Right of return

Christian Century, May 2, 2001 by Alain Epp Weaver

IN THE JUBILEE VISION of Leviticus 25, the dispossessed and disenfranchised are allowed to return to their ancestral homes every 50 years. More than 50 years have passed since the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe of 1948, in which 700,000 Palestinians became refugees and hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed by Israeli troops. Those refugees are still awaiting their jubilee year.

While millions of Palestinian refugees languish in overcrowded camps, a vigorous debate is finally under way concerning their future. For decades the refugee issue has been ignored by the Israelis, and after the signing of the Oslo accords the fight of return also seemed to disappear from Palestinian political discourse (even as it remained of vital concern for the refugees themselves).

While the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes remained firmly anchored in international law (such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and resolutions (in particular, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194), the issue was on the margins of the political front. Palestinian political analyst Salim Tamari warned in 1996 that the refugee issue could be "marginalized and neglected" only so long; eventually it would become an "explosive and destabilizing issue" in relations between Palestinians and Israelis and between Palestinian refugees and Palestinian political leaders.

But over the past year the fight of return has emerged as a key--perhaps the key--point of contention in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Some participants in the Camp David II negotiations suggest that the talks foundered not on the question of the status of Jerusalem and its holy sites but on the fight of return.

Numerous pundits have tackled the issue in the Israeli press, claiming to demonstrate why the fight of return is impractical and a grave threat to Israel. Palestinian refugees, in the Middle East and in the West, have organized to defend the fight of return. Across North America, for example, Al-Awda (Return) groups have sprung up, while similar groups have gained momentum in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the occupied territories and even inside Israel itself.

The energized debate over the fight of return is a welcome development. More than any other issue, the fight of return cuts to the core of the conflict: if justice, peace and reconciliation are to be achieved in Palestine/Israel, the refugee issue must be tackled head on, not swept under the diplomatic rug.

Confronting the refugee issue is psychologically difficult for Israelis for two reasons. First, an historical reckoning with the events of 1948 undermines nationalist myths of innocence. It reveals that Israel was, in the words of Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, born in "original sin." Israeli troops perpetrated over 30 massacres of Palestinian civilians and conducted a campaign of what Israeli analyst Meron Benvenisti has called ethnic cleansing. Benny Morris, one of the "new Israeli historians" who has dismantled nationalist myths surrounding 1948, describes the psychological pain which accompanies an Israeli acknowledgment of responsibility for the refugee crisis: Israelis, he writes in Tikkun, "engage in the psychological repression of what they know intellectually. No people likes to feel that its own statehood was built on the ruins of another people's fortunes."

Yet precisely suet a confrontation, according to Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta, is required for peace. Israelis, says Abu Sitta in a debate with Tikkun publisher Michael Lerner, "must shed their collective amnesia about the Palestinians, the notion that they landed in an empty country, conquered 530 empty towns and villages, cultivated a land where oranges, olives and wheat grew by divine intervention, and found urban and rural landscape carved by genies."

The second difficulty Israelis face when confronting the refugee issue is the fear that the return of refugees would pose a threat to Israeli existence and identity. Amos Oz, the prominent novelist, made the not atypical claim in the New York Times that the right of return is Palestinian code for the destruction of Israel. Morris, for his part, while acknowledging the facts surrounding Palestinian dispossession in his role as an historian, concurs with Oz that "Israel cannot accept the fight of return without facing destruction."

A different but related Israeli fear is that the return of Palestinian refugees would destroy the Jewish character of the Israeli state. Even most Israeli peace activists, who are otherwise sympathetic to Palestinian concerns about settlements, Jerusalem and other final status issues, view the fight of return as fundamentally problematic for precisely this reason. These Israelis often frame the fight-of-return debate as a conflict between two fights: the fight of refugees to return, and the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.

Can the fight of return be affirmed while keeping a clear Jewish demographic majority inside Israel? One way, says veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery and Jerome Segal of the University of Maryland, is to recognize in principle the fight of Palestinian refugees to return while in practice placing restrictions on the number of refugees allowed to move inside the Green Line. Establishing financial incentives to resettle in third countries, such as Canada, and annual quotas for the number of refugees allowed to exercise their fight to return would limit the number of refugees (to several hundred thousand) Israel would absorb, thereby protecting its Jewish majority.