Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 2000, pages 88-90

Arab-American Activism

Palestinian-Born High School Teacher Attends U.S. Peace Institute Conference on Conflict Prevention

“We must train peacemakers, as well as warmakers. We can challenge the coming generation to learn about peace efforts linked to conflicts everywhere, whether in the Middle East, the Balkans, or the Koreas.”

With those words, Jerusalem-born Sufian Abu-Rmaileh of Layton, Utah summed up a week-long symposium of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, DC, on the dynamics of conflict prevention and management in the world today.

Abu-Rmaileh, 38, was among 26 high school educators from 18 states brought together Aug. 7-12 for a week of briefings and discussions which touched on ways of resolving conflicts in nearly all the world’s major hotspots as a new millennium dawns.

Nationally known specialists exchanged ideas with teachers on the Arab-Israeli dispute, Kosovo and the Balkans, Rwanda in the aftermath of genocide, China and Taiwan, and prospects for peace in Bosnia, the Korean peninsula, and the India-Pakistan subcontinent.

Among the experts were director Joe Montville of the conflict prevention program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Harold Gould, professor of South Asia studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, executive director of the Global Coalition for Africa; Kemal Kurspachic, wartime editor-in-chief of the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjenje; and Jeff Helsing, summer institute chair and USIP education program officer.

Abu-Rmaileh teaches civics, study skills and English-as-a-second language at Northridge High School in Layton, a public school in Utah not far from Hill Air Force Base. A graduate of Birzeit University near Ramallah on the occupied West Bank (B.A. degree in English and education) and Hebrew University, Jerusalem (M.A. in linguistics, Arabic, English and Hebrew), he has been teaching in Utah for the past 11 years. He and his wife, Nuha, also a Palestinian, have four children.

Abu-Rmaileh found the summer institute, which has just completed its eighth year, to be particularly helpful in his case because many of his students come from military families stationed at the air base near his high school. “So often, in our high school courses,” Abu-Rmaileh said, “we teach about the conflicts of history and those today. It’s relatively seldom that we touch on peacemaking and efforts to resolve the conflicts. This is a especially interesting for students from military families.”

As USIP summer institute chair Helsing noted at a symposium roundtable Aug. 10 on Capitol Hill: “The next generation must have a better understanding of the world in which we live—including the changing role of the military. This is an important part of good citizenship. An understanding of issues of ethnicity in Bosnia, for example, has implications for improved race relations in the United States…vital not only for teachers and students but for politicians and professors, too.”

Abu-Rmaileh said that exposure to a variety of perspectives during his educational years (Muslim, Jewish and Christian—the latter in association with Mormon universities in Utah) has helped him identify “what unites rather than divides people of different beliefs.”

In a first-time event, Abu-Rmaileh and his colleagues took part in a Capitol Hill roundtable discussion on how to integrate global studies into curriculums at their own high schools. They met in the Rayburn House Office Building with moderators Helsing and Karen Collias of the U.S. Council for Basic Education. The high school teachers shared ideas on techniques for involving students in peace education, and an appreciation of the fine points of other cultures.

Abu-Rmaileh explained afterward that his classes are atypical. About a third of his students come from countries in Latin America, Egypt, Syria, Bosnia and Russia—to name a few of the nationalities represented. He draws on military officers from Hill Air Force Base or professors at the nearby University of Utah to brief his students. Among his guest speakers have been Egyptians, Jordanians and Koreans, and specialists on Kosovo and the Middle East from the unviersity.

The Layton high school teacher told his colleagues at the roundtable that in his series of classes on world religions, he requires the students to “prep” for appearances of these guest speakers by drafting and posing their own questions based on brief background papers. This helps him break away from a standard lecture format and pique the students’ curiosity.

—Alan L. Heil Jr.

Akram, Bennis Discuss Palestinian Right of Return

On Aug. 4, Washington, DC’s Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine hosted a briefing on the issue of Palestinian refugees’ right of return. Although the ongoing effort to reach a final status agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians has centered on the fiercely disputed and emotionally charged issue of Jerusalem, the topic of refugees and their quest to return to their ancestral homes remains prominent in the Palestinian psyche and public discourse. Susan Akram, associate professor at Boston University School of Law, spent a year at Al-Quds University as a Fulbright Scholar. She sought to answer some of the most difficult aspects of the issue, dealing with the historic background and legal framework to Palestinian demands for their return. Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, shared with the audience findings of her recent trip to Palestinian refugee camps.

Describing the right of return as the “linchpin to a lasting peace in the Middle East,” Professor Akram called for a just resolution to the refugees’ ongoing strife, reminding the audience that “the Palestinian refugee issue is the longest and largest refugee problem in the world.” No other refugee issue, she noted, has lasted 52 years. Citing a recent document by the U.S. Committee on Refugees, Akram pointed out that one in four refugees in the world today is a Palestinian.

Akram focused her presentation on the question, Why are Palestinian refugees afforded fewer international protections among all other refugees in the world? She explained that the U.N.’s framework for dealing with refugees in general is the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees (CSR) and its related 1967 protocol. These two instruments historically have provided a widely accepted definition of refugees, which focuses principally on “the inability or the unwillingness of an individual to return back to his or her country based on a well-founded fear of persecution.”

The Boston University professor explained that the 1951 CSR and its 1967 protocol, both considered legal precedents, have been universally interpreted as not applying to Palestinian refugees. Article 1D of the 1951 CSR has been viewed as an “exclusion clause” for Palestinian refugees, preventing them from receiving benefits normally afforded to refugees under international law. Article 1D states that “this convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance. When such protection or assistance has ceased for any reason, without the position of such person being definitively settled in accordance with the relevant resolution adopted by the General Assembly of the U.N., these persons shall ipso facto be entitled to the benefits of this convention.”

It is clear from the drafting history, Professor Akram concluded, that Palestinian refugees were the only group of refugees this clause intended to exclude from benefits.

Akram pointed out that a similar provision exists in the statute of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which is the main U.N. organ authorized to provide protection for refugees. The UNHCR mandate provides a rich body of laws articulating and regulating states’ obligations toward refugees, who are to be treated as equal citizens of their host states. However, similar to article 1D of the 1951 CSR, paragraph 7C of the UNHCR statute effectively excludes UNHCR mandate from persons who are receiving protection or assistance from other U.N. agencies. Provision 7C of the UNHCR and article 1D of 1951 CSR, therefore, have been interpreted cumulatively as follows: Palestinian refugees are not afforded equal rights and protection guaranteed to other refugees.

Professor Akram argued that this interpretation is “incorrect.” These provisions have been inaccurately applied to exclude the Palestinians. As a matter of fact, Akram argued, the regime created to handle the Palestinian refugees issue—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA—was not intended to offer less protection than that guaranteed to other refugees. Rather, it was intended to offer “special” or “heightened” protection.

Explaining why Palestinian refugees were allocated this “heightened” refugee status, Akram said it was clear from the drafting history of this international refugee regime that Palestinian refugees were of enormous concern to the drafters, especially in the period between 1948 and 1951. U.N. agencies and drafters felt a direct legal and moral obligation toward the Palestinians because of U.N. Resolution 181, which allowed the partition of Palestine and invited the Zionists to force Palestinians out of their homeland. In addition, while there was a consensus in the 1951 CSR regime that the most appropriate resolution for refugees is a third-country resettlement, for Palestinian refugees it was a different story. Their demand to return to their homes was reflected in an international consensus that later became embodied in U.N. Resolution 194, which called for the refugees’ repatriation to their homes and for compensation. In additions, the Zionists’ massive displacement of Palestinians fulfilled the persecution requirement already stated in the very definition of refugees.

Seeking to dispel the notion that international law simply ignored Palestinian refugees, Professor Akram explained that there indeed existed a protection system created specifically to handle Palestinian refugees. At the heart of this system lies the United Nations Conciliation Commission on Palestine (UNCCP). Established under the language of Resolution 194, one of the earliest resolutions on Palestinian refugees, the mandate of UNCCP resembles that of UNHCR, and was intended to offer Palestinian refugees what UNHCR guarantees all other refugees worldwide: full protection of rights.

In addition to protection secured by the UNCCP, UNRWA was created to provide humanitarian assistance. Under international refugee law, assistance entails basic benefits: food, clothing, and housing, Professor Akram asserted. She warned that it is important to keep in mind that this was the “sole and limited” mandate relegated to UNRWA. When UNWRA cites the figure of 3.5 million Palestinian refugees, Akram noted, one has to realize that the number reflects UNRWA’s definition of who is entitled to receive its assistance. “It has nothing to do with the total number of refugees as they would ordinarily be defined under international legal protection,” she pointed out, but represents a subset of refugees who are eligible to receive food, clothing and housing, not necessarily all Palestinian refugees.

Professor Akram then sought to clarify the primary source of misinterpretation of Palestinian rights under international law. The real purpose of UNHCR’s statute 7C and article 1D of the 1951 CSR was not to exclude the Palestinian refugees, Akram stated, but rather to act as a “fallback” provision. Originally, UNCCP was intended to provide protection, while UNRWA provided assistance. In case either of these functions failed, article 1D was to be a fallback provision to allow the application of UNHCR and the entire 1951 CSR regime. This, however, never took place.

The regime failed primarily because of the demise of the UNCCP, which was required to implement U.N. Resolution 194, calling for the repatriation of Palestinian refugees and to which, until recently, only one country—Israel—has dissented. Because the U.N. realized that UNCCP was unable to fulfill its major function, the UNCCP mandate and budget were changed, and the UNCCP became a small office for collecting Palestinian claims in New York.

Professor Akram concluded by discussing the main consequences of the failure of the assistance and protection system created for Palestinians. Clearly, the breakdown of the UNCCP resulted in the lack of proper legal protection for Palestinian refugees. For 52 years, there has been no entity capable of intervening with states to protect Palestinian refugee rights. This has resulted in egregious violations against Palestinian refugees around the world. In addition, lack of international representation of Palestinian refugees meant there existed no forum for Palestinian refugees to make claims for property restitution or compensation.

Most importantly, Akram cautioned, there is a clash between individual refugee rights and collective rights for Palestinians. There has been a change of focus by the PLO in addition to a clear departure from the language of resolutions prior to the 1970s, when the emphasis was on individual rights. The focus now has changed to center on the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as a collective. “If the Israelis are successful at imposing a clause that extinguishes individual claims,” Akram warned, “they can make the argument that it is legally supportable because they have satisfied the collective rights embodied in the later resolutions.” These resolutions, 242 and 338, which have acted as the backbone to the Oslo talks, deal primarily with the issue of returning land for the Palestinian people: collective rights over individual rights.

The second speaker, Phyllis Bennis, described her most recent trip to Palestinian areas, especially her visit to the Dheishe refugee camp.

Bennis highlighted important changes in global perception of what international law is about, noting that there is a new appreciation and excitement about the potential role that international law might play in defending human rights. The possibility is emerging of expanding international human rights in general, and toward the Palestinians in particular, and Palestinians are taking note of that, drawing parallels between their issues and other hotly debated issues in the international arena. For example, Palestinians would argue that, following the end of the war in Rwanda, no one challenged the right of Rwandan refugees to go home. Similarly, in Bosnia and other global conflicts, the right of refugees to return home dominates final status negotiations. Specifically, Palestinian refugees are well aware of U.N. Resolution 194 stating that Palestinian refugees should be allowed both to go home and to be compensated for any loss of land or property.

Interestingly, Bennis noted, Resolution 194 is the only resolution that has come up for reaffirmation in the U.N. year after year. The United States has voted in support of U.N. Resolution 194 from the time it was enacted until 1994, during the first General Assembly session following the beginning of the Oslo process. At the time, U.N. Ambassador Madeline Albright declared that, as a result of the bilateral negotiations between Israel and the PLO, several U.N. resolutions related to the conflict, including 194, should be rendered “expired and null.” Bennis noted that 194 was never overturned, but it is no longer voted on every year.

From her recent trip, Bennis described the general discourse taking shape among Palestinians in refugee camps about the right of return. Palestinian refugees are discussing the possibility of returning to the homes of their ancestors, from which they were forced to flee. She explained that grandchildren of those expelled in 1948 living in refugee camps are discussing the right of return as a “realistic demand that is part of the question of justice.” The demand to return no longer is idealized, she insisted.

Bennis accompanied a group of young people from the Dheishe camp who traveled to villages from which their grandparents were expelled. The teenagers have been involved in an oral history project interviewing the older generation of Palestinians to learn concretely about the Palestinian way of life prior to 1948 and to explore the possibility of reliving such experiences in case the right of return materializes.

The Israeli position on the Palestinian right of return has not attempted to articulate a legal counter-response to the interpretation of U.N. Resolution 194, Bennis noted. Rather, she said, the Israeli position is primarily premised on concerns that allowing Palestinians back to the lands of their ancestors will disturb the demographic balance of this exclusively Jewish state in favor of Palestinians. Currently, 20 percent of the Israeli population is Palestinian. Bennis stated that Israelis are fearful that opening Israel to Palestinian refugees and their descendants would result in a substantial increase in Palestinian population whereby Palestinians may comprise 40 or 50 percent of Israel’s population. Bennis insisted, however, that “not liking the outcome, doesn’t allow [Israel] to violate the law.”

Until the U.S. shifts its position and begins supporting unconditional application of international law, Bennis argued, the Israelis have no reason to change their position. She concluded that even though there is room for a lot of creativity and compromises in future negotiations, any talks must start from a recognition that the right of return is an absolute.

—Asma Yousef