Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale.israele
Titolo: Il problema dei rifugiati palestinesi

http://www.jrep.com/Palaffairs/Article-0.html
Palestinian Affairs: Returning to Reality
Isabel Kershner
Is a resolution of the fifty-five-year-old Palestinian refugee problem
finally in sight?
[...]
The fate of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 has long been considered one of
the most fundamentally intractable issues mitigating against any
Israeli-Palestinian final-status deal. The Palestinian leadership has
insisted for years that without an Israeli recognition of the right of
return, at least in principle, there can be no end to the conflict. The
Palestinians base their claim on U.N. Resolution 194 of 1948, which
stipulates 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 who choose not to return.
The roughly 700,000 Palestinians who left their homes in 1948 are now
estimated, through natural growth, to number over 4 million. (Counting those
not registered with the United Nations and other displaced Palestinians, PLO
officials put the figure as high as 6.5 million.) The majority live in the
West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the neighboring countries of Jordan, Syria and
Lebanon.
No Israeli government would conceivably agree to grant the refugees free
entry out of fear that the country would be swamped and cease to be a
predominantly Jewish state. And there is a strong consensus that conceding a
"right" of return even in principle would create an unhealthy legal
precedent for future generations.
After decades of deadlock, though, several recent initiatives suggest a
possible pragmatic chink in the Palestinian ideology of return. In February
2002, a New York Times op-ed signed by Yasser Arafat stated that the
Palestinians should take Israel's demographic concerns into consideration in
trying to resolve the refugee problem, though that article, appearing at the
height of the intifada, was summarily dismissed by Israelis as a cynical PR
ploy. Already in late 2001, Sari Nusseibeh, a prominent Palestinian
intellectual, started arguing publicly that the inherent logic of a
two-state solution implies that the refugees should "return" to the new
state of Palestine, not Israel, a principle firmly upheld in the peace
document he subsequently drafted with former Israeli Shin Bet chief Ami
Ayalon. And this July, Khalil Shikaki, a prominent Ramallah-based political
analyst and respected pollster, published a groundbreaking, if
controversial, survey indicating that if Israel were to recognize Resolution
194 or the right of return, only around 10 percent of refugees in the West
Bank, Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon would choose to return to Israel, as part of
a small number allowed back over several years. Given various other options,
most chose receiving "fair compensation" and either staying put in the host
country, moving to areas in Israel that would be transferred to the
Palestinians in a land swap, or moving to the Palestinian state. Shikaki
states that the poll was designed in consultation with PLO officials in
charge of negotiations and the refugee issue. The results, he argues, show
that Israel can afford to recognize the right of return without undermining
its Jewish character.
Now, the refugee debate has culminated in the so-called Geneva Accord, a
draft permanent-status agreement negotiated by Israeli leftist and former
minister Yossi Beilin and Yasser Arafat comrade and PLO Executive Committee
member Yasser Abed Rabbo, who was himself born in Jaffa in 1945. The accord
proposes an end to the refugee issue without any mention of the right of
return at all. "It was very hard for the Palestinians. They tried to open
the issue up again in the last round of talks in Jordan," a participant on
the Israeli team told The Report. "But we insisted; even the word 'return'
doesn't appear anywhere."
The evasion of the unmentionable in the Geneva document has opened the way
for Israeli critics and Palestinians alike to argue that symbolically, the
right of return hasn't actually been conceded at all.
Still, it is hard to dismiss Geneva as soft on the refugees. The draft
document refers to Resolution 194 as the basis for resolving the issue, and
presents the refugees with options for a permanent place of residence,
including the Palestinian state, host countries, a third country or Israel.
Residency in Israel would, however, be at the country's "sovereign
discretion" and in accordance with a number that Israel would submit to an
international commission, based on the average of total numbers accepted by
other third countries. The Israeli side has suggested the number would hover
around the 20,000-30,000 mark. After realizing their choice, individuals
would lose their refugee status, and no further claims could be raised
beyond those related to the implementation of the accord.
Gershon Baskin, co-director of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and
Information (IPCRI), pre-negotiated the refugee issue with senior
Palestinian minister Nabil Sha'ath weeks before the Taba talks of January
2001. Geneva, he says, offers "the first flickering light of possibility
that the refugee issue can be solved."
Even now, though, few issues stir passions on the Palestinian side like that
of the refugees. Nihaya Zaki aside, plenty of others are prepared to go to
the barricades on the matter of principle. On the morning in July that
Shikaki was due to release his poll results, a mob from the Al-Amari camp
stormed and trashed his Ramallah offices and assaulted Shikaki, fired by
rumors that he was about to deny the refugees their rights and reportedly
agitated by intelligence agents from Arafat's Muqata'ah headquarters a few
blocks away.
Jamil, 43, a resident of Al-Amari, was one of the mob. "Shikaki's a liar,"
he explains, sitting in the camp's central coffee shop. "He said everybody
would stay where they are. We will only give up on going back if that is
imposed on us," he insists. Moments earlier Jamil had been expounding on the
fact that he didn't believe in the possibility of return, and that he wouldn
't want to go to live in Israel as an Israeli anyway. He also relates that
he has a sister in Florida and a brother with a grocery store in California.
Ideally he'd like to join them, but with three wives and 21 children in
Al-Amari, that's not an option.
Ashraf, 25, also went to Shikaki's office, though he can't really articulate
why. He has two uncles in New Jersey and wishes he could go too. Asked
whether he'd been brought up on the idea of return, he says he's "fed up
with hearing about it."
But Walid, 47, who came back to Al-Amari in 1998 after 20 years in the Gulf,
says the right of return is "like the Koran. I believe we will go back one
day." He claims that "all the land around Ben-Gurion Airport" belonged to
his father. Asked whether he'd want to go and live in Israel now, he
replies, "What is Israel? One day the United States will cut its aid and it
will disappear."
With the refugees, this is a familiar theme. Muhammad Samara, 48, another
Al-Amari coffee shop habitué, says that if he doesn't return to Anaba, his
children will in generations to come. "We have to be pragmatic," he goes on.
"If they were to give us an independent state in the 1967 territories, I'd
accept that and live here for the interim. But I won't sign a paper saying I
'll never return. Maybe when we become powerful enough, we'll go back and
take our land."
It is precisely this kind of talk that leads skeptics to question the
validity and conclusions of Shikaki's findings, and the worth of the Geneva
Accord. Both pro-Israel analysts and Palestinian refugee-rights purists
place doubt on whether any amount of semantic tongue-twisting or survey data
can really lay the refugee issue to rest. Arafat himself, notorious for
holding two ends of the stick, has not enunciated any position regarding
Geneva's formulation on the refugees.
Max Abrahms, a research fellow at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for
Near East Policy, has publicly taken issue with Shikaki's poll, contending
among other things that the options Shikaki offered in the survey would
never really placate the desire to return. "The poll doesn't show that the
Palestinians would ever be content with those options as a final resolution
of the issue," he says, adding that the respondents' expectations of what
constitutes "fair compensation" are also wildly off the mark.
Shlomo Hasson, a Hebrew University professor and deputy director of the
Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies in Jerusalem, calls the Shikaki
poll "a trap" if it is interpreted as being part of some kind of solution.
"He leaves the issue of the right of return open, perhaps to be realized in
15 or 50 years," says Hasson, who is engaged in ongoing Israeli-Palestinian
dialogue. "You can't learn anything about the future from it," he warns.
And Palestinian activists such as Muhammad Jaradat of Badil, a
Bethlehem-based refugee rights advocacy group, reject both the Shikaki poll
and the Geneva initiative on grounds that according to their interpretation
of Resolution 194, the refugees must be given a totally free choice
regarding return to their original homes that is neither conditional on
Israeli permission nor subject to any number caps. The mention of 194 in the
Geneva document is there merely to allow Palestinian negotiators to "save
face," Jaradat asserts.
Indeed, when it comes to the numbers, the Geneva teams' projected intake for
Israel of around 30,000 refugees falls far short even of Shikaki's 10
percent, which would amount to over 373,000. (He notes, however, that only
about 1 percent would agree to take Israeli citizenship.)
In pointing out the weakness of both Shikaki's findings and of the Geneva
initiative, pro-Israeli and refugee advocates alike cite the dramatically
different results of earlier refugee polls, including one by Baskin's IPCRI
published in August 2001. That survey suggested that 96.7 percent of those
asked would return to their original home towns if given the opportunity.
Almost 69 percent said they would return without compensation.
But Baskin himself attributes the different results to a changing reality.
"Shikaki's poll shows that something has happened here in the last three
years," he says. He defines it as a "coming to senses" by the refugees.
Israel has become so poisoned in Palestinian eyes that few would want to go
and live there. "Though they can't say so openly, that effectively
translates into giving up the right of return," he posits.
Baskin sees Geneva as a continuation of that process of the "changing
understanding" among the refugees.
Many are bound to consider that wishful thinking. But for Nihaya Zaki and,
she swears, many refugees like her, dreamtime is over and hard-nosed realism
is in. "My parents left Anaba. If they hadn't left their village," she says,
"we wouldn't be where we are today. Why should we leave everything we've
built up here? We won't make the same mistake and give up our land again."
November 17, 2003

 ha scritto nel messaggio
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Arabi, arabi.
Palestinesi è solo la denominazione degli arabi della Terra Santa. Come
brianzoli è la denominazione degli italiani che vivono in brianza
Ciao
Ad'I

 brianzoli è la denominazione degli italiani che vivono in brianza
Negare persino il nome (anzi, la "denominazione": non sono nemmeno vini
DOC), a questo popolo, non ne negherà la realtà. Se hai qualcosa da dire
sulla soluzione del problema dei profughi, parla, altrimenti taci; il tuo
consueto livore antiarabo (e non "antipalestinese") non mi sembra
produttivo, ai fini della discussione... Shalom.
Namib

 Namib