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"Across the board, from the mainstream political parties as well as
from the refugee camps, the petitions and the declarations have
flooded in. Just read any half-dozen and you see immediately that
they are unequivocal. For the absolute majority of the Palestinian
people, the refugee issue is right at the core of the conflict, and
it has to be addressed .."
By KARMA NABULSI
LONDON - This year is the 250th anniversary of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s legendary Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of
Inequality. In its dedicatory epistle to the Republic of Geneva,
Rousseau, citizen of that virtuous city, described the democratic
vision he claimed was inspired by it: “I should have wished to be
born in a country where the sovereign and the people could have had
only one and the same interest, so that all the motions of the
machine might only tend to the common happiness; since this is
impossible unless the people and the sovereign are the same person,
it follows that I should have wished to have been born under a
democratic government.”
The Palestinian people desire such an equal happiness as did
Rousseau for the citizens of Geneva. Last month, the Swiss
government invited dozens of international luminaries and VIPs to
this same Geneva, in order to celebrate a peace plan between
Israelis and Palestinians. The plan calls for a two-state solution,
the sharing of Jerusalem, the dismantling of some settlements and
the keeping of some others and, most fundamentally, for Palestinian
refugees (the Palestinians being largely a refugee population with
more than five million refugees) effectively to give up the right of
return to their original homes and properties inside Israel as the
necessary “painful compromise” for peace.
All those guests — Jimmy Carter, Lord Carrington, Hans-Dietrich
Genscher — are citizens of countries imbued with the very
institutions whose creation are due, in no little measure, to
Rousseau’s seminal texts. The Geneva accord has been universally
welcomed as a moment of great hope; a serious response at last to
Sharon and his bleak enterprise.
How, then, to explain that the accord directly contradicts the
values shared by those dignitaries at Geneva? Or how to portray the
despair it has engendered among the vast majority of Palestinians?
For not only is our predicament in facing the Israelis desperate; it
has just been made worse. We are now confronted with utter
incomprehension about the very nature of the Palestinian struggle
for liberty and rights, about the most simple of our realities: The
recognition of our right to our homes. How to explain that this
accord, far from being the long-overdue reaction to Sharon and his
violent ideology, is instead the formal articulation of that very
ideology? Or that the Palestinian democratic, peace-loving and
moderate voice was wholly absent from Geneva?
If there was time, one could begin at the beginning: 1948, the Nakba,
when we became a refugee people; or explain the cataclysmic result
of that dispossession, and how the right of return to one’s home,
enshrined in UN resolutions since 1949, is more than an aspiration;
it is both an individual and collective right, and one that accrues
to any refugee anywhere. Instead, let us start just over three years
ago at the Camp David meeting between Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton and
Yasser Arafat in the autumn of 2000. This meeting was the
culmination, of sorts, of the Oslo process that had begun in 1993.
This mechanism had put the refugees on hold, considering it too
explosive an issue to negotiate immediately. Yet it was never
addressed or discussed by Israel, since it absolutely rejects any
mention of the rights of refugees. This central issue, for
Palestinians, is understood only in apocalyptic and existential
terms, signifying to the average Israeli the destruction of Israel.
Nothing had been done in the years of the Oslo process to start
educating the public on what the State of Israel might look like if
some of the refugees were to choose to return to their homes. Nor
did Oslo bring the refugees into the peace process.
At Camp David, seven years after the Oslo accords, Barak presented
Arafat with just such an ultimatum, and insisted any rejection of
this deal would cast the Palestinian leader into the role of
terrorist. There is no partner for peace, said Barak, after Arafat
refused the terms. Meanwhile, what remained of the Israeli left was
determined to prove Barak wrong, and that it was possible to find a
Palestinian partner who would sign away refugees’ rights.
For those Palestinians in the mainstream who have been seeking a
viable settlement, a personal position on the right of return hardly
matters. Once understood that the Palestinian people (over 50
percent of whom are under 18 and are temporarily beaten but not
vanquished) consider it the essence of their identity, the very
basis of their struggle, then peaceful negotiations with Israel mean
that this simple truth is recognized as the starting point of any
authentic peace process.
If Palestinian officials, or ex-officials, attempt to abandon their
people, their people will inevitably rise up against them. And most
importantly and practically, any deal signed under such premises
will not hold. Having severed their peoples’ voices from the
opportunities for a reasonable process, these Palestinian
negotiators have lost any chance of representing them. Worse, they
have redefined their people as a nation of terrorists, outside the
laws of civilization, and are further, much further, away from the
chance of a peaceful settlement for both peoples. This is what has
been driving the internal conflict within the Palestinian body
politic in so dark and ugly a manner these last three years: In the
Palestinian Authority headquarters in Ramallah and in secret
meetings across Europe. For Palestinians, it is between those who
see democracy as the only viable way forward (and who are, indeed,
the Palestinian peace camp), and a few individuals who, because of
coercion by the Israelis and Americans, will sign any deal at all,
even if it excludes the majority of their own people. How has the
Palestinian grassroots reacted to Geneva? Across the board, from the
mainstream political parties as well as from the refugee camps, the
petitions and the declarations have flooded in. Just read any
half-dozen and you see immediately that they are unequivocal. For
the absolute majority of the Palestinian people, the refugee issue
is right at the core of the conflict, and it has to be addressed.
This understanding is couched in age-old principles of international
law, of human rights and human dignity, of mutual recognition and
tolerance. Sadly, none of this has been reproduced in the newspapers
or on the television screens of democratic Europe over the weeks
since the accord was signed. This is the very civil society those at
Geneva declared they were keen to include: Democratic, peace-loving,
the voices of the future. Indeed, Rousseau’s citizens reside not
only in the fair city of Geneva, they also dwell — in sincere hope
and unconquerable expectation — in the refugee camps of Khan Younis
and Shatila.
— Karma Nabulsi is a fellow of
Nuffield College, Oxford, a former PLO representative and adviser at
the peace talks 91-93.
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