 |  |
Click for Contents
|
P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017 Tel. 972-2-531-5440, Fax: 972-2-537-9489 Advertising Fax: 972-2-531-5425, Email Editorial: [email protected] Subscriptions: [email protected] Web site: http://www.jrep.com |
Palestinian Affairs: Returning to Reality
Isabel Kershner
Is a resolution of the fifty-five-year-old Palestinian refugee problem finally in sight?
Nihaya Zaki must be one of a very few Palestinian refugees who could technically up and move to Israel tomorrow morning if she wished, thus realizing the decades-old refugee dream -- what Palestinian leaders have long referred to as the "sacred" right of return. For Nihaya, who�s in her 30s, holds Israeli citizenship, obtained when she married an Israeli Beduin in the early 1990s and went to live with him in the southern Israeli town of Beersheba. Her daughter, Sahar, now 12, is Israeli-born.
Niyaha�s husband died of an illness 18 months into the marriage, so she brought her daughter back home, here, to the Al-Amari refugee camp on the edge of Ramallah. She says she wouldn�t leave for the world.
"It�s true the standard of living is better in Israel," she declares, sitting at a Formica table in the no-frills felafel restaurant she runs in the heart of the camp, a militant hotbed. "But we�ve established ourselves here. This is a more honorable society, where you don�t forget your religion and morals. This is ours and we�ll die here. I�d rather lose my right hand than leave," she goes on, as if reciting a psalm.
Nihaya, a practical type, has little time for slogans and political correctness. She is unusually blunt in her dismissal of the Palestinian refugee lore of return, but she insists that she represents a trend in the camp, a warren of narrow alleyways and higgledy-piggledy two-story houses that today could be mistaken for a poor area of the city.
"Since I was a small child I�ve been hearing about the right of return from the TV, from the people sitting around here and from my own mother. So where is it?" For the 7,000 residents of Al-Amari, Nihaya explains, it�s an impossible fantasy, an un-achievable dream. "Everyone thinks this way. Everyone�s lost hope. Today in the coffee shops they�re not talking about the right of return, but about who just got killed. I challenge you to speak to anybody here -- nobody is living on dreams."
Nihaya�s parents left Anaba, a village between Ramlah and Lod, in 1948. While she was living in Beersheba, she took her mother and her aunts to revisit their past. There�s no trace of their houses now. Instead, on the ruins of Anaba stands a cement factory, a hulking landmark rising up against the horizon along the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway. Nihaya relates that even her 70-year-old mother has given up any thoughts of returning: "She�ll tell you �Leave it, it�s for the Israelis now.�"
The fate of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 has long been considered one of the most fundamentally intractable issues mitigating against any Israeli-Palestinian final-status deal. The Palestinian leadership has insisted for years that without an Israeli recognition of the right of return, at least in principle, there can be no end to the conflict. The Palestinians base their claim on U.N. Resolution 194 of 1948, which stipulates that 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 that compensation should be paid for the property of those who choose not to return.
The roughly 700,000 Palestinians who left their homes in 1948 are now estimated, through natural growth, to number over 4 million. (Counting those not registered with the United Nations and other displaced Palestinians, PLO officials put the figure as high as 6.5 million.) The majority live in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the neighboring countries of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
No Israeli government would conceivably agree to grant the refugees free entry out of fear that the country would be swamped and cease to be a predominantly Jewish state. And there is a strong consensus that conceding a "right" of return even in principle would create an unhealthy legal precedent for future generations.
After decades of deadlock, though, several recent initiatives suggest a possible pragmatic chink in the Palestinian ideology of return. In February 2002, a New York Times op-ed signed by Yasser Arafat stated that the Palestinians should take Israel�s demographic concerns into consideration in trying to resolve the refugee problem, though that article, appearing at the height of the intifada, was summarily dismissed by Israelis as a cynical PR ploy. Already in late 2001, Sari Nusseibeh, a prominent Palestinian intellectual, started arguing publicly that the inherent logic of a two-state solution implies that the refugees should "return" to the new state of Palestine, not Israel, a principle firmly upheld in the peace document he subsequently drafted with former Israeli Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon. And this July, Khalil Shikaki, a prominent Ramallah-based political analyst and respected pollster, published a groundbreaking, if controversial, survey indicating that if Israel were to recognize Resolution 194 or the right of return, only around 10 percent of refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon would choose to return to Israel, as part of a small number allowed back over several years. Given various other options, most chose receiving "fair compensation" and either staying put in the host country, moving to areas in Israel that would be transferred to the Palestinians in a land swap, or moving to the Palestinian state. Shikaki states that the poll was designed in consultation with PLO officials in charge of negotiations and the refugee issue. The results, he argues, show that Israel can afford to recognize the right of return without undermining its Jewish character.
Now, the refugee debate has culminated in the so-called Geneva Accord, a draft permanent-status agreement negotiated by Israeli leftist and former minister Yossi Beilin and Yasser Arafat comrade and PLO Executive Committee member Yasser Abed Rabbo, who was himself born in Jaffa in 1945. The accord proposes an end to the refugee issue without any mention of the right of return at all. "It was very hard for the Palestinians. They tried to open the issue up again in the last round of talks in Jordan," a participant on the Israeli team told The Report. "But we insisted; even the word �return� doesn�t appear anywhere."
The evasion of the unmentionable in the Geneva document has opened the way for Israeli critics and Palestinians alike to argue that symbolically, the right of return hasn�t actually been conceded at all.
Still, it is hard to dismiss Geneva as soft on the refugees. The draft document refers to Resolution 194 as the basis for resolving the issue, and presents the refugees with options for a permanent place of residence, including the Palestinian state, host countries, a third country or Israel. Residency in Israel would, however, be at the country�s "sovereign discretion" and in accordance with a number that Israel would submit to an international commission, based on the average of total numbers accepted by other third countries. The Israeli side has suggested the number would hover around the 20,000-30,000 mark. After realizing their choice, individuals would lose their refugee status, and no further claims could be raised beyond those related to the implementation of the accord.
Gershon Baskin, co-director of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), pre-negotiated the refugee issue with senior Palestinian minister Nabil Sha�ath weeks before the Taba talks of January 2001. Geneva, he says, offers "the first flickering light of possibility that the refugee issue can be solved."
Even now, though, few issues stir passions on the Palestinian side like that of the refugees. Nihaya Zaki aside, plenty of others are prepared to go to the barricades on the matter of principle. On the morning in July that Shikaki was due to release his poll results, a mob from the Al-Amari camp stormed and trashed his Ramallah offices and assaulted Shikaki, fired by rumors that he was about to deny the refugees their rights and reportedly agitated by intelligence agents from Arafat�s Muqata�ah headquarters a few blocks away.
Jamil, 43, a resident of Al-Amari, was one of the mob. "Shikaki�s a liar," he explains, sitting in the camp�s central coffee shop. "He said everybody would stay where they are. We will only give up on going back if that is imposed on us," he insists. Moments earlier Jamil had been expounding on the fact that he didn�t believe in the possibility of return, and that he wouldn�t want to go to live in Israel as an Israeli anyway. He also relates that he has a sister in Florida and a brother with a grocery store in California. Ideally he�d like to join them, but with three wives and 21 children in Al-Amari, that�s not an option.
Ashraf, 25, also went to Shikaki�s office, though he can�t really articulate why. He has two uncles in New Jersey and wishes he could go too. Asked whether he�d been brought up on the idea of return, he says he�s "fed up with hearing about it."
But Walid, 47, who came back to Al-Amari in 1998 after 20 years in the Gulf, says the right of return is "like the Koran. I believe we will go back one day." He claims that "all the land around Ben-Gurion Airport" belonged to his father. Asked whether he�d want to go and live in Israel now, he replies, "What is Israel? One day the United States will cut its aid and it will disappear."
With the refugees, this is a familiar theme. Muhammad Samara, 48, another Al-Amari coffee shop habitu�, says that if he doesn�t return to Anaba, his children will in generations to come. "We have to be pragmatic," he goes on. "If they were to give us an independent state in the 1967 territories, I�d accept that and live here for the interim. But I won�t sign a paper saying I�ll never return. Maybe when we become powerful enough, we�ll go back and take our land."
It is precisely this kind of talk that leads skeptics to question the validity and conclusions of Shikaki�s findings, and the worth of the Geneva Accord. Both pro-Israel analysts and Palestinian refugee-rights purists place doubt on whether any amount of semantic tongue-twisting or survey data can really lay the refugee issue to rest. Arafat himself, notorious for holding two ends of the stick, has not enunciated any position regarding Geneva�s formulation on the refugees.
Max Abrahms, a research fellow at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has publicly taken issue with Shikaki�s poll, contending among other things that the options Shikaki offered in the survey would never really placate the desire to return. "The poll doesn�t show that the Palestinians would ever be content with those options as a final resolution of the issue," he says, adding that the respondents� expectations of what constitutes "fair compensation" are also wildly off the mark.
Shlomo Hasson, a Hebrew University professor and deputy director of the Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies in Jerusalem, calls the Shikaki poll "a trap" if it is interpreted as being part of some kind of solution. "He leaves the issue of the right of return open, perhaps to be realized in 15 or 50 years," says Hasson, who is engaged in ongoing Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. "You can�t learn anything about the future from it," he warns.
And Palestinian activists such as Muhammad Jaradat of Badil, a Bethlehem-based refugee rights advocacy group, reject both the Shikaki poll and the Geneva initiative on grounds that according to their interpretation of Resolution 194, the refugees must be given a totally free choice regarding return to their original homes that is neither conditional on Israeli permission nor subject to any number caps. The mention of 194 in the Geneva document is there merely to allow Palestinian negotiators to "save face," Jaradat asserts.
Indeed, when it comes to the numbers, the Geneva teams� projected intake for Israel of around 30,000 refugees falls far short even of Shikaki�s 10 percent, which would amount to over 373,000. (He notes, however, that only about 1 percent would agree to take Israeli citizenship.)
In pointing out the weakness of both Shikaki�s findings and of the Geneva initiative, pro-Israeli and refugee advocates alike cite the dramatically different results of earlier refugee polls, including one by Baskin�s IPCRI published in August 2001. That survey suggested that 96.7 percent of those asked would return to their original home towns if given the opportunity. Almost 69 percent said they would return without compensation.
But Baskin himself attributes the different results to a changing reality. "Shikaki�s poll shows that something has happened here in the last three years," he says. He defines it as a "coming to senses" by the refugees. Israel has become so poisoned in Palestinian eyes that few would want to go and live there. "Though they can�t say so openly, that effectively translates into giving up the right of return," he posits.
Baskin sees Geneva as a continuation of that process of the "changing understanding" among the refugees.
Many are bound to consider that wishful thinking. But for Nihaya Zaki and, she swears, many refugees like her, dreamtime is over and hard-nosed realism is in. "My parents left Anaba. If they hadn�t left their village," she says, "we wouldn�t be where we are today. Why should we leave everything we�ve built up here? We won�t make the same mistake and give up our land again."
November 17, 2003
Palestinian Affairs
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2004 |  |