't believe money will be the obstacle in the end, though he, like the Israeli government, obviously isn't thinking in terms of trillions. "We're a prosperous state. There'll be readiness from the wealthy countries of the world to help the peace. And maybe we can ask wealthy Jews to open their pocketbooks for one last thing."

Israeli officials don't react to the Palestinian figures. As a yardstick of international generosity, though, Canadian academic Rex Brynen, an organizer of the July compensation conference, has noted that "only $3 billion (about one quarter of it in the form of loans) has been pledged to support the entire Oslo process in the West Bank and Gaza."

This is a story that can have no happy ending. "In the best case scenario," says Gershon Baskin, who considers himself to be as liberal as they come, "there'll be millions of disappointed Palestinians. Most won't be able to return to the 'homeland' and won't see the large amounts of money they expect."

Deep down, the PLO's Abd al-Rahman probably knows it too. "Perhaps the idea of reconciliation between two peoples on a two-state basis is something that can be achieved in the next five years," he suggests, "while other issues are not solvable in the same time frame.

Perhaps the question of the refugees should stay as a final final-status issue - without capitulation.