A matter of right
The fundamental issue at the heart of the Palestinians' right of return is one of recognition, say Yehudith Harel* and Amr El-Zant*
The results of the recent poll conducted by Dr Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, in which the vast majority of polled Palestinian refugees did not express an interest in returning to what is now Israel, led one of us to recall a visit to three refugee camps in Jordan in 1996.
Except for a few, the nearly 50 refugees we talked to said that despite their attachment to their ancestral land, they did not, if given the choice, intend to go back to Israel. For them, Palestine of old had disappeared, taking with it their villages and houses. Most preferred compensation in order not to resettle into a society not designed specifically for their sake, and actively pursuing the purposes of another people. Indeed, the bitterness born of the realisation that one is irrelevant to the proposed grand design defining the country can only be aggravated by the knowledge that for many previous generations, it was the culture of one's ancestors that determined its identity.
Nevertheless, absolutely everybody said that they insisted on being given the option of repatriation, and would never accept to be "told" by Israel that they cannot return. The unanimous and adamant demand of recognising this right came out so forcefully that it made one stop and think hard about the phenomenon. And it was then and there that one came to realise what the right of return really meant for the Palestinians and that without its recognition there would never ever be any resolution to the conflict.
Among the many motivations behind this insistence is an important point of principle involving the symbolic content the refugees attach to any compensation they might get as part of a peaceful settlement. They require it to be viewed as their fundamental right as dispossessed former inhabitants of the land, and not as charity granted to them by Israel, as a result of "generosity and good will". This they could not accept. They would not allow their cause to be reduced to a "humanitarian case". This refusal is a sort of settling of accounts with the Zionist movement, which they hold responsible for the destruction of their society and heritage, all the while placing the blame entirely elsewhere, and the rewriting of history in a way as to marginalise the importance of the destroyed communities.
For most Israelis the issue of the right of return evokes apocalyptic images of the "destruction of Israel". As shown by Shikaki's research, however, the recognition of the right of return is not about demographic warfare. It instead involves a conceptual struggle between competing narratives. The demand for recognising the right of return aims at penetrating the hegemonic status and the self- righteous and self-declared moral superiority of the Zionist movement over the moral and historical rights of the indigenous population. Israelis refuse to cede to this precisely because they are not ready to admit their share of historical responsibility for the Palestinian tragedy.
When denying and negating the right of return, Israelis are protecting an interpretation of events that has become entangled with their own sense of identity. For what is up for destruction is not the country, but its implausible idealised reconstruction of its past. The danger is not embodied in a flood of refugees, but rather in a series of revisions of cherished beliefs. The return that is in fact feared is that of a haunted history.
It is the discrepancy between the acceptance by the refugees of the reality of the situation in Israel, and the absence of any conceptual modification of mainstream opinion in Israel, that may have enraged the mob which recently demonstrated against Shikaki. Neither ordinary Palestinians, nor the refugees, would allow the issue to go away unless their perspective of the events tied to the founding of the Jewish state is taken seriously. Under no circumstances can they be converted to the Zionist reading of the events leading to the destruction of their society. For they know that in the absence of that movement they would have been, for better or for worse, masters of their own fate in their own state. The key to compromise is therefore recognition of this situation by those who won, whose plans actually materialised.
The recognition of unpleasant facts facilitates the advent of a less tormented future. While many Palestinians are ready to accept the reality of Israel, few can be forced to see justice in the fact, which is intricately entangled, so as to be inseparable, from the processes that lead to their dispossession. They require that Israel views its peace proposals not in terms of "generous offers" but as minimal reparation for those who paid the price of its emergence.
* Yehudith Harel is an Israeli peace activist and one of the founders of the recently formed Palestinian Israeli Joint Action for Peace. She is a member of the Israeli chapter of the International Alliance for Arab-Israeli Peace.
* Amr A El-Zant is an Egyptian physicist who was a research fellow at the Israel Institute of Technology (1996-2000) and is currently at the California Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Cairo Peace Society.
