SARI KASSIS from Friends of Palestine spoke at a Green Left Weekly forum in Sydney on November 1. The following is an abridged version of his speech.
I am a card-carrying Palestinian. The card is a small orange identity card. This card doesn't so much prove my Palestinian identity as mark me out as a subject of Israel's occupation. The card decides where I can and can't go in the land of my people. The Israeli authorities use it to stop me from going to Jerusalem or wherever else I please.
The Palestinian refugees, officially numbering 4 million out of an estimated total world Palestinian population of 8.5 million people, have spent 50 years living as refugees. Various institutions acknowledge Palestinians as refugees, but few have acted in any significant way to solve their plight. The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), for example, is used by Israel and its allies to keep the refugees' heads just above water — sometimes not even that.
Most discussion about refugees revolves around compensation and resettlement. The vast majority of Palestinian refugees express the opposite desire: repatriation remains their main goal.
UN General Assembly resolution 194 is the foundation of the refugees' claim. It provides options of return and compensation, and compensation and resettlement for those who do not wish to return. Importantly, it does not dictate to the Palestinians their choice, as is being done in the "peace process".
The right of return for the refugees must remain an inalienable right. This is one of the main things Palestinians and those who are in solidarity with the Palestinian people are struggling for.
UNRWA was established to deal with Palestinian refugees. The drawback of this is that UNRWA has sole responsibility for them. They are excluded from the human rights protection of United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). UNRWA was established in the belief that the plight of the Palestinian refugees would last a year at most — 52 years on, it still works under extreme conditions, not only because of the situation on the ground but because funding is so scarce. The governments, including the US, that are supposed to fund UNRWA have not met their responsibilities.
The UNRWA definition of Palestinian refugees excludes:
- Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war who ended up in places outside of the area of operation of UNRWA, including in Egypt and other North African countries, Iraq and the Gulf region;
- internally displaced Palestinians who remained in the area that became Israel (they were originally included, but subsequently excluded on the assumption their condition would be addressed by Israel);
- Residents from Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and their descendants displaced for the first time in the 1967 war;
- Individuals who, after 1967, were deported from the West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli occupation authorities;
- so-called "late comers" who have been prevented by Israel from returning to their homes after their Israel-issued residency permits have expired while they have been outside the occupied territories studying, visiting relatives, working, getting married, and so on;
- Palestinians who were outside British-controlled Palestine when the 1948 war broke out, or who were outside the territories when the 1967 war broke out, and who were prevented from returning by Israel; and
- well-to-do Palestinians who sought refuge in 1948 but whose pride prevented them from registering with UNRWA.
The legal status of the Palestinian refugees in Arab states varies from country to country. This is strongly linked to the interplay of Arab politics in the region and the regimes' opinions about the Palestinians.
Palestinians in Arab states
Where the Palestinian refugees were treated as marginal and not integrated, and the host society was weak, such as Lebanon prior to the Syrian intervention and the Israeli invasion in the early 1980s, or in Jordan before the outbreak of the so-called civil war in the early 1970s, Palestinians tended to create parallel and separate institutions to cater for their needs.
In Egypt, after the eclipse of Nasserism in the early '70s, the Palestinians became marginalised. The government tended to apply maximum coercive power in controlling them.
Before the Gulf War, Palestinians in Kuwait were able to work and contribute to the building of the country. Like other non-nationals, however, they were not allowed to become citizens, own property or participate in political life.
Historically, three principles have shaped Arab states' policies toward Palestinian refugees:
- Arab countries, except Jordan, in order to highlight the plight of the refugees and to put pressure on Israel to admit responsibility for them, have denied refugees citizenship rights. Arab governments claimed this served the interests of the refugees and strengthened their right of return;
- Arab League countries adopted, as early as 1952, a series of resolutions granting Palestinian refugees residency rights and the right to work on an equal footing with citizens of member states of the league. However, the right of Palestinians to work remains an arbitrary government decision. This affects Palestinians' income and the way they are perceived and treated; and
- the PLO originally rejected attempts by refugee organisations, including the UNHCR, to assist in settling Palestinian refugees in third countries and did not press for their rights to be normalised in host countries. It feared this would lead to Palestinian resettlement and the loss of their collective right of return.
Lebanon has the most stringent policies of the Arab countries against Palestinian refugees. It reduces their numbers by emigration, has severed the links between the Palestinian refugee camps, denies Palestinian refugees' civil rights, including the right to work to reconstruct housing, and refuses to establish a legal and administrative framework, to clearly define the status of Palestinian refugees.
Rights denied
The root of the problems faced by Palestinian refugees in their host countries is Israel's displacement of the Palestinian people to create a Jewish-only state.
The Israel government's attitude to Palestinian refugees has similarities with the Australian government's treatment of the indigenous people of this country.
Israel is willing to establish a compensation package, payable to the states where refugees now live, but not put in its own money. It would be internationally funded, mainly by the US and Britain, and eventually Arab countries.
Israel claims the payment of compensation should be calculated not individually but on a global basis, with the payment of a lump sum to resettle the refugees in the host countries. Israel also insists the loss and damage of Jewish settlers' property incurred during the 1948 war should also enter the calculations as well.
Israel rejects the return of Palestinian refugees whose home was inside Israel, but accepts their return to Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Gaza. We interpret this as a form of resettlement.
Historically, Israel has had a sinister approach to dealing with displaced Palestinians. On June 5, 1948, Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund, suggested a plan to David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, for preventing the return of the Palestinian refugees.
The plan consisted of creating "facts on the ground" that would make the refugees' return impossible: destroying the largest possible number of Arab villages through military operations; preventing Palestinians from ever working their deserted land; settling Jews in Arab towns and villages; passing laws to prevent the return of the refugees; and helping Arab countries absorb the refugees. All but the last element were approved by Ben-Gurion — helping Arabs was too far-fetched!
Israel, in 1994, published a background paper on the refugee issue outlining the positions it has reiterated since 1948: the 1948 refugee problem was the creation of neighbouring Arab states; close to 600,000 Jewish refugees had to flee Arab countries in the early 1950s and seek shelter in Israel; the number of displaced Palestinian refugees in the 1948 and 1967 wars was less than that claimed by the Arab side; and the definition of a refugee according to UN Resolution 194 is imprecise and at variance with other international legal definitions, particularly by applying it to a displaced collectivity of people.
The Israel government paper emphasised that in other international documents the right of return belongs to nationals, or at least permanent residents, of a state. Palestinian refugees have never been nationals or permanent residents of Israel: they fled before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, or before the areas where they lived came under Israel's control in 1948 or 1967.
Israeli historians have finally admitted that the refugee problem was created by Israel governments' military actions and a strategic "ethnic cleansing" policy.
Palestinian refugees have maintained their desire to return. Israel has to accept this. The Palestinians, by taking to the streets of Palestine, have delegitimised any peace process that signs away their right of return. Nothing less than the right of return, as well as compensation, is acceptable.