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Palestinian Refugees Must be Allowed Back Home
by Arjan El
Fassed
On 6 May 1999, US President
Clinton pledged to Bosnian refugees "you will go home
again in safety and in freedom." He added: "When you
have gone through something as awful as this, it is very easy
to have your spirit broken, to spend the rest of your life
obsessed with anger and resentment. But if you do that, you
have already given those who have opposed you a victory."
The same week on May 10,
Madeline Albright, the US Secretary of State, spoke about
Kosovo refugees. "We must have peace on terms that will
allow the people of Kosovo, with our help, to return to their
homes and rebuild their communities. And we must have
accounting for the wrongs that have been done."
The Dayton Accords strongly
supports the right of return and restitution of property for
Bosnian refugees. More recently, the international community
used massive force to oppose ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and
implemented refugee repatriation. The same international
standards and principles upheld in Bosnia and Kosovo, against
ethnic cleansing and support for voluntary repatriation, must
apply to all refugees regardless of their national and ethnic
origins - including Palestinian refugees.
The right of Palestinian
refugees to return is an inalienable, individual, human and
collective right. According to international human rights law,
in no case may a person be arbitrarily deprived of the right
to return. A wide range of international legal instruments,
including UN resolutions, international human rights
conventions, humanitarian conventions, and bilateral and
regional agreements, as well as general legal principles
considered to be binding, recognize the right of return.
The international community has
consistently and formally recognized the right of Palestinian
refugees to return to their homes, their right to their
property and to the income derived from their property.
Through the United Nations, it recognized that the continued
displacement and dispossession of Palestinian refugees has
arisen from the denial of their inalienable rights under the
Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and declared that full respect for the
inalienable rights of the people of Palestine is an
indispensable element in the establishment of a just and
lasting peace in the Middle East.
Any state whose ideology forces
it to categorize its citizenry into separate segments and
provides preferential treatment for one segment cannot be
called democratic. Israel's appearance as a democracy is an
illusion because it is a democracy for Jews only. This is the
very core of the apartheid-system operative in Israel. It is
this racism described under "Israel's character as a
Jewish state" that prevents Israel to allow Palestinian
refugees to return, which it is legally obligated to do.
Research not only shows that the
right of the refugees is legal but also possible. A study on
the demography of Israel shows that 78% of Israelis are living
in 14 percent of Israel and that the remaining 86% of the land
in Israel is mostly land that belongs to the refugees on which
22% of the Israelis live. However, 20% live in city centers,
which are mostly Palestinian such as, Beer Al Saba', Ashdod,
Majdal, Asqalan, Nazareth, Haifa, Acre, Tiberias and Safad. As
for the remaining 20%, they live in kibbutzes and moshavs.
They control the legacy and heritage of five million
Palestinian refugees. Is there any logic to having 2,400
refugees on one square kilometer in the Gaza Strip while any
one of them could look over the barbed wire and see his land
practically empty?
If Gaza refugees returned to
their homes in southern Palestine, no more than five percent
of Jews in the center would be affected. If the refugees of
Lebanon returned to their homes in the Galilee no more than
one percent of Jews in the center would be affected. The total
number of refugees from Gaza and Lebanon equals the number of
Russian immigrants who came to Israel in the 1990s to live in
the homes of these refugees.
Human rights are universal,
indivisible, interdependent and interrelated. This also
applies to peace. Strict adherence, de facto and de jure, to
international human rights law and international humanitarian
law is the prerequisite for creating trust and strengthening
security in the wider sense.
Not allowing back Palestinian
refugees amounts to collaboration with ethnic cleansing. The only solution that
is both workable and moral is to implement the right of return for all
Palestinians wishing to exercise it, no matter how inconvenient it may be for
some.
The author is a
Dutch-Palestinian political scientist, human rights activist and is affiliated
to the the Palestine Right to Return Coalition
(Al-Awda).
Source:
by courtesy & ©
2000 Arjan El Fassed
by the same author:
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