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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Focus Books Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Clinton's 'slip of the tongue'
By Graham UsherIt was supposed to be one of those feel good White House meetings at which President Bill Clinton usually excels, especially after a "successful" trip from a visiting "friend". But amid the usual soft ball questions tossed up for Clinton and President Hosni Mubarak at their Washington press conference last week there landed a very hard ball indeed. Since the US leader had supported the right of return of the Albanian refugees to Kosovo, asked Abdel-Moneim Said director of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, did he also support the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their lands in what was Mandate Palestine but is now Israel?
After a somewhat embarrassed smile, Clinton acknowledged the pertinence of the question and proceeded to dig a large hole for himself. "If you look at it as a practical matter," he said, "whether the refugees go home depends in part on how long they've been away and whether they wish to go home. It will also depend on what the nature of the [final] settlement is [between Israel and the Palestinians], how much land the Palestinians will have, where it will be, how does it correspond to where they lived before."
Realising perhaps that these off-the-cuff comments were going nowhere, Clinton dug deeper and hit upon one of the real unexploded mines of the Oslo peace process. "I would like it if the Palestinian people felt free and were free to live wherever they like, wherever they want to live," he said.
It is barely a secret that were the 3.5 million registered Palestinian refugees "free" (and especially those 1.1 million still living in camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon) they would have returned to their lands, villages and towns in Israel long ago. Although this is almost certainly not what Clinton intended by his remarks, this is how they could be construed. And this is how they were construed by Israel's new prime minister, Ehud Barak, who broke a six week silence on diplomatic matters to scold the US president.
Any Palestinian right of return would be "unacceptable" to Israel, said a spokeswoman for Barak on 2 July, adding that Clinton's comments were apparently a "misunderstanding" which the US administration should "clarify and correct". Israel's US Embassy made haste to do so, rushing out a "clarification" within hours of Barak's rebuke. "The long-standing view is that the issue of Palestinian refugees is a matter that needs to be dealt with and resolved by the parties themselves," it said.
But by then the refugee genie was "out of its bottle", as one outraged US-based Jewish group put it last week. And the Palestinian leadership was having fun keeping it there. "Clinton's statement is an excellent basis for a solution of the Palestinian refugees' problem," Palestinian Authority Cabinet Secretary, Ahmad Abdul-Rahman, told Israeli Radio on 2 July, adding that the apparent US-PA rapprochement was the fruit of Yasser Arafat's "shrewd diplomacy."
But it took the newly elected Palestinian member of the Knesset, Ahmed Tibi, to nail down the real reason why Clinton's comments so alarmed Israel and Israelis. "Clearly the Palestinians should be allowed to return home," he said, "and Israel will have to deal with it."
But for Israel (whether led by Labour or Likud) the main prize of the Oslo formula is that it enables Israel not to deal with the refugee issue, and especially the fate of nearly one million Palestinians driven from their homes in 1948. With the Oslo Accords, Israel achieved a long held ambition of separating out the case of the 1948 refugees from those 350,000 Palestinian refugees driven from homes and refugee camps during the 1967 war. The repatriation of these "displaced persons" to the West Bank and Gaza was supposed to have been negotiated by a quadripartite committee made up of Israel, the Palestinians, Jordan and Egypt within the framework of Oslo's now expired five-year interim period. But, says member of the Palestinian delegation to the committee, Salim Tamari, the parties could not even agree to a definition of a refugee, let alone any arrangement for their return.
"The heart of the problem was that Israel wanted the definition of displaced persons "to exclude the descendants of the 1967 refugees and confine it to those Palestinians driven out during the five days of the war itself," says Tamari. "Our position was that any definition of displaced persons "must include descendants and those Palestinians who lost their right to residency in the West Bank and Gaza through being out of country prior to and after the war."
Nor is the squabble a matter of semantics. If the Arab definition of displaced persons plus their descendants is operative, "we are talking about the return of over a million refugees", says Tamari. As for the Israeli estimation, "the Israelis refuse to put any number on displaced persons."
This stonewalling was the hallmark of the "peace" governments of Rabin and Peres (the committee didn't meet during the Netanyahu period) and Tamari fully expects it to endure under any government lead by Barak. "If Barak shows any flexibility on the 1967 refugees, it will only be to try and extract a Palestinian renunciation of return for the 1948 refugees," he predicts.
Yet, with the final status negotiations seemingly about to begin, there will have to be some movement to break the logjam. So far, Arafat's negotiating tack has been to downgrade the refugee case, partly, perhaps, to appease Israeli fears and partly to prioritise instead the issue of Palestinian statehood. Tamari says the time has come for a reordering of priorities.
"The first thing the Palestinian negotiators should do is set down their own red lines," he says. This means "winning from the Israelis acceptance of the principle of the right of Palestinian return to Israel prior to any negotiations about the modalities or volume of their return". He also calls for increased coordination between the Palestinians and those Arab countries that host the refugees such as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. But, above all, "there should a direct representation of the refugees themselves, and especially those that live in the camps, in any Palestinian delegation to negotiations that are deciding their fate." In this, says Tamari, the Palestinians should learn some tricks from the Israelis.
"Israel often mobilises the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza to set the agenda and terms of the negotiations," he says. "The refugees should do the same, both directly through representation on the delegation and indirectly through politically organising around the right of return in the camps."
Such organisation has so far been sorely lacking. But until and unless it occurs the aspiration that one day Palestinian refugees will be "free to live wherever they like" will remain what Israel has always insisted it was -- "a slip of the tongue."
