http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000810/t000074944.html
Palestinian Refugees Must Be Allowed to Choose
Middle East: Israel's rejection of the right of return goes against
international law.
By ELIA ZUREIK, LA Times, 08/10/2000
In 1948, 800,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled out of fear from
their homes in what is now Israel, and they never have been allowed
to return. Today, these refugees and their descendants number more
than 4 million. More than any other factor, the dispossession and
suffering of the Palestinian refugees have fueled the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And more than any other factor, their fate
is the key to its resolution.
At the Camp David summit, Palestinian and Israeli negotiators
overcame an important barrier by discussing the Palestinian refugees
seriously for the first time, but they remain sharply divided on the
issue. As before, Israeli officials maintain that the creation of the
Palestinian refugee problem had nothing to do with Israeli policies and
practices. They claim instead that the Palestinian exodus was
prompted by calls from Arab leaders for Palestinians to flee--or
simply by the tragedy of war--even though substantial evidence
from recently declassified official Israeli sources reveals
premeditated plans to expel and transfer indigenous Palestinians
across the borders into other Arab states.
Even were we to assume that the Palestinian exodus was caused
by the unintended consequences of war, it is still hard to see how this
justifies Israel's continued prevention of the refugees' return. There
are numerous examples of peoples who were displaced during war
but permitted to return to their homes once peace was established,
most recently in the Balkan wars. That is what refugee law
prescribes, and that is the solution initially proposed by the United
Nations in 1948 and reaffirmed more than 100 times since.
Israel's rejection of the right of return simply has no basis in
international law or practice. The refusal to allow the return of the
refugees has a deeper ideological basis: Israel wants to preserve a
Jewish majority. Allowing Palestinian refugees to return might disturb
Israel's "fragile demographic balance" or "change the character" of
the state, to use the euphemisms of the day. Accordingly, what
is--under any standard--a form of ethnic cleansing is defended by
Israelis as a means of national self-preservation.
Notwithstanding the international trend toward increased mobility
and pluralism and the increasing diversity in Israeli society itself--in
part a result of the influx of many immigrants from the former Soviet
Union--Israel continues to conceive of itself as a state for only the
Jewish people.
But what of the Palestinian refugees? They are no less attached to
the land of their forbears than their Jewish neighbors. United Nations
data show that among the former Palestinian residents of West
Jerusalem who became refugees in 1948, two-thirds still live nearby,
either in East Jerusalem or in adjacent towns. Many of them can see
their old neighborhoods in the distance; a few lucky ones granted
permits to enter Israel can even pass by their old homes. But they are
barred from returning and reclaiming their property.
Refugees farther away in Lebanon, Syria and other countries must
rely only on their memories--or, for the younger generations raised
in filthy, overcrowded refugee camps, their imagination. I recently
read an interview with an elderly Palestinian woman living in the Ein
el Hilwa camp in Lebanon. Tightly gripping the rusted key to her
family's farm near Jaffa, she asked her interviewer how she should
explain to her grandchildren, who had known only the stench of the
camp's open sewers, what it was like to wake up to the scent of fresh
lemons.
These refugees must have felt especially embittered to watch
Israel admit 6,000 Lebanese affiliated with the South Lebanese Army
as a reward for their collaboration during Israel's occupation of
Southern Lebanon, while Israel has declined to allow the Palestinians
to return to their homes.
The Palestinian refugees did not choose their past; it was forced on
them. If there is to be peace, however, they must choose their future.
This simple idea is the essence of the Palestinian position on refugees
in the ongoing negotiations with Israel.
For the right of return to have any meaning, each Palestinian
refugee must be given a free choice about where to live. A sizable
number probably will choose not to return to their homes in Israel,
particularly if they are given the opportunity to settle elsewhere or to
improve their quality of life.
Many are established in other countries and would prefer to remain
in them. But the choice must be theirs and theirs alone.
Elia Zureik, a Professor of Sociology at Queen's University, Kingston,
Canada, Advises the Palestine Liberation Organization on Refugee
Issues
