The way home

For many, the Palestinians' right of return may be no more than a pie in the sky. Salman Abu Sitta begs to differ, as Sherine Bahaa reports
"What we are seeing on the news today about Israeli attacks on Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza is not something new. It is a natural extension of what the refugees have been suffering for the past 50 years." The words were spoken by Salman Abu Sitta, a Palestinian who is an expert on the right of return for his people, at a seminar this week.
The seminar was organised by the Centre for Arab Studies, which is affiliated to the Arab League.
Abu Sitta has long been a fervent advocate of the right of return of Palestinian refugees. He is a researcher who has devoted much of his life to collecting maps, testimonies of eye-witnesses and other data in order to compile details about the number, names and homes of the Palestinians expelled in 1948 -- before and shortly after the creation of the state of Israel.
Abu Sitta has seen his life's mission as revealing to the world that Western conceptions about how Israel was established are a fallacy. He has tried to tell the world about the heavy price Palestinians had to pay.
His goal is nothing less than the return of all Palestinians to their own villages and cities. To this end, Abu Sitta established the Palestinian Return Centre ("Awda") in London. Awda is a global network charged with educating the international community on how to fulfil their legal and moral obligations vis-a-vis Palestinian refugees.
Abu Sitta has also written dozens of articles on the right of return as well as his latest book, Blueprint for Return, in which he refutes Israeli arguments used to rule out all possibilities for the return of more than four million Palestinian refugees to their land.
According to Abu Sitta, who is a former member of the Palestinian National Council, Israel was able to establish itself on the ground just a year and a half after it came into existence.
"It was not war like the one fought in Europe," he said. "It was not a coincidence or an accident. It was a nakba (catastrophe) unprecedented in modern history."
"Israel has expelled nearly 85 per cent of the original inhabitants of the land. It was a deliberate separation enforced between people's history and geography," Abu Sitta said.
The events of 1948 are still vivid in his memory, he said. He remembers the exodus of refugees, who were obliged to leave their houses either because of massacres or because of a total evacuation of villages and cities. Jewish immigrants, summoned from different parts of the world, then took over these cities to replace the real owners of the lands.
Images of helpless Palestinians fleeing Gaza on fishing boats still irk the human conscience, but officials and diplomats tend to relegate the importance of human issues for the sake of finding a broader settlement to the conflict.
In his famous article in the New York Times on 3 February, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat asserted that the Palestinian right to return "must be implemented in a way that takes into account" Israel's "demographic concerns."
This kind of statement can easily be used to confirm what many have long feared -- that human rights will be sacrificed because of Israel's racist laws and apartheid system.
Most Palestinian refugees expelled in 1948 now fear that the right to return to their homeland will be sacrificed in order to reach a peace deal between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
Palestinian officials, including Yasser Arafat, have explicitly said that the priority in terms of the right of return will be given to Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon -- more than 200,000 people.
According to recent reports in the Western press, the formula currently being presented to Palestinians is that a very limited number of people, originally forced to flee in 1948, will be permitted to return to Israel. Only a slightly bigger number will be allowed to return to the future Palestinian state.
Enter Abu Sitta. He has rejected this proposal and offered a counter-argument. The return of the refugees is "both legal and possible," he said.
He began his argument by stressing the fact that the right of return is clearly spelled out in UN Security Council resolution 194. "This resolution has been reaffirmed 135 times by UN General Assembly members, which is something very rare," he said.
Abu Sitta also rejected the "demographic concerns" aspect of Israel's argument. Using large projections of maps and statistics, he showed that the sites of the 531 Palestinian towns and villages, depopulated by Israeli forces during the early days of the expulsion were still empty and could still be identified.
According to Abu Sitta's figures, "More than 90 per cent of the village refugees could return to empty sites." In this way, Abu Sitta said, no Israelis would be evicted to allow for the return of the refugees.
Abu Sitta went even further. He ruled out any solution that ignored the plight of the refugees. "No solution to the Middle East conflict would be accepted without a prior solution to the issue of the refugees," he said.
"Our problem is not economic or political. It is fundamental. Even Israelis reiterate this equation of no peace without a solution to the refugees saga, but of course our solution is different from theirs," Abu Sitta said.
Abu Sitta differentiated between the right of return and the establishment of a state. "The declaration of a Palestinian state is a political right. It is simply a state extending its sovereignty over a piece of land," he explained. "But the right of return is a human right. It is related to the return to one's own house and land, whatever the name of the state might be."
"My father was living in Palestine under the British mandate, while my grandfather lived in Palestine during the Ottoman period. We do not care what the name of the state is. Be it Israel, be it Palestine, it is the return that matters most," he added.
Nowadays, there is a third generation of refugees who have never even been to Palestine, but still dream that one day they see their ancestral lands. Abu Sitta quoted Daniel Rubinstein, the Israeli writer, in his description of the strong bonds between the Palestinians and their land. "All people live in their countries, but the Palestinians have their country living in them."
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