Palestinians in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories, over 50 percent of whom are refugees, are preparing to commemorate 54 years of displacement and dispossession – al-Nakba .
At the same time they are beginning to assess the massive physical damage and destruction (estimated at over US $300 million) left in the wake of Israel’s most recent military campaign to crush indigenous resistance to the ongoing illegal military occupation and the denial of the right to self-determination.
Israel continues to deny Palestinian refugees, including internally displaced Palestinians, the right to return to their places of origin and recover their property inside Israel. A total of three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population are displaced either outside or inside their homeland.
All Israeli governments have denied displaced Palestinians the right to return, real property restitution and compensation in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (11 December 1948) and numerous recommendations by UN human rights bodies.
Since 1948 Israel has expropriated more than 17 million dunums (17,000 sq. km) of land owned by Palestinian refugees, and nearly 1 million dunums owned by Palestinians inside Israel, including internally displaced Palestinians.
Moreover, Israel has further expropriated and/or controls some 4.7 million dunums in the 1967 occupied West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. In 1948 Palestinians owned more than 90 percent of the land in historic Mandate Palestine.
Today, the indigenous Palestinian Arab population owns and controls just over 10 percent of the land within the borders of their historic homeland (i.e., inside Israel and the 1967 occupied territories).
At the same time, Israel has either expropriated or destroyed over 150,000 homes belonging to refugees displaced/expelled in 1948.
The primary reason why Israel refuses to allow the refugees to come home is that they are not Jewish.
For Israel’s political and military establishment, the death of hundreds of Israelis and more than a thousand Palestinians since September 2000 - and perhaps thousands more, as well as the mass destruction of Palestinian property is a price that it is willing to exact in order to impose a solution on the Palestinian people that preserves both, the post-1967 colonisation program in the occupied territories and the "Jewish character" of the Israeli state (i.e. a Jewish demographic majority and Jewish control of refugee lands).
At the time of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David (July 2000) and Taba (January 2001) numerous Israeli politicians and analysts commented that violent confrontation, including war, was preferable to accepting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their places of origin inside Israel.
In March 2002 Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon stated, "It won’t be possible to reach an agreement with [the Palestinians] before the Palestinians are hit hard. Now they have to be hit. If they aren’t badly beaten, there won’t be any negotiations. Only after they are beaten will we be able to conduct talks." (Ha’aretz, 5 March 2002)
Israel has also argued, however, that because refugee homes have been destroyed or expropriated to house Jewish Israelis (referred to as ‘secondary occupation’) return is not possible.
In the early 1950s, for example, Israeli officials informed the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), mandated to facilitate a durable solution for the refugees based on General Assembly Resolution 194 (i.e., voluntary return, restitution, compensation), that "the individual return of Arab refugees to their former places of residence is an impossible thing. Their houses have gone, their jobs have gone."
This argument has since become something of a mantra repeated not only by Israeli officials but also by international diplomats, analysts and academicians. Writing in the May issue of Foreign Affairs ("The Last Negotiation: How to End the Middle East Peace Process"), for example, Hussein Agha, a Senior Associate Member of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University, and Robert Malley, Director of the Middle East Program at the International Crisis Group and former special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs, state:
"Many of the refugees presumably want to go back to their original homes. But these homes, and indeed, in many cases, the entire villages where they were located, either no longer exist or are now inhabited by Jews."
The conclusion drawn is that while limited numbers of refugees may be able to return, "consistent with the exercise of Israel’s sovereign powers over entry and resettlement locations", financial and other incentives will be needed to "persuade" the majority of the refugees (i.e., impose arbitrary restrictions on the basic human right to return) to "choose" some form of resettlement either in a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip or in a third country.
The land owned by the refugees has remained largely vacant; Jewish settlement is concentrated in a number of urban centres, while some 160,000 rural Jewish Israelis live on more than 17,000 sq. km of refugee land.
In light of this fact, the argument that the destruction (or even secondary occupation) of a Palestinian refugee’s home, and even village, permanently negates the right of return is at best misinformed, if not duplicitous. No one has raised the argument, for example, that Israel’s destruction of hundreds of Palestinian homes in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories since the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada negates the right of the homeowner to continue living in his/her city, town or refugee camp.
Nor have such arguments garnered serious consideration in other refugee cases. In Kosovo 50 percent of the housing stock was destroyed, 65 percent in Bosnia, and 80 percent in East Timor. In each of these cases the international community supported the right of refugees and displaced persons to return to their places of origin.
The logical solution to the problem of damaged or destroyed housing is rehabilitation and reconstruction. Five years after the Dayton peace agreement was signed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, the international community had assisted with the repair and reconstruction of nearly 30,000 housing units.
The experience of UNRWA in rebuilding destroyed refugee shelters in places of exile over the past five decades provides one immediate example of a model directly applicable to housing reconstruction for returnees in the Palestinian case.
The mass destruction of Palestinian refugee homes and villages in 1948 is not a credible reason to deny Palestinian refugees the right to return to their places of origin inside Israel, nor can it be argued that the passage of 54 years renders claims for real property restitution irrelevant.
To do so would not only violate basic principles of international law but would also essentially punish Palestinian refugees for Israel’s rejection of the right of return and real property restitution. Israel’s sole argument for denying Palestinian refugees their rights (and thereby obstructing a durable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) is that the refugees are not Jewish.
As numerous UN human rights treaty bodies have noted, this argument is not consistent with international human rights law including the universal norm of non-discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, and religion.
On the occasion of the 54th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, BADIL Resource Center calls upon the international solidarity movement to:
Educate and inform about the history and the scope of Palestinian displacement and dispossession;
Educate and inform about Palestinian refugees’ right of return, real property restitution and compensation in accordance with international law and UN Resolution 194.
Resources are available on the websites of BADIL ( www.badil.org )and the Palestine Right to Return Coalition ( http://al-awda.org )
Nakba memorials of the Palestinian community in Israel start traditionally on April 17, the day on which Israel celebrates its independence day according to the Hebrew calendar. On the morning of 17 April 2002, collective visits were organised to several depopulated Palestinian villages. In the afternoon, the fifth Al-Awda (Return) March took participants to the depopulated village of al-Birwa (near Acre). Around 7,000 marched from the Acre-Safad intersection to the village, raising the names of the destroyed Palestinian villages and banners demanding the right of return for internally displaced Palestinians and refugees in exile. Other slogans called for the end of Israel’s military occupation and Sharon’s war crimes committed against Palestinian towns and refugee camps.
Participants were internally displaced Palestinians and their supporters, Palestinian NGOs, community organizations and public representatives. Most noteworthy was the first-time participation of Jewish-Israeli groups, such as Zikhrot, Sawt Badeel, Re’out, Bat Shalom and others. The participants marked the sites of the four cemeteries of al-Birwa village with signs in English, Arabic and Hebrew.
For additional information contact: Association for the Defense of the Rights of Internally Displaced in Israel: [email protected]