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No writer on the issue of Palestinian refugees and the strategy of
preserving the right of return cannot but call attention to the
danger in President George W. Bush’s last announcement on the need
for Palestinian refugees to give up the right to return.
Palestinians from every walk of life and political persuasion
regarded this promise as a new Balfour declaration, which offered “a
gift of one who does not own to one who does not deserve”.
Additionally, Bush’s statement was perceived as a new Balfour
Declaration because of the marked absence of the Palestinians in the
making of these promises, even though they constitute a central
party to the dispute and legitimate owners of the indigenous rights.
It gave the impression that the Palestinian people have nothing to
do with the fallout from the massive injustice that would befall
them.
Irrespective of the reasons that forced the president of the most
powerful nation in the world, to surrender the legitimate rights of
the Palestinian people granted by international law, the United
Nations, and human rights law, Bush’s announcement amounts to a stab
in the back of the Palestinian people. Needless to say, it
represents a huge boost to the Zionist vision in relation to the
right to return of Palestinian refugees.
The Israeli view relating to solving the problem of Palestinian
refugees has remained one in essence, with no great change ever
since the establishment of the Zionist entity. This view, founded
close to six decades ago, was based on Israeli denial of having
created the problem, and so was wholly unconcerned with the return
of the refugees. Added to this were the political and demographic
realities that emerged in Palestine, and the dispersal of the
Palestinian refugees throughout the world, which in the Israeli
view, required an international solution based on the distribution
of the Palestinian refugees as human blocs to several states in the
form of quotas with the guarantee that Israel would have the least
share as the principal destination to absorb them in large numbers.
Hence, the Jewish state was diligent in launching a media and
diplomatic war on the terminology, “Right of Return”, because of the
legal dimension it represented based on international human rights
treaties and United Nations resolutions relating to refugees in the
world generally, and the Palestinians in particular.
Palestinian unanimity in firmly holding onto all their rights, at
their head – the Right of Return, led to Arab steadfastness in the
face of the Israeli view even after the removal of the methodology
of armed revolutionary action as the sole means of liberating
Palestine from the Charter of the PLO, the staged programme of 1974,
and the declaration of a Palestinian state in 1988. Throughout the
decades, the Right of Return remained a fixed fundamental item
adopted in the official Palestinian political agenda. The
Palestinian public was unanimously in accord on this principle.
With entry of the region into the period of “Oslo” and the primacy
of power, in what is known as political realism in the region,
founded on the precept of inability to face down America - the only
super-power after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of
Iraq in the 1991 war, political thought and principle were turned
head over heels. Everything now became open to give and take,
including permanent fundamentals and absolute rights. As for
Palestinian rights and at their head the right of Palestinian
refugees to return to their homes, the Palestinian official line
came ever closer to the Israeli view, starting with the
non-affirmation of the Right of Return in the Oslo Agreement on the
pretext of leaving it to the final status negotiations and ending
with the signature of what is known as the Geneva document, signed
in December 2003 by official and quasi-official Palestinian figures
and prominent figures from the Israeli left.
The truth about this last document is that the official Palestinian
position had reached a point where it is now indistinguishable from
the Israeli position. It is important to note that the Palestinian
refugee had been given some choice over his place of permanent
residence, but under restricted conditions and regulated by Israeli
wishes, which rejected his return to the village or town from which
he had been expelled, considering this a threat to the identity of
the Jewish state. From here we go on to emphasise the fact that the
Palestinian people had accomplished over the past decades an
establishment of the inviolability of the Right of Return, which
forced the proprietors of “creative” solutions to seek ways around
this by paying lip service to it and giving the right of human
choice as the principal aspect of the solution.
We can infer from this that popular and civil reaction to policies
was now taken into account by decision makers, especially after the
experience of the first and second Intifadas that foiled the plot
and blocked a large number of agreements. This manifested itself
most clearly in the unexpected Arab and international popular
reaction to the assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, which was able
to abort the plot to the extent that it was one of the reasons why
the Arab Summit could not be convened, because it could not match
the anger of the Palestinian and Arab populace.
In light of the Palestinian and Arab position retreating from
holding firm to rights, the role of civil society organisations
comes to the fore, as one of the prime assurances that contribute to
strengthening the Palestinian line, and keeping rights alive until
the general political situation in the international arena changes
in favour of the Palestinian people, which is not far-fetched, if it
is remembered that balances of power are subject to change and are
not fixed.
Yet the question remains, how can civil and popular organisations,
especially “return committees”, achieve adherence by the Palestinian
public in spite of the state of official division and disintegration
prevalent in the area and the absence of a political opposition
qualified to take the initiative and bring order to the Palestinian
household and work to preserve the Palestinian rights without
surrendering them? Achieving such a mammoth task by civic society
organisations will not come about except by following a clear
strategy that avoids arbitrariness.
One of the ironies about the potential civic society organizations
in preserving the Right of Return is that of proper planning. That
entails holding firm to all Palestinian rights, foremost of which is
the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their villages and
towns from which they were expelled. This must be accompanied with a
full recognition that this right is holistic and indivisible, and
that the Palestinian refugee is its rightful owner not just
commissioned. Hence, he is not concerned with the detail and
complication of political solutions.
This is potentially a political weapon in the hands of the
Palestinian negotiator, if he wished to utilize it in terms of the
protection afforded by the unanimous support of the Palestinian
population for the right to return, and the impossibility of
bypassing their overwhelming popular wishes. In this instance, it
maybe worthwhile taking heed of the example of the Israeli
negotiator, who always cites unanimous Israeli public rejection of
the return of Palestinian refugees whereupon the western world has
become convinced of this, as evidenced by the two reports published
separately by the Committee on International Conflict and the UK
Overseas Development Agency, and before them Clinton’s paper on the
refugee issue, which are clear indications of western adoption of
the concept of circumventing the right to return of Palestinian
refugees and seek any other alternative solutions in terms of
resettlement.
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It is imperative to unify understanding amongst civic society
institutions, that the Right of Return is not restricted to a single
generation, hence adopting the long term view is vital and needed in
drawing up a staged plan to deal with the political cross purposes
and complications existing in the region and internationally. On
this score, Palestinian negotiators committed the grave mistake of
building their negotiating strategy on the premise of resolving the
Palestinian issue within the current timeframe, which forced them to
make certain serious capitulations. Some of these they now confess
to. Again the Zionist example is instructive on how to achieve
long-term goals as part of a phased strategy. Hence we see that the
time elapsed between the first Zionist conference in Basle in 1897
and the establishment of the Jewish state was 50 year.
Proper planning must then be followed by precise organisation of the
efforts to defend the Right of Return. One of the more important
priorities of these undertakings must be to benefit from previous
experiences, notably in the field of documentation, which guarantees
that experience is passed on to future generations. Admittedly, the
generally weak performance of Palestinian institutions in previous
decades at all levels can be attributed in part to concentration of
the work in the hands of one personality who was the decider in all
details with no effort to document or record, and when that person
was absent or removed from the scene, this was the end of that
initiative, and the people lost the wealth of contacts and
experience which made it hard to compensate for or even build upon.
One of the steps that can reflect the advances in this work is the
spread of a culture of regular critical assessment of the work, with
the serious review of errors committed. It is not an exaggeration to
say that this culture has been virtually non-existent in the
experience of the Palestinian nationalist movement in the past,
which resulted in many errors. Is it conceivable that the
Palestinians who experienced the 1970 war in Jordan, the Lebanese
civil war in the 70’s followed by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in
1982, the siege of Beirut and departure of Palestinian revolutionary
forces to places of exile, and after that the war of the refugee
camps in the mid-eighties, should not have taken serious stock of
their leadership to examine the errors committed and identify those
responsible for them? For whatever reasons, the same personalities
that were at the helm in the 1960s are still controlling the
decision-making in various fields, whether at the Palestinian
factional or popular levels. If civic society institutions are to
fulfil their mission they must overcome these shortcomings.
In the same vein, it is imperative to follow a course of
transparency by declaring financial information on sources of income
collected for projects and clarifying expenditure in order to
achieve a popular base that is trusting of these activities. There
is no need for a lengthy discussion on the importance of such
initiatives.
Practical steps must be taken to liaise at all levels and in
different geographical areas. What can be most helpful in this
regard is the spread of the spirit of selflessness and cooperation
under the banner of defending the Right of Return, and departure
from the practice of siding absolutely with a person, organisation
or party, but rather entry into the field of constructive and noble
competition. Here we may recall the pioneering initiative of our
people inside Palestine in coordinating the activities of the
Al-Aqsa Intifada, which reflected positively on success of these
activities and bore fruit on the regional and international level. A
notable feature of this success was the unilateral ceasefire
declared by all the factions of Palestinian resistance, which was
observed without fail for several months.
It is important also to maintain ties and communication between all
classes of the Palestinian people in the refugee camps, whether
inside or outside Palestine, as well as with the exiled
Palestinians. This will have the effect of facilitating the flow of
information and highlight the suffering, contributing to the
establishment of joint solidarity campaigns and unifying the content
of the political message. This brings us to the development of a
political discourse of civil and popular institutions on the issue
of the Right of Return, which assures no division between political
and humanitarian dimensions, avoiding entry into solutions, but
concentrating on the legal dimension of the Right of Return. We must
give priority to the political and media efforts of organisations to
defend the Right of Return, whilst being aware of their limitations
as NGOs. The motivation for this is that if the voice of the refugee
is not heard reiterating his adherence to his right, this will lead
to a monopoly of the issue by a small minority, which claims true
representation of the people’s will.
As for the content of what is put forward, removing the topic of
referendum from the political lexicon of return committees is a
particularly pressing issue. The individual and communal capacity
associated with this right goes against the idea of a referendum
having any credence, whether legal or political, if the people are
agreed in rejecting it.
Of equal importance is the need to highlight points of weakness- and
they are many- in the content of the Israeli proposal for the
refugee issue. Palestinian organisations must expose these and
organise programmes in the media, trade unions, and other platforms
to show the extent of their illegality and fallacy. In this context,
the Israeli Law of Return heads this list, because of its grave
contribution to prolonging the conflict, and keeping the Palestinian
refugees away from their land. This law is virtually unique in its
racism and absurdity. Strangely enough, Palestinian negotiators have
not referred to this point and others since the Madrid process
started in 1991.
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In the area of core values and understanding, the dissemination of
short slogans of profound political meaning that are marketable on
the world stage, will enshrine the Palestinian rights. In the spirit
of acknowledging and giving due credit, we thank the return
committees in America for their adoption of the word “Awda” (Return)
in their English language publications, furthermore as their
official name, such that the term started to enter dictionaries of
world languages, in the same way as the words; “Nakba” and
“Intifada”
In the field of action pressure campaigns can be adopted to
influence decision makers regarding the issue of refugees and to
block any move leading to the loss of their rights. The circles of
influence here are not restricted to the Palestinian, but extend to
the Arab and international arenas.
Foremost amongst these, is an awareness programme for the people in
the refugee camps to reach a level of awareness of their role and
what they have in terms of rights, which they must not surrender nor
distinguish in terms of age or sex. Success of such campaigns will
yield a state of affairs such that any person, alleging that the
Palestinian people are not concerned with the return of the
refugees, would be ostracised by Palestinian society.
To achieve continuity in purity of thought, especially the Right of
Return, we must give due attention to the new generations, and
assure the spread of a culture of strong ties to the homeland as
part of a focused educational curriculum. Of the programmes that
ease this task, what is known as the process of reliving the memory,
and preserving Palestinian history both spoken and written. This
leads us to take advantage of the presence of the generation, which
lived through Nakba, still amongst us, which accounts for 11-13% of
the total Palestinian population. This reminds us of the importance
of the participation of the wealthy people of Palestine in projects
of national importance and to push these forward so that they see
the light, recognising that some have contributed to constructive
projects through the life of the cause. Serving this line of action
would be to launch a campaign to guide secondary school, university,
Masters and PhD students, wishing to study in the social sciences,
to direct their research to these areas. In this way, this will
contribute to recording of all that is worthy of preservation of
cultural heritage and artefacts, which will lift the morale of later
generations and strengthen national identity and sense of belonging
to Palestine.
Civic organizations also play a role in adopting bright researchers
and must work to have their works and ideas relating to Right of
Return published and marketed. This leads, in parallel, to the
development of a specialised human resource, which can provide
leaders capable of transmitting the ideas and opinions of the
Palestinian people faithfully and precisely. This no doubt is
accompanied by openness to state of the art technology, which eases
influencing world public opinion. This was lent extra weight by
media openness and the revolution brought by satellite channels in
conveying images of what is occurring in Palestine to the world
leading to a dramatic change in world public opinion toward the
issue, which made Israel the greatest threat to world peace
according to the majority of Europeans.
Given that the Palestinian people are a single indivisible body more
light must be shed on the suffering of the Palestinians of 1948.
Ties with them must be strengthened and joint projects must be
established to raise their spirit and show the Palestinians as one
body.
What remains is to point out that the return committees in the West
have a double responsibility because of the political openness
there. These Palestinians must affirm their firm intention to
exercise their Right of Return and dispel the Israeli myth that the
Palestinians in the West do not wish to return.
In this context, we call for the increase of conferences and
meetings that give substance to the sense of belonging to the
homeland.
We conclude by saying that the Palestinian people have succeeded in
defeating the Israeli strategy based on the premise that dispersing
a homeless Palestinian people to the far corners of the globe would
end in the issue being forgotten. The magic has turned sour on the
magician. The changes that have occurred in the geopolitical arenas
where Palestinian concentrations are found have created a better
climate conducive to the success of any comprehensive programme of
adherence to the Right of Return.
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