On November 29, 1947, the United Nations partitioned Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Arabs, however, rejected the Jewish state, and so, hours after Israel declared independence, the combined armies of Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan (Jordan), Lebanon and Syria, along with what we now call the Palestinians, tried to push the Israelis into the Mediterranean Sea. Their failure was wholly unexpected, and turned 420,000-539,000 Palestinian Arabs into refugees, one-third of whom wound up in the West Bank, another third in the Gaza Strip, and the remainder in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or farther afield. Today, according to grossly distorted U.N. statistics, those so dispossessed number 4.25 million.
As Mitchell Bard explains, the Palestinians left for a variety of reasons. “Thousands of wealthy Arabs left in anticipation of a war, thousands more responded to Arab leaders’ calls to get out of the way of the advancing armies, a handful were expelled, but most simply fled to avoid being caught in the crossfire of a battle.”[1] Two documents describe the then-prevailing mindsets. On January 30, 1948, the Arab Jaffa newspaper, Ash Sha’ab, reported: “The first of our fifth column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere. . . . At the first signs of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle.” Of course, those who left fully anticipated homecoming after an early Arab victory. Meanwhile, Israel’s Proclamation of Independence, issued May 14, 1948, invited the Palestinians to remain in their homes and “to play their part in the development of the State of Israel, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies in institutions.” Yes, the Hagannah, the underground military arm of the Jewish Agency, on occasion expelled Palestinians. But these were the exceptions, and accounted for only a small fraction of the total exodus. Moreover, rather than premeditated, expulsions came in the heat of battle, “dictated predominantly by ad-hoc military considerations (notably the need to deny strategic sites to the enemy if there were no available Jewish forces to hold them).”[2]
Thus, as Efraim Karsh observes, “The Israeli ‘narrative’ sees the refugee tragedy as primarily self-inflicted, a direct result of the vehement Palestinian/Arab” jihad to ethnically cleanse the Jews after they survived the Holocaust. By contrast, Palestinians view themselves as the unprovoked victims of a Zionist grand design to expel them from their patrimony,[3] the Nakba (disaster) for which they are entitled redress.
* * *
In December 1948, following the armistice to first Arab-Israeli war, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 194, stating, inter alia, that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so.” As a goodwill gesture during the Lausanne talks in 1949, Israel offered to repatriate 100,000 Palestinians separated from their families during the war, and to compensate others for abandoned property. The Arab states, who had refused to negotiate face-to-face with the Israelis, rebuffed the offer because it implicitly recognized Israel.
Refugee negotiations effectively resumed at Madrid in 1991. The parties began by restating their longstanding positions. Israel, the Arabs and Palestinians argued, bore full responsibility for the refugees because its armed forces had carried out a systematic, planned campaign to expel the Palestinians during the 1948 war. The Palestinians then invoked Article 11 of U.N. Resolution 194, which, by their reading, required Israel to allow all refugees interested in returning to their homeland to do so forthwith, and to compensate all those uninterested in returning. The Palestinians argued that 194 granted every single refugee—and every refugee’s descendants—the “right of return” to the place he left as a result of the war. Israel, however, rejected, as it has done since 1949, this alleged right, since the war the Arabs started created the crisis in the first place.
During the Camp David 2 summit in 2000, under the auspices of U.S. President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak continued to refuse responsibility, legal or moral, for the refugees. He did, however, agree to express Israel’s regret over their plight, to absorb around 100,000 under the family reunification scheme, and to make a financial contribution to an international organization for their rehabilitation outside Israel. The Palestinians rejected Clinton’s plan, insisting that it “reflect[ed] a wholesale adoption of the Israeli position.” They announced that the refugees alone had the right to decide where to settle, and emphasized that implementing the “right of return” was a precondition for peace. The only flexibility the Palestinians would consider were “mechanisms” to implement repatriation.
At Taba, Egypt in 2001, the Palestinians stiffened their position, to which Yossi Beilin, justice minister and head of the Israeli team on refugees, gave a “personal response.” Israel would absorb several tens of thousands of refugees over a number of years, based on the family reunification scheme. The rest would be rehabilitated in their host countries, emigrate to other countries, or settle in those parts of Israel that would become a future Palestinian state. Beilin’s team did not object to the settlement of refugees in the Palestinian state in unlimited numbers, and agreed that Israel would compensate the Arab states for their expenses as hosts. Yet these proposals, which far exceeded Israeli public opinion, left the Palestinians unmoved. The most they would concede was to “pledge”—without any apparent authority—that most refugees would opt to remain where they were. Finally, just last week at Geneva, negotiators proposed that Israel should decide how many refugees may exercise repatriation, although this paper excluded mention of the return right.
* * *
Clearly, then, the refugee crisis has received its due of discussion. But why no progress? Abba Eban, a former Israeli Foreign Minister, put it best, at the opening of the 1973 Geneva conference. The refugee crisis is “not basically intractable,” he said. Rather, a “conscious decision” to propagandize it has perpetuated it. For instance, when Israel controlled the Gaza Strip, it consistently tried to move the Palestinians into permanent housing. But the Arab states opposed such uplift; they preferred to keep their brethren as symbols of Israeli “occupation.” Ditto for Arab contributions to UNRWA. While the single state of Israel initially gave $3 million, all the combined Arab countries could pledge was $600,000. As recently as 1994, Israel’s contributions continued to exceed those of the Arabs, except Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco.[4] So extreme is the Arab position that a former director of UNRWA, Ralph Gall[rr?]oway, summarized it this way in August 1958. “The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore . . . against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.”[5] Forty years later, the managing editor of Ha’aretz observed the same motives. “When I see children and their parents living in dire poverty in refugee camps . . . I wonder why their Arab neighbors, especially those who have enjoyed immense oil riches all these years, have never come to their aid. The sad truth is that the Arab countries have abandoned them to a bitter fate in order to foment hatred of Israel.”[6] After all, the “ever-proliferating numbers of alleged refugees amount to an ever-sharpening dagger at Israel’s throat.”[7]
The second barrier is numbers. The U.N. says there there are 4.25 million Palestinian refugees. The official Palestinian position is for every one of them to have the right to return. Of course, for Israelis, this would be pure political and social suicide—the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Even Israeli politicians most inclined to accommodate Palestinian national aspirations, like former Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Meretz Party head Yossi Sarid, oppose substantially altering Israel’s demographic balance. After all, the Jews cannot be a minority in their national home.
Third, consider the role of UNWRA, or to use its full title, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Since 1948, this international agency has operated for the welfare of the Palestinian refugees (Officially, UNWRA came into existence on December 8, 1949, when it replaced its predecessor, the United Nations Relief for Palestinian Refugees, which was founded on November 19, 1948.) Yet since 1950, the U.N. has contained another organization for refugee affairs, the United Nation High Commission for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.). Each has its own definition of “refugee.” U.N.H.C.R. defines the term as someone who, “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted . . . is outside the country of his nationality.” Thus, descendants of refugees—Palestinians who never fled anywhere, many of whom have never set foot in Israel proper—are not refugees.
UNRWA uses a remarkably different definition. It classifies a refugee as any person who lived in Palestine “between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both [his] home[] and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.” What’s crucial is that UNRWA extends its term to the descendants of these refugees. It even considers the children—some now unto the fourth generation—of just one Palestinian refugee parent to be refugees. Thus, in just 50 years, half a million refugees have skyrocketed to 4.25 million. As Daniel Pipes puts it, where the “High Commission’s definition causes refugee populations to vanish over time, UNRWA’s causes them to expand without limit.”[8]
But it’s more than deceptive statistics, which even UNRWA admits “cannot be considered statistically valid.”[9] UNRWA’s handing out free food and cash to those claiming refugeehood is, in one professor’s formulation, “as if a new TV show were invented . . . called ‘Who Wants to Be a Palestinian Refugee?’”[10] And, like money, the numbers talk; out of a total population of almost eight million creative and entrepreneurial Palestinians, 4.25 million claim “refugee” status—thereby condemning themselves to “lives of exclusion, self-pity and nihilism.”[11]
Indeed, then, who would want such charity cases? Frustrated and bitter, they provide manpower for terrorists. Poor and jobless, they exist in a culture of dependency, which is contagious. But, of course, it’s a vicious cycle that makes them these pariahs; the policies of their Arab hosts keep them frozen in amber-like conditions. For from the moment the Palestinian refugees arrived in the neighboring Arab states, tensions ran high. “The former considered the states derelict for having issued wild promises of military support on which they never made good.”[12] The latter regarded the Palestinians as cowards who deserted their homeland and honor.
As time passed, relations worsened, with Arab governments frequently offering jobs, housing, land and other benefits to Arabs and non–Arabs—but not to Palestinians. Saudi Arabia, for example, would not hire unemployed Palestinians to alleviate its labor shortage in the late 1970s and early 1980s; instead, it recruited thousands of South Koreans and other Asians. During and following the First Gulf War, Kuwait expelled more than 300,000 Palestinians. In 1995 Libya expelled 30,000. Furthermore, although demographic figures indicated that ample room for settlement existed in Syria, and although it had been offered international funds to pay for the project, Damascus refused to resettle refugees in 1952¬-54—except those who might refuse repatriation. Iraq was also expected to accept a large number of refugees, but proved unwilling. Even Jordan, the only country to naturalize the Palestinians, did so not for humanitarian reasons, but to absorb the West Bank.
Then there’s Lebanon, which hosts 400,000 Palestinians in twelve refugee camps intended to accommodate just 50,000 of them. Restrictions on reconstruction further prohibit repairing these semi- or totally destroyed conditions, leftover from the civil war. To be sure, Lebanon’s mosaic of confessional groups agrees on little, but they largely unite in rejecting Palestinians, denying them even the most basic civil rights and prohibiting them from attending public school and owning property. Lebanese writer, Raghid al–Sulh, has listed four reasons for opposing their tawteen (implantation).
1. Original intent: Lebanon granted the refugees sanctuary as a humane, emergency measure; it was never intended to be permanent, which would negate the right of return.
2. Economics: Lebanon is small and dense. Hence it lacks the resources to employ the refugees.
3. Politics and history: Lebanese blame the Palestinians for their civil war and related tribulations. They therefore believe they have paid a much higher price for the cause than their fellow Arabs, and have fulfilled their duty.
4. Demographics: Naturalization would alter the country’s precarious sectarian balance and destabilize the political structures that the country has crafted to reflect those religious and ethnic complexities. Specifically, with power-sharing divided between Muslims and Christians, an influx of Palestinians, mostly Sunni Muslims, would dilute the power of the Christians, particularly the Maronite Christians, and threaten to restore civil war.
Thus, as former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al–Hariri liked to say, “Lebanon will never, ever integrate Palestinians.”
The fifth barrier is U.N. Resolution 194. On one hand, 194 is the cornerstone of the legal claim to a “right of return. Conversely, like all General Assembly resolutions, and unlike Security Council resolutions, 194 is not binding but is a recommendation. Further, only one of its 15 paragraphs refers to refugees in general—not “Arab refugees”—in language that could as readily apply to the equal, if not more, number of Jews whom the Arab states were then expelling. Third, 194 stipulates that compensation for the property of those refugees choosing not to return “should be made good by the governments or the authorities responsible.” Had the provision applied only to Palestinians, Israel would surely have been singled out as the compensating party; instead, the wording implies that Arab states were likewise potential compensators. Fourth, instead of recommending repatriation as the only solution, 194 put this option on a par with “resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation.” Fifth, and most important, 194 does not refer to descendants of refugees.
Indeed, given these provisions, the Arab states voted unanimously against 194. It is therefore sheer hypocrisy for those same Arabs, and Palestinian representatives, to see today so clearly in 194 the “right” they formerly argued that document failed to recognize. (Only in the late 1960s, with the connivance of their Soviet and Third World supporters, did they begin the 194 makeover.) Even Benny Morris, the Israeli “new historian” who documented instances of expulsion, found that Arab leaders encouraged the Palestinians to leave. And in their memoirs, Haled al–Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948¬-49, like Jordan’s King Abdullah, reached the same conclusion. Wrote al–Azm: “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.”
Finally, 194 requires that returnees live “at peace with their neighbors,” which means Palestinians must first unequivocally accept Israel’s right to exist. But after decades after rabid rejectionism, this remains at best an iffy proposition and, as such, a deadly threat to the Israelis’. For though they have no lost love for their Arab brethren, most Palestinians save their understandable rage, understandably, for “the Zionists.”
* * *
And yet, despite the seeming polarization in official positions, we may discern some middle ground. For instance, some Palestinians, both intellectuals and officials, have spoken of a right of return—not to “that same home, piece of land, or grove which a certain Palestinian owned before 1948”[13]—but to “national soil,” namely, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As Rashid Khalidi notes, emphasizing “attainable,” rather than “absolute,” justice, while “it must be accepted that all Palestinian refugees and their descendants have a right to return to their homes in principle,” “in practice force majeure will prevent most of them from being able to exercise this right.”[14] Proceeding on this distinction, the West Bank and Gaza would constitute a Palestinian state, and every Palestinian who so wished would receive citizenship there. To assuage concerns about the political consequences of Palestinians permanently residing in their countries but with Palestinian citizenship, Israel and the Arab host governments would presumably exercise their sovereign right to deny dual citizenship, and could easily establish additional legal disincentives. Further, the Arabs could copy the U.S. green card or the French carte de sejour, a la Syria. While recognizing the Palestinians’ full civil and economic rights, they could deny them political rights, like voting and office-holding. It will be tricky, but it will promote socioeconomic integration without hampering political stability.
Obviously, though, many refuges will want to emigrate to Israel. In this regard, consider that on humanitarian grounds, Israel has since the 1950s allowed more than 50,000 Palestinian refugees to return under its family reunification program. Another 75,000 whom the 1967 war displaced from the West Bank and Gaza have returned to those territories under Israel’s sanction. In the midst of the prevailing euphoria over the 1993 Oslo Accord, Israel doubled the number of licenses it granted annually for reunification from 1,000 to 2,000. Given such generosity, Israel should repatriate, over ten years, up to 100,000 Palestinians, giving priority to those with family already in Israel, those associated with the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon, and those refugees, by the international definition, from 1947-48. Over which Palestinians return and where they live, like any other country, Israel should have sovereign discretion, though it should give priority to Haifa, Jaffa and other Palestinian ancestral estates.
For Palestinians who return neither to Israel nor Palestine, surely some will prefer the West. In fact, emigration to a democratic and prosperous Europe, which funds most of UNRWA, especially to Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, could be the most popular alternative. Already, over the past decades, Canada, Europe and America have granted individual asylum to almost half a million Palestinian refugees, whom they generally treat the same as any other refugees. En masse, Canada has offered to accept 15,000 Palestinians.
But what about Palestinians who cannot relocate? In short, their hosts must assimilate them. To this end, and given that the U.S. funds forty percent of UNRWA, Washington should use economic pressure and condition its foreign aid. In particular, we should demand that the Arab League and the Palestinian Authority formally sanction pan–Arab assimilation, with particular emphasis on Kuwait to receive back the 300,000 Palestinians it expelled during and following the First Gulf War, and on Syria, which besides dominating 400,000 Palestinians within its borders, oppresses 400,000 more in Lebanon’s.
Finally, there is always the issue of money. To compensate the refugees, Israel should take part in a huge international aid and development program. The extent of Israel’s contribution, considering that at the end of 1993 Israel’s Custodian of Absentee Property had repaid Palestinians who lost property in Israel more than 250,000 dunums of land and more than 10,000,000 New Israeli Sheckels, will depend on the extent of Palestinian concessions on other final status issues. (The Israeli negotiating position calls for compromise on the territorial and Jerusalem questions in return for a Palestinian concession on the right of return.) To administer said effort, a private committee, not the perverse United Nations, should assume the funds and functions of UNRWA over five years, during which UNRWA, including its mischievous definition, will be phased out from each country in which it operates. Recognizing UNRWA’s role in perpetuating Palestinian misery, the U.S. should condition its U.N. dues on UNRWA’s elimination.
In close cooperation with the host states, the committee should invest in community rehabilitation and development programs, helping the refugees to build homes, receive education, and contract jobs. The committee should have discretion to use a fixed per capita award or a claims-based award for property claims, and to decide whether refugees receive money for their pain and suffering.
Likewise, while I recommend that refugees who move to Israel not receive aid, this is up the committee. But compensation in reciprocity, that is, to Jewish refugees whom the Arabs deported over the decades, to be paid to the Israeli government, following the same formula, including determination of refugee eligibility, as that used for the Palestinians, is mandatory. Ditto for priority for the 1948 refugees. As an incentive for success, and hence more donors, the committee should distribute compensation over ten years, after which this framework will no longer require Israel to make annual payments.
Of course, these proposals will meet with knee-jerk hostility from many: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah, Israel’s National Religious Party (Mafdal), to name just the major extremists. But the real question is the reaction of the Israeli, Arab and Palestinian silent majorities. On one hand, hungering for the day when they need not agonize over which mall or restaurant a suicide bomber is least likely to strike, when reservists will remain reservists, conscription will cease and tourism and foreign investment resume, the Israelis could be persuaded of the necessity for repatriation and reparations, as they were vis-à-vis the Oslo Accord. Conversely, heed the Arabic statements of Palestinian and Arab leaders (translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute). Not only have they knowingly failed to prepare their people for a concession, they have also declared repeatedly that the right of return is nonnegotiable and peace impossible without its just resolution. Small surprise, then, that polls from 2000 show that the vast majority of Palestinians reject anything less than the full right of return;[15] indeed, during Camp David 2, hundreds demonstrated in Gaza against compromising.
Does this mean that the above framework is dead on arrival? No. To be sure, resolving the refugee crisis will require enormous efforts worldwide. But, as a matter of practicality, as opposed to prejudices, it can be done. First, in light of the failure of previous accords, declarations, memorandums, road maps, etc., events should not arrest timetables.
Second, consider Jordan, which since its 1954 Nationalities Act has successfully naturalized 95% of its Palestinian population. Similarly, Syrian Palestinians, although ineligible for citizenship and despite tight controls over their political activities, enjoy a full legal equivalency with local nationals in almost all areas, including employment and governmental services. Even Lebanon, via its Foreign Minister, Faris Buwayz, in October 1992, has hinted at accepting the permanent settlement of 50,000-100,000 refugees; and in 1994 it naturalized 60,000 of them.
Third, history demands that we view the Palestinian refugees within a larger historical perspective. For in the post–World War II era, while all over the world tens of millions of refugees in similar or worse straits have resettled and rebuilt their lives, the Palestinians have been “shamefully left in homelessness and destitution, and nourished on hatred and false dreams.” Indeed, while the Palestinians fled in 1947-48, Israel received the same number, if not more, Jewish refugees from Arab countries and the debris of Hitler’s Europe—and integrated them in full citizenship and economic dignity.
Fourth, the above framework will inspire significant funding on the ground that this is the be-all-end-all opportunity to help the Palestinian refugees “become citizens, assume self-responsibility and build for the future.”[16] (The Oslo process drew $2.5 million.) In the same way, it is in each nation’s self-interest to see stable markets take hold in the world’s largest region of fossil fuels. Certainly, there is no shortage of Arab donors; from governments (the United Arab Emirates to Canada), to nongovernmental organizations (the Islamic Development Bank to the United Nations), to individuals (Saudi princes to the bin Ladens), the money exists. But does the will, especially since in 2001, Arab governments paid but $7 million combined to UNRWA, despite their annual, billion-dollar petroleum incomes?
* * *
I began this paper as an advocate for Israel, and, vis-à-vis Israel’s Arab neighbors, I conclude it even more convinced. But the plight of the Palestinian refugees is pitiful. No one wants them. No one cares about them. Instead, “leaders” such as Yassir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and Bashar al–Assad exploit them as political footballs, dumping them into overcrowded and unsanitary “camps,” screaming “occupation,” and using UNRWA as a fig leaf, thus diverting censure from their despotic rule.
To be sure, there are good reasons for not wanting the Palestinians. For one, since the war between Hashemite troops and Palestinian guerillas in September 1970, Jordanians have credibly equated Palestinians with the destabilization of their kingdom. Further, a sizable number of Palestinians recognized September 11 by dancing in the streets, distributing candy and waving signs lionizing Osama bin Laden. And, of course, with utter contempt for their own lives, for their families and for innocent women and children, a disturbing number of Palestinians turn themselves into human bombs, which is later glorified as martyrdom.
Nonetheless, negotiators should not trap themselves in the past. To borrow Microsoft’s motto, they should ask, Where do we want to go today? En route, Arabs and Palestinians need to grasp five principles, or cognitive prerequisites for that elusive “just, comprehensive, and durable peace.” They must, at long last, face the facts.
First, they must temper their fantasy of a mass return with the reality that after 55 years—55 years of war—the state of Israel is here to stay, and to retain its Jewish character.
Second, as much as it pains them, they must recognize that had they accepted the original U.N. resolution (181), and not sought to negate it with tanks—to initiate full-blown war—there would be no refugee crisis. Aggressors are responsible for their aggression. Israel, however, though essentially blameless—ask anyone so engaged: war necessarily blurs the line between self-defense and offense—is not unfaultable. Therefore, in language either equally displeasing or by which both parties can claim vindication, Israel should admit regret, but not responsibility; like America’s 2001 “sorry” letter to China, after China detained 24 members of a U.S. spy plane, Israel should apologize without admitting having done anything wrong.
Third, it’s high time these generations of nonrefugees escape the refugee status, since the overwhelming majority of them were born after the events of 1948-49 that engendered the crisis. According to one demographer using the global definition, of the 1948 refugees, 200,000 remain living today; by international standards, those other 95%, some four million people, are not refugees at all.
Fourth and finally, yes, the refugees have a sincere tie to the land of Israel. Many still have the keys to their front doors. The vision of “returning home” is real. But victimhood can be self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating.
Footnotes
[1] Mitchell Bard, “The Palestinian Refugees,” Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise.
[2] Efraim Karsh, “The Palestinians and the ‘Right of Return,’” Commentary Magazine, May 2001.
[3] Efraim Karsh, “Were the Palestinians Expelled?” Commentary Magazine, July-August 2000.
[4] Mitchell Bard, “The Palestinian Refugees,” Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise.
[5] Ralph Gall[rr?]oway, August 1958, As quoted in Terence Prittie, The Palestinians: People History, Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 71.
[6] Yoel Esteron, “Refugees and Reparations in the Mideast,” New York Times, January 13, 2002.
[7] Daniel Pipes, “Does Israel Need a Plan?” Commentary Magazine, February 2003.
[8] Daniel Pipes, “The Refugee Curse,” New York Post, August 19, 2003.
[9] “Report of the Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, July 1997-June 30, 1998.”
[10] Steven Plaut, “Who Wants to Be a Palestinian Refugee?,” FrontPageMagazine.com, July 1, 2003.
[11] Daniel Pipes, “The Refugee Curse,” New York Post, August 19, 2003.
[12] Efraim Karsh, “The Palestinians and the ‘Right of Return,’” Commentary, May 2001.
[13] Ziad Abu Zayyad, “The Palestinian Right of Return: A Realistic Approach,” Palestine-Israel Journal 2 (Spring 1994), p. 77.
[14] Rashid Khalidi, “Toward a Solution,” in Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, Palestinian Refugees: Their Problem and Future (Washington, DC: CPAP, 1994).
[15] Jerusalem Media and Communication Center Public Opinion Poll No. 37, “On Palestinian Attitudes Towards Final Status Negotiations and the Declaration of the State, June 2000”; Ha’aretz (Israel); July 19, 2000.
[16] Daniel Pipes, “The Refugee Curse,” New York Post, August 19, 2003.
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Unpublished Notes
Arab leaders love the Palestinian cause but loath the Palestinian people.
The Palestinian position today “is that individual refugees decide for themselves which option they prefer—a decision must not be imposed upon them.”[17]
Although estimates of compensation typically run into billions of dollars, they vary widely.
Ziad Abu Zayyad suggests “distinguish[ing] between . . . the ‘right of return’ as a principle, and . . . exercising that right by literally returning to Palestine as a national homeland, and to that same home, piece of land, or grove which a certain Palestinian owned before 1948, as a private individual property.”
The parties cannot reach a solution in a multilateral framework. The Palestinians, surrounded by Arab representatives, simply parrot unattainable demands and use the talks to rally international opinion rather than negotiate.
Negotiations should therefore first focus on the human aspects (economic and social welfare) and not on political angles (“right of return” and compensation).
As Daniel Pipes writes, The fantasy of a mass return sustains their rejectionist impulse
Given that peace in the Mideast necessitates compromise, are the parties cognitively prepared?
But with the exception of the Palestinians, nearly all have been settled. Indeed, the Palestinian refugees aren’t just unsettled; they’re also growing.
How many would exercise this privilege should Israel permit it carte blanche? As one indication, public opinions polls from December 1999, conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, a Palestinian organization, showed that over half the Palestinians estimated that between one to four million refugees would prefer to relocate to Israel proper.[18]
Both Arabs and Israelis propagandized the Israeli attack on Dier Yassin, Arabs to scare the Pal-estinians into flight, Israelis, particularly those moving toward Yaffo outside Tel Aviv, to depo-pulate those areas.
Before the outbreak of hostilities, many Palestinians had already fled their homes. By the end of January 1948, the exodus was so alarming that the Palestine Arab Higher Committee asked neighboring Arab countries to refuse visas to these refugees and seal the borders against them. By April 1948, a month before Israel’s declaration of independence, some 100,000 Palestinians, mostly from the main urban centers of Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and from villages in the coastal plain, had gone. As fear and chaos spread, the early trickle of refugees became a flood, numbering more than 200,000 by May 14.
Not only should Israel acknowledge moral and legal responsibility for the refugee crisis, it should also acknowledge responsibility for preventing a solution. Further, Israel should compensate all refugees without exception for their abandoned property and for decades of privation and suffering, in addition to the Arab states for their expenses as hosts.
[17] “Permanent Status Issues: Refugees and the Right of Return,” P.L.O. Negotiations Affairs Department.
[18] Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, Public Opinion Poll No. 34, “Palestinian-Israeli Attitudes Towards Palestinian Refugees, December 1999.”
Posted by Jonathan Rick in 
Before entering the digital space…
I flacked for the American Conservative Union and the Cato Institute, and reported for Time magazine and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.