Hanan Ashrawi was in town last week. A member of the PLO executive committee and a long-time Palestinian spokesperson, negotiator, and politician, she is a well-known figure in Washington, DC. After delivering a prosaic and predictable talk at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Ashrawi came to life, as most speakers do, during the Q&A. Marwan Muasher, Jordan's former deputy prime minister, introduced her as “someone who has always spoken truth to power.” When Muasher called on me, I asserted that it might also be useful to speak truth to the powerless, particularly to Palestinian refugees. Whether or not there exists a right of return, and regardless of the language in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or in U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194, the Israeli public across the political spectrum is united in its opposition to the return of the refugees. At what point, I asked, is it time to have a conversation with Palestinian refugees about alternative futures? In response, Ashrawi offered a three-stage formula, none of which required any truth-telling by the Palestinian leadership: Step One: “Israel has to acknowledge its responsibility and culpability” for the creation of the refugee problem. “We know what happened. '48 is clear,” she said. “There is a clear [historical] narrative that has to be acknowledged.” Step Two: Israel must acknowledge the validity of the Palestinians' right of return. “All refugees have these rights. The Palestinians are no exception.” Step Three: Individual Palestinian refugees must be given the choice whether and how to exercise the right of return. “You can discuss alternatives and options provided you give them the right to choose.” Each part of this formulation is problematic. In today's Israel, not one of these three steps is acceptable to Netanyahu, Livni, Barak, Peres, or any other mainstream political leader. Step One – Are the Jews solely to blame for the Nakba? No single, clear, historical narrative has emerged which is accepted by Arabs and Jews alike about what happened in 1948, who started it, and who did wrong to whom. Instead we have conflicting narratives. Compare, for example, the works of Efraim Karsh with those of Rashid Khalidi, Avi Shlaim, or Benny Morris. The disagreements among scholars of the period are profound and unlikely to be resolved any time soon. We should not assume that we already know the whole story about 1948. The Palestinian and Arab equivalents of Israel's “new historians” have not yet written their tomes. Last week in the Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami discussed that most fateful and controversial of years, 1948: “Few Arabs were willing to tell the story truthfully, to face its harsh verdict. Henceforth the Palestinians would live on a vague idea of restoration and return. No leader had the courage to tell the refugees who had left Acre and Jaffa and Haifa that they could not recover the homes and orchards of their imagination.” Step Two – Acknowledging a Palestinian “right of return” is a step too far for most Israelis, even those who sympathize with the plight of stateless Palestinian refugees. The right to a home? Yes. The right to citizenship in a state? Yes. The right to return to a former home that has been occupied by three generations of Israelis for more than sixty years? No. Ashrawi's Step Three is an obvious non-starter with Israelis. They will not agree to millions of Palestinians deciding individually whether they will move to pre-'67 Israel. That Israel will contribute to a compensation fund for their loss of land and livelihood, on the other hand, is eminently possible. In the 2008 negotiations between then-prime minister Olmert and Abbas, Olmert is reported to have offered to allow one thousand refugees per year to immigrate to Israel for a total of five years. That's five thousand people out of a total of more than half a million Palestinians who lost their homes in '48 and several millions of their descendants. Not surprisingly, Abbas rejected Olmert's number as far too low. Yet for Netanyahu, the acceptable number is zero. Netanyahu's insistence that Jerusalem remain the undivided capital of Israel is a deal-breaker for the foreseeable future. So is the Palestinians' insistence on an acknowledged and exercised right of return. It doesn't follow that either side should necessarily give up or moderate its position. But unless it does, peace between the two peoples is a long way off. Mahmoud Abbas on Refugees' Rights Lest you conclude that Ashrawi is alone among moderate Palestinian leaders in insisting both upon the principle of the right of return and upon its implementation based on individual Palestinian choice, consider last month's New York Times op-ed penned by Mahmoud Abbas. His autobiographical opening paragraph is telling: “Sixty-three years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was forced to leave his home in the Galilean city of Safed and flee with his family to Syria…Though he and his family wished for decades to return to their home and homeland, they were denied that most basic of human rights.” “The Long Overdue Palestinian State” reads the title of the op-ed. One might wonder why the lead paragraph of this promotion for a two-state solution is all about refugees, a subject to which Abbas returns repeatedly in the Times piece. Without any reference to refugees, a cogent argument can be made for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in which perhaps four million Palestinians currently live under occupation. But clearly for Abbas, the refugees are the heart of the problem: “Zionist forced expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel…Indeed, it was the descendants of these expelled Palestinians who were shot and wounded by Israeli forces on Sunday [Nakba Day] as they tried to symbolically exercise their right to return to their families' homes.” And later in the op-ed: “A key focus of negotiations will be reaching a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on Resolution 194, which the General Assembly passed in [December] 1948.” Mahmoud's last sentence, like his first, is about refugees: “Only if the international community keeps the promise it made to us six decades ago, and ensures that a just resolution for Palestinian refugees is put into effect, can there be a future of hope and dignity for our people.” Hanan Ashrawi and Mahmoud Abbas need to be taken seriously when they speak of refugee rights. It is a mistake to assume that all the talk about justice for Palestinian refugees is merely a negotiating tactic that will be dropped at the appropriate point in the negotiations. U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 For those who have not yet committed it to memory, the paragraph on refugees in 194 reads as follows: “11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at 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 loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible”. Notice that the above paragraph does not mention a “right of return” or anyone's rights at all. Nor does it specify which governments or authorities are responsible for paying compensation. From Israel's point of view, it also contains loopholes which could prevent its implementation: “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date…” [Emphasis added.] How does one measure the willingness of returning refugees to live at peace with their neighbors? Perhaps with the requirement that they take a loyalty oath to “the Jewish state of Israel”, which most returning Palestinians would be loath to do. Or Israel could claim that the earliest practicable date is the day after Lebanon and Syria sign peace treaties with Israel. Section 11 doesn't even specify that “the refugees” are Arabs or Palestinians. Israel can claim that the term also applies to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries who fled to Israel and that any compensation package must include payment to them as well. Another section of Resolution 194 established the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, which failed in its efforts at conciliation after the '48 war and which few people have heard of since the early 1950s. I just discovered that the UNCCP, based in New York City, still exists and continues to issue its annual “Progress Report”, which the General Assembly gratefully acknowledges each year! Two important points are usually left out of Palestinian references to UNGA 194. Unlike Security Council resolutions, General Assembly resolutions lack the force of international law and therefore need not be followed or enforced by member states. And 194 contains other provisions that Palestinian leaders never mention and do not support: “8. Resolves that, in view of its association with three world religions, the Jerusalem area, including the present municipality of Jerusalem plus the surrounding villages and town,…should be accorded special and separate treatment from the rest of Palestine and should be placed under effective United Nations control”. In other words, 194 reiterates the call of the original UN General Assembly partition plan (UNGA 181) for the internationalization of Jerusalem and its environs under UN control. There is a reason why Abbas does not bring up this section. He wants east Jerusalem for the capital of a new Palestinian state, while Netanyahu insists that Jerusalem will remain the united capital of Israel. Neither sides wants Section 8 of 194 realized. The PLO and the Arab states insist, however, on the implementation of Section 11. Alternately heralding and ignoring sections within the same resolution need not be condemned. After all, consistency is less important to national liberation movements and to nations than is survival. But this selectivity reveals a truth: Palestinians don't support a right of return because they believe it's called for in 194. They support 194 because they believe it calls for a right of return. In this regard, Palestinians are like Israelis, Americans, Chinese, and every other people on the planet. We use the arguments we think will sell. There is no evidence that Palestinians have any greater reverence for human rights or international law than do other peoples. They argue for human rights and international law because these arguments support their position and resonate with a certain segment of western society. They also open up certain avenues of action in international bodies. It may be a matter of principle, but it is definitely a matter of politics. UNGA 194 is complex, ambiguous, and at least partially obsolete. Attempts to resolve the conflict in Palestine based upon it have failed miserably. Perhaps someday, would-be peace makers in the Middle East will stop reciting, as “terms of reference”, the series of failed Security Council and General Assembly resolutions that tie us so disastrously to the past: 181, 194, 242, 338, 1701, 1860, etc. If you repeat something long enough, eventually you believe it, whether it's true or not. The constant refrain of “the Palestinian people's inalienable right of return” has shaped Palestinian aspirations. It has also helped shape Israeli intransigence on the subject. In Thursday's Haaretz, Ari Shavit predicted that “in the coming years the Palestinians will not compromise on the right of return” and that “no moderate Palestinian leader will be able to face the refugees and persuade them to give up their homes and villages.” For these reasons, among others, Shavit concludes that “there will be no peace with the Palestinians. Not this year, not this decade, perhaps not this generation.” The future of the refugees The real question is whether Palestinian refugees will be offered an opportunity for normalcy without their fate being held hostage to a moribund peace process. The uncaring harshness of Netanyahu's rhetoric on the subject coupled with the doctrinaire approach of Ashrawi and Abbas leave the refugees stuck in a perpetual limbo. It is possible for Israel, the PA, the Arab states, and the world's major powers to all agree – without referencing 194 – that the plight of the still largely stateless Palestinian refugees must be and will be urgently addressed. What happened to Palestinians in 1948 remains important, but what happens to them in 2011 and beyond is of far greater import. The refugees and their descendants deserve the world's attention and its action. ** Read more from Michael Lame on his rethinkme blog. BM
