The Right of Return

We Israelis need a scarecrow to frighten ourselves, one frightening enough to pump adrenaline into our national bloodstream. Otherwise, it seems, we cannot function…The new scarecrow is the “Right of Return”. Not as a practical problem, to be dealt with in rational terms, but as a hair-raising monster: now the Palestinians’ sinister design has been revealed! They want to eliminate Israel by this terrible ploy! The want to throw us into the sea! …The end of our state! The end of the vision of generations! A second Holocaust! It seems that the abyss is unbridgeable.

The Arabs demand that each and every Palestinian refugee return to his home and land in Israel. The Israelis staunchly object to the return of even one single refugee. On both sides, everything or nothing. There goes the peace. (Uri Avnery, Right of Return).

It might sound as if Avnery is exaggerating in the piece quoted above, but there is no subject in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that seems less open to rational discourse than the Right of Return. Conventional wisdom asserts that the possibility of Palestinian refugees returning to their former homes in what is now Israel is, at best, a non-starter. At worst, the demand to return is interpreted as a deliberate PLO ploy to destroy Israel: They want to flood Israel with refugees that have been taught to hate Israel for their entire lives!, as one participant summed it up when I once dared mention the Right of Return in a Middle East discussion forum.

Background:

At the end of the British Mandate, there were some 1,237,000 Palestinian Arabs and 608,000 Jews living in Palestine [1]. During the course of the 1948 war, started by the Arab side to prevent the partition of the country, more than half of the Palestinian people, around 750,000 persons, were uprooted. Some were driven out by the conquering Israeli army, others fled when the fighting neared their homes, as civilians do in every war.

Immediately after the war, the new State of Israel refused to allow the refugees to come back to their homes in the territories it had conquered. We must do everything to ensure they never do return, as David Ben-Gurion confided in his diary entry for 18 July 1948. [2]

The Ben-Gurion government housed new Jewish immigrants in the abandoned homes in some of the formerly Arab towns. It also eradicated about 450 abandoned Palestinian villages and put up Jewish settlements on their sites. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages.You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population. (Moshe Dayan). [3]

In the 1967 war, some events repeated themselves. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven out, by force or intimidation, from the huge Jericho refugee camps in the Jordan Valley, and eastward from Tulkarm, Qalqilya and Latrun, near the Green Line.

This is the origin of the Palestinian refugee problem. According to official UN statistics, the number of Palestinian refugees now stands at 3.7 million people, mostly dispersed in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

International Law:

The right of these Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they had left was made explicit in UNGAR 194 (III) of 11 December 1948, in which the General Assembly

Resolves that the 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, 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…

Their right to go home is also enshrined elsewhere in international conventions governing the status of refugees in general, e.g.:

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948, Article 13(2)

Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own….No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.

- The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) of 1966, Article 12, paras 1 & 4. (The Nov 1999 Human Rights Committee General Comment on the ICPPR makes clear that in Article 12 “his own country” applies to … individuals whose country of nationality has been incorporated in or transferred to another national entity, whose nationality is being denied them.)

International protection for a refugee ceases only when he has …voluntarily re-established himself in the country which he left or outside which he remained or he is …able to return to the country of his former habitual residence

- (Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Article 1C, 28 July 1951)

So the Right of Return is not a cunning invention by the PLO to swamp Jewish Israel with Palestinian returnees and their children. It is an established principle of international law, which the world community has insisted must be honored in the case of other displaced people, such as Muslim Kosovars displaced in the wars accompanying the break-up of Yugoslavia and the East Timorese who fled Indonesian invasion and occupation. It is also a natural priority for the PLO, which Israel recognizes as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, whether they are in exile or in the Occupied Territories. The 3.7 million Palestinians in refugee camps make up almost half of the entire Palestinian population. If you are a PLO negotiator, charged with representing Palestinian interests, the refugees constitute half of all your constituents, and their rights properly occupy an important place in your priorities.

What the PLO wants:

Having said all that, 3.7 million people is still 3.7 million people, and realpolitik dictates that we recognize that regardless of the legal basis for return there is no prospect whatsoever of Israel (pop. 6.5m) agreeing to allow that many refugees back into Israel proper. So why does the PLO insist upon it? Well, actually they don’t, and they never have at any time during the peace process: Never, despite the claims of certain Jewish organizations, did the Palestinian negotiators demand the return to Israel of 3,000,000 refugees. The figures discussed in the course of the talks varied from several hundred to several thousand Palestinians to be allowed to return with Israel’s authorization [4]. Gilad Sher, Israel’s chief negotiator during the premiership of Ehud Barak, was very clear that the Palestinians are not demanding the practical Right of Return to Israel - which, in my opinion, is not an element of their 'core position'. [5]

And the consistent statements of the PLO leadership make clear that when they demand recognition of the Right of Return they are thinking of something more nuanced than a simple return to Israel for the refugees:

We seek a fair and just solution to the plight of Palestinian refugees who for 54 years have not been permitted to return to their homes. We understand Israel's demographic concerns and understand that the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees, a right guaranteed under international law and United Nations Resolution 194, must be implemented in a way that takes into account such concerns.

- Yasir Arafat, President of the Palestinian Authority, The Palestinian Vision of Peace, NY Times, 3 Oct 2002.

Whereas the Palestinian side considers that the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes is enshrined in international law and natural justice, it recognizes that the prerequisites of the new era of peace and coexistence, as well as the realities that have been created on the ground since 1948, have rendered the implementation of this right impracticable.

- Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Sec-Gen of the PLO-Executive Committee & former PA Prime Minister, Article VII of the Beilin-Abu Mazen Document, 31 Oct 1995.

The refugee problem is a major one. We want to establish the Right of Return, but a balance must be struck between the establishment of the Right of Return and Israel's concerns and interests.

- Dr. Saeb Erekat, Head of PLO Negotiation Affairs Dept, statement to the Council of Europe, January 2002.

[At Taba, w]e asked for the principle of the Right of Return, but the implementation of it, it should be discussed in a very practical and even pragmatic way, without affecting…the Jewish nature of the state of Israel…You want me, as a Palestinian who was born in Jaffa, to forget my personal thing, my attachment as a person to the place of my birth? I will not do that. But you want me, as a serious politician responsible for the future of my people, and as a person who wants, really, to put an end to these agonies, to take a position which hurts me - I should take it. I will do that. This is the difference.

- Yasser Abed Rabbo, FIDA Sec-Gen & former PA Cabinet Minister, Brookings Institute Debate on the Right of Return, cited in Ha’aretz, 22 Nov 2001.

I believe that the Palestinians understand that they cannot simultaneously demand both the right of refugees to return (to Israeli territory) and a Palestinian state. The refugee problem will be solved within the framework of a Palestinian state, which will provide the refugees a solution to their problem...I believe that the refugees need to return to a Palestinian state that will give them the possibility to return and build new lives, and the Palestinians need to recognize that. The Palestinian dream of the past needs to be replaced with the (new) dream, that we need to create for the future.

- Professor Sari Nusseibeh, Pres. of Al-Quds University, formerly PLO rep. in East Jerusalem, Palestinian State Will Solve Refugee Problem, reported in Ha’aretz, 21 Dec 2001.

So although still asserting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Palestine, the PLO is signaling that the implementation of that right can be flexible enough to preserve Israel as a Jewish state by having refugees “return” to the new Palestine that will arise from the Occupied Territories, not to Mandate Palestine. In fact, senior Palestinian officials have already been quietly warning the refugee population not to hold on to the hope of returning to an old Palestine that no longer exists.

I'm sure that you all want to go back to Palestine, to the homes your families left in the Galilee, Jaffa and Haifa. Indeed, the Israelis expelled us from our lands, and I and my friends in the leadership will insist on our right to return. But it is important for you to know what is awaiting all those who choose to realize that right and prefer it over the option to settle in the new state of Palestine or to emigrate to Canada, or Europe, or to join families in other countries. You won't be going back to your home, nor to the neighborhood or the village. The houses, neighborhoods, and villages are all gone. New cities have been built on your lands, and in your houses, Jewish babies have been born. You will join a Palestinian minority in a country where the language of the state is not their language, its culture is not theirs, its flag is not theirs, and the anthem is not theirs. No jobs await you, nor a welcome home.

-- Abu Mazen, to the refugees of Yarmuk Camp, Syria. [6]

I told them that if anyone tells them it is their duty [to try to return to Israel] and not only a right, they should slap them back. I told them they won't find their homes in Sheikh Munes, and that nowadays it's called Ramat Aviv.

– Dr. Nabil Sha’at, Palestinian Foreign Minister, to the refugees of Rashadiyeh Camp, Jordan. [6]

If the PLO is not actually expecting refugees to return to Israel, what exactly are they asking for in asserting the Right to Return? The key lies in the Sari Nusseibeh article cited above, Palestinian State Will Solve Refugee Problem, in which Nusseibeh explains that an important component to a solution to the Right of Return is some level of Israeli recognition that it is responsible for the Palestinian refugee problem:

The Palestinians need Israeli recognition and admission of the pain that was caused them - even partial recognition or [recognition] that it was unintentional. Such a recognition would have psychological importance that the Palestinians need, and cannot be measured in price.

Israeli recognition:

Isaac Deutscher, a Polish Jew, described the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in terms of a man who jumps from a burning building. Europe’s Jews were trapped in the 1930’s and 40’s in an inferno not of their own making. The only way to save themselves was to jump. The act of jumping was Zionism, and the place they landed was Palestine. Unfortunately, in jumping to safety, Europe’s persecuted Jews landed on an innocent passerby, who had nothing to do with setting the fire that was killing the Jews. The passerby was the Palestinian people. In saving themselves, the Jewish immigrants to Palestine landed on the Palestinian passerby and broke his arms and legs. They then got up and walked to safety without even acknowledging the plight of the passerby. It is this reality – of the disaster that befell an existing Palestinian people and culture when a new state was established in their midst - that the PLO is asking Israelis to acknowledge, when it asks for Israel to at least recognize that Palestinian refugees have a theoretical right to return to the homes that they lost in the founding of Israel.

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy understood how fundamental is the need for Israeli recognition, as he meditated on the Pope’s historical visit to Yad Vashem and his apology to the Jewish people for centuries of Catholic anti-Semitism:

As far as can be recalled, Israel has never apologized for anything, as though it were a state that has never done anything that merits an apology. Not the "small" injustices of the occupation and not the great historic injustice done to the Palestinians…. An Israeli apology? Forget it. A request for forgiveness? Don't make us laugh.

Is there anyone in Israel who seriously thinks that the Palestinians do not deserve an apology? Israel will one day have to set up its own truth and reconciliation commission, like the one in South Africa - particularly for what it has wrought in the last 10 years - as part of a process of internal conciliation and purification. This will be even more necessary with regard to the great historical injustice. We may have been righteous victims in 1948, but on the road to realizing our claim to justice we perpetrated a terrible wrong on another people who had absolutely no connection with our calamity. That wrong continues to bleed in the refugee camps, in the occupied territories and in the Palestinian diaspora, and it will continue to haunt us and prevent the achievement of a genuine settlement. For the most part it is irrevocable; no reparations will atone for it. But Israel is unwilling, to this day, to even acknowledge its existence, not to speak of taking responsibility for it. (Ask Forgiveness? Who, Us?, Ha'aretz, 26 March, 2000).

Indeed, for much of their history, Israelis – and before them, the pioneers of Zionism - have studiously ignored the very presence of a pre-existing population in Palestine. For the first fifty years of the Zionist enterprise, Palestine was sold as a land without people, waiting for people without a land [7]. As late as 1969, Israeli PM Golda Meir could exclaim, Who are the Palestinians? There was no such thing as a Palestinian people in Palestine. It was as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist [8]. Even as recently as the premiership of Ehud Barak, the Israeli government continued to maintain publicly that the Palestinian refugee crisis was nothing to do with Israel. It is this denial of Palestinian existence and Palestinian history that the PLO is seeking to end once and for all by asserting the Right of Return. The Palestinians are asking Israelis to recognize that when Israel was founded Palestine was already home to a people with a history and a culture, who did not give it up by choice.

If this is what the Palestinian Right of Return really means, why doesn’t the PLO leadership come out openly and acknowledge unequivocally that the refugees are never going to return to Israel proper? This would lay to rest the Israelis’ fear, well exploited by those on the right who oppose a negotiated solution with the Palestinians anyway, that the PLO is seeking to destroy Israel by swamping it with refugees. But this underestimates the importance of the Right of Return to the Palestinian side. In Avnery’s words: The Right of Return expresses the very core of the Palestinian national ethos. It is anchored in the memories of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, and the feeling that a historic injustice was committed against the Palestinian people. The PLO could no more sell a unilateral concession of this size to the Palestinians than an Israeli government could sell to the Israeli public a unilateral renunciation of its claim to sovereignty over all Jerusalem.

The PLO insists that the detailed solution to the refugee problem can only be made at the negotiating table, because concessions of this magnitude can only be swallowed in a comprehensive agreement in which mutual compromise lessens the pain of what is being given up. French journalist Charles Enderlin recognized the impossibility of treating the refugee issue in isolation from the wider issue of the Occupation when he wrote, in refutation of the “Generous Offer” myth: It’s an insult to human intelligence to imagine, as some propaganda makes out, that the Palestinian leadership thought it possible to conclude a peace deal that included the return to Israel of 3.7m refugees. The truth is that they could only have agreed to drop this historic PLO claim in exchange for a viable Palestinian state on virtually the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, with the Arab part of Jerusalem as capital [9].

A Compromise Solution:

What kind of Right of Return might emerge from a negotiated peace leading to a two-state solution? Well, we don’t need to resort to guesswork here, as considerable progress was made on the refugee issue in the negotiations that followed the failed Camp David summit - certainly enough to show what a final settlement of the issue is going to look like. The most important breakthrough came at Taba in January 2001, where the Israeli negotiators offered this declaration to their Palestinian counterparts:

The issue of the Palestinian refugees is central to Israeli-Palestinian relations. Its comprehensive and just resolution is essential to creating a lasting and morally scrupulous peace. … The State of Israel solemnly expresses its sorrow for the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees, their suffering and losses, and will be an active partner in ending this terrible chapter that was opened 53 years ago.

Despite accepting United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 1947 [calling for the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab], the emergent State of Israel became embroiled in the war and bloodshed of 1948-49, that led to victims and suffering on both sides, including the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian civilian population who became refugees… . A just settlement of the refugee problem in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 must lead to the implementation of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

In this declaration, Israel recognized for the first time that it shared responsibility for the problem of the Palestinian refugees. It agreed to contribute directly to a solution to the problem, and it affirmed that this must lead to the implementation of UN resolution 194, which stipulates 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.

Having finally received Israeli recognition of the right to return, how did the Palestinians propose to implement that right? Well, the Taba negotiations produced the following framework. Under the auspices of an international commission that would organize and fund the resettlement package, Palestinian refugees would have a choice of:

- Repatriation to Israel proper;

- Repatriation to the “swapped territories” (i.e. the small areas of Israel to be transferred to Palestine, in return for the annexation to Israel of the largest Jewish settlements contiguous to Israel);

- Resettlement in the new Palestinian state, created out of the Occupied Territories;

- Absorption by the host states that have housed them since 1948 (a proposal which is raised again in the Saudi peace proposal of January 2004);

- Resettlement in a third country (Canada and some European states offered to accept Palestinian refugees willing to relocate there, as part of a comprehensive peace package).

The new state of Palestine would be regarded as the natural destination for most refugees, and repatriation to Israel proper would require in each case the approval of the Israeli government. With compensation and resettlement packages designed to make the non-Israeli options most appealing, how many of the 3.7m refugees would ultimately return to Israel proper? Well, no final figure was agreed, but the numbers under consideration varied from about 25,000 (to be admitted over a three-year period) to a maximum of 40,000 over five years.

So, in the end, the Palestinian Right of Return does not involve the destruction of the Jewish state under a flood of 3.7 million refugees. In reality, it comes down to maybe 40,000 returnees, several billion dollars’ worth of international funding, and five letters: S-O-R-R-Y.

Footnotes:

[1] According to the British government’s A Survey of Palestine - Supplement, pub. Jerusalem (1947), p. 10.

[2] Quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, pub. Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.

[3] From a speech to the Haifa Technion, reported in Ha’aretz, April 4, 1969.

[4] Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002. Pub. Other Press, 2003; p.324.

[5] Gilad Sher, Just Beyond Reach: The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations 1999-2001, p 156.

[6] Both quoted in Abu Mazen and Nabil Sha’at to Palestinian Refugees: You Aren’t Going Back to Israel, by Akiva Eldar; Ha'aretz, September 5, 2002.

[7] Israel Zangwill, The Return to Palestine, New Liberal Review II, Dec. 1901, p.627.

[8] Golda Meir: Interview with The Sunday Times [of London], 15 June, 1969; quoted in Palestinians: The Making of A People, by Baruch Kimmerling & Joel S. Migdal.

[9] Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002. Pub. Other Press, 2003.

Comments

[Rojo]

The Israeli discourse about the Right of Return, along with the fears of the "Demographic Time Bomb," brings into relief some of the true fears of the Zionist ideologues. And that is Israel's identity as a "Jewish" state. But the Zionist's can't have it both ways. If they want to control all of Mandated Palestine (and no one can convince me that that is not Sharon's ultimate goal), they will likely have a majority Palestinian population--not so subtle efforts to make Palestinian life intolerable in an effort to get them to emigrate (a form of creeping "Transfer")notwithstanding. In which case, The pretense that Israel is a democracy, will be even more risible. I already question Israel's status as a democracy given the second-class rights of Palestinians within Israel (or so-called "Israeli Arabs"). It's time to support the one-state solution. A secular state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. Apartheid is not the solution.

[politcentr]

Excellent idea! I do positively support the author of this insightful article. For some interesting facts about national minorities go straight to http://www.geocities.com/prosvieta -
a site dedicated to Endangered languages of Eastern European National minorities.

My best regards, Polit.Centr

[Kurious Dude]

I found your article very informative. I wanted to inquire about the current state of affairs. It seems that the article leaves off saying that all preconditions were met. The Israelis came back with an offer that acknowledged the Right of Return and offered a kind-of-a "sorry". The Palestinians put a reasonable cap on the number of refugees at 40K over a five-year period. This begs the question why the downward spiral after the negotiations at Taba which should have settled the last major issue?

[L of C]

Hi Kurious,

I’m glad you found the article useful. Unfortunately, the refugee problem was not the last major issue between Israelis and Palestinians; when the Taba talks were suspended, there were still gaps on Jerusalem and on borders (specifically, how much of the Israeli-settled areas of the West Bank would be annexed to Israel). The negotiators were confident though that if they had had perhaps another six weeks, they would have reached a final settlement of all issues. The talks were suspended because of the Israeli general election in Feb 2001, which threw out the Barak govt and brought PM Sharon to power. No Sharon government will ever return to Taba-type talks, because the Taba negotiations were leading to a genuine two-state solution, and Sharon simply does not believe in a two-state solution. (He envisages instead an imposed settlement that would give the Palestinians limited autonomy under Israeli control – kind of a one-and-a-half state solution). So, since PM Sharon came to power, there have been no talks at all on final status issues leading to a two-state solution – ie on the big issues like borders, Jerusalem and refugees.

The Geneva Accord grew out of frustration on the part of some of the Taba negotiators at the lack of real negotiations over the last three years. Basically, the Geneva negotiators resumed from where the Taba talks left off, and showed what a final settlement would look like if Taba had not been suspended. The Geneva Accord has not been formally accepted by either the Israeli or the Palestinian government – Sharon would certainly never accept it; Arafat (in my opinion) probably would, if he were facing an Israeli govt that would reciprocate.

Hope that answers some of your questions.