On the Palestinian right of return
Can the Geneva Accord and the roadmap for peace be reconciled, asks Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
The main obstacle now standing in the way of a comprehensive settlement between the Israeli and Palestinian teams who pursued secret negotiations in Geneva for more than two years is a disagreement over the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes pursuant to UN General Assembly Resolution 194. The other issues in dispute between the two sides have been settled or are on their way to being settled, including the highly contentious issue of Jerusalem which has for long defied all attempts to resolve it.
Yet the Geneva Accord in its present formulation is the expression of a possible -- not a just -- peace. It is a settlement the negotiating parties were able to agree on but which is still the subject of sharp discord within the ranks of each. Both Sharon and wide sections of Palestinian public opinion have denounced the accords as an act of treason to their respective causes. The battle is now over which of the conflicting parties is better placed to win over public opinion, especially on the issue of the Palestinian right of return.
Resolution 194 stipulates that the refugees have the right to either return or receive compensation for their lost property. It has been accepted by the Arab parties, who insist it should be implemented as an indivisible whole. The angry reaction of many Palestinians to what they consider an unacceptable concession on the Palestinian right of return is a clear indication that any agreement that does not fully uphold what they perceive as their inalienable right has little chance of success. Justified though it may be, it is a reaction that could end up isolating the Palestinians instead of Sharon and his government of ultra-hawks from international public opinion, which now strongly supports the new peace initiative.
The Geneva documents call for a limit, to be set by Israel, on the number of Palestinian refugees who will be allowed to return is interpreted not only by its Palestinian critics but also by many of its Israeli supporters as simply cancelling the right of return altogether, because the exercise of the right is made conditional on a unilateral Israeli decision. Palestinian critics accuse the document of simply "liquidating the refugee problem", and dismiss it as a latter-day version of the Balfour Declaration. In the occupied territories it has been rejected by a wide range of trade unions, associations, institutions and town and village councils, which have threatened to take drastic measures against its signatories, while Palestinians in the Diaspora denounce it as an attempt to legitimise the "ethnic cleansing" of 1948 and to condemn the dispossessed refugees to perpetual exile.
Israelis see the Arab insistence on clinging to Resolution 194 and refusal to make any concessions on the Palestinian right of return as proof that the Arabs have not abandoned their aim to eradicate the Jewish state, even if they now hope to bring this about through the shifting demographic balance between Jews and Arabs in Israel, where, thanks to the much higher birth rate among the Arab population, the Arabs are expected to eventually outnumber Jews.
However, the Israeli logic is based on a fallacy, in that it replaces Palestinians who still dream (after more than half a century) of returning to their homes (most of which no longer exist) by a prototype of Palestinian extremists out to wrest control over the Jewish state. Moreover, Israel has been able to absorb more than one million Jews from the Soviet Union. This proves that the issue is not one of numbers but of identity, of whether immigration to Israel is Jewish or Palestinian.
It is wrong to deal with the Palestinian right to return as an abstract notion, totally ignoring the number of refugees and the conditions in which mass departures occurred. The vast majority of Palestinian refugees are expected to come from Lebanon, where the structure of Lebanese society and its extremely sensitive ethnic balance make their continued presence untenable. The number of these refugees -- just over a third of a million (that is, one third the number of Russian immigrants to Israel) should not be a problem if it became the final factor on which a breakthrough towards peace would depend. We must also remember that not all Palestinian refugees want to go back to what is now Israel; many would prefer to wait until the Palestinian state has been established.
In giving Israel the right to determine the number of Palestinians authorised to return to Israel, the Geneva initiative turns what is a right consecrated by a UN resolution into a "gift" that is subject to the sole discretion of those who dispossessed them in the first place. Is it possible to reconcile the two rights, the Palestinian and the Israeli, instead of dealing with them as mutually exclusive? The right derives from property the Palestinians owned in what has now become Israel. Whether this disputed property should go to a Palestinian or an Israeli is a legal question that must be settled, once and for all, by a credible neutral third party under international supervision. Every Palestinian aspiring to restore a right should be given the opportunity to file his claim within a given time-frame, but no restriction should be put on the number of claimants.
As to the issue of compensation, this too should be subject to rigorous rules. Among the most important is that the compensation received by Palestinian refugees who waive their right of return should be equivalent in value to the compensation received by Israeli settlers in consideration of evacuating their settlements. If the Jews are awarded compensation for the persecution they suffered under Nazi rule in the past, Palestinians are entitled to similar compensation for the persecution they suffered under Zionist rule in the more recent past. Unless the same criteria are used to assess the compensation due to both parties, there can be no equitable peace.
Moreover, the value of any specific commodity is a function of its scarcity in the market. The more difficult it is to find, the higher its price. Peace is a rare commodity when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. If the Palestinian right of return is the critical element on which the entire future of the peace process depends, it is worth paying the necessary price for peace before it is too late.
Time is of the essence because we are now at a crossroads between two contradictory logics which could easily degenerate into an all-out collision and widespread destabilisation at any time. One logic asserts that the essence of the Palestinian problem is the Palestinian right of return. According to this logic, the conflict began with the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes and is now coming to an end with the legitimisation of that expulsion, that is, a complete and final liquidation of the entire Palestinian problem. An opposite logic maintains that the Palestinians must be treated on an equal footing with the Jews and that a sustainable peace is only possible, in the final analysis, if both sides are treated equally. The first logic leads to still more intense violence. The second logic will expose Sharon still more as standing up against the international order as a whole, which will strengthen pressure on him to reconsider his policies.
White House Spokesman Scott McClellan said that Bush did not object to Powell's meeting with the co-authors of the Geneva document, Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abd Rabbou. McClellan also insisted on the need to keep the roadmap alive, being the only document Sharon has not formally opposed. Powell welcomed the Geneva Accord and described his talks with Beilin and Abd Rabbou as "constructive and positive". Attempts are now envisaged to combine the roadmap and the Geneva initiative into one integrated whole, which would constitute the basis for an overall and final peace settlement. This should be an opportunity to remove the ambiguities over the Palestinian right of return and avoid exposing the new peace project to the failures suffered by many of the previous ones.
