11 - 17 April 2002
Issue No.581
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 April 2002 Issue No.581 |
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Around the right to return
Le Droit au Retour: le problème des réfugiés palestiniens (The Right to Return: the Problem of the Palestinian Refugees), Farouk Mardam-Bey and Elias Sanbar, eds, Paris: Actes Sud, 2002. pp401Conceived as a companion volume to the same editors' Jérusalem, le sacré et le politique (reviewed in Al-Ahram Weekly in December 2000), Le Droit au Retour is a selection of texts, mostly specially commissioned from international experts, on the issue of the Palestinian refugees left homeless following the creation of Israel in 1948. Like the city of Jerusalem itself, the fate of such refugees, scattered in camps in surrounding countries, was postponed at Oslo, being one of the issues to be dealt with during the final-status negotiations, which have yet to take place. In the meantime, and despite current events, the volume usefully summarises firstly the events leading to the Palestinian refugee issue, secondly the history of the refugees, and thirdly perspectives for the eventual return.
The first section of the volume, entitled "Origins of the Problem," contains essays by Nur Musalha and Walid Khalidi on the flight of the Palestinian population from Palestine in 1948, together with pieces by Salman Abou Sitta and Dominique Vidal on the consequences of this flight, firstly for Palestine and secondly for Israel. "A Country Wiped off the Map" is the title of Abou Sitta's piece and "Israel Faced with its History" is the title of the essay by Vidal.
Masalha, a professor at the University of Surrey and at London University in the United Kingdom, examines the many misrepresentations that have surrounded the flight of the Palestinian population in 1948, showing that Palestine was not "a land without a people" at the time and that the Palestinians were not urged to flee by the governments of neighbouring Arab states. On the contrary, the expulsion of the Palestinian population was an aim of the Zionist settlers, as has been shown by Israeli "new historians" such as Benny Morris quoted here, and that aim was pursued with whatever violence was thought necessary. Khalidi continues this theme, with Abou Sitta showing how abandoned Palestinian property was then absorbed following its owners' flight. Dominique Vidal, assistant editor of the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, argues, again drawing on the work of the Israeli new historians, that the expulsion was centrally planned and organised.
The book's second section, "State of Affairs," looks at developments subsequent to the refugees' expulsion, containing essays by Palestinian researchers holding posts in countries such as Palestine, Canada, France and Jordan. One of the main issues looked at in this section of the book is the work of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which had broad responsibility for the refugees' settlement and welfare following its establishment in 1948 under United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194. As Youssef Courbage points out in his essay "Palestinian Demography: the Improbable Lightness of the Figures," "Palestinian nationality having all but disappeared in 1948," UNRWA records, together with those kept by various Arab governments, provide irreplaceable data on the history and numbers of the Palestinian refugee population.
In the same section of the book, Hana Jaber's essay "Economy and Society: What is a Refugee Camp?" continues the historical theme by looking at the role the camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Gaza Strip have played firstly in continuing and reinforcing Palestinian national consciousness despite the lack of a Palestinian state and secondly in the national life and politics of their host countries. In his essay "The Absentees' Property Directorate in Israel," Ussama Rafik Halabi, a Lebanese lawyer, looks at Israeli law on abandoned Palestinian property within the post-1948 Israeli borders, showing how such property was absorbed and its original ownership erased.
The third part of the book is likely to be the most controversial, since it examines the consequences of this history for Israel and the various proposals that have been put forward since 1948 either to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes or to receive compensation for their loss. This issue has still not been solved, and the writers gathered by Mardam-Bey and Sanbar thus have to content themselves with explaining what is at stake in any settlement and what any settlement would have to involve.
A Palestinian wedding in Wadi Hunayn, near Ramleh, 1935
On the first point, which has to do with matters of international law, Monique Chemillier- Gendreau, a French professor of international law, argues that an acceptable solution must be found, since international law is in the Palestinians' favour. The mass movement of refugees as a result of armed conflict was a feature of European and extra-European history during World War II, and post-war texts, to which Israel is signatory, therefore laid down norms for returning such refugees to their place of origin once hostilities were over. The question, therefore, she says, is not whether the refugees have the right to return, since on any reasonable interpretation of international law they do have either that right or the right to compensation. Instead, the question is how the refugees' return, or their agreed compensation, is to be organised, notably because of the difficulty of deciding who would be eligible for what, and to what degree.
Michael Fischbach, an American academic, examines the compensation part of the question in his essay "The United Nations and the Compensation of the Palestinian Refugees," looking at the various schemes that have been tabled since 1949. Various attempts have been made to arrive at an estimate of the total property lost by the Palestinians in 1948, the Johnson Report carried out on behalf of the UN in 1962 putting the total amount of compensation due at $ 1, 377, 456, 000, for which Israel would be partially liable, with the Arab League and the Israeli authorities putting forward conflicting figures. Partly as a result of such disagreements, and of disagreements over the way in which the figures are to be calculated, such compensation schemes have been left unimplemented.
The other part of the question, how repatriation might in fact be carried out, is discussed by Philippe Fargues in his "Demographic Consequences of the Right of Return." Fargues points out that Israel has always been hostile to the idea of the return of the Palestinian refugees, and in response he develops three possible scenarios for Palestinian return, each involving different numbers of refugees and their return to different places. A mix of return and compensation might be the best idea, he thinks, together with the refugees' absorption by the surrounding Arab states. He also discusses the calculations put forward by Salman Abou Sitta in a different context, and in these pages, of a "complete" Palestinian return to what is now Israel proper.
Finally, Elias Sanbar, co-editor of the volume and editor of the French Revue d'Études Palestiniennes, contributes an essay entitled "Is the Right to Return Negotiable?," a characteristically elegant and reflective conclusion to the book as a whole. Sanbar writes that three recent developments have changed prospects for a solution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees, lending hope that it can now be finally resolved. The first of these has been Palestinian-Israeli mutual recognition, as agreed at the signing of the Washington peace accords between Yasser Arafat and assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the second, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the revisionary historical work carried out by a new generation of Israeli historians, and the third the new climate in which negotiation between the two sides has been shown to be possible.
Whether these three developments have now been negated is a moot point. Yet, perhaps Sanbar's most important contribution to the debate that this book records is to reconstruct its wider context. He notes that Israel is fearful of the possible consequences of Palestinian return, dismissing some such fears as "screen-fears" whipped up by the media, while describing others as being only soluble through reconciliation. These fears include that of "being swamped," that of "losing Israel's special Jewish character" and that of seeing oneself as one truly is -- "looking in the mirror" and being constrained to recognise the suffering and injustice for which Israel has been responsible. Such fears can only be quieted through negotiation and agreed settlement, he contends.
In fact, Sanbar argues, Israel has a special responsibility towards confronting such fears and working for their responsible solution. "The desire to appear as the bearer of moral values was built into Zionism at its foundation," he argues, originating in the 19th- century European Zionists' desire to escape the persecution to which they were subject in Europe and to build their own state where they would be free to express their own identity. Subsequent persecution in continental Europe, notably the Nazi extermination of the European Jews, gave added legitimacy to that moral quest. However, Sanbar argues, secure Israeli identity and a secure Israeli state cannot be built at the expense of harm to others.
If such harm is allowed to continue, he says, then it will not only continue to call into question Israel's "moral character," which has been at the heart of the state's international legitimacy, but it will also poison "Israeli hearts in a silent fashion, since everyone in Israel knows what happened to the Palestinians, permanently nourishing the internal division between what people affirm themselves to be and what they know they are."
Sanbar is optimistic that a solution can be found. It seems a pity that this book, like the editors' previous collection on Jerusalem, is not available in English.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
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