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BOSTON (IslamOnline) – More than 500 Palestinian Americans came from all parts of the country and converged in Boston last weekend for a day-long conference on, “The Right of Return.” The conference discussed possible scenarios for the 3.6 million Palestinian refugees – over 1 million of whom live in refugee camps – and prospects for long-term stability in the Middle East.
Background Most of the refugees settled in ad hoc tent camps that soon came under a U.N. agency created especially to look after them, the U.N. Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA). Today these camps still exist, and the tents have given way to more permanent structures – too permanent, as three generations of families have known nothing but their camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan and Lebanon (and to a lesser extent, Syria and Egypt). Refugees who could leave left the camps and dispersed throughout the world in search of a livelihood. Today, only about 3 million Palestinians live in historic Palestine (just under 1 million in Israel, just over 2 million in the West Bank and Gaza Strip). Another 3 million live around the world, with a high concentration in Jordan, where they make up more than half the population. Hundreds of thousands, especially those still living in camps, are determined to return to their original homes, even though 52 years has passed since their expulsion. But Israel, supported by the rest of the world, has never entertained the thought, arguing that an influx of Palestinians would dilute or end the Jewish-ness of the state, in which 4 million Jews live. The peace process, began in 1991 in Madrid, has generally ignored the refugees except to set up a multilateral committee to discuss their situation and/or to defer serious discussion indefinitely.
“Right of Return Conference” “Many Palestinians are concerned that the final negotiated solution [will] compromise the Palestinian refugees’ right to return,” wrote Lamis Andoni, a prominent Palestinian-Jordanian-American journalist who is a co-founding member of the Trans-Arab Research Institute, which organized the conference. The conference featured prominent Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, along with a myriad of experts such as MIT professor Noam Chomsky, The Independent reporter Robert Fisk, London-based refugee expert Salman Abu Sitta, and a number of university professors. Said decried Palestinian negotiators’ “extraordinarily gifted power of forgetting” when dealing with their Israeli counterparts, but acknowledged “No simple solution exists in the foreseeable future.” The end result is that the Palestinians, as a nation, suffer from “dislocation and distortion,” he said. He said that whatever negotiated settlement was reached, it would not fulfill aspirations on the Arab side. “It’s going to take a great deal of phony logic to convince people that the deal about to be made is not an abrogation of Palestinian rights.” Israeli professor Ilan Pappe, the director of the International Relations Department at Haifa University, argued that unless the right of return is granted to Palestinian refugees – whether they choose to act on it or not remains their choice – “the conflict in Palestine will be far from settled.” Another scenario floated these days by various parties, including the United States, is that the refugees registered with UNRWA (no one knows how many others there are) be compensated for the loss of their land. But it is improbable that they will be compensated for the agony and wasted lives they have suffered. The financial compensation model is touted as an alternative to the right of return and not a complement, and is thus rejected by many refugees, who generally were not represented in the conference. And even under this model, Israel refuses to take any blame for causing the refugee debacle. It insists that it will not pay restitution, but that any compensation funds be collected internationally and managed and disbursed by Israel. Several speakers spoke of the hypocrisy of the West, which worked hard to pressure Swiss banks last year to pay restitution to Holocaust survivors, while supporting Israel in its neglect to acknowledge any responsibility for the tragedy it inflicted on millions of Palestinians. Other speakers focused on the need for the American public to know more about the refugee situation, in order to pressure future U.S. governments to change their position on this historic problem. “The U.S. point of view has near-decisive impact on what happens in that part of the world,” said Chomsky. In this regard, the Arab lobby in the United States was lambasted for its historic inability to help Americans become aware of the problem, among other shortcomings.
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