No peace without an end to exile

In the second of a series, a Palestinian academic says that any Middle East deal which ignores the rights of the refugees will be rejected

Karma Nabulsi
Wednesday September 18, 2002
The Guardian

A few weeks before the al-Aqsa intifada began in September 2000, an extraordinary public meeting took place at Aida refugee camp, Bethlehem. There were others at Palestinian refugee camps all over the region. A cross-party British parliamentary commission was actually asking the refugees what they thought about their future, peace and the right of return. They were taking the testimony of dozens of groups of refugees, popular committees, old people, children. This was unprecedented, for during the last 10 years of the Oslo process, the issue of the refugees had been comprehensively removed from the negotiating table - many thought for good. They were instead to be resettled either in a new state or in the host Arab countries, against their will and international law.

Asking the refugees what they thought was seen as destructive by policy experts and diplomats at the countless round tables on the Middle East. Simply raising the issue is now perceived as demonstrating naivety at best, at worst raising an unrealistic argument that compromises the greater good: a comprehensive peace. The possible return of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Muslim and Christian Arab refugees to their original homes in what is now Israel would threaten the Jewish character of the state of Israel, and as such could not even be discussed. Even to speak about the right of return is seen as a betrayal of the post-Oslo consensus on the shape of a future settlement.

Back at Aida camp, a Palestinian refugee, Adnan Shehada, gently told the MPs why it was not actually going to happen like that. "The right of return is an essential human value and not only a Palestinian political issue. It is also the issue of belonging." Here is the answer to why the right of return is still central, whether on the table or off it. The Palestinians still believe it is - therefore it is.

The issue of return is vital because it represents the essence of what it means to be a Palestinian. It is much more than a legal right or a property right or an individual and collective right (although it is also all these things). It remains the touchstone of shared Palestinian historical identity. It has shaped us completely. It is why we have stayed refugees for so long.

There is a fashionable way of seeing the modern Palestinian predicament as a sort of mirror image of the Jewish diaspora on the European continent. The exiles will easily find their way after the final settlement in a globalised world, it is thought, connecting to their community through the internet, perhaps adding a Palestinian passport to that of Canada or of Jordan. But this is largely a false image, merely that of an elite who managed to get passports or savings out, or went to the Gulf or America in the 50s and 60s.

Palestinians do possess an enormous flourishing of talent and skill: as doctors, engineers, scientists, artists, architects and teachers from the coastal towns and cities, as well as from the countryside. But the overwhelming character of the Palestinian people remains that of farmers and peasants, people intimately connected to the land, although for three generations now born in camps, often only a few kilometres from their destroyed villages and empty fields. Hundreds of thousands are officially excluded from certain professions in their host countries, refugees with no hope for the future, no travel documents, who dream only of return.

But questions of order and security remain paramount in the international arena. So if a settlement that ignores the refugees' rights could work in practice, then surely it must be tried, after all these years of war? And surely a sovereign state of some sort would make up for the compromises forced upon them? However, after one grasps the collective sentiment of the Palestinian people on return, and their almost sacred relationship to these rights, it is obvious that any such deal will be rejected by the vast majority, no matter if a leader can be found (and none has yet) that will sign these rights away. An imposed settlement that did not deal with return would herald the beginning of a new war - not the end of the conflict, nor the durable peace we all seek.

And what of a minimal justice? Completely ignoring the wishes of the main victims of this conflict, those dispossessed in 1948 when Israel was established, is so unfair as to be simply unsustainable. The Jewish people were victims of another conflict, the second world war and the Holocaust. Unless this terrible victimisation of the Jewish people has elevated Israel's right to the land over that of the indigenous inhabitants, this is another reason why one must have the courage to address the fears and insecurities of both sides (as well as their root causes) in an imaginative and determined fashion.

Understanding the right of return of Palestinians, how it could be recognised, how to bring both sides together, is the single most important challenge for all who sincerely love Israel. It might be time to actually talk to the refugees themselves and involve them in a peace process. The British commission of inquiry made a welcome discovery when they tried this method. They learned that the refugees' own desire was to accept the right of Israel to exist, to live at peace with it, and emphatically not to destroy it. One simply has to ask.

· Karma Nabulsi is a fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, a former PLO representative and adviser at the peace talks 1991-93