Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2000, pages 65-66

Israel and Judaism

Compromise on Palestinian Refugees Is Essential for Middle East Peace to Succeed

By Allan C. Brownfeld

As Israeli and Palestinian leaders slowly move toward final-status talks, many outlines of what a final agreement would include are beginning to emerge. Compromise will be necessary, and such compromise will be difficult for hard-liners on each side to accept. Palestinians are likely to get less than 100 percent of their territories back, and the question of Jerusalem’s final status remains a difficult one to resolve. An important outstanding issue which has yet to be seriously addressed relates to the question of Palestinian refugees.

There are, of course, serious problems with the 1993 Oslo accords. Milton Viorst, author of In the Shadow of the Prophet: The Struggle for the Souls of Islam, notes that, “…the statement of principles drafted at Oslo and signed in Washington was fundamentally flawed. The Palestinians forswore their right of resistance in return for a vague Israeli pledge to turn over the land taken in the 1967 war. The recent decline in terrorism is evidence that they have taken their part of the deal seriously. But the Oslo agreement failed in leaving too many issues to be resolved by further bargaining—between parties of grossly unequal strength.”

In April, Nail Abourdeneh, an aide to Yasser Arafat, said that Palestinians would never relinquish their demand that Israel allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes lost during the 1948 war. Prime Minister Ehud Barak already had said that the refugees would not be resettled. But the principle of a “right of return” for the Palestinian refugees from both the 1948 and 1967 wars rests on the principle that they should return to their areas of origin, even if such areas are currently within the state of Israel. This is among the most controversial issues in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict.

Israel refuses to repatriate the Palestinian refugees, claiming that they fled of their own accord and that it is under no obligation to take them back.

Article II of the U.N. General Assembly’s Resolution 194, ratified in December 1948, declared that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes, and live in peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for the loss of, or damage to, property which, under the principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the governments or authorities responsible.” The resolution has been affirmed by the General Assembly over 40 times, most recently in 1990. It represents the strongest claim under international law for the rights of repatriation available to the Palestinian refugees.

“The mass flight of Palestinian civilians was a strategic goal of the founders of Israel.”

The official Israeli position disputes the legality of the Palestinian claim based on U.N. Resolution 194. It blames the Arab states for generating the Palestinian refugee problem, arguing that they ordered the refugees to flee so that Arab armies could liberate Palestine from the Zionists in 1948. Furthermore, Israel says that it could never accept the Palestinian right of return because it would fundamentally alter the Jewish character of the Israeli state.

A recent report issued by the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine in Washington, DC, reports: “With the new wave of Israeli ‘revisionist’ historians uncovering more material on the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, it has become clear that the mass flight of Palestinian civilians from Mandate Palestine was a strategic goal of the founders of Israel.” Regarding Israel’s argument about preserving the Jewish character of the state, W.T. Mallison and S.V. Mallison, authors of The Palestine Problem in International Law and World Order, declare: “The United Nations is under no more of a legal obligation to maintain Zionism in Israel than it is to maintain apartheid in South Africa.”

Since the Israeli position in opposition to the Palestinian claim rests, in large measure, on the idea that it was the Arab states which generated the refugee problem, emerging historical studies which challenge that assessment must be carefully considered.

Israeli history textbooks are now being rewritten, and are moving away from many of the ideas that prevailed in the past, toward what some have referred to as an era of “post-Zionism.”

“Post-Zionist” Textbooks

The new books, for the first time, freely use the word “Palestinian” to refer to a people and a nationalist movement unheard of in previous texts. They refer to the Arabic name for the 1948 war—the Nakba, or catastrophe—and they ask the public to put themselves in the Arabs’ shoes and consider how they would have felt about Zionism.

Eyal Naveh, a history professor at Tel Aviv University and the author of one of the new textbooks, says: “Only 10 years ago much of this was taboo. We were not mature enough to look at these controversial problems. Now we can deal with this the way the Americans deal with the Indians and black enslavement. We are getting rid of certain myths.”

One ninth-grade text, Passage to the Past, by Kezia Tabibyan, not only mentions the 1948 massacre carried out by radical Zionist forces in the village of Deir Yassin, something Ms. Tabibyan says had never been done in a ninth-grade text before, but also engages in a kind of historiography by asking students to reflect on the use of myths in nation-building. She says: “If I want to educate the citizens of Israel after 2000 they must know that there is another point of view…They must deal with Deir Yassin. They must know that there was another people that had their life there.”

Baruch Kimmerling of Hebrew University’s Sociology Department, in an article on the subject of “The Palestinian Tragedy: AlNakba,” in a special issue of the journal Theory and Criticism published jointly by the Van Lear Institute and the United Kibbutz Movement Press with the support of Israel’s Education Ministry, discusses the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.

He writes: “The Palestinians expect that even if we don’t return their land and houses to them—because we are the strong ones and they are weak—that at least we should acknowledge their tragedy and suffering, and the fact that our society and state has, to a large extent, been founded on the ruins of the Arab society and culture. They do not even expect us to ask forgiveness—only that we acknowledge the facts.”

At the end of April, the U.N.’s “Division for the Unalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” convened a conference in Paris, followed by a U.N.-sponsored meeting of non-governmental organizations. Palestinian speakers insisted on the literal fulfillment of U.N. Resolution 194, which gives each refugee the right to return to his or her former house and/or receive compensation.

Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist and founder in 1983 of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, was invited by the U.N. to take part as an “expert.” He proposed that Israel acknowledge its responsibility and accept the Right of Return in principle. Most of the refugees opting for repatriation, he argued, should be settled in the State of Palestine, which must include all the territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while those opting instead for compensation must receive generous payments for their lost property, as well as for loss of opportunity and education.

Beyond this, Avnery also proposed a limited return of refugees to Israel proper, as part of the healing and reconciliation process. He suggested as a possible model that 50,000 refugees should be allowed to return every year in an open-ended process. He explained that the dream of the Palestinians is a nightmare for Israelis and that a viable solution must be accepted by the majority of the refugees and the majority of Israelis, which may seem impossible at the present time. It is his view that a process of debate, dialogue and practical discussions may lead to the de-mystification of the problem and elimination of the myths and irrational fears that block any solution now. In particular, Avnery proposed that a commission of inquiry, composed of Palestinians and Israeli historians, should be set up at once to study the historical facts and come up with a report on the events of 1948 that will be acceptable to both sides.

The only other Israeli who participated in the meeting was Knesset Member Yossi Katz (Labor). He proposed the return of 100,000 refugees to Israel as the final settlement. Mr. Katz has now been nominated as Israel’s ambassador to Germany and is unlikely to be a major participant in the future discussion about the Palestinian refugee question.

Writing in The Other Israel, the journal of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, Adam Keller declares that, “It is time for Israelis to face at last what has been avoided for decades: the question of the refugees—the plight of the people whose suffering is the direct result of the creation of the state. Second- and third-generation refugees cherish the memory of a lemon tree which they have never seen with their own eyes…In theory, who should better understand them than a people who base their entire claim to the land on centuries of steadfast longing, a people who in their schools and nurseries teach the verse ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem.’ In practice, Israelis—even most of those willing to compromise on all other issues—regard the possibility of the Palestinian Right of Return as utter menace. An Israel whose democratically-elected government can offer the Palestinians no more than isolated and already overcrowded enclaves will definitely live to face the Right of Return in all its unmitigated fierceness.”

Original Sin

Beate Zilversmidt, also writing in The Other Israel (May 2000), argues that, “Regardless of whether the Palestinian refugees were all expelled, or that many just fled the war—there remains thej original sin around which the State of Israel has shaped itself; not allowing the Palestinian refugees to come home after the war was over. We are part of the society which was built on the ashes. Even those who had fled to a neighboring village but after the war’s end fell under Israeli sovereignty had their homes destroyed and their land confiscated. That is how it could happen that at the 52nd Independence Day—May 10—Palestinian Israelis from the Galilee organized the Internally Displaced Palestinians’ Return March to al-Damoun, a village in the Karmel Mountains destroyed in 1948. Never before has the Nakba (The Disaster) been so openly brought to public attention in Israel as this year.”

According to Donna E. Arzt, professor of law at Syracuse University and author of Refugees Into Citizens—Palestinians and the End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, the refugee question is “the one issue where the parties appear furthest apart…and the most unrealistic in their expectations.”

Finally, the question of Palestinian refugees is beginning to be discussed within the American Jewish community. In February, a symposium was held in New York City sponsored by Americans for Peace Now on the subject. While Israeli and Palestinian spokesmen were far apart in their proposals, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a columnist for Moment, a widely-read U.S. Jewish magazine, who attended the meeting, expressed the hope that the maximalist positions on each side are “part of a bargaining strategy.”

Writing in the June 2000 issue of Moment, she provided this assessment: “Eventually, the Palestinians must accept that complete return is impossible. That while it may be their right to return to the territories, opening the floodgates of a fledgling state to 3.5 million refugees is not to their advantage, economically or politically. That the capacity to issue Palestinian passports and promote more effective absorption of diaspora Palestinians in their host countries might suffice to establish national self-respect. And that while some may be theoretically entitled to return to their 1948 homes inside Israel, it’s more important to use that right as a bargaining chip than to stand pat on the issue and scuttle the whole deal…If the Jewish people could come to terms with Germany 10 years after the Holocaust (so they could focus on building Israel), the Palestinian people can also find the will to compromise (if building Palestine is their main priority). By the same token, Israel must eventually accept that as the Oslo agreement dictates, the return of some displaced Palestinians is inevitable—not to their homes, perhaps, but to their homeland. If this strikes you as pie in the sky, bear in mind that David Ben-Gurion was ready to take back 100,000 refugees into a much smaller Israel. And if we don’t start thinking compromise on refugees, we might as well say kaddish for the peace process.”

No great and divisive issues can ever be resolved until they are first placed on the table for discussion and debate. Finally, the question of the Palestinian refugees is beginning to attract the attention which is needed to produce a genuine compromise which can lead to real peace.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.